The 20th Anniversary Miami Book Fair International has been going on all week, but the street fair portion starts today and ends Sunday. I worked there with the Boynton Beach City Library many, many years ago. I think it was the 3-4th annual, if the timing is right. I met some really nice people there at the time, including Ron Wiggins, who was one of the only reasons for me to read the Palm Beach Post's Accent section as a teenager. I'd really like to go this weekend, but I'm not up to that level of milling around for hours and hours yet. A pity, because Will Eisner is going to be there, and he's always a fascinating speaker. Other folks that are attending that I'd like to hear from are Garrison Keillor, Dave Barry, and Carl Hiaasen... Highly entertaining people who can give any writer great ideas and handy tips on the field. It's something not to miss, if you can help it.
Danny reminded me to post about Voyager's distance now.. This Wired article sums it up nicely.
WASHINGTON -- NASA's Voyager 1, built to last just five years to probe Earth's planetary neighbors, has reached the solar system's final frontier and may have surfed into interstellar space, more than 26 years after its launch.
Whether or not it has escaped the sun's sphere of influence -- known to astronomers as the heliosphere -- Voyager 1 has exceeded all expectations and on Wednesday was more than 8 billion miles from Earth, or 90 times the distance between Earth and the sun.
The Earth-sun distance, 93 million miles, is a convenient measure for astronomers and is known as one astronomical unit, or AU. Voyager 1 is the only human-made object known to have traveled 90 AU.
At this point, scientists are loath to predict when Voyager 1 will give up the ghost, because it still is sending data.
"We do have enough electrical power, if nothing breaks on the spacecraft, we can continue till 2020," said Edward Stone, a Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, at a briefing at NASA headquarters.
Stone said Voyager 1, carrying a gold record bearing greetings, images and diverse information from Earth, has not yet crossed what he called the "final frontier" out of the solar system, but that the crossing could occur before 2020.
However, Stamatios Krimigis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory outside Washington said at the same briefing that Voyager already has done it.
"We have discovered that Voyager 1 has actually crossed into the area of interstellar space, around August 1, 2002," Krimigis said at the same briefing.
At the frontier, the flow of charged particles emitted by the sun -- known as the solar wind -- simply stopped, Krimigis said, adding that the spacecraft encountered the kind of material associated with interstellar space.
He said this meant Voyager 1 had successfully navigated something called termination shock, a violent-sounding term for the area where the sun's influence ends and the area between the stars begins.
Because this area is very close to being a perfect vacuum, the termination shock does not bother Voyager 1 at all, according to Frank McDonald, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland outside Washington.
"The spacecraft has no idea that it passed or didn't pass through the shock ... the spacecraft is not perturbed at all, so it's not a danger in any way," McDonald said.
Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 were built to explore Jupiter and Saturn and their surrounding phenomena and were expected to last five years after their launch in 1977. But the two of them kept going, eventually exploring all the giant outer planets of the solar system, along with 48 of their moons and their systems of rings and magnetic fields.
Voyager 1 left the planets behind in 1990, taking a backward-looking snapshot before heading toward the space between the stars. Voyager 1's path is bent up from the plane where most of the planets lie; Voyager 2 is headed downward.
"This little engine that could was not designed for this kind of lifetime," said Louis Lanzerotti, a Bell Labs expert on solar wind who has been involved with the Voyager program since 1972. "It's absolutely remarkable."
I didn't know that we were still getting data from the DSC1! That in itself is amazing to me.
As a question of scale -
A simple way of explaining Voyager's current distance from the Earth (via Slashdot): if our galaxy was just 100 KM wide, within 20 meters in any direction of the sun would be approximately 20 other stars. The nearest star would be 3-4 meters away. Yet Voyager would only be 1.5 mm away from our sun. This disc is now the most distant thing in the history of humanity.
I heard on the radio today that Pure Platinum changed hands and is now called... Spearmint Rhino? I wonder what happened to the Russian Mafia guy that used to run PP and SG? I bet it was a real-life version of Miami Vice. Looking at the website, it looks like Rhino is an up and coming franchise.. another "McDonald's strip club". It looks like these guys are all over the US, UK, Russia and Australia! Looking at the FAQ, it seems that the club rules have changed drastically too.
Cow hit by train lands on farmer's wife
A farmer's wife in Turkey has been taken to hospital after a cow was hit by a train and landed on top of her.
Nazmiye Serengil, from Mus, had taken her cows to graze on a field next to a railway track.
However, one of the cows wandered onto the tracks and was hit by a train.
The cow was hurled into the air and, according to daily newspaper Milliyet, landed on the woman, who was sitting a few metres away.
She was taken to hospital where she received treatment for a broken left foot
Fling the Cow, anyone?
Cool... a lost Incan city has been rediscovered by archeologists using fancy-pants satellite technology.
LONDON (Reuters) - An Anglo-American team of explorers have found an Incan city lost for centuries in the Peruvian jungles despite being within sight of the key religious center at Machu Picchu.
Using infrared aerial photography to penetrate the forest canopy, the team led by Briton Hugh Thomson and American Gary Zeigler located the ruins at Llactapata 50 miles northwest of the ancient Incan capital, Cusco.
"This is a very important discovery. It is very close to Machu Picchu and aligned with it. This adds significantly to our knowledge about Machu Picchu," Thomson told Reuters by telephone Thursday. "Llactapata adds to its significance."
The site was first mentioned by explorer Hiram Bingham, the discoverer of Machu Picchu, in 1912. But he was very vague about its location, and the ruins have lain undisturbed ever since.
After locating the city from the air, the expedition used machetes to hack through the jungle to reach it, 9,000 feet up the side of a mountain.
They found stone buildings including a solar temple and houses covering several square miles in the same alignment with the Pleiades star cluster and the June solstice sunrise as Machu Picchu, which was a sacred center.
"This gives the site great ritual importance," Thomson said.
Not only was Llactapata probably a ceremonial site in its own right, excavations suggested that it might also have acted as a granary and dormitory for its sacred neighbor, he added.
The Incas abandoned their towns and cities and retreated from the treasure-hunting Spanish invaders after the Conquistadors captured and executed the last Incan leader, Tupac Amaru, in 1572.
Some of the cities have since been rediscovered, but many more are believed to lie hidden in the dense jungle, almost impossible to detect without new technology or a chance encounter.
Last year, the expedition found another lost Incan town at Cota Coca, about 60 miles west of Cusco.
"The fact that we have found two in two years means there could be many more out there," Thomson said.
He said the use for the first time of an infrared camera to locate a set of ruins from the air had been a breakthrough, but one that did not make the humble machete redundant.
"It makes wielding the machete slightly more purposeful -- at least you know where you are going and that there is something definitely in front of you -- but it certainly won't put it out of business," Thomson said.
Once again, Doctor Jones, we see that there is no city you can find which I cannot steal.
New cellphone uses finger as earpiece
TORONTO - A new Japanese cellphone worn as a wristwatch uses its owner's finger to transmit sound to the ear.
The Finger Whisper uses its wristband to convert the sounds that normally go to an earpiece into vibrations that travel through the bones of the hand and can be heard when the finger is placed in the ear.
The prototype cellphone is answered by touching the forefinger to the thumb and then by putting the finger in one's ear to listen to the caller.
The user can then end the call by touching forefinger to thumb again.
The wristband also includes a microphone that the user speaks into.
The phone doesn't have a keypad, but users can say the number they want to reach into the microphone. Voice recognition software then dials the number.
The company that created the Finger Whisper phone, NTT DoCoMo, hasn't given a date for when a commercial version of the phone will be available.
From the palm, I chase after Sauron on my walker. (drawn in the waiting room at the doctor's this morning)
Haiku to celebrate -
Movin' Right along
Sauron's Eye of Evil Laughs
He owes me five bucks.
During my nap earlier, I dreamt my sweetie was wearing an eye-patch and kissing me like crazy. Works for me! I didn't find the eye-patch unusual at the time... I feel it was just costuming.
Japan Politician, Cultist Resort to Haiku
TOKYO - Both men faced desperate situations. One, a former prime minister, was being forced to give up his seat in Parliament after more than half a century because of his party's new mandatory retirement policy. The other was a doomsday cult disciple convicted to hang for his role in the deadly 1995 attack on Tokyo's subways.
They both decided there was just one thing to do — write a poem.
Demonstrating this nation's millenia-old love of the poetic, former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone angrily announced this week he would relent to calls that he not run in upcoming elections, but warned in a haiku he wasn't finished as a politician:
Underscoring the weight given to poems here, Nakagawa's were carried Thursday in all four leading nationwide papers — the Yomiuri, Asahi, Mainichi and even the Nihon Keizai, a business newspaper.
All major newspapers carry weekly poetry columns, generally soliciting contributions from readers and offering comment from experts. The haiku form of poetry, which limits expression to just a few syllables, has become famous abroad.
Poetry reading is also a major social event in Japan.
Tens of thousands of people send in short poems on a fixed theme in hopes of being among the select few whose lines are chosen for recital in the annual imperial poetry reading ceremony, which is held in the Imperial Palace and televised live nationwide.
The ceremony, held early in the new year, also features poems written by the imperial family, which has been a major patron of poetry since ancient times.
But the Japanese can be a tough audience — and the poems by Nakasone and Nakagawa didn't win raves.
"From the professional point of view, those short poems and haikus usually lack artistic quality," said Shunji Hioki, assistant professor of Japanese literature at Tokyo's Aoyama Gakuin University. "You can't write a good poem on the spur of the moment."
He said Nakagawa's poems — he actually penned two that were read by his lawyers — were particularly disappointing.
"They were not good as poems," he said. "If you really put your true feelings in it, it reaches people's heart, but these poems don't."
I've returned from having the staples out... didn't hurt a bit, only one even pinched at all on removal. I think that the bandage glue was more irritating to me than the staples were. I now have a row of butterflies there that will come off over time as I wash. I took pictures, but the shots don't really show anything special, so I won't bother hosting or posting. But I did get a shot of Newt getting all in the camera, so I'll throw that in. The sounds of the staples coming out were not unlike someone clipping overly long toenails, and tossing the chaff into a plastic cup.
So, I just had the *BEST SHOWER EVER*. Scalding hot water hitting pores that seemed to have a direct connection to my brain, all of them cheering in extended waves. My neck, shoulders and back were the most appreciative, though the whole of my skin reacted in a positively euphoric way to having finally getting that dead layer off, and the rest back to a level of clean that I prefer. After the hot and soapy, I rinsed, and then went to a cold shower (just as well, I pretty much used all of the hot water), to brace up. I feel *fantastic*! There were a couple of times that I thought I might lose consciousness from the aforementioned euphoria.. I was very careful about standing and positioning, just in case. Seriously, it was without exaggeration, a near religious experience, and took my breath away. Quite blissful.
I haven't shaved down to my goatee yet... I'm going to wait a little while for the hot water to recharge so that when I go to rinse off any stray shorn scruff I can have another happy scald-fest. I've got 4 weeks of physical therapy and then I go back to the doctor for a follow-up. I can use the same folk I had before, so across the street it is!
I'm still not very tired now, but I may try for a nap later in the day. We'll see.
Lunar Eclipse This weekend (Sat Night, Sunday Morning) It's going to be short, but sweet.
Snapped awake out of a sound sleep at 3am, my body refuses to rest anymore right now. Is it because it's doctor day? I don't know, but I'm bright eyed and bushy-tailed, almost as if someone sneaked a shot of b12 into my system when I wasn't lookin'.
Well, I've surfed a little, and I'll try and get a spot more snooze-time in before the trip.
Entish
To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla
Danny reminded me to post about Voyager's distance now.. This Wired article sums it up nicely.
WASHINGTON -- NASA's Voyager 1, built to last just five years to probe Earth's planetary neighbors, has reached the solar system's final frontier and may have surfed into interstellar space, more than 26 years after its launch.
Whether or not it has escaped the sun's sphere of influence -- known to astronomers as the heliosphere -- Voyager 1 has exceeded all expectations and on Wednesday was more than 8 billion miles from Earth, or 90 times the distance between Earth and the sun.
The Earth-sun distance, 93 million miles, is a convenient measure for astronomers and is known as one astronomical unit, or AU. Voyager 1 is the only human-made object known to have traveled 90 AU.
At this point, scientists are loath to predict when Voyager 1 will give up the ghost, because it still is sending data.
"We do have enough electrical power, if nothing breaks on the spacecraft, we can continue till 2020," said Edward Stone, a Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, at a briefing at NASA headquarters.
Stone said Voyager 1, carrying a gold record bearing greetings, images and diverse information from Earth, has not yet crossed what he called the "final frontier" out of the solar system, but that the crossing could occur before 2020.
However, Stamatios Krimigis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory outside Washington said at the same briefing that Voyager already has done it.
"We have discovered that Voyager 1 has actually crossed into the area of interstellar space, around August 1, 2002," Krimigis said at the same briefing.
At the frontier, the flow of charged particles emitted by the sun -- known as the solar wind -- simply stopped, Krimigis said, adding that the spacecraft encountered the kind of material associated with interstellar space.
He said this meant Voyager 1 had successfully navigated something called termination shock, a violent-sounding term for the area where the sun's influence ends and the area between the stars begins.
Because this area is very close to being a perfect vacuum, the termination shock does not bother Voyager 1 at all, according to Frank McDonald, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland outside Washington.
"The spacecraft has no idea that it passed or didn't pass through the shock ... the spacecraft is not perturbed at all, so it's not a danger in any way," McDonald said.
Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 were built to explore Jupiter and Saturn and their surrounding phenomena and were expected to last five years after their launch in 1977. But the two of them kept going, eventually exploring all the giant outer planets of the solar system, along with 48 of their moons and their systems of rings and magnetic fields.
Voyager 1 left the planets behind in 1990, taking a backward-looking snapshot before heading toward the space between the stars. Voyager 1's path is bent up from the plane where most of the planets lie; Voyager 2 is headed downward.
"This little engine that could was not designed for this kind of lifetime," said Louis Lanzerotti, a Bell Labs expert on solar wind who has been involved with the Voyager program since 1972. "It's absolutely remarkable."
I didn't know that we were still getting data from the DSC1! That in itself is amazing to me.
As a question of scale -
A simple way of explaining Voyager's current distance from the Earth (via Slashdot): if our galaxy was just 100 KM wide, within 20 meters in any direction of the sun would be approximately 20 other stars. The nearest star would be 3-4 meters away. Yet Voyager would only be 1.5 mm away from our sun. This disc is now the most distant thing in the history of humanity.
I heard on the radio today that Pure Platinum changed hands and is now called... Spearmint Rhino? I wonder what happened to the Russian Mafia guy that used to run PP and SG? I bet it was a real-life version of Miami Vice. Looking at the website, it looks like Rhino is an up and coming franchise.. another "McDonald's strip club". It looks like these guys are all over the US, UK, Russia and Australia! Looking at the FAQ, it seems that the club rules have changed drastically too.
Q. Are customers allowed to touch the dancers?Something tells me that's only vaguely enforced...Or Maybe they've really cleaned up their act? Hard to believe, but I suppose anything's possible. Well, that's enough dwelling on that subject... strip clubs are mostly a sad thing.
A. Customers are not permitted to touch any dancer or employee of the club.
Cow hit by train lands on farmer's wife
A farmer's wife in Turkey has been taken to hospital after a cow was hit by a train and landed on top of her.
Nazmiye Serengil, from Mus, had taken her cows to graze on a field next to a railway track.
However, one of the cows wandered onto the tracks and was hit by a train.
The cow was hurled into the air and, according to daily newspaper Milliyet, landed on the woman, who was sitting a few metres away.
She was taken to hospital where she received treatment for a broken left foot
Fling the Cow, anyone?
Cool... a lost Incan city has been rediscovered by archeologists using fancy-pants satellite technology.
LONDON (Reuters) - An Anglo-American team of explorers have found an Incan city lost for centuries in the Peruvian jungles despite being within sight of the key religious center at Machu Picchu.
Using infrared aerial photography to penetrate the forest canopy, the team led by Briton Hugh Thomson and American Gary Zeigler located the ruins at Llactapata 50 miles northwest of the ancient Incan capital, Cusco.
"This is a very important discovery. It is very close to Machu Picchu and aligned with it. This adds significantly to our knowledge about Machu Picchu," Thomson told Reuters by telephone Thursday. "Llactapata adds to its significance."
The site was first mentioned by explorer Hiram Bingham, the discoverer of Machu Picchu, in 1912. But he was very vague about its location, and the ruins have lain undisturbed ever since.
After locating the city from the air, the expedition used machetes to hack through the jungle to reach it, 9,000 feet up the side of a mountain.
They found stone buildings including a solar temple and houses covering several square miles in the same alignment with the Pleiades star cluster and the June solstice sunrise as Machu Picchu, which was a sacred center.
"This gives the site great ritual importance," Thomson said.
Not only was Llactapata probably a ceremonial site in its own right, excavations suggested that it might also have acted as a granary and dormitory for its sacred neighbor, he added.
The Incas abandoned their towns and cities and retreated from the treasure-hunting Spanish invaders after the Conquistadors captured and executed the last Incan leader, Tupac Amaru, in 1572.
Some of the cities have since been rediscovered, but many more are believed to lie hidden in the dense jungle, almost impossible to detect without new technology or a chance encounter.
Last year, the expedition found another lost Incan town at Cota Coca, about 60 miles west of Cusco.
"The fact that we have found two in two years means there could be many more out there," Thomson said.
He said the use for the first time of an infrared camera to locate a set of ruins from the air had been a breakthrough, but one that did not make the humble machete redundant.
"It makes wielding the machete slightly more purposeful -- at least you know where you are going and that there is something definitely in front of you -- but it certainly won't put it out of business," Thomson said.
Once again, Doctor Jones, we see that there is no city you can find which I cannot steal.
New cellphone uses finger as earpiece
TORONTO - A new Japanese cellphone worn as a wristwatch uses its owner's finger to transmit sound to the ear.
The Finger Whisper uses its wristband to convert the sounds that normally go to an earpiece into vibrations that travel through the bones of the hand and can be heard when the finger is placed in the ear.
The prototype cellphone is answered by touching the forefinger to the thumb and then by putting the finger in one's ear to listen to the caller.
The user can then end the call by touching forefinger to thumb again.
The wristband also includes a microphone that the user speaks into.
The phone doesn't have a keypad, but users can say the number they want to reach into the microphone. Voice recognition software then dials the number.
The company that created the Finger Whisper phone, NTT DoCoMo, hasn't given a date for when a commercial version of the phone will be available.
From the palm, I chase after Sauron on my walker. (drawn in the waiting room at the doctor's this morning)
Haiku to celebrate -
Movin' Right along
Sauron's Eye of Evil Laughs
He owes me five bucks.
During my nap earlier, I dreamt my sweetie was wearing an eye-patch and kissing me like crazy. Works for me! I didn't find the eye-patch unusual at the time... I feel it was just costuming.
Japan Politician, Cultist Resort to Haiku
TOKYO - Both men faced desperate situations. One, a former prime minister, was being forced to give up his seat in Parliament after more than half a century because of his party's new mandatory retirement policy. The other was a doomsday cult disciple convicted to hang for his role in the deadly 1995 attack on Tokyo's subways.
They both decided there was just one thing to do — write a poem.
Demonstrating this nation's millenia-old love of the poetic, former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone angrily announced this week he would relent to calls that he not run in upcoming elections, but warned in a haiku he wasn't finished as a politician:
With dusk yet to comeA few days later, upon hearing he was being sentenced to hang for helping make the sarin nerve gas that was used by the Aum Shinri Kyo cult to kill more than a dozen commuters and sicken thousands more, Tomomasa Nakagawa, a physician, wrote this, which was read after the trial by his lawyers:
Cicada persists in song
While it still has life.
The autumn windThough the venerable custom of writing poems in times of severe stress — kamikaze pilots were known to write them before taking off on suicide missions — has largely vanished, few countries revere poetry as much as the Japanese.
In days of seclusion
Shadows move
People's faces
Time does not return
Underscoring the weight given to poems here, Nakagawa's were carried Thursday in all four leading nationwide papers — the Yomiuri, Asahi, Mainichi and even the Nihon Keizai, a business newspaper.
All major newspapers carry weekly poetry columns, generally soliciting contributions from readers and offering comment from experts. The haiku form of poetry, which limits expression to just a few syllables, has become famous abroad.
Poetry reading is also a major social event in Japan.
Tens of thousands of people send in short poems on a fixed theme in hopes of being among the select few whose lines are chosen for recital in the annual imperial poetry reading ceremony, which is held in the Imperial Palace and televised live nationwide.
The ceremony, held early in the new year, also features poems written by the imperial family, which has been a major patron of poetry since ancient times.
But the Japanese can be a tough audience — and the poems by Nakasone and Nakagawa didn't win raves.
"From the professional point of view, those short poems and haikus usually lack artistic quality," said Shunji Hioki, assistant professor of Japanese literature at Tokyo's Aoyama Gakuin University. "You can't write a good poem on the spur of the moment."
He said Nakagawa's poems — he actually penned two that were read by his lawyers — were particularly disappointing.
"They were not good as poems," he said. "If you really put your true feelings in it, it reaches people's heart, but these poems don't."
I've returned from having the staples out... didn't hurt a bit, only one even pinched at all on removal. I think that the bandage glue was more irritating to me than the staples were. I now have a row of butterflies there that will come off over time as I wash. I took pictures, but the shots don't really show anything special, so I won't bother hosting or posting. But I did get a shot of Newt getting all in the camera, so I'll throw that in. The sounds of the staples coming out were not unlike someone clipping overly long toenails, and tossing the chaff into a plastic cup.
So, I just had the *BEST SHOWER EVER*. Scalding hot water hitting pores that seemed to have a direct connection to my brain, all of them cheering in extended waves. My neck, shoulders and back were the most appreciative, though the whole of my skin reacted in a positively euphoric way to having finally getting that dead layer off, and the rest back to a level of clean that I prefer. After the hot and soapy, I rinsed, and then went to a cold shower (just as well, I pretty much used all of the hot water), to brace up. I feel *fantastic*! There were a couple of times that I thought I might lose consciousness from the aforementioned euphoria.. I was very careful about standing and positioning, just in case. Seriously, it was without exaggeration, a near religious experience, and took my breath away. Quite blissful.
I haven't shaved down to my goatee yet... I'm going to wait a little while for the hot water to recharge so that when I go to rinse off any stray shorn scruff I can have another happy scald-fest. I've got 4 weeks of physical therapy and then I go back to the doctor for a follow-up. I can use the same folk I had before, so across the street it is!
I'm still not very tired now, but I may try for a nap later in the day. We'll see.
Lunar Eclipse This weekend (Sat Night, Sunday Morning) It's going to be short, but sweet.
Snapped awake out of a sound sleep at 3am, my body refuses to rest anymore right now. Is it because it's doctor day? I don't know, but I'm bright eyed and bushy-tailed, almost as if someone sneaked a shot of b12 into my system when I wasn't lookin'.
Well, I've surfed a little, and I'll try and get a spot more snooze-time in before the trip.
Entish
To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla
posted by Scottobear at
7:24:00 PM
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