We were invited to join some friends tonight for a little campfire in their back yard, complete with S’mores! I know Steve from playing basketball together for a few years now, but we’ve not gotten to spend much time together with the rest of the families. Somehow the conversation migrated to my time in Venezuela….
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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….
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…
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,…
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!)…
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…
Memorial Day
(Flags hung on the front of our house… Soon to be unfurled again!) It’s Memorial Day Weekend! We’re planning to get together with Jen’s family, and my sister and family this Sunday over in Buffalo. It’s the official start of summer! But it’s also a time to remember the people who selflessly have given their…
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…
Rubber-Necking, Heroes, and We Just Don’t Get It
There was an auto accident right in front of our house today. Thankfully it did not involve any of us. Actually, it only involved one person – the driver of one vehicle, who collided with a parked car on the side of the road. But this story involves several different folks, and a peek into…
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…