Not my usual drivel…

Well, Folks,

Here's a recommendation to a remarkable book. You may have seen Peter Coyote as the compassionate doctor who took care of E.T, in that movie. That is the slimmest sliver of his history. In his memoir is a tale of earnest striving, foolhardy courage, full throttle love, and some triumph in a day when the odds were most against those that dared to change not only their culture, but their own hearts. This fellow was not a'freared of taking on a doomed mission. He tells the story without a shred of self promotion, and great honesty.

"Sleeping Where I Fall"

S

A Remix of Earth…

Folks,

Back in 1977, Earthers launched a pair of robots into the heavens, Voyagers One and Two. Today they are at the very edge of our solar system. One of them created the first family album of our home system, and in that a pale blue dot caught was in a sun beam from a vantage of four billion miles from the ground where its guts were forged.

Attached to the sides of these robots are golden phonograph discs. Yes. There were such things, once. Anyhow, etched onto their surfaces where simple images of our world's place in the home system, images of a man and a woman, the DNA helix, and a little bit of math to help the aliens decode what laid in the grooves below those images. That was an assortment of the sounds of Earth. Babies crying, folks speaking in myriad tongues, and a bunch of music from all over our planet, circa the end of the 20th century.

Reportedly, one or both of these records have been intercepted, and we are now given the gift of a remix from some twelve billion above our heads, or below our feet, depending on your local hour and where you stand, the season, and the tides of gravity bending Space and Time.

Good Weird Aural Fun… "Scrambles of Earth". Just hit the links on the upper right of the screen to receive your messages.

S

Warm Up Pitch…

Folks,


There's a lake in Antarctica, called Vostok. It's buried under about three miles of ice, and nothing above the surface has touched it for around fourteen million years. A Russian team is about to drill thru all that ice to taste the water in the hidden lake, and do so without mucking up the data with contamination.


This is interesting, as there is another body of water under ice, far away on the Jovian moon, Europa. It looks like a place where life might thrive, or at least survive. Earthers plan to send a robot there in 2020… just to see what might be up. What the Russians are doing is the first demonstration of the tech required for a competent exploration of that moon.


By the way, if you've got even a small telescope or a nice set of binoculars and a view of Jupiter, take a gander that'away. You'll see four small stars by the big planet, ones not visible to the naked eye. Go back in, get warm, and when you go back out in a quarter hour, you will see that those stars moved about their father planet. Those are the principle Jovian moons, and you will have witnessed exactly what so stunned Galileo and all of civilization in 1610. Now, very soon, we may touch one of those stars and see what is beneath a mantle of ice. It might be something that will talk back to us.


Getting Ready for Europa to get more info on the Russian mission.

S

Good, Clean Scientific Fun!

Folks,


A Nice Picture of The Theory of EVERYTHING from Garret Lisi, courtesy of TED.

S

Very Leaky WikiLeaks

Folks,

Is it surprising? Assange, as gallant as his mission may be, is not spotless. Dang! Reality!!!

Nothing is Simple.

S

It's not that hard?

Folks,

With many kilos of fissionable material, high grade Uranium and Plutonium lost just in the USA, discounted as an "accounting error", it is well to ponder how easy it was for a couple of college students to design a workable atom bomb from scratch. This was back in the '60s that the kids did it, and it took less than three years for them. I'm astounded that it's a problem for many nations on Earth to pull off the same feat. Or, have they?

Hey, kids, let's build an atom bomb!

S

More Geekiness!

Folks,

Okay, enough weirdness. Back to geeky stuff. If you're as old as me, you might have laid your hands on the first commercial computer that worked like the one under your fingertips. Well, that's not likely, no matter how old you are. Apple could not sell a lot of $10,000 computers in the early '80s, and hasn't tried since.

In many ways, the Apple Lisa still surpasses the junk we put up with today. It was far from perfect, due to the pokey CPUs of the late '70s. Still, if you've got an iPad or other iOS device, you can see its legacy continue in the guise of something you can fit into you backpack or pocket.

S

The Birth of Lisa…



And, Wiki's entry…