Scholastic youth bit the iconoclastic sleuth with an uncouth sarcastic tooth...

A little less than three hours ago, NASA's Dawn Mission launched into space via a Delta II Heavy Lifter and is on it's way to the asteroid belt. The Dawn spacecraft is NASA's newest deep space explorer on the first interplentary mission in history. Dawn will slingshot around Mars, testing it's framing cameras, measuring x-rays, gamma rays and infra-red imagers as it leaves the red planet's orbit...and zooms on to Vesta, the first of two asteroid belt objects to study.

Dawn is also the first spacecraft to use Ion engines. Dawn has three Ion engines, which is one more than a George Lucas imagined TIE Fighter. Each Ion engine weighs about 20 pounds, has the diameter of a basketball and only functions in the vaccum of space, running very swiftly and thriftly on Xenon fuel. Xenon is a gas that is four times heavier than air. The Ion engines are designed for at least 5.5 years of functioning. Dawn's power source are the solar panel arms, fully extended at 54 feet, these panels will collect energizing solar rays as the space craft jets further and further from the sun. The asteroid belt objects Dawn will explore are about 3AU distant, give or take a couple thousand miles...these solar panels are NASA/JPL cutting edge tech.

Dawn has 112 levels of incremental throttle, over the next few days it's throttle will increase to level 28 as it rights itself from the launch spin and gains velocity. Slowly and deliberately Dawn will gently increase it's speed, over the next four days it will go from 0-60 mph...the follwing days 60 more mph...after 12 days in it will cruising at 180 mph. This puts less stress on the ion engines and conserves xenon. as the 2,600 lb spacecraft rockets through the solar system. After about a year in space Dawn will reach 5,500 mph...at 5 years in it's speed will reach 23,000 mph.

Absolutely interesting stuff. Space history was made today.

-A

PS: It's NASCAR weekend here in Kansas! I will be out at speedway for majority of the next three days watching my favorite drivers blow the quarterpanels off the competition. Won't be writing on here during that time.

The population's inspiration and elation with lactation is a fascination and creation of frustration...

The e-news must be slow today...Yahoo has a story about satellite imaging being able to find downed planes or lost hikers in remote areas...so why not look for bigfoot populations and sea monsters. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about cryptozoology. I do think that the mind can play tricks on a person, as the synaptic sparks in the brain try to make sense of shadows and peripheral vision. The mass effect of delusional folklore, superstition and hysteria still tuns rampant through society. I also know that thanks to evolution there seem to be new species, however large or small discovered on a regular basis. Humans even make new breeds or domesticated animals through artifical selection. Just look at all of the funky-less-than-natural dogs that are available for people to sink money in to. I am however skeptical of everything, yet one can have "faith" without having belief in the supernatural, new age, hollistic, paranormal. One can be scientific and natural and still have to take things on what can be termed faith. I have never seen an atom or it's nucleus. I have never stepped foot on the moon but know it is more than just a flat paper disk rising and setting in a pin pricked sky. Due to the lifespan of the human animal, I could never know 100% for sure that the universe over 13 billion years old. However, many respected sources with many scientific models have variably tested and proven these things to be the best of factual knowledge a human can understand. So without the means to actually look for yourself, it could be termed a faith of a sort. However you could also switch the word to trust...which I like better, since it cannot be misconstrued to have and alternate magical meaning. Nothing should be taking on faith, when it cannot be imperically measured, meaning that when science has reached it's boundry, that improbable supernatural answers are the only possible explanation. That cannot be without proof, and the absence of proof does not make it real. The scientific mind can change, can evolve, can adapt to new information.

So now using satellite imaging could it be possible to find fantastical creatures lurking just out of reach of human contact. Will there be dragons found? Unicorns? Merfolk? Bigfeet? A plesiosaur swimming deep in a European lake? Creatures that have evolved or survived through minimal breeding habits? There must be more than one of such creatures. Why else would they be so engrained in folklore? How difficult would an image be to authenticate? I myself can make very convincing bogus images using Adobe Photoshop. Scientists have yet to establish concrete evidence and serious study of such things. Yes there are socities that devote time to searching for cryptozoological animals, but nothing conclusive as of yet. The back-from-extinction coelacanth has somehow survived and remained fairly elusive to humans. Could a missing link between the human ape and the primate ape be sustaining it's population deep in a dense forest somewhere?

-A

An electroshocked and mocked pickpocket flocked to the retrorocket's flippity-flopped windsock...

Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born in Missouri- November 30, 1835 and died - April 21, 1910 of a heart attack. Clemens became one of the first and one of the most prolific American writers under the name Mark Twain. Samuel Clemens is one of my all time favorite authors. I am far from close to have reading his entire cannon of material, however its is a goal of mine to read as much of it as I can while I'm here. I have read his mainstream classics, as well as a few not so mainstream, I have also read just about all of his short stories. My fascination with Mark Twain does not end there...he was born in the time of United States history that particularly interests me, and he was fairly local to where I myself have lived my life one hundred years later. Clemens was an extremely accute critical thinker and his philisophical and political opinions and ideas were very cutting edge for his time and his esteamed place in society. Later in life after gaining life experiences through world travel, Clemens could even be labeled a revolutionary. He was a supportor of the labor-movement. He was anti-imperialism, which in and of itself was an un-Amercian way of thought for a turn-of-the-century individual, with political aquaintances. He even became VP of the American Anti-Imperialism League. Clemens was a very vocal social critic, that gave lectures on his opinions. He was an abolitionist and an opponent of racism. He was for the ethical treatment of animals and himself a vegitarian. One of the most controversial aspects of Clemens criticism was how he felt about orginized religion. His opinions and writings on that subject matter was kept in the closet, so to speak, by the surviving members of his estate, these publications were not truly marketed by publishers and kept from the mainstream until the early 1960's. Those are still not the Mark Twain books you will find readliy available for purchase when shopping your average local bookshop. There is a quite sizable collection of works published posthumously.

I do share many of the same opinions that Samuel Clemens held. That is why he is one of my, if not my favorite author of the late 19th and early 20th century. I am continually impressed by his personal views on life and the cosmos and his way of inventing fictional characters that seem incredibly lifelike.

-A

None of the one nun's sons had a ton of fun with a stun gun hunting water moccasin...

I am currently reading Martin Rees book "Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others". He makes mention of an interesting illustration of the span of our Sun's main sequence age. If you started a cross country walk on a beach New York (Sun turns on) with the destination being a beach in L.A. (Sun goes red giant), taking just one step every 2000 years, in comparisome with the current age of The Sun, your hike would have you placed somewhere in Kansas right now. The sun being just a bit under middle age...4.5 billion out of a 10 billion year main sequence. Rees' book so far is quite enjoyable, sort of in the vein of Hawkin's "Brief History of Time", as cosmos theory for the common person. What I like about Rees is that he chooses to leave all supernatural references out, yet still however reluctantly includes mention of unproven hypotheticials for information purposes. Difficult not to mention both books together, since Hawkins and Rees are colleagues with similar educational background...yet each ended up having a different approach.

Scientists have discovered that Neptune has a huge temperature differential. Being that it is furthest planet from the Sun, it only recieves 1000th of the sunlight that the Earth basks in. Neptune is a gas giant and composed primarily of helium and hydrogen, yet the methane in it's atmosphere makes it reflect blue. Neptunes year is 165x that of Earth, so it's seasons last quite long. The southern pole is currently pointed at the sun, and has heated up during this 40 years of summer. The average temperature on Neptune is -392F, but at the south pole it heats up to around 18F degress. There is more on this on the Nasa.gov site.

-A

Behold the head cold is instead conjolled in the rolled gold of a bread mold...

This evening at Glenwood Arts Theatre in Metcalf South Mall (Overland Park) at 7:40pm there will be a screening of a film called "Kansas Vs. Darwin", which is a documentray of the evolution hearings in Kansas that happened back in 2005. A couple years back the Kansas state school board was neck deep in the intelligent design legal debate which would have allowed creationism taught along side evolution in biology classes...infringing on the constitutional law that seperaes state and church. The ID supporters wanted to promote christian biblical creationism while reducing Charles Darwin's in depth science of evolution and natural selection to a mere whistful theory. More here...

http://www.kansasvdarwin.com/default.asp

I really wish I could attend this screening...however I am preoccupied.

-A

YES! Clint Bowyer won his very first cup race at Louden this weekend! Leaping four places upwards in the chase for the cup championship. That black and white JD car looked fantastic in victory lane. Bowyer did such a hard set of burnouts that he killed the car and it had to be pushed onto the checkered floor in front of the stage. One down nine to go for team RCR.

The sour cream color scheme of the meteor stream made the theme team scream...

Is there life on other planets? With the notion that the Earth is just one planet attached to the Sun, a star. That the Sun is a star among a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and that there are quite possiblly a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. The likelihood of life elsewhere would seem very probable. The fact that our solar system is a third of the age of the universe, means that lifeforms and species on non-earth planets, even quite possibly in our very own solar system, may have come and gone. Species have come and gone even on the Earth, just within the current 4.5 billion years, a fraction of time since the big bang of 13+ billion years ago.

NASA and SETI are constantly searching for signs of life. Scientists are studying extreme environments here on Earth hoping to understand life that could posssibly exist on other planets or their moons. Water, seen as ice on extra-terrestrial surfaces could house ancient microbial life. That life too could be in the process of constant evolution to adapt with an ever changing environment and weather system.

Jupiter's moon Europa is extremely bright when viewed through a telescope, due to the icy surface. The theory is that surface is constantly fed with fresh ice due to the pull of Jupiter's gravity which constanty opens and closes fissures in the ice which brings new liquid water to the surface...so there is liquid water hidden below. Water is the great diluder of building block elements that put evolution in motion. Could there be microbial or other aquatic life under Europa's crust?

Saturn's moon Titan is covered in a thick atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The conclusion drawn by an atmosphere such as this, is that Titan could have hydrocarbon lakes...hydrocarbons being a staple component of life. Titan could be home to lifeforms than would even defy the wildest imagination here on Earth.

On Earth we have thousands of creatures than have evolved and adapted to the harshest environments. Aquatic life that never sees sunlight. Life that exists in small microbial scale buried under ice. Tube worms that thrive on elements in boiling water being ejected into the ocean by vents that extend into the depths of the Earth. NASA astrobiologist Dr. Richard Hoover discovered bacteria and fungi that have lived under the icy Alaskan tundra for 32,000 years. Carnobacterium pleistocenium has thrived where no other species could in subfreezing temperatures and in total darkness.

So the likelihood of eventually finding or being found by off-planet life seems probable, but still has yet to happen.

-A

The Persian cat and a Norway rat had an eschat chat with a faithless fruit bat...

NASA's Dawn mission has finally made it to the launch pad. The mission was originally scheduled to take off in July but was postponed so NASA could give 100% attention to the recently completed STS-118 mission to the ISS. A Delta II 7925-H (heavy lifter) has made it to launch pad 17-B and the Dawn payload is atop of it. The mission's launch window starts September 26th and closes October 15th...the next Shuttle missioon STS-120 is slated for an October launch. The Dawn spacecraft will zoom off to the asteroid belt to study two of the largest objects orbiting there, Ceres and Vesta.

Ceres has a spherical body about the size of Texas and was recently dubbed a dwarf planet, in the same recatagorizing that eliminated Pluto from the classification as an outer planet. Vesta was the fourth object discovered in the belt and is about the size of Arizona. Scientists estimate Ceres could be composed of up to 25% water, which takes form as ice buried under a surface of space dust, and could quite possibly have polar ice caps...on the other side of the spectrum Vesta appears to be composed of basalt rock, frozen lava which would indicate resurfacing and an early history of volcanism. Vesta is nearly spheroid in shape except for a huge impact crater at it's south pole. It is estimated that about 5% of the meteorites found on Earth originate from a massive impact in the asteroid belt, much like the one that ejected debris out of Vesta's crater.

The Asteroid Belt orbits the Sun in between the orbital paths of Mars and Jupiter. The four largest objects in the belt, including the two listed above and Pallas and Hygiea comprise almost half of the overall mass of the main belt. The rest of the objects range in sizes from a grain of sand to a mountain.

The Dawn spacecraft is scheduled to reach Vesta in September 2011 and study the asteroid until April 2012...at that point it will make it's way to Ceres by February 2015, with the primary mission coming to an end in July 2015. I would assume that like most successful NASA exploration missions, Dawn will continue on much longer than the projected timeframe.

-A

The demeritted ferret inheritted the parrot in the beret's carrot...

One the most difficult to digest and highly unlikely things that people of christian faith tend to believe in is a second coming. At some point in the last 2000 or so years someone with a vivid imagination included "revelations" into an edition of the book. These revelations tell of prophetic occurances supposedly yet to happen. Now being that I was forced to go to a fundementalist AoG church as a child, I was warned on several occasions about the soon-to-come-to-pass rapture. What I thought was most strange was that I was also told as a child that if anyone claimed to have supernatural powers, like fortune telling or predicting the future, that they must be of the devil or a witch or satanist of some sort.. Then of course the bible has a whole chapter of Nostradamusian predictions, and the very fact that they claim Jesus to have had magickal powers seemed strange to me that they held a prejudice against modern people claiming to have a supernatural touch. The church I attended thought astrology and horoscopes were devilish. How hypocritical to have a "my superstitions are holy but your's are not" attitude? Anyways...for hundreds of years those of christian faith have used the "end times" routine into scaring heathens into worshiping their god. The dispensationalists of 190 years ago even plotted out a chart of what they think will happen. They even invented a person called the "Antichrist" as someone to point the prophetic finger at. Far as I can tell the Antichrist person isn't even mentioned in the revelations chapter. It all never set well with me. As a young child it scared the shit out of me, just like it was supposed to...but it never made sense. However a whole bunch of people all over the world actually believe in a coming apacolypse. Like a nuclear war, which could indeed happen, but not by a supernatural cause unless you count that the switch was thrown by a faith-head. These people even welcome it. They believe that it will be the grand finale when Jesus flies down from outer space and lands in a cloud to collect all of the buried skeletons, rotting corpses and cremated remains (good luck gathering up all of the dust JC), up into the clouds with him. Then all of those true believers will vanish and instantly fly up, up, up and away into outer space or wherever they think the afterlife is staged.

Several other religions have their own version...

1)The jewish think that they will finally strike all of their enemies down (get revenge), then ressurect the dead, then the messiah will come down to Earth and be crowned king.

2) The mormons think that Jesus will come back to the planet and land in Missouri. They will have his landing pad clearly marked as a yet to be constructed temple, relax, they have plenty of time. The mormons think that people on Earth only have 7000 years to exist, being that we live in the 6000th year, they have another 1000 or so to build a couple temples. The mormons then think that all wicked non-mormons will perish in fire. After that all that will be left are those that believe in mormon ideology.

3a) Suni Muslims think that Jesus will come back but will fool everyone since he is a false messiah (anitchrist figure)...only the true muslims will know the difference. Then a true muslim will gather an army to fight the fake-jesus. The "real" Jesus will only come back after they start fighting the fake-jesus. The second-second-coming Jesus will general an army to stomp out the bad guys...but that's not all, the sun will then rise up in the west and kill anyone that's left...then it's judgment day.

3b) The Shia muslims predict a whole bunch of political actions, a fake messiah and quite a few of them dying in Iraq. Then someone will rise up make a speach, raise an army and kill off the bad guys...then there will be peace, once everyone is using true islam as their religion...then after a while the dead will pop back up and be judged.

4) Zoroastrians think that there will be a great final battle, where the bad guys lose. Then for just three days leftover sinners will be punished, then forgiven as judgement day goes into full swing.

5) The norse think that all of the gods will fight it out, and rip the Earth and Universe apart, whatever is left of the planet will be ruled over by two gods and a ressurected one.

6) Heaven's gate followers thought that their two leaders arrived from heaven in a UFO in these end times...and that they would follow them back up to heaven in a UFO hidden in a comet's tail...most of them killed themselves trying to catch up with that comet.

7) Branch-davidians thought that David Koresh was a prophet and that he would be able to impregnate a girl to bring forth the "Chosen One". Koresh claimed to be the voice of god, so the ATF raided his compound and burned it. Have faith though, branch-davidians think that Koresh will return (second coming) 1,335 days after his death...well that second coming was supposed to happen in August or October of 2000, since it did not the davidians now think Koresh will come back to life in March 2012.

Of course I'm paraphrasing and abridging all of this, all religions have tried and proven source material to base the facts on.

In case you are a sinner and the christian god or Jesus leaves you behind, I found a survial manual that explains all of the horrible things that are going or about to go down, for the full effect don't watch this until Jesus comes back....



-A

Part time mime without a dime commits prime time crime for key lime slime...

Decent weekend was had. Harvick made the championship chase. I was really sweating that. Didn't like seeing him and Dale Earnhardt Jr. on the fence like that...but if I had my drethers, which it turned out I did...Happy made it. Matter of fact just about all of my favorite drivers made it in this year. I cannot wait for the Kansas Speedway race weekend.

The Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes have detected nine very small galaxies, very far away. Gazing deep into space and back into time, scientists in the USA and China have discovered snapshots of these young galaxies that are forming just a mere billion years of the Big Bang. These nine galaxies have stars that are only a few million years old and are still using Big Bang elements in formation. The galaxies are quite small in relation to the Milky Way since they are not fully grown.

-A

"There’s flies in the kitchen I can hear ’em there buzzing
And I ain’t done nothing since I woke up today.
How the hell can a person go to work in the morning
And come home in the evening and have nothing to say."

-John Prine - "Angel From Montgomery"

The ironic shift of tectonic plates is the chronic gift that every masonic debates...

I recently found a copy of a quite revealing BBC Two documnetary on google. Being that I was born and have lived in Kansas all but one year of my life, I am quite familiar with the disgusting shenannagins that the Phelps church puts on. I have actually witnessed one of their picket lines in Lawrence Kansas around the univeristy campus. As horrible as I thought the congregation of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka Kansas are, the reality exposed in this documentary still amazed me. How can a religion be interpreted, twised and corrrupted in this fashion? Then again, maybe they do have the ulitmate interpretation of the bible, afterall the bible does chronicle an extremely wrathful "worship me or else" god. The church members honestly believe that everyone but the 70 or so members of the church are going to spend an eternity burning in hell. They laugh out loud at the notion of god's vengence. They are not only the most hated family in America, but also the most hateful...



-A

A riddle of noncommittal whittle of a tasty tittle of peanut brittle...

The History Channel's broadcast of The Universe has come to an end with an excellent program on The Big Bang, or rather beyond it. This episode was two hours long and focused on several theories and where the ideas of the theories come from. In the end the concept of the Universe actually having a starting point, as an incredibly compact atomic sized cosmic egg was proven to be the scientific theory of choice, once scientists could record and measure the leftover heat signature from the incredibly high velocity expansion that happened about 13.5 billion years ago.

The episode showcased several theories of the cosmos and also how a certain religion has been trying it's best to stiffle "heretic" scientists for the last 400 years. The conflict between supernatural improbable faith and natural fact driven science is definately not a modern issue. Once Galileo Galilei decided to aim his spyglass upward instead of out to sea started the ball rolling. Though Galileo was a practicing catholic, he could not ignore his discoveries even though they went against his personal faith based convictions. The church sort of took his scientic revelations in stride until he tried to make sense of scripture by reinterpreting it to fit his science...hmm...seminal intelligent design...maybe. Well the church could not tolerate a scientist trying to rationalize the bible, so they labeled him a heretic and sentenced him to house arrest for the remainder of his life. Too late to silence him for his emperical work was already opening the eyes of the public...paving the way to a factual scientific pursuit of the cosmos. Galileo's telescope proved Copernicus' heliocentrism model...the church did not like to ponder the fact that the Earth is not center of the universe.

The concept of geological time is often times difficult for someone to grasp, let alone cosmological time. The Earth is over four billion years old...think about one billion years...now mulitply that by four and then add a several more million years. Wow, staggering. Humans and their trackable primate ancestry only go back about 85 million years. Mountain ranges have come and gone. Oceans have come and gone. Species have come and gone....billions of years. Now think of The Universe, it is estimated to be at least three times older than our solar system. So in that time stars have come and gone, planets have come and gone. Ancient stars and planets are being destroyed by gravity and new ones forming by gravity even as I type this.

To even try to wrap your mind around the age of the cosmos look at the cosmic walkway illustrated at the Hayden Planetarium. The downward spiral walkway is as long as a football field. The era of dinosaurs spans about a foot of that distance...the era of Humans is no wider than the the width of a strand of hair in that cosmological display. I'd wager that is likely a generous assumption, after all the timeline needed to fit into a building.

-A

An unpatriotic despotic found the robotic aquatic neurotic quite exotic...

1) Back from a long weekend. Actually had four days off in a row, very nice....four days on / four days off / four days on...I could get used to that schedule. Didn't do much of anything, except watch the races and watch some of the Universe marathon. Also rented The Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie...funny without the censor bleeps, but the format works better as 10 or so minute long segments IMHO.

2) Been a year already since naturalist Steve Irwin died. He is/was one of my heroes. He was one of the greatest animals to walk the planet. A tragic loss to the Earth indeed. He did so much to bring the wonders of wildlife and reveal the mysteries of the natural world into public awareness. I was truly saddened this day last year. Too bad his existance was cut short, but he seemed to have lived a life worth living. Steve-O left a well-placed footprint in history. I miss him.

3) Scientists have discovered a huge hole in The Universe, in the constellation Eridanus there is a "cold spot" where the concentration of detectable galaxies severly decreases. This is not a black hole by any means, but a void that stretches almost a billion light years across. NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotopy Probe satellite measures the Cosmic Microwave Background that is an imprint left by The Big Bang...and it shows an expansive void, that does not even contain dark matter or cosmic dust or stars...just space. Could this be empty shell of the first three minutes?

-A