Read and Think!

Folks,

From Penn Gillette. Remarkable reasonableness:

"If you want to become an atheist, I always recommend reading the Bible from beginning to end. Not a guided system of reading it, but just read the whole thing, and I think if you do, you come out being an atheist. I don't think you have to do anything special. I think at the end of a book about hatred, slavery, horrible acts towards women, crazy contradictory laws, and the jealous nature of this God, I think it's apparent that it was written by crazy people for political reasons. "


S

Antikythera Legos!

Folks,

This picture is of what is likely the oldest computer on Earth. It's a set of gears and cams designs to predict, with extraordinary precision, the positions of the stars and planets, back about 100BCE, by the Greeks. Then it was lost in a shipwreck, only to be found 2,000 years later.

Some clever folks with Lego blocks built a working model of the thing. Here's how it works.

S

Whoops!

Folks,

Twenty five years ago, today, my girlfriend and I skipped work to enjoy an afternoon of rather "explosive" joy in each other's arms. When we got back to the TV studio where I worked, we saw our colleagues standing dazed, looking ashen in front of the TV in the lobby. The Challenger had just blown up. I looked to my gal and she looked at me. We both felt like maybe this was our fault. Crazy thinking, but the idea did flash across both our minds.

Then, I thought of my favorite teacher, Mr. Monoogian. He taught me to really love science in the 7th Grade. I'd recently run into him again, and he had told me that he was sort'a disappointed that he was only the runner-up to be the first teacher Astronaut to fly into space. A lady named McAuliffe had gotten the gig. But for his bad luck, it would have been his rear end that was blasted to bits on that morning.

Anyhow, Marty Monoogian is retired today. In his career, I bet he taught a lot more kids than just me to aim for the stars. Christa McAuliffe did the same, and still does today, even after she has long disappeared into the high winds.

A few months after The Challenger exploded and incinerated its crew, one of the smartest guys then on the our planet, Richard Feynman, explained how it had happened. The problem was, the most complex machine that Humans had yet created was held together with what were basically rubber bands. Rubber freezes and gets brittle. Feynman pulled a rubber band from a glass of ice water, and crushed it into shards to demonstrate his point in a very simple experiment. NASA had tried to launch a very complicated vehicle loaded with the most potent explosives, a big gadget stuck together with rubber bands, on a very cold morning in Florida. Whoops!

Now, people that puts their rear ends on top of things that explode with the power of a small atom bomb must know the risks. They've seen those before them blown up, burned up, tumble out of the sky on fire, suffocate, and be crushed even on the ride home. This business of going toward the Heavens is no fooling around. Still, I would love to get on a rig with old Marty Monoogian and aim for the stars.

S

How Did We Get Here?

Folks,

How did Life on Earth arise? Are our kind, from the most simple virus to our primate kin, unique? It is possible that this warm, wet planet is a petri dish for an alien experimenter? It's possible that a meteor or comet came bearing the stuff of Life to our home. It is just as possible that anywhere in the Universe, if water or liquid methane stirs up the dirt, Life will happen… and it will be along a design not too different from our own. Physics and chemistry may be all that is required. We do got rules around here.

This is an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on Panspermia (Greek for "Seeds Everywhere").

On May 11, 2001, two researchers from the University of Naples claimed to have found live extraterrestrial bacteria inside a meteorite. Geologist Bruno D'Argenio and molecular biologist Giuseppe Geraci claim the bacteria were wedged inside the crystal structure of minerals, but were resurrected when a sample of the rock was placed in a culture medium. They believe that the bacteria were not terrestrial because they survived when the sample was sterilized at very high temperature and washed with alcohol. They also claim that the bacteria's DNA is unlike any on Earth. They presented a report on May 11, 2001, concluding that this is the first evidence of extraterrestrial life, documented in its genetic and morphological properties. Some of the bacteria they discovered were found inside meteorites that have been estimated to be over 4.5 billion years old, and were determined to be related to modern day Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus pumilus bacteria on Earth but appears to be a different strain.


Tantalizing clues from microbes in the Earth's stratosphere, where none should be alive, let alone on the tenuous but fierce winds, to what look like tiny bacteria in bits of a meteorite that fell from Mars to Earth's Antarctic.

Here's the Wiki article… The Origin of Life?

S

My Old Girlfriend…

Folks,

My, my… there once was a lady named China Cat. She had a kid named Sugar Magnolia. In turn, Sugar begat Tiger Rose who took in a stray, Loose Lucy, who brought with her terrible trouble for all concerned. Well, we did have some fun before she got the whole joint busted. That I must confess.

S

Loose Lucy…

Ball of Confusion…

Folks,

There was actually a day when all folks danced all over politics, didn't scare each other so much, and a bunch of guys in tuxedos made from the stuff of space suits stomped the terra, sang like angels, and made the kids hopeful and happy.

When I first heard the following tune, there was a guy riding a golf buggy over the dust of the Moon. He even brought a golf club with him. Our world, then as now, was boiling with war, but a bunch of kids and their moms and grandmothers were putting a stop to one particularly gruesome fight. We'd thrown one depressive bum with atom bombs out of the White House, and were on our way to taking out another. We did that, as well. There are times when idiots with atom bombs can be dealt with appropriately, and nobody has to get killed.

Many think that the '60s ended in 1969. Whatever that spirit was that animated the social change of that decade, did not ebb for several years later. In fact, the tide still flows today, tho it is less discernible.

So, here's one of the anthems that we danced to…

S

The Temptations… Ball of Confusion!

Folks,


An edited repost from FB, commenting on the reality that we are but bits of old stars born of bits of atoms, space, and time. The fellow who prompted my extemporaneous explateration noted that when we handed a coin over a store counter for change or a tip, we were exchanging star stuff.


S


"There is the fact that we are the dust of a Supernova, holding the dust of a supernova in a silly coin while standing on the dust of a supernova.

Like the old lady said to the physicist, "Hey, buddy, it's turtles all the way up and down."

We are, however, privileged to live in a day hoped for by Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato and their ilk at the dawn of "modern" thinking. Today, some folks are good enough at math and have the scientific instruments to peer across time and space toward the very edge of our Universe. From this perspective, we might soon even glimpse other Universes. This is a literal, scientific possibility. (String Theory, the LHC Experiment)

Wow! Think about this for a moment. It took us Humans about 200,000 years from our specie's birth to create a clan of families. It then only took another few thousand years to make a village. Then, just a while later we made the first little cities, about 10,000 years ago. We swiftly made city states, and thence on to nations. Today, we are reckoning with forging one Human world, lest we perish… yeah, along this path we also created war and a weapon that can literally destroy a planet.

The stakes are high, even as we swiftly, over the course of less than half a millennia of refining physics and engineering, stand in the face of the edge of the Universe… or, perhaps our doom, but hopefully our redemption.

For all I know, we live on a world that is a petri dish, an experiment left behind by another species, or maybe we're just an example of what happens when you contaminate a pristine, barren planet in the right place around its home star with certain chemicals. Whatever. Here we are and this is a beautiful moment to learn all that we can about Everything, and maybe make a difference. What else is there to do?"

What You Get When Protons Collide