Jacob Bronowski "Scientific Humanism"

Friday, January 31, 2014

Astro picture for the day/Jesus Christ is a sungod youtube extra

Image Credit & Copyright: Harel Boren and Tal Faibish

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

astro picture for the day

Image Credit & Copyright: Fabian Neyer

- youtube extra, DreamChaser spaceplane,

SpaceX has been ahead and should remain there for awhile, but there's others with great innovations to make space happen. Blue Origins I find kind of similar to SpaceX. DreamChaser has a novel technology here that can work with SpaceX actually. There's others with great engine innovations; I forget who, buy they've found that piston pumped rocket engines instead of turbo can make for greater reliability and cost reductions. Now, if SpaceX and these others could get that technology. And, there's other even more radical technologies; a kind of scramjet/rocket engine hybrid using superconducting is being innovated in England; but, they're at least a decade away. Well, enjoy the DreamChaser video!

- Science/Tech extra,

nanotechnologists have used nanotubes to make a nanocomputer smaller than a single biological cell.

nanotube computer self assembled from the bottom up . What's interesting about this is they can design any number of different computers with this technology; and they chose to design their first nanocomputer to be able to control actuators and sensors. What actuators? Some kind of nano-actuators to manipulate and position individual atoms? So far, the major science/technology blogs I know of have chosen not to mention or comment about this; sorry to sound conspiracy like, but 'do they want to keep this quiet for some reason?'

The New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto(and hopefully Sedna) group has made this cute video,

Thursday, January 23, 2014

youtube for the day/ Robert Johnson documentary/belief in the devil in a society

This outstanding documentary of Robert Johnson reveals much. It shows, be means of people playing live, how great is the Delta blues and Robert Johnson music. I know from the beginning of my own efforts almost two decades ago now, and hearing what others things of it, that people often feel Robert Johnson for one is a bit Spartan sound. Sounds like dirt on a dirt road. Sometimes, one has to see these things live to really see and hear it and feel it.

I've heard of John Hammon before, but I didn't believe he could play. But, to some topics that comes up in the movie that I found a bit striking . . .

. . . the people Mr Hammond was able to find(and he finds some interesting ones!) seemed almost embarrassed to talk about Robert Johnson. His death by poisoning seems pretty clear, so the embarrassment is a bit over-worrisome imo; but, the interesting issue that comes up when discussing the blues and Robert Johnson back then for these people is that the music is devil worship. They say a bluesmen must have sold his soul to the devil to learn how to play like that. And indeed, Robert Johnson and other bluesmen(I can think of Peetie Wheatstaw who also liked to associate himself with devil and the blues) almost wanted to be associated with this folklore of selling your soul to the Devil to learn the blues. Robert Johnson wanted to learn the blues so bad so he can 1) stay off the plantation, and 2) get lots of women. It ultimately cost him his life of course.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

astro picture for the day/Quote for the day extra

ESO/Very Large Telescope image

A zoomable view of the Lagoon nebula . I find that just two or three clicks to the right is good enough.

Quote for the day

"Life is only a short episode between two eternities of death, and even in this episode, conscious thought has lasted and will last only a moment. Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night. But the gleam is everything." - Henri Poincare

- ScienceTech news extra 27Jan2-14 edit,

Nanowire nanocomputer built , it's kind of striking they design the computer for controlling nano-actuators; actuators to control what? Atom by atom assembly?