Category: Space

Scale solar systems

papermache_jupiterThat ugly blob over there on the right is Jupiter. Well, Jupiter as I built it for school when I was eight in 1974. I found it recently in my mom’s house but couldn’t find the rest of the solar system, even another gas giant, to go with it. I distinctly remember getting the color scheme from the Pioneer 10 fly-by which I saw live on a broadcast at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Anyway, back at school I made a scale model solar system for class and while I couldn’t quite get the distance scale correct (Pluto would have been somewhere out in Kern County), I got the planet diameters down. Even got my photo in the local newspaper in their feature on my class. Some kids play with scale model trains, others build planets…

Couple years back I took a picture of part of the scale solar system in downtown Ithaca, New York.

What’s the point of all this? Some kids and scientists in the UK are building a scale solar system of their own (BBC news story). A little Googling turns up a meta-directory of scale solar systems.

 

Dogs and cats living together… Mass hysteria!

Senator John Cornyn (R – TX) is afraid that gay marriage will lead to a slippery slope Sodom & Gomorrah of marrage absurdity

“It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right. . . . Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife.”

So why stop there?.

John then listed the stuff he plans to marry. Not long afterwards, Victoria at Unspeakable Vitrine picked up the meme and came up with her own list.

Now that the bedrock of Western Civilization has been irrevocably shattered here in Portland, I realize that it’s time for me also to be lawfully wed to a selection of animals, objects and concepts. Here’s my list. I encourage you to post your own. Remember, an elected official has made it clear that if you can marry someone with the same bathroom parts, you can marry ANYTHING. Have fun, and happy marriage!

Therefore, I intend to marry:

The box turtle, because The Man is putting them down.

box_turtle

The 1964 New York World’s Fair

nyworldfair1964

Iapetus, a moon of Saturn

iapetus

“Southforkscu“, a Romanian replica of the set of the TV show Dallas built by the King of Romanian cheddar, Ilie Alexandru.

romanian_dallas

This album cover from the band Quatermass

quatermass_cover

Venus transit links

venus_transit

The transit is going on now and there’s plenty of webcam action:

DirecTV also saw fit (finally) to move NASA TV over to the main channel grouping, so non-dual band dish users (like me) can watch. It’s on channel 375.

Where am I? In Pavonis Mons Whose side are you on?

rover-tumbleweedUnlike the current crop of complex Martian robot explorers, the Tumbleweed Rover is large, inflated ball that contains a small instrument package which can transmit data to an orbiting satellite. The Tumbleweed has no propulsion of it’s own, it depends entirely upon the wind to get around. Currently one is deployed in Antartica and is happily getting blown around by the wind as it collects weather information.

There’s no way you can convince me that the Tumbleweed Rover team weren’t thinking of this

rover-prisoner