Yet another Retirement Ceremony Update

Had to change the time for the dinner for my retirement. Apparently the restaurant doesn't accept reservations on a Friday night, so we're having it on a Thursday night. Oh well, I'll end up making it more about my daughter's birthday then as opposed to my retirement.

I was also just told that AFCENT doesn't think that it's a good idea for the guy that is coming in to be the chief of this shop to actually swap out with the guy who is the current chief. Instead he's going to swap out with me. And the guy that is coming in to replace me, will actually replace the current chief. So this means I get to leave later. Apparently the Air Farce could fuck up a free lunch. I swear, if it makes sense, and could possibly benefit me in the slightest, just on principle I think the AF is going to do the exact opposite. Fucktards, every single one of the pencil necked geeks!

Go, go Atlantis!

I don't know about you, but I love shuttle launches. It's just something to consder that we are sending humans into space! Say what you will about the United States (and Russia and China), but putting people into orbit is an impressive feat. And for all those that say the manned space program is a waste, I suggest you only do all your air travel from this day forward on robotic air carriers, and let robots drive you to and from work every day. There are just some things that require a human brain!

And I am glad that they are going up to add more life to the Hubble Space Telescope. The scientific returns we've gotten from Hubble are just amazing. They have just pushed the limits of our understanding, and shown us how much we really have left to figure out. Remember the Hubble Deep Field? That was just plain amazing. Looking at an EMPTY spot in the sky! I know that I'll be incredibly sad when the Hubble mission is finally over. I wish that we could just boost it up, or somehow retreive it, but sadly (at least as things stand), it will end up entring our atmosphere to burn up.

Here's to NASA, the astronauts, and Hubble. Cheers!

What Movies are you Looking Forward to?

I am just dying to get home just so I can be with my family. I also have a lot on my plate like retirement from the Air Force, and trying to find a job, and all that stuff... Let's just say that it is causing a lot of stress in my life, so I decided to make a blog entry on a lighter vein. So what movies are you looking forward to this summer? Here is my list of movies:

Wolverine - Yes, I'm a geek and I love the X-men franchise. Hugh Jackman does a great volverine as well. Now, I got to see a "pirated" copy of this while sitting here at Al Udeid. Sure, got to see the plot (pretty good) without all the special effects added in. Not sure it's enough to go see just for that added bonus. While I enjoyed the movie, I don't think it was outstanding. It passed the time, and I enjoyed getting more background on Wolverine himself.

Star Trek - I really want to see it. I must be a sucker for that particular franchise as well. Maybe it's the humanism that drew me to the universe of Gene Roddenberry, and sort of kept me there?

Harry Potter - Laugh at me if you will, but I love these movies. Even though they are supposedly kid's books, J. K. Rowling has done a great job with a fantasy setting that really draws you in. Besides, this is the one where Dumbledore dies. I hear that Snape kills him...

Angels & Demons - Just because it pisses off hard core theists, I may go see it. I actually found the previous film to be okay, just as a mystery for finding the final clues. Otherwise I may wait for video on this one.

Terminator Salvation - Another franchise that has had its ups and downs. Let's hope this is the salvation they are looking for. I like the intensity Bayle brings to his characters, and the setting is just plain cool.

UP - Pixar has a way of surprising you! Whie I have to admit that the previews don't really look all that good, who knows. I may end up taking my daughter on a date to this if she wants. Besides, the short at the start may be worth the price of admission.

Land of the Lost - Huh? Okay, when did this get made, and why did they pick Will Ferrell? Okay, Ferrell did a great job in "Stranger than Fiction" so that has to count fr something. I wonder if it will be as campy as the old TV show? Not sure which I would prefer.

Transformers - They did a great job on the first one, so let's see if they can keep it up. It's not Shakespear, but it's fun!

Well, that's all the movies I am saw on a first search. Not having gone to an actual theatre in 5 months means that I haven't seen a single preview. I have no idea what's really going to be released! Notice any trends in my choices? So, are there any particular movies you are looking forward to?

WTF? Just, WTF?

Um.

Yeah.

Hm.

Honestly, I have tried starting this post about 6 times, each time weighing a new opening. Do I talk about the nature of a democratic republic? Do I start with a statement about Barry Goldwater shitting his pants? Since I decided that I can't have it all, I've decided that I'll have none of it.

It seems that the Paradigm Research Group has issued an ultimatum to the President:

"[E]ither disclose the reality of the Extraterrestrial presence by June this year, or prepare to face an onslaught of media based inquiry and scrutiny."

Look out, President Obama! Scrutiny! HAHAHAHA!

OK, how is the Paradigm Research Group going to incite the entire media to, uh, inquire about the real alien invasion?

The plan is simple: failing President Obama's open and direct admission to the American public (and the world) that Extraterrestrials exist and are currently engaging Earth and its citizens, PRG and its network will provide the media with all the documentation and information they require in order to further ramp up the pressure.

If you have evidence, why do you need the President to take the lead on this one? I merely ask because the logic is so bent. Why should the President spend a smidgen of his valuable time appeasing PRG? I mean, there's some big stuff going down right now, and the adults have some serious work to do. Well, you see, in the conspiracists' worldview, all things are usually connected:

Disclosure may be far from President Obama's mind these days, but the seemingly endless series of crises thrust upon him and his administration may also stem from a far greater and problematic issue, mainly the holding back of information concerning whether or not other sentient and highly advanced life forms are present and engaging us as a species.

The aliens are responsible for assuming bad debt? They are giving us Mexican Jumping Flu? They are tossing Madonna off of an endless series of horses? (Stay off, dumbass! You clearly suck at riding!) I can't even process that claim it's so far out there.

74.2 km/sec/Mpc

Just saw that we've nailed down how fast we're flying apart from the rest of the universe, and it just made me think of a particularly funny song from "Monty Python and the Meaning of Life". Actually, in thinking about it, it does seem that the most recent and dramatic philosophisers on the "Meaning of Life" have come from the UK. Monty Python, Douglas Adams, and even someone like Dawkins!

I encourage you to click the title link. Dr Plait does a wonderful job explaining what those numbers mean.

Just for your enjoyment, here are the silly lyrics:
Whenever life get you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you've had quite enu-hu-hu-huuuuff

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour
That's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned
A sun that is the source of all our power
The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way

Our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars
It's 100,000 light-years side-to-side
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick
But out by us it's just 3000 light-years wide
We're 30,000 light-years from galactic central point
We go round every 200 million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whiz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
Because there's bugger all down here on Earth

Galaxy Zoo

Beware this amazingly fun and educational black hole for your free time! The Galaxy Zoo. We have come to an age in astronomy where we cannot expect astronomers to classify every single image we take. We have so many images, and only so few astronomers. And while you are classifying the galaxies, you learn about them, and you may even find some spectacular photos to put on your desktop.





From the site itself: The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, no less). In order to understand how these galaxies — and our own — formed, we need your help to classify them according to their shapes — a task at which your brain is better than even the fastest computer.
More than 200,000 people have taken part in Galaxy Zoo so far, producing a wealth of valuable data and sending telescopes on Earth and in space chasing after their discoveries. Zoo 2 focuses on the nearest, brightest and most beautiful galaxies, so to begin exploring the Universe, click the ‘How To Take Part’ link above, or read ‘The Story So Far’ to find out what Galaxy Zoo has achieved to date.
Thanks for your help, and happy classifying.
The Galaxy Zoo team.





Also, I just had to make this blog post so I could have a tag from every letter in the alphabet. I just noticed today that I was missing "Z" (although I sorta cheated with "X", but that was an early entry, and I only just now noticed my tags.). Yeah, I'm a goof, but this is my blog after all!

Facts, not Fantasy!

Who hoo! We are getting a start for a collection of information for the "Facts, not Fantasy" page. It's only a start, and I am still trying to figure out a great number of things, but now we have a place in the world wide web. This is a resource for all who want to fight the anti-vax pro-disease nutters out there. Feel free to copy and paste the info on there and place it wherever you want.

The page still needs some work, but we are at a start. Right now, the main focus of the page has the vaccine/autism link information on it. It has a very basic start on the evolution information, but that is nowhere near ready. The FAQ and Links page aren't ready yet either, but those aren't nearly as difficult to put finishing touches on as pages with a great deal of content.

Some things that I want to do is enable comments (only for people who wish to register of course). We'll do our best to not actually moderate the comments there, but we will make fools out of those who come in there and spread lies or use anecdotes.

I also need to work on a graphic for the page to get rid of that "Optimus" thing... Not even sure what that's about!

Later the page will be a resource for both the Vaccine/Autism crowd, as well as the Evolution/Creationist debate. Check back often. And if you want to help on this project, feel free to drop me a line.

Bland...

Yesterday my wife sent me an email, and she was talking about her shopping trip to the lawn and garden shop. Now that I am within 2 weeks of going home, I am really starting to miss more than just my family. I am missing simple things like seeing the colour green! While I am sure there are some areas of Qatar that are beutiful to look at, I must say that the area they put Al Udeid is the most desolate and just plain ugly are of the entire country. It's almost as if they had a deliberate search for the worst possible place to put this base. And the farm to the north with the open pits of crap doesn't help!

The picture above shows about as much colour as I see here. Pretty bleak. I winder if that has anything to do with some of the ease with which extreemists are able to recruit people from this part of the world. Nothing to do with ideology, but rather that they have been driven stark raving mad by the lack of scenery and how incredibly bland this area is. Even to have green or anything vibrant takes an incredible expenditure or resources. I guess if it wasn't for the oil and natural gas, I just can't see any reason for living in this area.

My 2 cents for today.

While I like SETI@Home...

I have to say that I have always been a fan of SETI@Home. So much so that my wife is constantly giving me shit for running it. Of course, if I sit and analyze what it is that SETI@Home is doing, I have to be totally honest. It's a LONGSHOT to say the least. I know a lot of people will say that we have been broadcasting for over 60 years now. However, something very simple seems to escape a lot of folks: The Inverse Square Law. It applies to any omnidirectional radiation. Our crude radio and TV counts in that.

The longshot of course is that there may be intentional high power transmissions. Of course, the fact that we as a human race have only made a total of 5 transmissions ourselves doesn't speak for there being that great a chance of us finding too much. And those transmissions were all of limited length. They would probably be like a "Wow! signal" to anyone out there that just happened to pick it up.

It is very unlikely that alien civilizations are going to pick up television transmissions according to the table from this site: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part6/section-12.html

Note the range for UHF television (2.5 AU) and the range for the UHF carrier (0.3 LY). Neither estimate is enough to make it out to the nearest star. They don't list a range for VHF television but FM radio is in the middle of the VHF television band and the estimated range for that is 5.4 AU. Again no where near enough to make it to the first star. Let alone out of our own SOLAR SYSTEM!

The optimistic ranges for detecting a nearby planet are based on either massively powerful transmitters or highly focused outputs from large transmitters.

The calculations that I made suggested that one would need an Arecibo sized antennae with a 250,000 watt transmitter to be able to send a detectable signal to a planet as far away as 150 light years.

This is easily with the capability of earth's technology. The Arecibo antennae has only limited steering capability. I think it is mostly constrained by the direction it is pointing as it rotates with the earth so there are lots of potential targets it couldn't be aimed at. The 250,000 watts could be pulsed so that no where near 250,000 watt of continuous power would be required. But will the powers that be that control enough of earth's resources ever feel like funding a major effort to transmit to unknown alien civilizations?

I have wondered about the feasibility of a laser transmitter to reach stars. If the powers that be wanted to dedicate some resources to this idea the authors suggest that we might hit a 1000 light years with a currently feasible optical laser. I think that bumps the stars for which a signal might be detected from about a 1000 that lie within 100 light years to about a 100,000 that lie within a 1000 light years.

The article on the possibility of optical SETI: http://seti.harvard.edu/oseti/tech.pdf

And keep in mind, so far, everything about SETI is privately funded! So don't go on some tangent about wasteful government spending, this is not the place to look.

Such "Wholesome" Fables

So someone came up with the hillarious idea of doing "bible" stories without alteration. None of this Veggi Tales cutesey crap, but all the rape, slavery, incest, genocide, etc. Frikkin' hillarious! Of course, the so called christians (most of whom have never actually read the bible) would accuse folks of making that shit up. Trust me, with as fundamentally fucked up and weird as the bible is, no one needs to make shit up. The response would be that we only followed the script, and expected them to be happy about it. And people say they should live their lives accrding to this book? Yikes! There are the examples of people who have indeed attempted to live "biblically". I think A. J. Jacobs was the most prominent. I like one of his quotes:

"A critique of fundamentalism. I became the ultra-fundamentalist. I found that fundamentalists may claim to take the Bible literally, but they actually just pick and choose certain rules to follow. By taking fundamentalism extreme, I found that literalism is not the best way to interpret the Bible."

Emphasis mine. Oh how true that is in pretty much every regard! Why is it that people who probably haven't read it from cover to cover (instead, relying on what someone else cherry picks for them) insist on telling others what it's all about. And then they seem to just pick and choose the things they are going to follow, and at the same time try to enforse the things they pick and choose on others... I guess that goes to the arguments so many theists have that atheists can't have morality (WRONG!). Well, the bible sure is a fucked up place to get morality from as well!

Anyway, that is my random blog post for today. For the pagans out there, I guess today is Beltaine or something. Enjoy.