According to an article in The Economist, Pluto’s planetship is currently being debated. Apparently the Kuiper-belt contains thousand of objects that may or may not be planets, and Pluto is one of those objects. Pluto is less than 1% of the Earth’s mass, and there is an object discovered in the belt that is larger. So now the astronomers are rethinking the definition of a planet. Hope we stay on the list!
Apparently the US Airforce is working on teleporation.
A brief synopsis of the article:
* Teleportation – SciFi: the disembodied transport of persons or inanimate objects across space by advanced (futuristic) technological means (adapted from Vaidman, 2001). We will call this sf- Teleportation, which will not be considered further in this study.
* Teleportation – psychic: the conveyance of persons or inanimate objects by psychic means. We will call this p-Teleportation.
* Teleportation – engineering the vacuum or spacetime metric: the conveyance of persons or inanimate objects across space by altering the properties of the spacetime vacuum, or by altering the spacetime metric (geometry). We will call this vm-Teleportation.
* Teleportation – quantum entanglement: the disembodied transport of the quantum state of a system and its correlations across space to another system, where system refers to any single or collective particles of matter or energy such as baryons (protons, neutrons, etc.), leptons (electrons, etc.), photons, atoms, ions, etc. We will call this q-Teleportation.
* Teleportation – exotic: the conveyance of persons or inanimate objects by transport through extra space dimensions or parallel universes. We will call this e-Teleportation.
…
“The first solution can be found from the class of traversable wormholes giving rise to what I call a true “stargate.” A stargate is essentially a wormhole with a flat-face shape for the throat as opposed to the spherical-shaped throat of the Morris and Thorne traversable wormhole, which was derived from a spherically symmetric Lorentzian spacetime metric that prescribes the wormhole geometry.”
…
“P-Teleportation, if verified, would represent a phenomenon that could offer potential high-payoff military, intelligence and commercial applications. This phenomenon could generate a dramatic revolution in technology, which would result from a dramatic paradigm shift in science. Anomalies are the key to all paradigm shifts!”
Interesting, even if we won’t be sending ourselves, or anything else, through space via teleportation anytime soon.
If you’ve ever seen the Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror VIII, you know the wonderful things one could do with a teleporter…they include….
1. Getting a beer in the kitchen from the living room.
2. Going to the bathroom from the living room without having to go upstairs.
3. Genetically combining yourself with a fly.
Either way, the fact that the Air Force is investigating the potential for teleportation is just…well….it WrOcKs!
My cousin Theresa flew in Christmas eve from Alabama. I was lucky enough to be selected for airport pickup of her and her two daughters, as I am lucky enough to happen to be the closest family member to O’Hare.
After getting the kids buckled in the safety seats, and settling in for a short ride back to Bolingbrook, I started complaining about the lack of Christmas music [less 90.1 & 93.9] I had heard on the radio this year. Well… Terry, as she likes to be called, informed me that she went to a Kmart in Alabama and was looking to get a new Nativity Scene. She couldn’t find them and asked the store manager where the Nativity Scenes were. The store manager promptly responded saying that they were not allowed to sell Nativity Scenes.
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My hard-drives have been dropping like flies. After over a month of not wanting to deal with the problem, my systems are up and running again…. way to go me!
I was able to successfully restore my wonderful webserver, among other odds and ends, and only lost little things (like /etc/hosts & /etc/aliases) here and there.
Now, if I could only do that with the hosed 300GB Windoze hard-drive I have…thanks, Maxtor, for being big pricks who can’t even format a drive properly to ensure data integrity. Guess I get what I deserve by relying on a hard-drive vendor to format a windows drive.
Good thing the majority of the 300GB drive was game & game data, which is easily recoverable. Alas, I’ll have to start Doom III all over again if I am to try to win :o(
Oh, and thanks to my genius, not only was my webserver intact, but IHS didn’t have to be reinstalled/reconfigured…I just mounted the drive, ran apachectl start and away it went! I love *nix!
Apparently there’s a new Buddha afoot, but don’t worry, he won’t be ready for about 6 years….
“A snake bit me but I do not need treatment. I need six years of deep meditation.”
Sweet. So watch out world, in 6 years we will have a new Buddha…of course, now he will be called Ram. I wonder if he’ll reach enlightenment while still alive and cease to exist….I also wonder what his thoughts on Christ will be once he’s reached enlightenment.
Walmart has apparently started selling $10,000 yellow 1.75ct diamonds on its website….
Huh…wonder if yellow is coming back. The irony is, the yellow is really an imperfection in the diamond itself…I personally wouldn’t want to look at a diamond and think someone had pee’d on it…. I prefer clean, clear white diamonds myself.
The point is, who would buy anything this expen$ive from Walmart, of all places?! Did that smiley face go through the jewelry store and mark down the 1.75ct fancy-yellow diamonds?! At least its not as nice as it could be…for this price (from Walmart), I’d expect at least an SI1…
I would like to get comments from my tiny little readership (hmm, I wonder if I’m the only reader of my blog…perhaps I should advertise).
Have you noticed that God designed men and women to be a fairly humorous joke on each other?
For instance…as many I am sure have pointed out….
Men expect their women to stay exactly the same as when they first met them.
Women expect their men to change, if not expect to change their men.
The punchline is….
Men never really change.
Women change constantly.
God definitely has a sense of humor. :o) I’m just wondering who’s actually laughing….we know its not men, and we know its not women….
Oh forebode do we pretend
That in the evening we’re just friends;
But during light’s reflected beauty
Truth be told our every duty
Will one day be set aright
Of true love gained in the night.
How untethered we do think
Our actions lie there in the sink.
Truth be told the heart does wrench,
And suffer much egregiousness.
For in the end there’s nothing said,
Nothing gained, and nothing lost…
truly indifference bares a cost!
Oh heart of mine where do you lie?
In a heaven in the sky?
Or are you really underground,
In a tomb not to be found?
When will Wisdom set you free
And help end this misery?
For now the heart begins to fade,
And takes on a pale shade.
The sadness cuts apart the air,
And rips at that no longer there.
But true to hope and love once more,
We shall see what was before.
So there’s an email going around that says Denzel Washington donated enough money to build a new Fisher House when he traveled to Brooke Army Medical Center. Well, I had to look it up on Snopes, and it turns out its somewhat true, but he didn’t donate that much money. Either way, Denzel has always been one of my favorites (He’s the Sidney Poitier of our generation).
Kudos Denzel, keep up the good work. Why is it that really good actors never give their opinions about how the government is running its business, but mediocre or has-beens (and even never-will-bes) like to spew their opinions as if we give a rat’s a$$?! :o)
The email’s main premise is that this wasn’t advertised in any newspapers. Of course, it did happen in 2004…
Apparently the big house builders are skeptical of the housing market…
The sales forecast was cut by a range of 3.8 percent to 6.9 percent because of “some softening of demand” and delays in opening new communities
Interest rates are rising, making mortgages more costly and curbing home sales, which have hit highs each year since 2001. The housing market has accounted for 50 percent of U.S. economic growth and more than half of private payroll jobs created in that period
“Since Katrina, instead of going up $5,000 to $10,000 every week or two, we have been limited to no price increases or very limited price increases.”
Bruce Toll, the Toll co-founder…sold 502,480 shares earlier this year…leaving him with a 5.2 percent share of the builder. Robert Toll owned 18.1 million shares, or 11.6 percent of the outstanding stock, as of Aug. 31.
The Mortgage Bankers Association last week said its measure of home-purchase applications dropped to the lowest level since February. The gauge has declined in six of the last seven weeks.
Well, this will be interesting. Since its so widely reported, will this start to drive housing prices and demand down, or will it plateau and reverse slowly? We’ll have to wait and see what happens.