Science
April 08, 2011
June 06, 2010
February 06, 2010
December 17, 2009
February 25, 2009
September 25, 2008
June 12, 2008
April 15, 2008
December 10, 2007
Moon In My Room.
My girlfriend got me a sick Rangers jersey (with the laces) which I absolutely love and am positive I will spill much beer on @ MSG but she also got me this. It's a Moon In My Room from Uncle Milton Toys. (I know, kind of a creepy name for a toy company) Most of their toys are strictly for kids but they are all somewhat educational. I don't know how much a kid actually learns from an ant farm, but they also have little cars that run on solar power and other assorted Bill Nye type stuff. This moon in my room however is amazing and anyone who digs the moon will enjoy it. It may not be like having the harvest moon outside your apartment but it is amazingly close. It has a remote control that cycles through the moons lunar phases either manually or automatically.(click thumbnail to see it in action) Feel like a full moon is too bright? Hit the switch and your chillin' under a quarter moon. The model itself is about 10 inches across and flat on the bottom so you can hang it on the wall. It is realistically detailed as well. Great gift! She knows me well. Maybe next year I can get a full sized version.
November 25, 2007
Hello From The Children Of Earth.
Let's face it, life can be monotonous, even dull. Waiting for the elevator or stuck in traffic it is easy to see how this can seem so. We have often tried to invent devices to distract us but boring situations are likely to remain a part of Humanity. Which makes the story of NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft even more amazing. The very bare bones basics of this ongoing saga are more incredible than most tried and true, time tested fables. For starters it was a projected 5 year mission which last year celebrated it's 30th year in operation. Sound familiar?
The whole concept of the Voyager spacecraft were to take advantage of a celestial event that happens once every 175 years. In 1977 the planets were in a certain alignment that allowed engineers to plot a flight path that would use each of the target planets gravitational forces as boosters cutting travel time drastically and with much less of it's own power. This is commonly referred to as "gravity assist". This would allow close fly by scientific crap to be done in far less time and without the scientist being 150 years old when they finished. Some of the tests and goals were to record the sounds of space, capture images of our celestial neighborhood and to carry our first multimedia message to the rest of the universe out of our solar system and into the unknown. So thats just the concept.
When you look up Voyager stuff on the internets you get bombarded with crazy facts. Facts that bend your perception of normalcy. Things like finding out the winds inside the black spot storm on Jupiter's face travel 350 meters per second or simply that the Voyagers are the furthest man made objects from Earth ever. The coolest part to me is The Sounds of Earth golden record (left) on board each probe. This held some cool data including how to decode the video and audio and a mathematical map of sorts pinpointing Earth along with an images of what we look like. (a more advanced version of the plaques Carl Sagan helped devise on the previous Pioneer probes) Now who knows weather we will make friends or just tell some huge cockroach race where the free food is but I love the audio recording that was on this thing. A greeting from the children of earth. Just listening to it makes me think there is hope we end up more than charred embers waiting to become fuel for the next species to fight over. I guess I also like the juxtaposition. Billions spent and countless invaluable data collected and something as simple as a kid saying hi is really all that needs to be said. I suppose if one wanted to get all philosophical and shit you could argue that we are kids and were currently sending a message across the sandbox to see if anyone else wants to play.... That or we just threw a thermos at the fat kid, who knows.
So the next time you are waiting for an elevator and you swear you can feel your hair growing or your stuck in the back of a cab and you are actually contemplating a scene, think of the lonely pair of highly cost efficient robots floating on the edge of our solar system looking for any sign of life, billions of miles from anything, speeding toward the unknown in a space larger than anything we can fathom... and how much more that sucks than your stupid cab ride. And to all the Creationists out there remember: They were launched for our sins folks, our sins.
*SIMULTANEOUS
