Saturn And Mars

I watched an episode of PBS' Nova recently titled, "Voyage to the Mystery Moon". It was the story of NASA's Cassini mission to explore Saturn and land on its enormous moon, Titan. Very cool show about a pretty fascinating project. I am definitely very interested in space and space exploration.

Well, that show led me to do a bit more research on the internets, and while there, I discovered that right now (at least where we live) you can look up in the western sky, just after sunset, and see Saturn and Mars really really close together. It's pretty cool. You should try it.

This article gives a bit more detail, but it's basically July 9-11 that the planets will appear to be close together in the sky.

So if it's a nice night where you are (and you're near where we are) get out and enjoy the view!

The Intricacy Of Us

I recently watched a Discovery Channel show titled 2057: Future Car or something like that. It's more than just about the cars of the future. Really it's about life 50 years from now. Projected by scientists and theorists who feel they are on the current cutting edge of technology and such sciences.

A good portion of the show was both fascinating and scary. It relates to the post below actually. The vision the makers of this show have of the future is a very, very "connected" future. Every aspect of life is interconnected to the others via a centralized network. Everything is known about everyone. The idea is that this makes life much safer, better, but... really? I think not. Maybe that helped me want to "disconnect" (see the previous entry).

Cars that automatically correct errors of human drivers, clothes that report your vitals to doctors every three minutes or so, cameras and GPS systems tracking everyone everywhere. Yikes.

Scariness aside, one segment that caught my attention was the part about robots. The documentary makers made no excuses in saying that robots are not ready for everyday use just yet. They are really hard to make work. There has been great progress, but it has been very slow-going, and very difficult. The interesting part to me was when they were trying to just get a humanoid robot to walk, the creators said, "It's incredible how sophisticated the human body is, even just the balance it takes to take a step."

How incredible we are! All these brilliant minds have spent years trying to make a machine that can do what a two year old can do! Amazing. It was fun to watch. I don't doubt that we will progress and make something that can mimic human life more and more... but God has already done that! Holy cow. He's just amazing, and I am blown away right now at his design, creativity, and his handiwork in general.

To think that there is no Designer, seems to me you are either just not seeing what I am seeing, or denying it, or maybe just stubborn. And I'm just talking about the intricacies of the human body and how it all works together. I don't know the complete process of how we came into being, but I have no doubt just from what I have observed that we have quite intricately & skillfully been designed.

I'm not trying to start any arguments here, but as always comments/thoughts are welcome. It was just another moment today when I thought, "How can anyone think this is a sequence of events begun by random chance?" I think some might credit a universal "Life Force" rather than a being (God), but it seems the prevailing scientific thought precludes the possibility of a Designer... and that just seems so crazy to me.

I love that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. We are just amazing.

12-21-12

For some reason the topic of the world ending in 2012 came up in a conversation with a friend yesterday. So, I decided to look it up online and found a History Channel documentary from a couple years ago called Doomsday 2012: The End of Days.

It was pretty interesting stuff... There are several strange coincidences involving not on the Mayan calendar predicting the end of time on Dec 21, 2012, but a Chinese ancient book and a few other things. Even a computer program designed to predict the stock market has predicted major catastrophes accurately, and seems to predict the biggest one in the year 2012. There is even some astronomical event (the earth and sun will be perfectly aligned with the center of the Milky Way galaxy... which might be bad...) which supposedly only happens every 25,000 years or so.

That's a pretty rare occurrence.

Jesus said we won't know when the end is coming. I believe him. But all this stuff is quite fascinating, and I can't wait till December 21st, 2012. :-) It will be funny when/if that's just a normal day...

Some Things Currently Distracting Me

• Quite a Stanley Cup Final... with Detroit winning the first two by shutting out the explosive Penguins, and then the Pens winning game three on the back of two Sid the Kid goals! Great stuff. Should (hopefully) go seven.
  
  
• Phoenix successfully landed on Mars on Sunday and I have been intrigued ever since. The link goes to NASA's website... tons of stuff there (photos, videos, etc). Pretty amazing that we can shoot large metal objects 420 million miles away, and hit a target with pinpoint accuracy - and not damage the highly sophisticated scientific research equipment. Incredible. And then we get to see photos back from it just a few hours later. Nuts.
  
  
• Facebook games and chat have also occupied some time recently. I love word games, and it's fun to play against friends (and Jen, too!) in between projects I am working on. It's kind of a funny "mental break" (since you're working your brain on your break?) but it's been a blast. I have found games similar to Scrabble, Boggle, and one called Word Twist that is similar to no other game I know of... And, I've been playing a good friend of mine in Chess. He's quite good. Haven't beaten him yet. :-) Oh, and Facebook added an instant message feature which has been a neat way to chat "live" with people I haven't talked with in a long time. Pretty amazing.
  
  
• On top of that, we've gotten to see a couple cool movies lately, as well as some awesome episodes of the Knight Rider from season two DVDs borrowed from the library! :-)

More to come, but there's more to do... so, more here later.

Powerful Thoughts?

I don't know if this is for real, but I got it from a friend on Facebook and thought it might be possible? :-) Does mind over matter include over other matter? :-) Also, can't you affect how a plant grows by how you talk to it?

The rest of the experiment (says the video) is at www.themanifeststation.com/intention

(I don't think I'm on the same page as the folks at that site... but the video was interesting anyway...) :-)

Cool Lunar Eclipse

I was listening to the Science@NASA podcast last night and heard about an upcoming sky event your folks in the western US might be interested in knowing about. Actually, I guess it will be visible from most everywhere except Europe and Africa. But the Western US will have a fairly good view of the total lunar eclipse.

Here's what the NASA story says about the event:

The event begins 54 minutes past midnight PDT (0754 UT) on August 28th when the Moon enters Earth's shadow. At first, there's little change. The outskirts of Earth's shadow are as pale as the Moon itself; an onlooker might not even realize anything is happening. But as the Moon penetrates deeper, a startling metamorphosis occurs. Around 2:52 am PDT (0952 UT), the color of the Moon changes from moondust-gray to sunset-red. This is totality, and it lasts for 90 minutes.

So, if you're feeling like pulling a late night (or all nighter?) seems like a cool reason to do it! And we here on the eastern side of the country will see it too, it will just be cut short by the sun. Oh well. If I can be awake then, I'll be there!

Made It

Well, I made it. After finishing my book, then writing about it a bit here... I did another fun project, and then watched the movie World's Fastest Indian. Good movie.

Well, all of that took me up to about 4:30am. PERFECT for catching a sky full of meteors! :-)

I only saw maybe 6 or 7, but they were pretty cool. Unfortunately, there was a bit of cloud cover. But when there were holes, I saw some meteors! And, I did get a nice view of Mars, too.

Well, I suppose I should head to bed now... :-)

By George, You May Be Right!

Tonight as I listened to a podcast about black holes and the research some folks are doing surrounding the somewhat theoretical existence of such things, I thought, "What if we get to heaven and the guys who work so hard to figure out how stuff got started actually turn out to be more right than wrong? That'd surprise AIG a bit..."

I am certain that once things are no longer seen "through a glass dimly", many will be shocked at how things really are. Including me. And I really think it would be neat to find out that God in fact did somehow create these super enormous galaxies with black holes inside of them to somehow balance all that needed balancing in them.

And, regarding the billions of years... what if somehow God did take that long... but somehow also did it in a day? The Bible does reference God being unhindered by time (1000 years is like a day is like 1000 years). It's entirely possible that it is both things simultaneously. I still contend that we just can't know.

But I do love to see all the stuff we do figure out, or at least... sort of figure out. If you'd care to read the article, click the photo above. Pretty cool stuff. (The piranha thing is a bit strange, though...)

A Visit To The Creation Museum

My Dad told us a while back that he'd really like to take us to that there new Creation Museum in Kentucky, put together by the folks at Answers in Genesis. We agreed, wanting to see it ourselves, and picked today as the day we would all go check it out.

First, it was a hot day, and there were LOTS of people with the same idea as us. :-) It was packed! Far more than I thought it would be on a Friday morning. But perhaps this is still a holiday weekend?

We did get to see Ken Ham wandering through the lines as we were waiting to pay to get in. Didn't get to chat, but it was kinda cool/funny seeing him around there.

The place was just really well done. It was like Disney, but for the Bible. We even watched a fun "interactive" movie where the seats vibrated and we were sprayed by water and stuff. Very cool.

Overall, I think it might have been a good thing that I didn't get to read too many of their displays, or watch/hear too many of their video presentations at each station. I mean, I really enjoy this stuff - even enjoy the Creation science stuff... but... I'm not really a big supporter of AIG. I don't hate them, like some people (or at least, totally eschew anything they might say just because it is they who say it) but I am definitely not an AIG fan boy. :-)

We were thinking on the way home that Ken Ham and AIG's stance on the "young earth only" creation model is rather like the guy (who also has a society of "guys") who really thinks the Bible says the earth is at the center of the universe, and all else revolves around it. (Our sun included.) This dude thinks the Bible says just that, and that if we accept anything different, we'll be throwing out everything else in the Bible too. To him geocentricity is foundational, and to AIG, 6000 years is foundational. To me, both of those ideas are putting too much emphasis on one thing, that doesn't really affect the veracity of the whole Bible.

I might actually lean more toward a "young earth" idea, but it would not crush me to think that God created the Earth first (perhaps even "Billions of years" ago?) and then brought animals and people into the picture in the much more recent past. Or, really, any scenario that has God creating us is plausible to me. I just think the way he did it is a non-issue.

One interesting thing that I noticed - and I might make some folks mad here - is that I might now instinctively not trust Christians. There were a couple times today that I noticed that, but the first was the greeter lady. She was overly happy and friendly, which is to be expected in her position. She's a greeter. That's her job. But I guess I either know the behind-the-scenes, or could just hear it in her tone/voice - there is an agenda. Christians just have an agenda. They are friendly for a reason. They help for a reason. They want something from you.

It's too bad I feel that way, but as I said, I had that impression/feeling a couple times today in Christian-land.

Overall, it was fantastic. I would go again. I would like to go again. Very impressive collection of stuff they have there. I might want to NOT go with at least our three and one year olds... :-) That might be a bit more conducive to actually experiencing the whole thing... :-)

So, a big thanks to Grandpa Tom for footing the bill and taking us out to see the Creation Museum. Fun way to spend a Friday! :-)

A Long Time Ago... In a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Talk about fireworks... Wired News today posted this article about some 4th of July fireworks from what is now known as the Crab Nebula. But this was not a recent 4th of July... it was in the year 1054!!! Ha! Awesome.

We're hoping to catch some more modern fireworks tonight... if the rain lets up. Then off to visit family in Ohio for the weekend tomorrow!

Enjoy the article, and happy 4th of July!

From The Earth To The Moon

We just finished watching "From the Earth to the Moon", an HBO mini-series, and it was fantastic. The language was too much for our tiny kids (and, well, I didn't like it much either...) but the story form of this incredible time in history was very well done. It's 12 parts on 4 discs. And, it's great! :-) We highly recommend.

The one very cool thing I noticed was just how many people it took to make that happen. They did a great job of conveying that. From the 3 astronauts per mission each having vital, essential roles, to their fourth astronaut (Mission Control in Houston, which was a couple dozen MORE people who were each vital to the mission) ... it was all about team work. It could not have happened without all of those people.

And of course you can go beyond that... lots more people involved, including the companies who made the stuff that got us to the moon, and all of the people that worked together to make that happen.

It was just very obvious that even though only 24 men made the trip to the moon (so far), it was hundreds, maybe thousands? who made it possible. Life is not meant to be lived alone, and you certainly can't do super cool things like go hang out on the moon by yourself! It was a cool, vivid example of team work in action.

So, if foul language is offensive, perhaps you can borrow someone's TV Guardian... but it's an amazing reenactment of history. Incredible history. Add it to your Netflix queue today!

(A little side note. As you are probably aware, I am a big fan of space exploration. I really believe that NASA is getting ready to do this again. We don't have a "Cold War" to fuel public interest as much as in the 60s, but we are going to do some pretty amazing things in the next decade or two. In the coming decade, NASA plans to go back to the moon... and set up camp there. In the 2010s (and into the 20s) NASA is planning to send people to MARS. It could be much the same as July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong first put his boot on the moon. Stay tuned...)

Optical Illusions

After first-hand viewing of a cool optical illusion of the summer moon, I got this in my e-mail today from my Dad. (He likes to forward stuff... this one's pretty cool...) :-)

The instructions in the e-mail were as follows:

---

• If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, the dots will remain only one color, pink.
  
• However if you stare at the black "+" in the center, the moving dot turns to green.
  
• Now, concentrate on the black "+" in the center of the picture. After a short period, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will only see only a single green dot rotating.

It's amazing how our brain works. There really is no green dot, and the pink ones really don't disappear. This should be proof enough, we don't always see what we think we see.

---

Thanks, Dad! :-)

Race To The Moon

Last night I watched an hour-long PBS special (via Netflix) called "Race To The Moon". It's certainly another recommended addition to your queue. The story is just incredible. How in the world did we pull that off in the sixties... and we're not going back till 2013 or so???

The video is about Apollo 8, the mission where 3 astronauts went to the moon, orbited 10 times, and returned safely home. The famous Apollo 11 was just 7 (or 9?) months later, when they went the remaining 69 miles to the lunar surface.

A pretty cool part of the trip to the moon was just before they were going to break orbit and head home, they read Genesis chapter one via live broadcast to ... the world, I think! The creation story probably sounded a LOT different from the moon. What a vantage point!

Someday... it would be neat to visit there.... but Jen says I have to wait until she dies. She doesn't want me going while she's still here... :-)

Anyway, regardless of whether I get to visit the moon or not, watching the story of those guys who DID... fascinating.

Add it to the queue today!

Saltwater as Fuel

This is a pretty amazing story. A guy figures out a way to kill cancer cells using radio waves... and somehow in the process also figured out he could ignite SALT WATER, to temps up to 1500º?!? Crazy.

Thanks for the link, Dad. :-)

Killer Asteroid Coming - 2029!!

A friend forwarded me a link to an article he was reading this weekend. The article is from NASA, in 2004. It was determined that a rather sizeable asteroid has an orbit that intersects with Earth's orbit, and there was a 1 in 60 chance (One article I found claimed a 1 in 40 chance!) of a collision in the year 2029!

Thankfully, thanks to further study and extrapolation of data, the odds have gone down, and what we will likely get is a spectacular show as a giant asteroid passes closer to us than many satelites in synchronous orbit above the earth.

We just don't know where it will go after that. :-) Earth's gravity may change the orbit of the asteroid slightly... and we may be seeing it again!

So... why doesn't this happen more often? All that stuff spinning in circles out there... why don't they crash more often? How does everything work together so well?

It's crazy, I know.

If that asteroid, or one like it did hit the Earth... it would make a big mess. That show I watched (The Monster of The Milky Way, a NOVA episode) showed galaxies colliding... now THERE's a collision! :-) That would probably make a mess too...

So, thanks Heent for the link... for now, we have averted catastrophe... but who knows what the future holds? With all this spinning and circling... we're bound to hit something eventually, aren't we?? :-)

photo credit: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/

Interesting Coincidence

We found a neat little podcast from NASA called "Ask An Astronomer" that is definitely very cool for the kiddos. (Mom & Dad like it too!) They are little three minute answers to some big questions regarding things in the sky.

Today we watched a couple: one about lunar eclipses, and one about solar eclipses. Both Jen and I caught a pretty humorous line from someone who either didn't want to - or didn't feel "free" to - admit that God could have had some part in putting that stuff in the sky.

Speaking on solar eclipses, the astronomer said, "In an interesting coincidence, the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, but it's also 400 times closer to the Earth than the sun. So they appear to be the same size in our sky."

An interesting coincidence... :-)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again... there are just too many "interesting coincedences" for me to think that what we see around us has created itself over billions of years. I'm no weirdo who thinks I know how everything got here exactly... not by a long shot. I just can't believe Someone didn't have a hand in putting it there. It's too amazing to not have some Originator.

But anyway... thought that was a funny line. Interesting Coincidence. :-)

Circles

I watched a few PBS shows throughout the course of the day yesterday. Some of it was just listening, as I was working while listening to the audio on my laptop. You can watch many of the NOVA episodes online. Well, I happened to choose the Monster Of The Milky Way, and then later, The Elegant Universe.

The first show was about the discovery of some massive black holes at the centers of galaxies, including our own. I am fascinated by all things in space, so this was cool to learn about/see. Then I watched the Elegant Universe later at night, while getting some more work done in my office. It was a fascinating (and somewhat confusing!) look at the String Theory. I can't even pretend to summarize it for you here, but the called it the "Theory of Everything" :-) The people they interviewed were pretty sure that if they can prove their theory, it will explain everything about our universe. :-)

Overall, it was an attempt to understand the forces of gravity, electro-magnetic forces, time, and various "dimensions" of our universe. From super-huge galaxies, to sub-sub atomic particles. It's theoretical in some ways still, but they were looking at the parts of the tiny parts that make up the parts of an atom i think. :-) Sparticles? Sparticus? Something like that. Just amazing stuff.

AND... here's the weird thing I noticed...

God likes circles. Everything in the universe from the VERY VERY VERY small to the VERY VERY VEEEERY BIG... goes in circles. Electrons circle the nucleus of an atom. Those make up everything, right? So, that's a lot of circles. Then let's get bigger. A lot bigger. The earth spins. The moon circles the earth. The earth circles the sun. The sun circles the center of the milky way. The milky way is moving... not sure if it's spinning... but... how could we tell? And everything else around what I just mentioned is ALSO SPINNING in some kind of CIRCLE.

Why did He make so many circles?

Anyway, it's very cool that you can watch these programs online in their entirety. I don't know how real such a theory is, but it's fascinating to watch, and I love looking at the stuff that God made. It is awe inspiring every single time. From the way-too-tiny to the super big. And we probably don't even know the half of it!

So click the links above if you're interested. Perhaps you'll be awed as well. :-)

Earth

I've been watching Star Trek a lot again (my Sabres are done, so... I have more viewing time.) :-) I love the stories... I love the idea of space travel. I even love the idea of alien worlds and cultures. Pretty neat.

I have a nifty screen saver that shows a real-time satelite view of the Earth. It's amazing! I was just taking a look at it and just had to smile at how COOL the Earth is. I thought how amazing it would be to see it from that vantage point. Perhaps from the moon? Even further? But then how much cooler to return home to the big blue oceans, and the green land masses, and the white clouds circling the globe.

And I just wondered... what if we are the only ones? What if we someday figure out how to travel between star systems... and we discover that there is no other planet like ours, and there are no other forms of life outside of our own planet? (In this case, I mean like us... not microbes or whatever...) What would that say about our planet? About us? Doesn't that make this place pretty amazingly special?

I think it does.

Like I said... I think it would be neat to find other planets like ours out there... even to find there are other living beings elsewhere in the universe. But so far... it's just us, and we definitely have the coolest planet out there!

Although, I am somewhat partial to those big blue planets, Neptune and Uranus... they look pretty cool, too... :-)

60 Million Light Years

Can someone tell me how we can actually know that something is SIXTY MILLION LIGHT YEARS away? How is that even possible to measure? After a long internet search last night, the best I came up with was something called Parallax, but isn't it just theory?? (It's supposedly a similar process to how surveyors measure distances on land.) In space, it's just untestable! How can you PROVE that you're right, that it's so insanely far away?? It can't be MEASURED.

As I was searching for how we actually measure a light year, all I found was the theory behind it. I tried, but there was really nothing. The assumption that the speed of light is a constant across space, and that stuff just really was that far away (though there was no other proof save the movement of a star against the background, or something... but... how do we know how far the background is????)

That is the part of modern "science" that just perturbs me. I was telling Jen last night that I really am no "apologist" for any certain point of view, but those who promote the "secular" view tend to rub me the wrong way in how things are just "accepted" and stated as fact. The "conservative christian" folks rub me the wrong way with their need to have absolute truth (which I think is near impossible for us to know/have), but I must confess, when I read their stuff, I just see a way of approaching science that I am much more in tune with. I'm sure it has a lot to do with my starting point.

I did stumble upon some interesting reading though as I searched... If you're interested. (Links below)

(And no, I'm not trying to stir up some crazy debate here. Just read and add your thoughts if you like, but I don't care enough about any particular view point below to defend it ardently.)

• How Far Away Is That Star, And How Do You Know? (R.G. Aitken, Astronomical Society of the Pacific)
  
• The Velocity of Light and the Age of the Universe (AnswersInGenesis.org - interesting theory...)
  
• Light-Year (Wikipedia)
  

Simply Fascinating

This morning as I was taking my shower, I turned to face the water to rinse off my soapy face and I felt a breeze. I thought, "That's odd," and opened my eyes. It was just the water shooting out, displacing the air, and making a little "breeze". You don't necessarily think that when the water shoots out that it has to "move" anything... cause air is so "transparent". Hard to remember it's there, and actually substantive. But, it's true, and there was a little breeze.

So, I just stood there, taking it in for a moment. It was fascinating.

Then I felt a little silly, being fascinated by a shower head... :-) But really, it is cool. And so many times we miss the simple things that really are fascinating. God has packed the world full of simply amazing things. Just like the little breeze made by shooting water through the air, or we've been having fun tracking Venus across the sky lately, or ... you name it. From the tiny to the immense, there are very simple, everyday things that can be so fantastically amazing if we let them.

I hope you have a moment or two today away from the rush and routine of daily life to just be fascinated by something as simple as a little breeze.

Marveling

I was listening to a podcast from NASA the other day that described a recent photo session from a satellite in a synchronous orbit around the sun, 1 million miles behind the earth. They had captured the moon passing in front of the sun, except, since it was 1,000,000 miles away, the moon was a lot smaller, and did not cover the entire disc of the sun as it does from Earth.

As they were talking, I looked up at the sun, not far above the horizon in the early hours of the morning, and I thought that it is so cool that the sun being 93 million miles away and the moon being a lot closer (don't remember that distance!) look about the same in our sky. That was a pretty cool plan by the Planner. :-)

We were just talking not long ago also about how cool just the moon is. How it's cycles are so regular (people used to plan around the lunar month) and how neat it is that moon always faces the same way? Doesn't it? It doesn't rotate. Does it? I'm not putting a lot of research into this... just taking a moment to marvel at the universe God has created. The precision of all of the elements within it working together, and this is the "fallen" state. Romans says creation "groans" to also be set free.

It's a pretty amazing world. Just wanted to share some of my recent marveling.

Lunar Eclipse March 3rd

Saw this come across my desktop today, and wanted to share. I'm a huge fan of things that happen outside of our atmosphere... this should be pretty cool. Check the page below for the story and a map of when and where to watch :-)

NASA - March 3, 2007, Lunar Eclipse

Space Elevators

I found this yesterday in a news article, and thought it was fascinating, and wanted to pass along.

Apparently, people are trying to build elevators that will take us (and heavy payload) into space.

Fascinating.

Check out this video, too.