Uncategorized Archives ~ Page 10 of 11 ~ From The Stratosphere

If I were an intelligent alien species with interstellar space travel, I would not come and visit out planet. I might come out here, but once I monitored the EM transmissions, broadcasts, and pollution content in the atmosphere, I’d just move on and mark Earth as “no intelligent life”. And I’d think it a shame, because it’s one of the most beautiful, habitable planets in the galaxy.

Look at all that water! Most of it is too saline for the land animals, but the sea life is obviously the dominant species. They’re just being exploited by the land creatures. They are so much more complex than the land life. Some of them can change colors, they have electric bodies, can live at incredible pressures. Those very large ones, the blueish ones that are 30 meters long, they eat tiny little plankton and are about as benign as can be. Size doesn’t seem to matter to them.

What posses the mammals to tear down or burn down their trees? Have they forgotten that the trees are the primary oxygen factories, an element they need for survival? Just confirmation that we should stay far far away and go check out what going on in the Tau Ceti system, or the Epsilon Eridanus system, or even any star in the Gliese quadrant. I’d but them down for another stop in 1000 years. After all, I’m an eternal optimist!

Apollo 11 Anniversary

By hsrivney | July 20, 2016

529 — I hope this isn’t a copyrighted photo. Human boot print on the Moon.

I would be guilty of a crime if I didn’t mark the anniversary, the 47th this year, of the Apollo landing on the moon today, the 20th of July. I am happy to say I remember watching a fuzzy television image in black and white and at the bottom some words, one of which was moon. I didn’t know the significance of this event in history for a couple more decades. I remember my kindergarten teacher discussing the summer spectacle but it didn’t stir my curiosity as much as watching water boil in a glass pot on a hot plate.

Humans have a hard time understanding big things. Not just large, like the galaxy, which is more than 100,000 light years across, or a googolplex of anything (1 plus 100 zeros), but even immediate large, like the length of time life has existed on Earth (about 3.5 billion years). Time and distance, as any algebra student will tell you, can be really hard to fathom.

Human achievement is an entirely different ‘big’ thing. And it is rarely, if ever, accomplished by one person in a single moment. Landing humans on the moon, and returning them to Earth, was a gargantuan feat that took thousands of humans centuries to accomplish (consider for arguments sake we start with DaVinci). It may have been the most comprehensive collection of effort to advance the human condition ever. Only war has ever used more people at one time for a single goal, and I’d like to think those events don’t serve to advance our civilizations but instead are more like plugging a hole in a dam to keep the worst from happening.

To don a protective garment, climb into a small metal cone and sit atop a rocket to escape gravity, to stay in a a few hundred cubic feet for days and land on another celestial body, get out, walk around, take pictures like a tourist, get back into the foil covered structure and then come back, having to splash down in the ocean without burning up like a meteor is extraordinary!

And a phrase was born: If we can go to the moon, we should be able to {fill in the blank}. No one says “if we can invent movable type, we should be able to {fill in the blank}”, or “If we can harness atomic power, we should be able to {fill in the blank}. There are thousands of milestones in human history, all of which advanced humanity in its own way (the wheel, the guillotine, penicillin) but still will support that as a species, nothing compares to what happened on July 20, 1969 AD, 19:56 Pacific Time, precisely because it didn’t happen on Earth.

And if we can go to the moon, only the limits of our imagination hold us back.

Opens Tomorrow!

By hsrivney | July 19, 2016

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The new Star Trek motion picture comes out on the big screen, including the IMAX theaters! Titled “Star Trek: Beyond”, this is the last film we will see Anton Yelchin appear on screen. Sadly, tragically, he was killed in a freak accident at his home when his vehicle slipped out of gear, rolled down the driveway, and violently pinned him against a mail post. The entire Star Trek community mourns his passing, and makes this film all the more precious.

Set in the Alternate Universe, many have begun to call it the “Kelvin” timeline, having to do with the ship James T. Kirk was not quite born upon, his mother evacuated to an escape pod while his father, George, commanded and piloted the ship to destroy another. Separate from traditional Star Trek canon, fans are beginning to accept the alternate Kelvin Universe, but this film will be critical to that goal. After the shock of finding Kirk and the crew return out of the 1960s as freshmen, the Into Darkness film dragged the characters to places even fans found hard to understand, bringing back a Khan character that was entirely out of character.

Reviews on the new film, ST Beyond, are encouraging, and I for one look forward to seeing this one in IMAX glory with a big bucket of popcorn and a ice cold Coke. Seen every Trek film in the theater, some great, most good, a couple of bombs (it happens) and am hoping in the alternate universe, the Kelvin Universe, that the odd numbers will be the magic episodes we all love and enjoy. It’s a great cast that has worked together and know their characters, so our expectations will be a little higher. I think we will not be disappointed!

Moon Day

By hsrivney | July 18, 2016

Artist's impression of the trio of super-Earths discovered by an European team using the HARPS spectrograph on ESO's 3.6-m telescope at La Silla, Chile, after 5 years of monitoring. The three planets, having 4.2, 6.7, and 9.4 times the mass of the Earth, orbit the star HD 40307 with periods of 4.3, 9.6, and 20.4 days, respectively. — Artist’s impression of the trio of super-Earths discovered by an European team using the HARPS spectrograph on ESO’s 3.6-m telescope at La Silla, Chile, after 5 years of monitoring. The three planets, having 4.2, 6.7, and 9.4 times the mass of the Earth, orbit the star HD 40307 with periods of 4.3, 9.6, and 20.4 days, respectively.

I like to challenge the brain on a regular basis. Now I’m going to challenge your brain. Don’t look up the answer on the internet right away, this is a private process for your brain only.

True or False: The nearest earth type planet discovered by humans is only 4 light years away.

Think about that for a minute. Four light years, if we could travel the speed of light, would take, well, four years to reach (at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, or seven times around the diameter of the earth). If we could go ten times the speed of light, it would still take more almost five months (speed of 1,860,000 miles per second). It takes eight minutes for the light of our sun to reach the earth. Four light years is pretty far away. At 17,000 mph, the current average space shuttle speed, it would take 165,000 years to reach a planet 4 light years from here.

And the truth is the closest earth-like planet discovered is 11.9 light yeas away around the sun-like star Tau Ceti. Now triple all the figures above. Half a million years to get there with today’s technology? That’s the disappointing fact. Even a generational ship is a pretty far stretch of the imagination. And yet we still dream of discovering life on other planets, shaking hands with extra terrestrials, or at least finding an amoebae we can bring home in a Petri dish. So what do we do?

We keep hunting nearby, we keep studying whatever we can, and we don’t stop reaching for the stars.

Tackling Technology

By hsrivney | July 16, 2016

Endeavour I am a right brain person. If it involves imagination, complex ideas, music, writing (well, that’s a given), even medicine (it’s an art and a science), you can hand me the job and it’ll be done. I am not a left brain person. Most students at Caltech are left brain students, studying the hard sciences and thinking abstract mathematics and quantum physics. This might come as a surprise but I spent many years as an accounting manager, followed by a career as a professional consultant converting mainframe systems to desktop Oracle software. I didn’t do the technical database management or write programs, but I still had to chase details, test software, and, here’s the creative part, find a way to get the old system to function the way employees needed it to, only better.

This is why I have to laugh at myself. It’s been a long time since software made me cry, literally. I grew to love computers as my slaves, doing what I asked them to do without complaining, although at times the old turn it off and back on again advice was the best solution more times than I will admit. So it didn’t seem terribly daunting that as the limited functions of this particular blog (wordpress.COM) became evident, my choice was to switch to a new platform (wordpress.ORG). There I was promised divinity and functions beyond my wildest dreams.

Here is where being left brained might have been an asset. Having purchased 3 years of hosting service, the service happily uploaded the software and then left me to fend for myself. I won’t detail the ugly 48 hours preceding the solution. I can say it wasn’t pleasant, I have a new grey streak of hair, cried half a box of tissues worth. I have been bombarded with new terminology, methodology, functionality, and the inability to simply log in to the new site. Why? Because this site, running on wordpress.COM, was still running. And there was a circular loop that sent me here every time I tried to get to the new host and software (dot ORG).

It’s been a long time since I gave up on anything. I have been thrown from horses, struggled through two college degrees as an adult, and learned to program a VCR. I know a carburetor from an alternator, designed a kitchen and fireplace overhaul (there’s the right brain in command), and learned to use an iPhone. Dealing with so called videos to guide me, chats with support, even dragging my software developer husband into the chaos still didn’t conquer the issue.

So our grand solution: live with the limited functionality of the wordpress.COM and cancel the three years of hosting a wordpress.ORG blog. I’m happier already! Here I am, posting my gripe as bloggers do, because I’d rather get back to writing another book instead of untangling the spider’s web I’d become ensnared in. More like the world wide web, I suppose.

Life is short. I don’t want to spend my time doing what frustrates me when I could pay someone else and free myself to let my right brain out to play. I encourage all people to find what they are good at and do it; know what you’re not good at and let someone else do it. Life is good again.

Category: Uncategorized

Not Coming Down

By hsrivney | July 22, 2016