Thursday, May 26, 2005

CNN.com - NASA: Voyager I enters solar system's final frontier - May 25, 2005
"Barring hardware failure, Voyager I and II boast enough power and communications capability to keep radioing back to Earth until 2020, NASA says."


It's astounding what we were able to accomplish in the 1970's. We think of that time as "before personal computers", where handheld calculators had all of four or five functions, and "Pong" was the great hit of entertainment. Yet, at that time, we were launching probes into space that are continuing to work to this day.


The only other NASA achievements that have worked this well are the Martian rovers and the Martian mapping satellite. And it took a lotta tries before we got that right...

Tuesday, May 24, 2005


Have I told you that Alex is wearing an eye patch now? It seems his left eye is a bit weak, so he covers his right eye for 12 hrs a day. Once it starts to get better it'll drop down to 8 - but he'll still be wearing the glasses! Boy, they sure do change the way he looks!
 Posted by Hello

And Emily lost one of her top two teeth. Since she had the wide gap between her teeth before this, the missing tooth plus the gap make her look like a hockey player! Posted by Hello

Monday, May 23, 2005

NASA science reveals texts of Trojan Wars, early gospels
This is the kind of thing we all hope for - finding a gem in a load of garbage. Multispectral imaging, as enhanced by computers, allows us to bring out the details of obscured writings to a point that we are able to translate them. This will be big - very big. As this article describes, they've only translated 1% of this find before now, but the new technology will speed up the process.



My favorite part:

Meanwhile, the Oxford team is looking at another promising application of the technology. Scholars have long known that the elaborately painted cartonnage used to encase mummies was a kind of papier-mache made from papyrus. A lot of the papyrus has writing on it, but there didn't seem to be a way of reading it without destroying the decorative cartonnage.

In one recent trial, the imaging process was able to read writing beneath the painted surface of a cartonnage fragment. Scholars were thrilled, even though it turned out to be just another government report.

Monday, May 09, 2005

The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster
A hoot! Be sure to read the archives for the full effect of the Dark Lord.
Astrologer to sue Nasa
I should have thought of this. I need a quick way to retire - why not sue the government for the damage it's doing to other planets? How about I sue them for littering on Mars? I believe it's a $500 fine per instance!