Want!

Flying Car anyone?





MIT Press Release

Counter-Intuitive

In End of Faith, page 183 :

When asked how thick a piece of newspaper would be if one could fold it upon itself one hundred times in succession, most of us imagine something about the size of a brick. A little arithmetic reveals, however, that such an object would be as thick as the known universe.

Caribbean Cruise - Miami > Turks > Halfmoon Cay > Nassau > Miami

Setting sail on September 21. Going to be a blast.

Homage!

http://xkcd.com/548/

Charlie Darwin

The Future is Now!

This is probably not the first time this video has come around, but it is still worth watching nonetheless. Advanced magnetics have so much potential....so much imagined by speculative scientists and authors of fabulation.

Way too cool.

"Up the Universe" - Eint Truzenzuzex, Bran Tse-Mallory*

A TED Talk that examines quite a bit of our knowledge of cosmology, and the origins of the universe. There is a really nifty visual rendering of a tour through several galactic clusters at a virtual speed in the billions of lightyears/sec (Seen in the still-frame of the embedded video. Definitely worth taking a gander.


*Eint Truzenzuzex and Bran Tse-Mallory are fictional characters created by Alan Dean Foster in his "Continuing Adventures of Pip and Flinx" science-fiction novels.

Nostalgia

Saturday Mornings, in my P.J.'s watching "Land of the Lost".






I'll try not to let Will Farrell as the star bother me.

Bus Slogan Generator!

Generate Your Own Slogan

If you had a super power, what would it be?

hmmmm.

Robots will Rule the World

The First Law of Robotics Stories: In the Future, Robots will rebell and a) Kill Us All; b) Enslave Us All; c) Protect Us All (from ourselves).


* Jack Williamson, in his short story "With Folded Hands" (1947) set the stage for robots stifling human expression in the future. This story predates Asimov's collection, "I, Robot" (1950) by a mere 3 years.

Coming soon to Calgary...

The Atheist Bus Ad is going to make its debut in the Chinook City.

I think this is a good thing. A symbol of freedom of speech, open social discussion, and non-discriminatory or censorial ad laws.

Some on the Calgary Herald website commentary are suggesting that they might not take transit anymore because of this. To me, this just seems over-reactionary and petty. It is interesting, however, to see the number of folks who's belief structure is so tender that a little difference of opinion leads to outcry.

100 Abandonded Houses....

A pictorial study of abandoned properties. No location specified for each picture:















....from Kevin Bauman Photography:
http://www.kevinbauman.com/100abandonedhouses/


Some of these have potential. I wonder if there will be a new trend for fix-er-uppers to buy interesting, but abandoned, architecture and restore these properties to their former glory?

Quote for the Day: President Obama

"For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers."

Thought for the Day: Circle of...

http://thisisindexed.com/2009/01/unforeseen-difficulties/

Pithy!

Defying Gravity

Want!

Stellar Nursery

The cluster of thousands of stars lies 20,000 light years from Earth in the Carina spiral arm of our galaxy. It is embedded in a star-forming nebula called NGC 3603, a cloud of gas and dust with enough material to form 400,000 stars like the Sun.

Previous measurements by Hubble and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile had come to the same conclusion for two of these star systems, indicating that the heaviest star involved is as massive as 114 Suns, which is at the borderline of what some theoretical models allow.

Very cool and interesting.