Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

The Kepler Telescope is on a roll, it is discovering exoplanets like crazy, and there’s no reason for it to ever slow down, because there are stars in every direction, everywhere it looks.  It has recently discovered eight “earth-like” planets, which I think is maybe still a bit of a stretch because “earth-like” can be up to 2 or 3 times earth’s size and unless it was a gas planet like Jupiter, it’s likely  to have gravity that would crush a human being.  Also, a couple of them are circling red dwarves, which is not very Earth like.  The nights, maybe, but the days would  never amount to the beautiful baby blue experience they can be on Earth.

Kepler 62f

Still, we’re getting closer all the time and eventually we’ll find one that’s the same size as Earth, has  a similar rotation around a similar star, and has land and water.

Why is that so important?  Life can develop in a wide variety of environments, we’ve seen that just on our own planet and we have no idea how alien an environment has to be before life cannot evolve.

But, we are not just looking for life.  Although any life at all would  be a good sign that we’re on the right track, but we’re really looking for life as we know it.  Oxygen breathing, mouth speaking, tool using people who are physiologically similar enough to us that we can  relate.

Then, we could trade ambassadors, even if it took several generations to get there.  We’d be able to survive on their planet without special equipment and  vice verse.

Czech archeologists announced yesterday that they’ve discovered  the tomb of an Egyptian Queen nobody’s ever heard of before.  That’s nice.  It’s  not earth shattering, like a radio signal from another star or teleportation or anything, but it’s one more, another piece of the puzzle.

Tomb of Khentakawiss III, cca 4,500 b.c.

We know far more about the history  of ancient Egypt than people  100 years ago did, and they were a hundred years closer to it.  So, progress.

The discovery is about halfway between the Pyramids at Giza (the famous ones) and the ones at Saqqarah (not as big, not as famous, but a lot more  extensive), and it’s in the middle of a whole bunch of other pyramids, so that there is now a huge area of suburban Cairo, a quarter of a ring around the giant city, the southwestern quadrant, which is almost solid pyramids.  That’s a slight exaggeration, there’s a lot of sand in between, but nonetheless, it is the urban sprawl of the dead.

I wonder about planets where the intelligent life forms are fifty, a hundred thousand, or a million years more evolved than us.  We have left so much historical rubble strewn across our planet and our entire  civilization is only 10,000 (if you count from the beginning of  written language) or 65,000 (if you count from the beginning of agriculture) years old.

Think of how the pace of progress has picked up over the last hundred of those 10,000 years.  Then think of  how that will double and redouble and then mutate until we break through all limitations into the realm of all seeing and all knowing.

Meanwhile, we’d better learn to manage our resources and our land usage a little better or sometime in the future, maybe a few thousand years from now, you won’t be able to walk for all the archaeological finds.

The pyramid

I just saw my first two episodes of “The Librarians,” and I can kind of see how it might be  considered cool, I’ll watch more, but it’s the kind of thing which is likely to jump the shark real soon.

Once you have magic, that’s it.  How did  he survive that stab wound? Magic.  The girl touched him, with the sword, and there was blue light everywhere, and he was O.K.

There’s a touch of Dr. Who about it.  The star, the rich doctor from E.R., I forget his name as an actor and character, seems to be trying to project that super confident, jaunty attitude as he travels through the dimensions or whatever he’s going to have to do to find this “library,” and talking to Bob Newhart in the mirror is a nice touch, but he seems to be trying a bit too hard.

I think the reason they set it in a library was so they could have lots of running through the stacks in emulation of the Dr., who has a scene  like that in damned near every episode.

It had a few cute girls, but mostly the  villain, and she probably won’t be back again.

So far, I give it 3 stars.  I  might get to like it more, but it might be like Haven, where eventually I have to say “Oh, come on, now they’re just making shit up.” and it won’t even make sense within its own universe.

I’m rambling.

The return to work after the holidays  is proceeding at a snail’s pace, which is cool because I’ll essentially have Monday  and Tuesday off so I’m going to work on the book.

Maybe work on some poetry, too.

Good night.

It was a terrible day today as far as getting things done, but it was an absolutely fantastic day for sitting around watching science fiction stuff on TV.

About 3 hours straight of alien encounters, kind of an awesome miniseries which dramatizes a hypothetical alien invasion, and the thing is, there’s a line between hypothetical and fictional, and you don’t very often see anything on TV that stands on the more real world version side of that line.

The difference is, they do it half as fictional dramatization, and half as interviews with scientists and science fiction writers explaining why they think this or that is going to happen and it’s great because they ran the gamut of futuristic technologies, from bio-engineering to space exploration, and the ethics of human beings becoming something not quite human.  I thought that was all great, but they spent too much time on stuff like virtual reality and a couple of other things which they really had to stretch to connect to the plot and were clearly only there because they are kind of cool technologies.

Also, a lot of it was just an excuse to talk about technologies that could be implemented today, and having it being brought to Earth by Aliens was a bit of a maguffin.

Still, pretty good.

Also, reading a book that we got Sam for his birthday, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.”  It’s definitely a bit more adult than “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.”  An amazing story of an autistic (well, Asperger’s they say, but the kids got it pretty bad) child at large in the world.

Fifi (or George)

I hope this doesn’t sound too wrong, but Santa doesn’t come all at once.  At least not at our house.  On Christmas Eve, Isabel got a cage and a promise.  We went and picked up the rabbit a couple of hours ago.

She said we’d name it George if it was a boy, and Fifi if it was a girl.  I should have asked the girl at the pet shop.  I mean, I should have asked her before she put George/Fifi into a dark little box for us to carry home.He/She seemed very calm inside the box but had struggled mightily against going in.  After he/she was in the box, I asked “So, is it George or is it Fifi?”  I wasn’t sure if she understood me, so I asked if it was a boy or a girl.  Some people just do not get jokes.  Even little ones.

She said she didn’t know and indicated no special desire to find out so I let the subject drop.  I figured it would be easy enough to check when we got home.

Hah.  While the kids were bringing in the cage and preparing it, I tried to pick him/her up so I could take a look, and she started scratching me like crazy.  “She’s female,” I said.

“Why do you say that?” asked my wife and daughter.  My daughter because she thought I was on to something, my wife just as an indicator that my lame, sexist humor was not appreciated.

Actually, Isabel did much better than me at establishing rapport, and when she picked the rabbit up to put him/her in the cage, he/she wasn’t bothered at all.

In other news, we just watched “The Interview.”  Egad.  It is embarrassingly bad.  If you need to watch it to keep up with current events or something, O.K., but if you’re looking for a good laugh and a well made film, just watch Despicable Me II again.

I guarantee you, it will be time better spent.