Non-Prophet

Springs Culture Cast Turns One!

It's a party! Springs Culture Cast has now been around for a whole year, and what a year it has been. Thinking back to a night of hanging out at 15C when Craig and Klayton first met seems more like 5 or 9 years ago than 1. I guess that is a good thing.

Thursday, February 28 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Smokebrush Gallery FREE BEER generously provided by Bristol Brewing Co. FREE FOOD from McCabe's Tavern

This event is FREE and open to the public, everyone is welcome.

Help us help you celebrate us celebrating you!

Dugongs

Closely related to elephants, and live in salt water instead of fresh like a manatee.

Dugongs, or sea cows as they are sometimes called, are marine animals which can grow to about three metres in length and weigh as much as 400 kilograms. They are the only marine mammals in Australia that live mainly on plants. The name sea cow refers to the fact that they graze on the seagrass, which form meadows in sheltered coastal waters. As dugongs feed, whole plants are uprooted and a telltale feeding trail is left.

Celestia

This is just about the coolest thing ever. Celestia is an open source 3D universe visualization application that lets you travel. This makes my measly 4" Celestron reflector scope sure to gather even more dust.

Fro Hat

Encyclopedia of Life Goes Live!

Yes! Finally!!! I've been waiting for this for what has felt like a forever! EOL.ORG!! EOL.ORG!!! Yeah! The wait is over! This site is going to be the greatest great ever!

Wait! Problem! The site is clogged due to extremely high traffic and I can't see a thing. Curses! Foiled! (We need an encyclopedia of life mirror, eol mirror, eol.org mirror.)

From the non-clogged Wikipedia:

Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.8 million known species of living organisms known to science, which went live on February 26, 2008 with over one million entries.[2]. It is compiled from existing databases and from contributions by experts and non-experts throughout the world.[3][4] It aims to build one "infinitely expandable" page for each species, including video, sound, images, graphics, as well as text.[5] In addition, the Encyclopedia will incorporate the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which will contain the digitized print collections from the world's major natural history libraries."

Credit Card Debt On The Rise

It is the trap that people are led into through the gigantic effort of our unstoppable consumer culture. It ruins lives far more often than it helps them. Paying interest on stuff that we don't really need as a method to stave off the materialistic hunger pangs is probably what will define this moment in history. Stuff, and tons of it, kept in expensive to rent storage units, while the burden grows, is the method of operation for so many of us. This is Babylon.

cnn.com:

Consumers have racked up more than $2.2 trillion in purchases and cash advances on major credit cards in just the last year. And it's become a habit for them to spend more than they have. The overall credit card debt grew by 315 percent from 1989 to 2006, according to public policy research firm Demos.

To compound the problem, fewer people are paying their credit cards bills on time. The percentage of people delinquent on their credit cards is the highest it's been in three years, according to CardTrack.com.

Gravitational Lens

It is like an optical lens, but instead of bending light it bends space. N8 pointed out that several new examples have been discovered recently.

Wikipedia:

A gravitational lens is formed when the light from a very distant, bright source (such as a quasar) is "bent" around a massive object (such as a cluster of galaxies) between the source object and the observer. The process is known as gravitational lensing, and is one of the predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.

The gravity from a massive object (such as a galaxy cluster or black hole) can warp space-time, bending everything in it - including the paths followed by light rays from a bright background source. This alters the time taken for the light to reach an observer, and can both magnify and distort the apparent image of the background source.

Unlike an optical lens, maximum 'bending' occurs closest to, and minimum 'bending' furthest from, the center of a gravitational lens. Consequently, a gravitational lens has no single focal point, but a focal line instead. If the source, massive lensing object, and observer lie in a straight line, the source will appear as a ring behind the massive object.

He's Back

I voted for Nader instead of Gore back in the day, and I've regretted it ever since. I thought that my vote would help to build a viable third party over time. I hoped that change could come to American politics through a slow but steady process of bridge building and hard work. What I saw was that Nader got a reasonable amount of support, but that he absolutely evaporated as soon as the election was over. That left me feeling like I was snookered. Fool me once shame on... whatever. I think his motivations are not entirely unselfish.

I love what the man says, I love what he stands for, but I don't think he will get another vote from me.

cnn.com:

Ralph Nader is entering the presidential race as an independent, he announced Sunday, saying it is time for a "Jeffersonian revolution."

"In the last few years, big money and the closing down of Washington against citizen groups prevent us from trying to improve our country. And I want everybody to have the right and opportunity to improve their country," he told reporters after an appearance announcing his candidacy on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Global Cooling?

in8sworld.net is citing an interesting piece that claims that the earth is actually cooling, not warming. What kind of a hippie does he think he is? Aren't we all unanimous in believing that we're heading for a flaming ball of death and carbon dioxide?

here:

....the study looks at dendrochronology (tree ring data) of the Scots Pine for the last 1500 years and the findings support a claim for a general COOLING trend of -0.3 degrees C over that time. The paper concludes that the late twentieth century is not exceptionally warm in the record; The warmest period over the past 1500 years was a 200 year span centered around 1000AD when there weren’t any SUVs around to take the heat for it (pun intended)!

Sonoluminescence

I remember back in my days working in particle physics a trip to the University of Pennsylvania. During it a guy working in the hall I was working in took me in and showed me his experiment to try to unravel the mystery of sonoluminescense. They had what I remember as a couple of Marshall amp heads hooked up to a jar full of water, and with it they could produce some very mysterious pulses of light. Adding to the mystery was that the light pulses were among the shortest in duration of anything that had ever been produced, and that the mechanism that accounted for the light was something of a complete mystery.

Wikipedia:

Sonoluminescence is the emission of short bursts of light from imploding bubbles in a liquid when excited by sound.
The effect was first discovered at the University of Cologne in 1934 as a result of work on sonar. H. Frenzel and H. Schultes put an ultrasound transducer in a tank of photographic developer fluid. They hoped to speed up the development process. Instead, they noticed tiny dots on the film after developing, and realized that the bubbles in the fluid were emitting light with the ultrasound turned on. It was too difficult to analyze the effect in early experiments because of the complex environment of a large number of short-lived bubbles. (This experiment is also ascribed to N. Marinesco and J.J. Trillat in 1933 which also credits them with independent discovery). This phenomenon is now referred to as multi-bubble sonoluminescence (MBSL).

More than 50 years later, in 1989, a major advancement in research was introduced by Felipe Gaitan and Lawrence Crum, who were able to produce single bubble sonoluminescence (SBSL). In SBSL, a single bubble, trapped in an acoustic standing wave, emits a pulse of light with each compression of the bubble within the standing wave. This technique allowed a more systematic study of the phenomenon, because it isolated the complex effects into one stable, predictable bubble. It was realized that the temperature inside the bubble was hot enough to melt steel. Interest in sonoluminescence was renewed when an inner temperature of such a bubble well above one million kelvins was postulated. This temperature is thus far not conclusively proven, though recent experiments conducted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign deduced the temperature at about 20,000 kelvin.