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The Bluegrass Report, one of the best sources for progressive political news in our fair Commonwealth, is apparently not welcome on the state-owned computers in Frankfort. Nor apparently are other liberal sites, according to The Daily Kos. State employees apparently lose their First Amendment rights once they enter their office doors. Shameful, but not all that surprising, considering who’s in office. Possibly related posts:
Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking caused a bit of a stir this week when he suggested during a talk in Hong Kong that humans need to get off the earth and colonize space.
He predicted we will colonize the moon within 20 years and Mars within 40 years, assuming we don’t self-destruct in the meantime. Reactions to Hawking’s rather off-the-cuff remarks have been mixed. Advocates of human space exploration predictably loved the media coverage, while more pessimistic types scoffed at the notion. Actually, Hawking’s notions are not original or even ground-breaking. Even Pres. George W. Bush, in a lame imitation of JFK’s famous 1962 challenge to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, has made human missions to the moon and Mars as a goal of the US space program. NASA developed — on paper anyway — lunar colonies back in the 60s and orbiting space colonies in the 70s. And of course science fiction writers have been kicking around the idea for more than 100 years. So, is Hawking off his rocker, or is there some merit in putting humans in space? Possibly related posts:
I’ve been off doing other things than blogging this past week, since the Muse has not visited me of late, but this latest Internet fad is just too good to pass up commenting on. To pevent their teachers from hearing their cell phones announce calls and messages, students are downloading a high frequency ringtone (about 17,000 Hertz) that the average adult cannot hear. The news has spread all over the ‘net and the news agencies so I won’t bother reviewing the story. I will gloss on the meaning of “average,” though. The 17kHz (that’s kiloHertz, folks) tone cannot be heard by the average adult, since as we grow older, we lose sensitivity to the higher frequency range of the human ear (20 Hz – 20kHz). But average, by definition, is a measure of the middle of a set of data. So, some adults (like me!) can in fact hear those high frequency tones. (I can also sometimes hear the high frequency whine of TV and computer cathode-ray monitors, which use a high frequency oscillator to “draw” the picture.) So, kiddoes, if you want to be absolutely sure your teacher cannot hear your pesky cell phone, try the “vibrate” feature and keep the phone off the desk. Possibly related posts:
Thirty years ago, the US launched twin probes towards the outer planets. Taking advantage of the favorable arrangement of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, the Voyagers swung by the four gas giants over the course of a decade, returning valuable data and beautiful, compelling images of the Big Four. The Voyagers kept on going, heading for interstellar space. Astronomers told us they would travel for hundreds of thousands of years before reaching another star system, since space is pretty damn big, but that caveat did not prevent some SF writers from using the Voyagers as a plot device. Thanks to a team led by astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, each probe carried on its side a metallic phonograph record (with a stylus included, in case alien space scientists had moved onto CDs) containing messages in dozens of Earth languages, photographs, music, tidbits about our biology and relative size, the location of our home world, and so on. The rest of the movie dwells on Bridge’s illegal alien status, and government attempts to capture him before he escapes across the “border,” and his relationship with “Jenny Hay Den,” played by Karen Allen. Possibly related posts:
I distrust people who claim to foretell the future, but sometimes one can extrapolate from the data and predict likely events. If either of these predictions come true, well, just remember you heard it here first. Prediction #1a. Razors will have so many blades in them that electric shavers will look skinny by comparison. Remember when razors had only one blade? Sure, they had two edges, but there was only one blade. You bought a nice metal handle, and then replaced the blades. Usually the blades were alike enough that you did not have to stick with the same manufacturer. Then the razor manufacturers had the novel idea of putting the two edges on the same side of a removable cartridge that would only fit their own (plastic) handle. They also created disposable razors, so you would be obliged to buy more stuff from them. Then the razor product designers added three blades, then four. Now there are five- and six-edge heads. Your old handles are now obsolete. I lost the only double-edged Gillette handle I owned somehow, but I still had a supply of the blades that fit that handle. No way was I going to find that handle in the store. I had to upgrade to a five-blade razor. Possibly related posts:
We have InsightBroadband service at home. It’s been pretty good, until this weekend. I can ping addresses, most of the time. Visiting websites is a touch-and-go process, though. Some pages load almost as fast as before. Others don’t load at all. Our VOIP service through Lightyear Alliance is out, too. I feel like I’m on the first step of a 12-step internet recovery program. Insight is in the middle of some major hoohah “upgrade”, which is killing their customers’ internet access. The main problem is with the DNS servers, it seems. These are the servers that associate user-friendly website addresses with the numerical addresses computers use, sort of like electronic “phone books.” When the DNS servers are not working correctly, it can take forever to load a webpage, if you can at all. Some users depend on their cable access for business purposes, and are going nuts right now. Insight, as you can expect, is resorting to the usual big-company boilerplate response. “We profusely apologize, etc., etc. Reboot all your equipment. Take two aspirin and call us in the morning.” I haven’t bothered calling customer support, since my networking skills are probably equal to (or maybe better) than their help desk staff’s. We are just waiting it out. Meanwhile, I can’t do diddly with this site or the school’s websites, at least from home. Possibly related posts:
Twenty years ago, a fission reactor at Chernobyl, Ukraine, exploded, killing 28 people by radiation poisoning and ruining the health of thousands more by contaminating the water and soil. By all accounts, the accident resulted from a poor reactor design and ill-advised operational decisions by the crew. It was the unforgiving laws of physics, however, that led to the worst nuclear power plant disaster in history. Nuclear power plants generate electrical power by using pressurized steam to rotate turbine blades connected to electric generators. The heat of a controlled chain reaction creates the steam. The trick is to control that chain reaction so that the nuclear core is hot enough to create the steam, but not hot enough to melt the reactor. Loss of that control caused the Chernobyl disaster. Nuclear fission occurs when an atomic nucleus is too unstable to maintain its structural integrity. Basically, there’s too much energy in the tiny volume of the nucleus and the nucleus quells the riot by splitting into two smaller nuclei and emitting gamma ray photons. The process inevitably leads to an increase in temperature of the radioactive material. Uranium is a naturally occurring “fuel” for fission reactors like the one in Chernobyl. Uranium has two principal isotopes, U-238 and U-235, which have different nuclear but identical chemical properties. Possibly related posts:
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