Category: Uncategorized

One of my AvantGo channels I download to my Palm to read on MARTA is space.com. I’m not sure how they make money, but they have a lot of good space-related articles. Today they had one on space junk, all the pieces of old rocket motors, dead satellites, loose screws, and other pieces of debris in orbit around the earth travelling thousands of miles per hour. Even a paint chip travelling at 10,000 miles per hour can knock a hole in a satellite or spaceman. So it is a significant problem and there are all kinds of efforts to minimize any cast-off material or debris. Also there is a project to track every known piece of junk to make sure critical satellites, the space shuttle, space station, etc. can move out of the way if they are in danger of being hit.

This article is about a series of old Russian satellites that had nuclear reactors on board for elecricity. The Russians didn’t want the satellites to fall to earth with reactor cores in them so they included a booster rocket that would, after the satellite was no longer needed, launch the reactor core into a much higher earth orbit that would take thousands of years to degrade. By the time the core would re-enter the earth’s atmosphere so many half-lives would have passed that it would no longer be dangerous. So that was a neat idea right there.

But then it seems that after the cores were ejected, the leftover part sprung a leak in its liquid coolant. A stream of drops came out of the satellite. Each drop is a piece of space junk and some of the “drops” are a couple of inches in diameter. So now there are 10,000 drops of Sodium-Potassium coolant in orbit waiting to hit anything in space at extremely high speed. Oh, and each drop is radioactive.

Then they said that because these satellites were all at roughly the same orbit, that even the non-leaking ones are now subject to be hit by one of these droplets, causing further leaks and even more space junk. In fact they said people are doing research to see if there is already a “critical mass” of space junk that will just keep colliding into each other and producing even more pieces of debris that will cause more collisions and so forth.

Fifty years of exploring space and we may have already ruined it.

http://www.space.com/news/mystery_monday_040329.html

Continue reading “Space Junk”

When I’m filling in album names and song titles I would get kind of confused on what words you capitalize and which you don’t. I found some tips on the internet somewhere that were very helpful:

Don’t capitalize:

a an the (articles)

at by for in of on to* up (2 or 3 letter prepositions)

as but if or nor (conjunctions)

except if it is first or last word

except in parallel with words that are capitalized: Homes In and Near Ohio

*do capitalize in infinitives: One Life To Live

Today my satellite provider pulled the plug on Viacom stations including MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central. Fortunately the Osbournes season was over, but I will miss The Daily Show. Although some CBS stations were pulled, the Atlanta station is still on. The disagreement stems from CBS charging Dish Network to carry their signal. Not only were they increasing the rate, but also requiring Dish Network to carry their Viacom stations which they also charge for. The end result is everyone pays more for their cable bill. But what bothers me the most is that they charge providers *anything* since they should be getting their revenue from advertisers. CBS makes these signals available free over the air but charge the cable providers to carry them. It makes no sense.

Dear CBS and Viacom,

If you didn’t run commercials on all of your programming then you should be able to charge whatever you want to cable companies to carry your signal just as HBO does. But because you burden your viewers with commericals (more than ever) you should not charge cable or satellite companies anything to carry your signal. Nor should they charge you to carry your signal since you need viewers and they can supply them. I blame CBS and Viacom for the constantly increasing cable and satellite bills. Dish Network on the other hand is trying to look out for its subscribers by resisting your attempts to extract more money from the viewers. I applaud Dish Network and their efforts to keep rates low. And I ask that CBS and Viacom not only go back to their old rates, but stop collecting fees from cable providers altogether and support your programming via the advertising that you subject us to. Until then I will continue to enjoy watching other networks and other programming and watching their commericials.

Thank you for your time,

I knew there was some phrase shorter than “The quick brown fox . . . ” that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I couldn’t remember it. So I started poking around and came across some anagrams which are words or phrases consisting of the same letters (“stop” and “post”). Here is a great one, where each phrase has the same letters, but it is also mathematically correct:

“Eleven plus two” and “Twelve plus one”

That’s almost as good as “Rocket Boys” and “October Sky”

Oh . . . and I found several shorter versions of quick brown fox, but this is the best:

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs

With the fifth book in the series J. K. Rowling takes a step backwards. While the first book was very simple with extremely flat characters, she has added depth with each successive book. In this one we return to characters who are so clueless and/or so evil that it simply isn’t believable. At the end of the fourth book Harry Potter tells the world that the leader of evil, Lord Voldemort, has returned to power. Rather than raise any alarms he is ridiculed as a liar by both the governing Ministry of Magic and the wizard media.

Continue reading “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”