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September 28th, 2009
 | 11:58 am - Switzerland Sends Its First Satellite Into Space
ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2009) — The first Swiss satellite in history -- extremely small and 100 percent student designed and built -- has been successfully launched from the Sriharikota space station in India. Constructed by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, with many institutional partners, the SwissCube has gone into orbit. Those who worked on it adhered to extremely precise requirements for space travel.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090923102333.htm
Let's hear it for the Helvetii!
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August 9th, 2009
| 05:38 pm
bees making a hive in a jar
video of a monkey herding goats (includes baby goats and baby monkeys)
A lunar eclipse will fall on our 4th wedding anniversary. 19 other things you didn't know about eclipses.
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July 23rd, 2009
| 10:50 pm
http://johnmoltz.com/post/146407206/10-reasons-i-know-the-apollo-11-moon-landing-was-faked
10 reasons I know the Apollo 11 moon landing was faked
1. There were three men on the Apollo 11 spacecraft. That means that the odds of someone dying at any given point in the mission were one in three… YET NO ONE DID!
2. The moon is approximately six kajillion miles away. It is impossible to travel that far because “kajillion” is a made-up word and not a measurable distance. You would be travelling forever!
3. If men had landed on the moon, this would have angered the lunar vampires we know to live there, sparking a war between Earth and the lunar vampires that would currently be ravaging both worlds. No such war appears to be taking place. Yet it is. The government is just covering that up, too. But it wasn’t started by an incursion on their territory, it was started during a dispute over the ownership of a mule named Paco.
4. This so-called “moon” that supposedly orbits our planet cannot be real because the teachings of Septon the Inquisitor tell us that life is an illusion and the real waking state does not come until we die and arrive, ironically, on the moon which is where people go when they die. I know it sounds confusing, but it makes a lot more sense after you watch the informational video and relinquish all your wordly possessions.
5. The entire trip supposedly took 8 days yet at no point are the astronauts shown on live TV defecating. And no one outside of NASA employees, some contractors, government inspectors, EPA officials, family and friends of the astronauts and the astronauts themselves has ever even seen any of the mythical poop bags from the supposed flight. WHERE ARE THE POOP BAGS??? Without defecating, they would have exploded after day 4.
6. Cary Elwes played command module pilot Michael Collins in “From the Earth to the Moon”. Cary Elwes is an actor who was also in “Glory” and “The Princess Bride”, therefore we know the entire mission was faked.
7. A lot of the communication between the LEM, command module and Capcom is filled with static which is just how someone would fake such communication in order to make it sound real. Which it isn’t.
8. “Buzz”? That’s not even a name. It’s a sound that bees make.
9. Three men in a confined space for 8 days and there’s no gay sex? Right. Any graduate of a British boarding school for boys would tell you that’s impossible.
10. I was a hollow shell of a person with few interpersonal relationships before I began to believe the moon landings were faked. Now I have a purpose and set of shared beliefs with a small cadre of others and we have achieved a modicum of fame for ourselves as noted kooks, fame we would never have been able to otherwise achieve because we have no natural talents.
That last one alone should convince anyone.
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March 27th, 2009
| 12:42 am
It's no longer a rhetorical question. Here is visual proof:
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March 25th, 2009
| 08:18 am
Leo, Jana: I am Uber, and you are not.
What do astrophysicists' cats walk on? (answer at end of post)
Helio-paws! (my beautiful wife came up with that one)
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March 19th, 2009
| 12:39 pm
first pictures ever of liquid water anywhere besides Earth
Photos of one of the lander's legs show droplets that grew during the polar summer. Based on the temperature of the leg and the presence of large amounts of "perchlorate" salts detected in the soil, scientists believe the droplets were most likely salty liquid water and mud that splashed on the spacecraft when it touched down.
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April 25th, 2008
| 12:09 pm
News for the day:
After Near Extinction, Humans Split Into Isolated Bands
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080424-humans-extinct.html
About 150,000 years ago, humankind split into small groups—living apart for a hundred thousand years before "reuniting" and migrating out of Africa, a new gene study says.
The Future of Sports
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/080425-space-station-sports.html
Astronauts, by necessity, work hard in space. But during their precious time off aboard the International Space Station (ISS), some spaceflyers are picking their brains to come up with the future of space sports.
I started to watch Caligula, the one with Malcolm McDowell, and realized I was no where near stoned enough. Have you seen this? I'm definitely sitting down next weekend and watching it.
Brand names 'as old as civilisation itself'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml;jsessionid=0LECYUVDXYG0NQFIQMFCFGGAVCBQYIV0?xml=/earth/2008/04/23/scibrand123.xml&site=30&page=0
Bottle stops used five millennia ago in ancient Mesopotamia (today's Iraq), the birthplace of cities and writing, carried symbols that marked them out as the earliest evidence of branded goods.
nite nite
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November 8th, 2006
 | 12:29 pm
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/061108_cassini_fate.html
They're deciding on the ultimate fate of Cassini. Some possibilities include throwing it into Saturn, Jupiter, or Mercury, or sending it outward in the wake of the Voyagers, possibly encountering some KBOs later on. All of the choices include continuing receiving data, including the one that sends it to the outer reaches of the solar system. Why don't they just put it in orbit around Titan or Saturn and continue monitoring until it dies? They're planning on receiving data anyway, so what's the problem? I realize this will require money to receive and process the data, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than sending another craft. It's not like the new data will be useless simply because it will always be of the same body. Set up something like SETI @ Home and let us do it.
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May 5th, 2006
| 09:12 am - Private Space Companies Forge Ahead Despite Failures
http://www.space.com/adastra/adastra_isdc_musk_060504.html
Private Space Companies Forge Ahead Despite Failures
LOS ANGELES, California - Leaders of two private space ventures that suffered failures vowed today to try, try again.
[ more ]
Keep on keepin' on, boys. We gotta get off this rock.
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July 18th, 2002
| 07:36 am
I can't believe in anything sacred when I don't believe in anything.
I have several things to post. They may or may not be separated into neat, clean sections. I will make an attempt to make them so.
Reign of Fire
I went to see this movie tonight. I give it not more than three stars. It was good, mostly because of the, albeit limited, special effects. But it certainly wasn't worth the $7.50 I paid to get in. If you can find it at a matinee it would be worth your time. Otherwise I suggest waiting until it comes out as a rental.
The Red Violin
I bought this movie a few weeks ago because a girl I am interested in said it was great, and that she would watch it with me at some point. Since she has been unavailable to watch it, probably due to a lack of interest in watching it with me, I decided to watch it tonight. Fucking great movie. For those of you who may not know of this movie, I will give a brief synopsis. Nicolo Bussotti, in the 17th century, crafted the perfect violin for his as yet unborn son. His wife died in childbirth, along with their son, and he varnished the violin with his deceased wife's blood, in a mixture with legitimate varnish. The movie is the tale of the violin's life, from Austria to England to China, winding up on an auction block in Montreal. 95% of you will not understand or enjoy this movie. The remaining five per cent of you with a brain, a clue, and an interest in romantic epics will thoroughly enjoy this movie as I did. Yes, I am saying that 19 of 20 of you are idiots. This is about par.
I long for romance
It occurred to me tonight, mostly during the previously mentioned movie The Red Violin that I have absolutely no romance in my life. This is extremely disturbing because the only thing I live for is fun and romance. I'm not religious in the least, so there is nothing for me to look forward to in the way of an "afterlife." I haven't much hope for mankind in the long run. Based on the Copernican theory of arbitrarily determining the life expectancy of a given thing, mankind has not more than, what was it, 1.8 million years to go, we won't be around forever. According to J. Richard Gott, our only hope for long term survival is to colonize anywhere else, such at the moon or Mars, if not another planetary system altogether. And in light of George W. "I'm a fucking idiot" Bush's recent attempts to cut funding for NASA's program for exploring the solar system, Pluto especially, I just don't think we'll do it. Part of Gott's prediction is that there is a limited window in which any given task can be done. Take, for example, the race to the moon. The only real reason we, the USA, went was to one-up the Soviet Union. We, at least those in charge, didn't care about exploring the moon or expanding our horizons. The Soviets were going and we were damned determined to get there first. There is no more Soviet Union, and unless there is someone else around to prompt us into action, I fear we won't have the urge to actually do anything. If we miss our window, then what? H.G. Wells painted a grim picture of our future in The Time Machine. The human race was degenerated to a dual nature of predator/prey, in which the working class was driven underground by the aristocracy and, as a result, came to view the surface dwellers, what used to be the "upper class" as cattle. Except for the fact that we were feeding on each other, I didn't think this result of humanity was such a bad thing. The surface dwellers, the Eloi, were a simple people who frolicked in the woods and sniffed flowers for a living, to put it briefly. The time traveller in the story, who saw only these Eloi at first, thought this wasn't such a bad thing. Then he discovered the Morlocks, the underground race who fed on the surface people, and realized that we were heading down a road onto which we would probably rather not trod. If we don't start looking at the earth as a whole unit, not as a conglomeration of countries and cultures, we are doomed.
And I realized I've gotten side tracked. I was talking about romance, and the lack thereof in my life. There is absolutely no romance in my life. None. I wake up. I go to work. I talk to people, most of them idiots, some of them cool, a very few of them have potential to be significant parts of my life. I come home. I go to bed. Occasionaly in intermissions I post, talk to my friends online, and watch movies that remind me of what I am missing. It's mostly the movies... and books and television shows and dreams. There is no one in my life, barring my immediate family - I'm aware that some of you don't even have that and I truely feel for you - that is affected one way or the other by my existance. To be sure, I realize that I affect everyone I come in contact with in some small way. But no one truely cares whether or not I had a bad day, or bought "that movie" I've been talking about for a week, or will cook pork fried rice for dinner. I have my roommates, who couldn't care less past whether or not I pay my rent, cook something, or burn the house down in a fit of rage for, to them, no reason at all. In The Red Violin, Senior Bussotti told his servants to leave the room so that he could speak to his wife, and they left, and the two of them had an important conversation afterwards. This doesn't happen in my life. In Reign of Fire Alex chooses to go to London to hunt the great male dragon. Quinn is visibly affected by this. Quinn's adopted son chooses to go also. Quinn is also affected by this, to the point to where he attempts to stop him. This doesn't happen in my life. In one episode of That '80s Show that sticks in my mind, Corey invites Tuesday to "the club" to hang out, and, after much thought and discussion with their mutual friend/boss, goes. This doesn't happen in my life. I guess I feel that I'm just living the life I've been dealt because I happen to have become aware in my present body, and that there's nothing significant about it. This is the proper view for an atheist. But I'm not satisfied with this. Purpose or not, I want to force my life to have some meaning. One thing I'm so incredibly tired of hearing is that one doesn't "need" love or a significant other to "be." Whether or not this is true, I want it for my existance, and in light of the fact that my existance has absolutely no purpose other than which I give it, I goddamned well want and expect to get what I want, and most of that expectation revolves around being something to someone. Basically it just comes down to that I want to come home from work and have someone there who wants to hear about my day, will be affected, preferably in a positive way, by my very existance, will realize that I am affected by their life - since I'm a heterosexual male, I'll presume that this will be a heterosexual female - and, basically, give a rat's ass that I'm around.
I'm not one for dating. I can never figure out the rules, and since they change from day to day, I doubt I ever will. I've never subscribed to the concept of just hanging out and "eventually" falling in love with someone. I'm far too imaginative and inspired for any of that. I want to happen upon someone in some dire circumstance and instantly fall in love. Some of you may claim that this only happens in movies and stories, but something sure as hell inspired those movies and stories, and I want that.
A friend commented on my "assessment" of The Red Violin just after I had rattled off a random Budgie quote - "I was born yesterday. Trouble seemed so far away." - and, even if it wasn't what he was commenting on, seems to fit. Not only the movie, but my life. I never thought, when I was young, that life would be as empty as it is.
I hunger for the fullness that others have.
Current Music: Stabbing Westward - Why
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June 5th, 1973
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