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Archive for March, 2010

I am surprised and relieved at how good the new series in the Stargate saga is, which is entitled Stargate Universe. I think my favorite character is Dr. Nicholas Rush because he is mysterious, brilliant, and driven to do what is necessary to accomplish his goals, and I am not sure if he has nefarious motives or not. Stagate in the past has always had the good guys fighting the bad guys, but in this series, the crew seems to be fighting amongst each other in a neo-surivialist mode: rationing water and food and energy. The show is unexpected and character driven. I love it! I also think Robert Carlyle is an excellent actor, in fact I watched him play Hitler last night in the movie Hitler: The Rise of Evil (2003), wow, what a performance!
All I can say is give me more episodes!
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• Stargate Universe Season 1.5 Teaser Trailer (dashpunk.com)

Since this year is the last year of the space shuttle program, they seem to be going into all the nooks and crannies and cleaning out stuff and deciding who will get what. From the article:
You may get a chance to see the container that holds their, well, you know, astro poop.With the shuttle fleet scheduled to retire later this year, NASA is cleaning out warehouses and storage rooms and offering space artifacts to certain organizations such as schools and universities, museums and libraries.
I doubt I want to see the potty the astronauts used, thank you very much! I find what the astronauts do interesting but not in such detail!
The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex was tentatively allocated 119 items, although officials don’t know exactly what all of the items are. The artifacts won’t be delivered until the shuttle program ends or as the items are phased out of production.
You can read the rest of the Article HERE and I am sure more news will pop up this entire year since the space program is sadly ending.
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• Winner (and Losers) of NASA’s Final Shuttle Patch Contest (wired.com)

I love pets and grew up with quite a variety from dogs, to cats and rabbits, birds, chickens, etc. My favorite pets are cats and that got me thinking about Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation and his cat Spot. I liked very much that Data wanted to care for a living creature and thus learn to be more human, be responsible for feeding and caring for his cat, and write poetry and paint using his cat as the subject matter.
Here is a funny and sweet vid of Data and his wonderful cat spot.

RIP Mica, you were loved and cherished and have now crossed the Rainbow Bridge.

German scientists have been researching cloaking technology in three dimensions and ironically have been practicing on gold. I could go off on how funny and odd that is, cloaking gold? I know a lot of money has disappeared in this economic crisis, but it has been fiat currency, to make gold disappear, that is another story! In all seriousness, this technology has been researched for some time now with some success achieved in two dimensions and now in three dimensions, using gold. Those of you who watch or read science fiction, for example, Star Trek, the Romulans, Klingons, and Jem ´Hadar, all use cloaks. The Jem ´Hadar from Deep Space Nine are unique in that they cloak themselves and can sneak up right in front of you without you even detecting their presence, the Romulans and Klingons cloak their ships, so in all these examples, the cloak is used for battle or to move from place to place in stealth.
Now I am racking my brain trying to find some purpose that cloaking will benefit humanity and I cannot. Maybe the answer eludes me in this time and place, but all I can see is the military of any country eager to get its hands on this kind of technology as well as police. Not even the Federation in Star Trek used cloaking technology in order to keep the peace with those who used cloaks and the Federation did not believe in spying on its own citizens.
So again, I wonder why this type of scientific study is taking place?
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• Cloaking device takes microscopic step (cbc.ca)

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Two scientists in Japan decided to make a model ship, the Enterprise, so small you need a microscope to see it and in the mean time taking the art of building model ships to a whole new level. I wonder where they will keep it?

In what certainly has to be the smallest scale ever for a science-fiction ship model, two scientists have constructed the USS Enterprise in a one-billionth scale.The scale model of the Enterprise is so tiny, that it can only be seen by an electron microscope.Scientists Takayuki Hoshino and Shinji Matsui of the Himeji Institute of Technology, located in Japan, used a focused ion beam to cut out the model, using a process called chemical vapor deposition (CVD).The CVD process used phenanthrene gas to etch the tiny 8.8 micrometer USS Enterprise.

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• Starship Enterprise built at one-billionth scale (dvice.com)

Wired.com has an awesome pic of the Martian Moon, from the article:
The sharpest images yet taken by the Mars Express spacecraft of Mars’ tiny moon Phobos reveal features as small as 14.5 feet across, the European Space Agency announced March 15.The Mars Express flybys, which happen every five months, may also determine if Phobos is a fragile pile of rocky fragments stuck together — what planetary scientists refer to as a rubble pile — or solid through and through, says Mars Express scientist Gerhard Neukum of the Free University of Berlin.
Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/mars-phobos-flyby/#ixzz0iMxw7Qdg
Science fiction movies and television make it look so easy to travel about in space when in reality it is very difficult and impressive the strides we have made. I just wish as much money were spent on space studies vs. war and weapons. Maybe one day……
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• Closest Ever Look at Martian Moon (wired.com)

I was thinking about George Orwell yesterday and how he lived through two world wars and an economic depression so I relate to a lot of what he writes about due to living in what I call a depression (not a great recession) and two major wars being fought in two separate countries at the same time right now in the year 2010. He wrote his famous book “1984″ in the year 1949 and yet it could have been written last year it is so relevant to our times as well as his various quotes.
I thought I would list some of my favorite quotes written by him over the years and in no particular order here they are:
1. All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

2. Big Brother is watching you.
3. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
4. Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
5. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
6.In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
7. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
8. To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
9. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
10. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

I thought I would bring up an older post I wrote about the economy since the California budget is still in the hole, one year ago the Stock Market plunged to new lows, people are still denying anything is wrong with the economy, and forget about getting the truth from the mainstream press about the entire economic mess in the world. We have change alright, for the worst, in my opinion.
Here is the original post:
How does the Terminator, Twitter, and the economy relate you ask yourself? Well I received a most interesting e-mail from a friend who is into economics and knows how much I love science fiction and thought I would get a kick out of reading the article and I did. The article is relating Skynet, from the Terminator series, which is a computer system that is created for defensive purposes, to Twitter and other social networking/info sites that provide us with quick information and connection to others. How, once again you ask, does this relate to the economy? Well, Skynet in the Terminator became self-aware and viewed humans as a threat to its existence and thus began the quest to wipe out the human race (I believe the Governator of California has become self-aware that he cannot fix the budget problems of that State in the US but that is another post!)
The article, which is found in Marketwatch and I will link at the end of the post, states that Tweeting and Twittering about the internet is making our attention spans shrink with the massive amount of data being downloaded into our minds each day. It makes us forget that, for example, GM would not survive through December ‘08 without a bailout and bankruptcy would be devastating for all involved to fast forward to June 1st, 2009 and bankruptcy is the best thing in the world for GM and “Skynet”, I mean the major networks and online papers are cheering the bankruptcy and telling us the economy is improving!
This entire thing reminds me of an episode of Stargate SG1 called Revisions(2003) in which each member of a very small society that lives in a bubble has a neural interface that keeps each person linked with the computer and when a “revision” is made, all memories of the previous persons or situations are erased as if it never happened. So if we had placed on our heads a neural interface, Skynet, or insert here your favorite government agency, would have just revised the data and we collectively would have forgotten the whole GM debacle.
I love technology and I know this article sounds pessimistic but with high quantities of information available to us these days, it is important to be discriminating in what we read and make sure our long term memories stay intact.
Anyway, I thought the article interesting and worth reading HERE.
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When I read this article in Space.com, I became very interested in what the scientist William Edelstein presented about warp speed using Star Trek and the Enterprise as his example. From the article:
The original crew of “Star Trek” featured as unfortunate examples at a presentation by William Edelstein, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, at the American Physical Society conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 13. The physicist showed a video clip of Kirk telling engineer Scotty to go to warp speed.
“Well, they’re all dead,” Edelstein recalled saying. His words caused a stir among the audience.
Some audience members at the American Physical Society event protested that Kirk, Spock and the “Star Trek” crew would all still live because of the starship Enterprise having shields. But Edelstein noted some of the existing difficulties with creating an electromagnetic shield with any resemblance to “Star Trek” technology.
I like how the audience wanted something to work, that it is possible to create or design a ship that can travel great distances in a short time!

The physicist concluded by suggesting that extraterrestrials might not have visited Earth because of all the problems in traveling at near-light speeds, including how to deal with deadly hydrogen space mines. But for the record, he does believe that alien life exists.

“Getting between stars is a huge problem unless we think of something really, really different,” Edelstein said. “I’m not saying that we know everything and that it’s impossible. I’m saying it’s kind of impossible based on what we know right now.”

I guess we need to get out our shovels and start looking for a Stargate unless… it has already been found and in use!

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At the website Wired.com, they have some great charts of how the Chilean city Concepcion moved 10 feet to the west after the 8.8 magnitude earthquake. From the article:

Precise GPS measurements from before and after the earthquake, the fifth largest ever recorded by seismographs, show that the country’s capital, Santiago, moved 11 inches west. Even Buenos Aires, nearly 800 miles from the epicenter, shifted an inch. The image above uses red arrows to represent the relative direction and magnitude of the ground movement in the vicinity of the quake.The analysis comes from a project led by Ohio State earth scientist Mike Bevis that has been using GPS to record movements of the crust on Chile since 1993. The area is of particular interest to geoscientists because it is an active subduction zone, where an oceanic plate is colliding with a continental plate and being pushed into the Earth’s molten mantle below.

Wow! I wish we had the crew of the Enterprise from the episode entitled “Pen Pals” in which Data has contact with a a young alien girl whose planet is ravaged by earthquakes. He breaks the rules of the Prime Directive and helps her and her world. The Enterprise and crew through advanced technology is able to stabilize the the crust thus ending the earthquake and volcanic activity.
Right now, I would settle for an early warning system that would let us folks that live in earthquake zones at least get out of a building before the quake hits!
You can read the article about the earthquake HERE.
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• Chile Earthquake Moved Entire City 10 Feet to the West (wired.com)