This is some footage I edited together of the storm that rolled through New Jersey into Manhattan on Tuesday night. After a 100+ degree day I was waiting for a storm but was not expecting one of this magnitude. I found it really soothing.
Twinkle twinkle little star.... how I wonder WHAT THE #$@%!!! This footage is great. It is a little shakier than normal in the middle as the camera man tries to stay with the falling rock but it's worth the wait because the ending is great. I am not sure when a meteorite becomes a shooting star or vice versa nor do I know where asteroids fit in to this whole extraterrestrial rock naming convention but whatever you call it it's a large chunk of it and it is all but doomed. The Earth so rules. Notice the steam and particles streaming off it. Crazy cool. Scary and ego killing but crazy cool.
Meteor - ATTENTION BREAK.COM - LOOK - Watch more free videos
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.
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
Recently my friend Felix who has a fantastic blog, did a story about the Creationism "museum" in bumblefuck whereverland USA. I wont even go into another tirade like I did on his comment board but in it I mention something I saw on a Nova episode about the same subject. Gravity and the fact that it is just a theory meets the only argument Creationists (?) ever had which was that evolution is only a theory and therefor has holes and can not be trusted as the truth. This, of course, is completely true but as religious types seem to do, they pull it so slightly out of contexts that it's plausible when you say it out loud. The ploy is in the word "just". With that tiny word squeezed in there like a thought in Paris Hilton's head, it mucks up the whole works. It belittles the term theory and automatically gives people who don't know any better an improper definition of the word. They make it seem like a theory is just an idea that some bloke came up with one time and it sounded really cool, so everyone started repeating it to pick up chicks at bars. As usual, one trip to a book other than the bible would have opened their eyes a bit, this time the dictionary. It states the definition of a theory as: "a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact." A scientist on the program said something to the effect of "well Gravity is still just a theory, are you going to question that too?"
I am a huge fan of Gravity. It allows me to snowboard not to mention it holds our universe together. I imagine the universe thing is pretty important but I don't know too much about that but I do know about snowboarding. Without gravity snowboarding would be pointless. As much as I like pointless things it would really kill the boarding vibe.
I watch a lot of NASA TV and they often show you mountains on other planets and moons and they are always bigger than mountains we have here. RIP OFF!! Most of these have only been seen by measurements and lasers because the atmospheres are too dense so you can't see through em. Mars on the other hand not only has a really thin and transparent atmosphere, it also has the largest mountain, Olympus Mons. "The
largest mountain in the Solar System rises 24 km (78,000 ft.)
above the surrounding plain. Its base is more than 500 km
in diameter and is rimmed by a cliff 6 km (20,000 ft)
high." If there were snow on this mountain you could ride it for 2 or 3 days and never take a chair lift. Of course gravity is so slight on Mars (38%) I guess snowboarding wouldn't be any fun at all.
Some people are born with a tendency to love the feeling associated with falling. There are levels of severity of course but I think I fall in that category. I once went skydiving with friends and I gotta tell you it is something I would love to do again. Seeing the world as a map with nothing between you and everything is certainly an experience. I would highly suggest it, pun intended.
