My dad, Norman Weibel, who is an American Legion chaplain and does weddings in California’s Inland Empire has a new website! Beware the music (it can be turned off at the bottom of the page).
Posted by Deana in Oddly Enough, Religion, Rites o' passage, Shameless Promotion, Shopping on August 29th, 2007 | No Comments »
I have never in my life taken a physics course, so this may be obvious to other people who have. Parts of this article explaining relativity using only words with four or fewer words make sense to me and parts don’t. The stuff near the end is really hard for me to understand, but I [...]
Posted by Deana in Science on August 26th, 2007 | 7 Comments »
I’ve been catching up on space things in preparation for the Mars Society Convention next week. Today I ran across an exciting summary of the progress that SpaceX has made toward launching their next Falcon 1 rocket as well as their much larger Falcon 9 rocket. According to the “monster progress update“, the next launch [...]
Posted by Chris in Space on August 25th, 2007 | No Comments »
I’ve been looking for a few choice keywords to describe what we talk about here at Global Spin. You know, “science, culture, politics, writing, foolishness” kind of thing. One of the places I checked was Compete, which offered the oddest suggestion yet: “important punctuation.”
So, yeah. I just had to Google it. There on page 2 [...]
Posted by Chris in Blog, Plain foolishness on August 24th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
I’m just about running out of awe lately. It’s like awesome things are showering down from the sky, perhaps in an attempt to counteract all the craptacular things that we are usually made aware of.
So you can imagine that I started reading this article about the wonders of aerogel with a depleted awe supply. [...]
Posted by Chris in Science, Space, Technology on August 23rd, 2007 | 2 Comments »
So you take a laser and you shoot it into the air, creating a true 3-D image that anyone can view from any angle. Can’t be done, you say? Science fiction, you say?
Well, the Japanese Institute for Doing The Impossible[1] has proven you wrong again by creating just such a device. Take that! It’s no [...]
Posted by Chris in Technology on August 23rd, 2007 | No Comments »
Make that drool-inducing gorgeous photos of places I’d love to see in person. EcoGeek (now added to my regular feeds) has a fun piece on green roofs. Not just solar tiles or recycled materials, though; these roofs are actually green, with grass and other plants.
It’s not just for hobbits anymore. The logic of green roofs [...]
Posted by Chris in Architecture, Art, Environment on August 22nd, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Funny, I was just talking to Nate about this the other day. “The real problem,” I said, “is that so far it hasn’t been possible to create any sort of artificial gravitational field. Without that it would be like developing a theory of electromagnetism if all we had was natural lodestones.” You can imagine my [...]
Posted by Chris in News, Science on August 17th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
Looks like Bigelow Aerospace has some new competition. A company called Galactic Suite has plans to build an orbiting hotel by 2012. Details are a bit sparse, but they already have $3 billion in funding to make it happen:
Galactic Suite began as a hobby for former aerospace engineer Claramunt, until a space enthusiast decided to [...]
Posted by Chris in Space, Technology on August 10th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Now why didn’t I think of that? An article in LiveScience talks about the roots of shyness and possible treatments.
Carducci says that despite beliefs to the contrary, shyness is not completely hardwired. This is because shyness requires a sense of self—which develops only after about 18 months of age. It involves feelings of excessive self-consciousness, [...]
Posted by Chris in Personality, Science, To Help on August 9th, 2007 | 1 Comment »