After spending five days working on other sites, I came back to my blog to find I was really tired of the default WordPress theme. It was too narrow, and the sidebar was hard to read. So, I spent Sunday night finding a new theme and as many hours finetuning it.

The new theme is called Sharepointlike, developed by a coder in Bulgaria. The links for “Category,” “Edit this post,” and “Comment on this post” were in Bulgarian, so one of my tweaks was to change those into English for the Cyrillic-impaired.

Then, I had to manually edit the index.php file for the theme to add the Amazon, PayPal and other doodads I have added during the last six months. This part was the post time-consuming, as I do the editing the old-fashioned way: change the code, upload the file, view in browser. Rinse. Repeat as necessary.
Finally, I could not live without my header image, a Martian sunset transmitted to Earth by the Mars rover, Spirit, in 2005. The image is compelling. I have the same feeling looking at it as I did way back in 1976 when the Viking lander sent back the first images of the ruddy Martian desert. I can imagine standing alongside the landers viewing the scenery with my own eyes.

Both bring home that Mars is another planet like Earth, with its own sunrises, sunsets and landscapes. Someday, a future Ansel Adams will be photographing Martian scenery just as the real Adams did in the American West, though perhaps with different equipment.

July 24th, 2006 | Category: General stuff, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hah! Got your attention that time, didn’t I?

No, this blog has not devolved into discussing Paris Hilton, who actually to the best of my knowledge has not had a recent public temper tantrum. In fact, the subject of today’s post is a white dwarf star in the zodiacal constellation Ophiuchus (next to Libra).

A team of astronomers has gotten lucky and been able to observe a white dwarf nearing the supernova (explosion) phase, as it sucks matter from its companion star. Usually, supernovae occur unannounced — we see them after the explosion has happened — so finding a star ready to blow up is a rare, exciting find. It will allow astronomers to gain a better understanding of the supernova process.

There are two types of supernovae, imaginatively termed type 1 and type 2. Astronomers subdivide type 1’s into three subclasses, based on their spectral emissions. The star in question, RS Ophiuchi, is nearing a type 1a supernova event, astronomers believe.

A white dwarf is the corpse of a medium-sized star, not unlike our Sun, that has exhausted its usable supply of nuclear “fuel.” Deprived of the outward pressure keeping its normal diameter at about 1.6 million kilometers, the star collapses. Intense gravitational pressures force atoms so close together that electrons are forced to share orbits they would not normally occupy, creating what is termed “degenerate matter.” The star is now the size of an earth-sized planet, about 15,000 km across.

July 23rd, 2006 | Category: Astronomy | Leave a comment

From the sunny city of Stockholm, Tangled Bank #58 has come to enlighten readers with incisive and witty science coverage. Pay it a visit. Tack så mycket!

July 19th, 2006 | Tags: Science, The media | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I’ve been spending the last couple of days maintaining and developing websites, both family- and work-related, which led to me to come to two not-so-original revelations.

1. How marvelous is it that any person with the necessary minimal skills can download free software and create a website in just a few hours? Even more amazing is that a person can have that website hosted for free, or at least darn cheap. I’m paying just $7.95 a month for this one and my computer-related site, for example.

2. Like any endeavor, developing and maintaining websites is an at times frustrating, but ultimately rewarding job. Open-source software makes step 1 possible for minimal cost, but at the expense of ease-of-use. WordPress may be an exception, but its content-management  cousins, php-nuke and Joomla can drive a person nuts.

So while I tear my remaining hair out, consider with me the amazing power that open-source software and low-cost webhosting offer the average Joe or Jo.

July 18th, 2006 | Tags: Technology | Category: Commentary | Comments (2)

With the conservative Rutherford Institute representing her, high school valedictorian Brittany McComb (at right) has filed suit in federal court alleging that school officials infringed on her First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

Foothill High School (Henderson, Nev.) officials edited McComb’s valedictory before the June 15 graduation ceremony to eliminate what they judged to be overly religious references. McComb delivered her original speech instead, and school officials disconnected her mike just as she launched into a discussion how God and the suffering of Jesus on the cross had given meaning and focus to her life.

School officials said they were acting on the advice of the Nevada American Civil Liberties Union, and were trying to avoid running afoul of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause.

In her suit, filed in US District Court in Nevada, McComb names the principal, assistant principal and the school employee who allegedly pulled the plug. The suit claims her rights of free expression and equal protection under the law were violated when the mike was cut off.

The suit asks that the court declare that the officials infringed on those rights. (Details here.)

Don’t say I didn’t tell you a lawsuit would happen.

July 14th, 2006 | Tags: Education & schools | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The gullibility of the scientifically challenged media and buying public never ceases to amaze. Spurred perhaps by sharply higher gasoline prices, backyard inventors and shady promoters are pushing the latest wonder technology, “HHO gas,” otherwise known as water gas, Brown’s gas or Klein’s gas.

For a tidy investment of a few hundred dollars, one can adapt a car to run on HHO, or for a few thousand, one can buy a device to produce HHO at home for transportation or for welding. Cars apparently can run for miles on mere puffs of HHO, and torches can burn holes in seconds through most metals.

I would encourage anyone buying such devices to first watch videos of the Graf Hindenburg accident in 1937 or the Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986, to get an idea of the Promethean power of HHO gas.

Wait, 1937? Isn’t HHO supposed to be a new technology? you ask. Nope. In fact, the principles behind the production of HHO have been known and used for close to 200 years. If you were lucky, you might have even made some in middle school science class.

If you run electric current through water, you break water down into its constituent parts, hydrogen and oxygen, both gases at standard temperature (20 C) and pressure (1 atmosphere). Very little current is required; a 6-volt lantern battery does the trick nicely, although quite slowly.

July 14th, 2006 | Tags: Professional skeptic, Science, Technology, The media | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (28)

Ed Brayton has an excellent essay on Dispatches from the Culture Wars explaining why intelligent design and creationism are not real sciences. If you know any creationists or ID supporters, refer them to this essay. It minces no words.

July 14th, 2006 | Tags: Professional skeptic, Science | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Superman in his latest incarnation is a box office smash, a suitable homage to the late Christopher Reeve’s version with a 21st century twist. Amazingly, some conservative bloggers find fault with the movie, for purely socio-political reasons. Chief among them is self-promoting expert on everything Debbie Schlussel.

Who is Debbie Schlussel? Well, I didn’t know either until I started blogging. Schlussel is a sharp-tongued critic of everything to the left of her far-right agenda, especially Hollywood stars who she believes suck up to Arab ass too much. Like all conservative pundits, Schlussel takes everything in popular culture seriously, as if each song lyric, film premise or TV show spells the end of civilization as we know it.

Schlussel is a Jewish Ann Coulter, if you will.

Anyway, Schlussel pops up on TV and radio every once in awhile to spout her special kind of invective. On MSNBC and on her own blog, she lambasts some of the plotline of Superman Returns. I will attempt to summarize, but the links to her post and to the MSNBC transcript are below if you want the news directly from the horse’s mouth.

1. Superman is a wimp because he leaves Earth for five years to “find himself” and his home planet, Krypton, “like every sensitive, slacker metrosexual.” (her blog)
2. Lois Lane is a slut because she has slept with two men (Clark and her fiance), and has a child by one of them, she’s not too sure which.

July 13th, 2006 | Tags: The media | Category: Random rants | Leave a comment

Two members of the Space Shuttle Discovery crew spent nearly seven hours repairing the International Space Station, accompanying their hard work with some goodnatured repartee.

Like the helpful service station attendants of yore, British astronaut Piers Sellers and US astronaut Michael Fossum joked, while they fixed a cable reel necessary for the operation of a railcar attached to the ISS. The railcar enables expansion of the ISS.

They swapped a defective reel with a new one brought aboard the shuttle; each one weighs 330 pounds on Earth. In orbit, they still have substantial mass and inertia, so there were a few tense moments while Sellers, like an orbital “weight lifter,” held one in each hand.

The two also learned that for space mechanics, elbow grease still works just as well as for earthbound ones. To get the reels swapped, they had to twist harder with a wrench to loosen stubborn bolts.

CNN has an account of the repairs and spacewalk.

Discovery is scheduled to return to Earth on the 17th.

Riding Rockets : The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut

Space Shuttle: The First 20 Years — The Astronauts\’ Experiences in Their Own Words

July 10th, 2006 | Tags: Science, Technology | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment