Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I like Senator Al Franken.  He’s cool.  He’s not flashy.  But, he’s direct.  He’s clear.  He says Ted Cruz does not understand Net Neutrality, and then he proceeds to give the clearest, most succinct explanation of it ever.  So, he not only set Ted Cruz straight, he also did a great job of educating the public.

I don’t really know what to think about Bill Cosby.   I still don’t know what I feel about  Woody Allen.

Sadness, I suppose.  They are cultural icons, I have been influenced by their art, they are a part of my consciousness.  But, it’s not looking good for Bill Cosby.  Too many incidents.  And the women have all told  similar stories.

Philae is dead.  It’s battery is dead and it’s only getting a couple of hours of sunlight a day, stuck in a crevice,  so it’s not likely to be charged soon.  Of course, as the comet gets closer to the sun, maybe.  Maybe Philae’s in a pretty good spot.  I hope so.  If not, RIP Philae, you did great.

Just watched a thing on Chupacabras (on Discovery Science, to their great shame), with the emphasis on their being aliens.  They had all sorts of dramatic questions – could they be aliens, with glowing eyes, and fur, and long, red tongues?  Could they be a CIA experiment gone wrong?

They had the scientist on who said it was just dogs, but they had several others who said no, it had to be aliens, or vampires, or alien vampires.  They had a lot of tense, dramatic scenes of people working in labs, doing tests and then, at the end – it was dogs.

But they didn’t even end it there, they closed with a question.  Could it be true?

Why do they do that?

I sometimes get a bit tired of the adulation of Vincent Van Gogh.  I wonder how much of it is our collective human guilt.  Does the fact that he died unrecognized mean we are trying to make up for lost time in expressing our appreciation now?  Or does it just make a more compelling back story?

The Starry Night (Vincent Van Gogh -1889)

Oh, sure, his paintings are great.  But is he better than Monet, or Gauguin, or Brueghel, or Dali, or Chagall?  It’s all subjective.  I sort of feel the same about Shakespeare.  Of course, he was an amazing writer.  But he was not the only amazing writer.

That said, this little video, which appeared on my facebook page today, only adds to the Legend of Vincent Van Gogh.  It’s also a good demonstration of how modern technology converges.  All of the things we know, in all of the different fields of knowledge we are exploring, sometimes bump up against each other.

Van Gogh painted “Starry Night” in the late 1800s, looking out the window of the insane asylum where he was residing, shortly before dawn, when the night, proverbially, is darkest.

The mathematical formula describing turbulence wasn’t discovered until about a hundred years later.  However, one scientist noticed that Vincent had painted it.

I don’t think Vincent Van Gogh was a genius physicist a hundred years ahead of his time.  I don’t believe he was a visionary like Nostradamus.  (I don’t even believe that Nostradamus was a visionary like Nostradamus),  or a time traveler or anything  like  that.

But, neither do I think it’s total coincidence.  One thing Van Gogh was known for was painting fast.  He never made any money, but he churned out a lot of canvasses during his sad and too-short life.  There is something to painting fast, or writing fast, or playing jazz, or doing improv in comedy, which leads to a special, and treasured, result.  If you spend a lot of time thinking about something, your internal editor has time to stifle your impulses.  It means fewer mistakes, but also less inspiration.

In fact, if  you are writing fast, like Jack  Kerouac blasting out “On the Road” in a single session, which  might  be an urban legend but I’ll bet there’s a grain of truth behind it, you are putting out directly,  unfiltered, what is in your head, and perhaps it is  a message from the universe beyond your  mind.  Everybody gets those messages, not everybody is uninhibited enough to let them flow through.

Van Gogh didn’t paint turbulence because he knew anything about turbulence,  or even because he actually saw the turbulence.   Van Gogh  painted turbulence because he was letting the universe speak through him.  Which is,  perhaps,  even more amazing.

It may be beginning to sound as if I’m a bit obsessed with comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and that would be accurate, I am, but this isn’t precisely about that.  But, agenda driven people find their agenda everywhere.

Dr. Matt Taylor

This time it’s the feminists.  I have no disagreement with feminism, at least in the broad outline.  I believe that all people should be treated as individuals, with respect, fairness and compassion.  Professionally, I think people should be judged on their capabilities, and any  job a person wants and is capable of doing, they should get.  I think women’s boxing is a bit weird, but I’m not going to see it so I can hardly be bothered that  it exists.

But, this is a bit much.  One of the scientists who helped make the whole mission happen, Dr. Matt Taylor, was being interviewed about it on TV.  I’m sure he said lots of nice, inspiring things about space, and the quest for knowledge, and how this mission is absolutely awesome because the idea of landing a robot on a tiny little rock which is roughly shaped like 3/4ths of a peanut, 3 and a half billion miles from Earth, deep in the frigid emptiness of space is  bold, and brilliant, and incredible.

Probably something like that.  I’ve no idea what he said.  Feminists are in an uproar (well, some feminists) about the fact that he was wearing a Hawaiian style shirt with some scantily clad ladies pictured thereupon.  It was really a mild sort of shirt.  You see far more misogynistic things every day.  Slogans on T-Shirts and random things posted on facebook.

Personally, I think Dr. Taylor should have just told them all to get bent (he could pull that off – He’s British, you know) but, instead, he issued an  apology, “I’m  sorry if I’ve caused offense….” and so on.

Final Score:

Feminists 1 – Casual dress at work 0

It’s probably just a coincidence.  I was glancing through the news, trying to figure out something worth blogging about, and I came across the story of a UFO sighting in Mexico.  Well, I read that article, because UFO’s are a subject I like talking about, if there’s some credible new development.  But the more I read, the more I thought “This is not credible.”  An alleged photo from an unnamed souce.  UFO’s were seen hovering over a nuclear power plant in Mexico, sucking out all of the energy.  Maybe it was the extraterrestrial  version of siphoning gas.  We are not being visited by representatives of the Galactic Federation, with intent to initiate us into this grand future society, but rather by George and Jane  Jetson, lost in the backwaters of the Universe and low on rocket fuel.  Anyway, the whole thing seemed flakier and  flakier so I decided not to use it.

Meanwhile, all that’s going on on TV seems to be these horrible storage locker auction  shows.  I do not see the interest.  What’s next for Reality TV: Dumpster Diving?  The amounts involved on these shows is just not that great, nobody’s going to  get rich, nobody’s life is going to be changed.

So, I changed the channel and, boom! Aliens.  And the first case they discussed was in Mexico.

Coincidence?  Yeah, I think it probably was.

p.s.  Amazon has settled it’s deal with Hachette, which means that if you haven’t been avoiding buying my books, you just don’t wan’t to buy them with Amazon or Kindle,  you now can order up as many as you like.

Rossetta’s mission to comet Cherrymarashinov-Garibaldi has been a rollicking success so far.  One other way that it’s cooler than the moon landing is the perceptive organs that that robot has.  First, it got a  whiff of the comet.  Pretty rank, is the basic descroption.  I remember an Asimov story that had that description of space travel.  The rookie was surprised that every planet they landed on smelled weird, and the grizzled old space pilot told him to suck it up and get used to it.

I  don’t remember anything like that from the moon landing.   Astronauts can’t take off their helmets, or they’ll die.  Robots are just out there in the free air, or absence thereof, sniffing away.

Then there is this:  the sound of the comet.  Of course, they had to tinker with the sound, speeding it up by thousands, I think, or slowing it down or something but, essentially, if you were standing on the comet you would hear nothing  but the emptiness of space.  This is what the comet would sound like if we had superhearing.  Still, it sounds pretty cool, and I’m sure it’s just chock full of scientific information.

The landing itself didn’t go as smoothly as hoped.  It looks like the reason Philae’s robo-harpoons didn’t fire properly, thus attaching it firmly, buckling  in for the long flight around the sun, is that it’s stuck in some kind of crevasse.  Another reason for using robots.  An astronaut with a broken leg is going to be pretty useless for anything, as well as being, personally, in extreme pain.  The robot will just sit there in the crevasse, merrily snapping pictures of the inside of the crevasse, more or less oblivious to the facts that it’s leg is broken and that it’s stuck and not going anywhere.

Except, of course, on a ride around the sun.