It’s May 25, 2010 and I’m prepping for the waterpark this weekend. In Utah, they’re prepping to go skiing:
The all-time latest snow in Salt Lake City.
It’s snowing in May
May 25th, 2010Jupiter’s strip show
May 20th, 2010This is Jupiter in November 2009:
This is Jupiter a couple of weeks ago:
Notice something missing? Pretty dramatic huh.
This wasn’t brought to our attention by NASA. They’re too busy these days shrilling for Barack Obama’s cap and trade legislation. This was discovered by an amateur astronomer in Australia by the name of Anthony Wesley.
Global cooling and Vietnam
May 19th, 2010Well, that’s not true either.
Contrary to the commonly held scientific conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer, Dr. Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University and author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, has unveiled evidence for his prediction that global cooling is coming soon.
“Rather than global warming at a rate of 1 F per decade, records of past natural cycles indicate there may be global cooling for the first few decades of the 21st century to about 2030,” said Easterbrook, speaking on a scientific panel discussion with other climatologists. This, he says, will likely be followed by “global warming from about 2030 to 2060,” which will then be followed by another cooling spell from 2060 to 2090.
As I type this, it’s struggling to top 60 degrees in mid May.
STS-132
May 16th, 2010Folks, it just don’t get any more awesome than this:
Pardon the sloppy video, I was more interested in watching than looking through a lens. These things are just unbelievable. Do keep in mind what you are watching is 3.5 or more miles away.
Meanderthal
May 12th, 2010The wild ride that is the internet and imaging software just keeps getting wilder. Now criminals, employees, crime victims, you name it, are being identified with imaging software. The Smithsonian is taking things to a whole new level now:
This me neanderthalensised. Actully, I like being heidlergensised better:
I think I do a good heidelbergensis dude.
This is actually an app released by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. It’s designed for Androids and Iphone. That’s right folks, you can only be neanderthaled with your telephone.
Subsea Oil Recovery System
May 5th, 2010When the story first broke that the Transocean Deepwater Horizon Rig had exploded and oil was leaking wildly out of control from the mine, my first initial thought was that they’d just turn it off. They all have shut-off valves. Well, that didn’t work too well. Apparently the shut-off valve was damaged. My second thought was to just put a cap on it. You know, like when you have an exploding Coca-Cola
That is the Subsea Oil Recovery System. It’s a huge concrete box with a spout on the top. This thing was built by Wild Well Controls and contracted by BP. Now, I’m not terribly sure how much this thing costs. But, it would seem to me, it would be a lot less expensive than the tab BP is getting ready to get hit with for cleaning up the mess they’ve created by being so flippant about containing oil during a crisis. If they had dropped one of these things over the drill in the first place, turning off the leak would have been simple.
National Star Wars Day
May 4th, 2010
Unofficial National Star Wars Day it is. Say to everyone “May the 4th be with you” you will. Talk in a very silly broken way you must. Show a nearly naked princess your very large worm you hope. Lucky you will be if she’s not your sister.
Rogue Satellites
May 4th, 2010This is kinda cool in a techie macabre kinda way.
Galaxy 15 apparently got zapped by a huge solar storm a few weeks back. This thing has coined a new term, to me anyway, called a “zombiesat”. When it got zapped ( killed, sorta ), it lost its guidance system ( soul ), but not its signal controls ( body ). Very quickly after that it lost it signal ( life blood ). So, it started moving around and now is moving in front of another satellite. When this happens, it will intercept that signal ( drink its blood ). This in theory could happen repeatedly for eternity. However, a bunch of clever scientists have figured out a way to stop it from drinking the blood from other satellites and temporarily turning them into soul-less zombies. They plan on sending a super-signal to overwhelm it ( drive a stake through it’s wiring ). Pretty cool stuff huh? They need to make a movie. I see a lot more personality in this thing than I do a ghostly-pale completely-emotionless emo-teenager.
Plasma Rain
April 29th, 2010Imagine a cloudy day when it suddenly starts raining white hot plasma. Used to be stuff of science fiction. Now we can just watch it:
The Roe Effect
April 29th, 2010A concept has bounced around in the back of my mind for a long, long, time. But, I’ve never done anything with it. Then, this morning, I read an article that does explore it. So, here goes. First I’ll start with the opening volley by James Taranto:
James then goes into all kinds of variables affecting the Roe Effect and why it may or may not be real. Bottom line, it HAS to be real. The only question is how much of a real impact does it have? James addresses all that stuff in a purely political manner. To me it goes somewhat deeper.
What would drive a segment of a population to espouse a philosophy that assures it’s own demise?
I had pondered why it is that the pro-abortion advocates seemed to be less prominant and much less vocal than they were 20 years ago. And profoundly moreso than 30 years ago. No one will argue that the debate has just become more civil, less polarizing. The Republicans have already told Obama that unless Obama’s next Supreme Court nominee opposes abortion rights, they’re toast. Obama’s nominee will be pro-abortion. He’s just that dead set on the issue as well. The debate most certainly has not cooled. So what’s going on? Why are anti-abortion candidates suddenly winning all over the country?
The Roe effect, however, refers specifically to the nexus between the practice of abortion and the politics of abortion. It seems self-evident that pro-choice women are more likely to have abortions than pro-life ones, and common sense suggests that children tend to gravitate toward their parents’ values. This would seem to ensure that Americans born after Roe v. Wade have a greater propensity to vote for the pro-life party–that is, Republican–than they otherwise would have.
Politically there are several dynamics at work. The country is becoming more urban very rapidly. We’re now experiencing the echo-echo-baby-boomers. This is a slight population surge of young adults. Both factors tend to lend themselves to more liberal political philosophies. So, politically, it’s hard to tell what’s going on. The impact is, of those voting blocks that have a propensity to be more liberal, they’re not as liberal as voting blocks in the past. In the last 20 years, outside of the most current three, the conservative voters have made huge gains. Conservatives are winning in places like Massachusetts. Now we’re looking at a major political upheaval after the liberal gains of the last three years. This country could once again go conservative this year. Three times in the last thirty years, zero times in the previous thirty. So what’s happening? A huge voting block has espoused a philosophy that eliminates itself.
Why would a large group of people espouse a philosophy that assures its own destruction? The assumption of course would be that the issue is so moraly correct it HAS to exist. However, if all abortion supporters were to have abortions, there would be no abortion supporters left. Then, of course, the anti-abortion people would have all the votes and then ban all abortions. But, within a very short time, people would start advocating abortions again and the cycle starts all over. Granted that’s an over-simplification, but the point is still valid. The impact is not that they have totally eliminated themselves physically. The impact is by diluting their political presence, they are assuring the political destruction of their philosophy. It just seems to me a rather bizarre catch-22.
