Given my excitement about the Endeavour a few weeks back I couldn’t pass up posting a link to this article at Jalopnik that speculates on what it would take to steal a space shuttle.
In other news, the illustrious Michael_lobster has been hard at work on a secret project. I think the results are pretty impressive:
[Edit]: I knew there was something else I wanted to post! Here’s a Minute Physics video I thoroughly enjoyed the other night:
It’s a less than perfect cell phone photo, but here is the highlight of my day:
Endeavour on its last flight. I had worried that I might not catch sight of it today. To me space flight and exploration is an incredibly powerful symbol of what we are capable of as a species when we put our minds to it. Sure, we’ve got a lot of problems on Earth, but we can also strive and reach and (as the saying goes) dare mighty things. Seeing one of those triumphs of humanity come home to rest was a exhilarating moment for me.
Warren Ellis has a fascinating essay up detailing the need to improve reality by seeing the present. This is simplifying things significantly, hence why I recommend giving the entire piece a read.
The bit I want to emphasize here is the power of perspective. Go back fifty years and describe our “mundane” everyday experiences of smartphones, exploration, medicine and scientific discoveries to the average citizen and I doubt he or she would believe you. Actually, I can imagine the exact words my grandfather would use to describe me (and no, they’re not quite fit to print). Here’s a video to prove my point:
That’s a solar eclipse on Mars. We have robots there exploring the planet for us.
Let me repeat that: We’ve successfully sent multiple robots to another planet in order to explore our solar system. The amount of innovation, development, and skill that allowed this accomplishment is simply astounding.
Typically when our technological development we take a stance similar to the following blase attitude: for all its might, the internet is mostly full of cats:
But here’s the thing: I watched that video on a tablet computer. Not only that, I watched it while I was feeling incredibly sick in the midst of 95+ degree LA heat. I was miserable, yet a cat video (apparently from someone in Japan that I’ve never met) managed to cheer me up. Again, if you break down the steps that it took to make that video, get it up on the web, and delivered on demand to my tablet, well even cat videos become pretty impressive.
I’ll give you this one LA, you make some pretty sunsets.
Our view on a walk yesterday.
For what amounts to a personal blog with a pretty small readership I seem to get a lot of spammers in the comments. I was emptying out the comments filter this morning and ran across these nuggets:
Symptoms of flu…
That was it. Very ominous. Or maybe it was referencing how the other comments feel.
I conceive the articles here is very excellent.
*System error. English teacher subroutine failing. Grammar? Very yes.*
Then the best one of all: three identical comments from different “people” declaring:
Does it look like some of these remarks look like written by brain dead individuals?
You don’t say!
Earlier this week the LA Times had a story about Jharia, India and the coal fires that have threatened that community for decades. The case of Jharia is pretty bleak according to the Times. An intriguing aspect of this story though is the increase of strip mining that has occurred as a means to “save” the coal from the fires. There are a number of different draws here since coal burnt in the ground as opposed to say a steel mill is ultimately money lost for mining interests. At the same time, strip mining leads to increased profits for those same interests. At the root though there remain the local residents whose lives are irrevocably changed by a coal mining disaster set to a slow burn.
Errant Reader 