Ever since my long-ago youth, I wondered how I could determine if what I described as, say, blue was the same thing that someone else described with the same word. Was it possible that despite our common-sense approach that said that we all were using the same terminology, we really weren’t communicating at all? This specific conundrum came up in …
Daily Battles
I often come across words of wisdom, or guidelines to help get one through one’s life, or even just a day. Most are commonplace and obvious, but that doesn’t always disqualify them or their value. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and all that. So, it was with some ennui that I accessed this blog post, only to …
What’s In Is Out
Okay, this isn’t science or technology related (except by a looooong stretch), but it does have relevance for our ongoing conversation (well, monologue, as I don’t allow comments). My reading is eclectic, to say the least, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I came across this item, describing how fashion in men’s shoes has changed over time. I was fascinated …
Guidance Systems
Biology continues at the forefront today, with a recent report that dung beetles use the Milky Way to navigate. Really! The experiment done to determine this connection was rather elegant; I’ll leave it to the reader to find out about that by visiting the link, above. For the purposes of this post, never mind that I never would connect an …
Reading
Just a quick one for today, while I compile material for a more-extensive post: “A man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” –Mark Twain, American writer Questions: None. Just think about the ramifications.
More Signal, Less Noise
News this week included a report that planet-searchers have found a “super-Earth” orbiting a star just 42 light years from “regular “(but still impressive) Earth. [Given that distance, Bob Murphy, a colleague and friend, has suggested that we name the planet “Douglas Adams”, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which that number has keen significance as the “Answer …
Another “Giant Leap…”
Felix Baumgartner’s October 14, 2012 leap of faith from 128,000 feet above the Earth is already history, but I’m moved to comment on it from several perspectives. I had followed his odyssey from its inception, when I originally thought that it was simply a stunt to advertise the sponsoring organization, Red Bull. OK, it was an advertising stunt, but as …
Overdesigning
SpaceX has done it again, albeit with a bit of difficulty. They launched a Falcon 9 rocket with a Dragon module to resupply the International Space Station (ISS). The launch itself was perfect off the pad, but just about 90 seconds into the flight, one of the vehicle’s nine engines malfunctioned. The Dragon docked successfully with the ISS today, but …
Do It Differently
I came across this interesting item last week, which describes how a person’s world view was changed by way of technology. It got me thinking about how wedded many of us are to doing things the way we have always done them, or how others have always done them, or, in some cases, not doing something at all because to …
Sci-fi? No; reality!
This video/animation of the launch-through-landing of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), aka Curiosity, was initially produced in 2011, long before the successful landing of Curiosity on Mars. Except for the juvenile need to include sounds where no sound could carry (i.e., outside the two planets’ atmosphers), this is exceedingly well done, and worth about five minutes of your time. The …