"NASA's Kepler telescope has reached one of its major mission milestones: finding an Earth-sized planet outside the Solar System. What's more, it has done it twice in the same star system. Whizzing around the star Kepler-20, about 290 parsecs (946 light-years) from Earth, is not only an Earth-sized planet, but also something just a touch smaller — a Venus."

"An audacious project to construct a vast infrastructure housing a neutrino observatory at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea is being undertaken by a consortium of 40 institutes and universities from ten European countries. The consortium claims that KM3NeT, as it is known, will 'open a new window on the Universe,' as its 'several' cubic kilometer observatory detects high-energy neutrinos from violent sources in outer space such as gamma-ray bursts, colliding stars and supernovae. On the scale of human constructions, it will be second only to the Great Wall of China."

My Son Calls My House "The Farm", I Can't Imagine Why?

"A mission that astronomers and cosmologists have only dreamed about — until now. A team at JPL and Caltech has been looking into the possibility of hitching an optical telescope to a survey spacecraft on a mission to the outer solar system. Light pollution in our inner solar system, from both the nearby glow of the Sun and the hazy zodiacal glow from dust ground up in the asteroid belt, has long stymied cosmologists looking for a clearer take on the early Universe."

"Firefox 9 is now available — but unlike its previous rapid release forebears where not a lot changed, a huge feature has landed with the new version: the JavaScript engine now has type inference enabled. This simple switch has resulted in a 20-30% JS execution speed increase (PDF), putting JaegerMonkey back in line with Chrome's V8 engine, and even pulling ahead in some cases. If you switched away from Firefox to IE or Chrome for improved JS performance, now is probably the time to give Firefox another shot."

I hate flying; and now this is not going to make me like flying any more then I already do...
"According to Stuff.co.nz, the Australian Transport Safety Board found that a software bug was responsible for a Qantas Airbus A330 nose-diving twice while at cruising altitude, injuring 12 people seriously and causing 39 to be taken to the hospital. The event, which happened three years ago, was found to be caused by an airspeed sensor malfunction, linked to a bug in an algorithm which 'translated the sensors' data into actions, where the flight control computer could put the plane into a nosedive using bad data from just one sensor.' A software updated was installed in November 2009, and the ATSB concluded that 'as a result of this redesign, passengers, crew and operators can be confident that the same type of accident will not reoccur.' I can't help wondering just how a piece of code, which presumably didn't test its input data for validity before acting on it, could become part of a modern jet's onboard software suite?"

We The People Petition to Veto SOPA has reached its signature count.

"Law professors Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post have just published a piece on the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. In Don't Break the Internet, they argue that the two bills — intended to counter online copyright and trademark infringement — 'share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet's addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet's extraordinary growth, and for free expression.' They write, 'These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country's tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information and ideas on the Internet. At a time when many foreign governments have dramatically stepped up their efforts to censor Internet communications, these bills would incorporate into U.S. law a principle more closely associated with those repressive regimes: a right to insist on the removal of content from the global Internet, regardless of where it may have originated or be located, in service of the exigencies of domestic law.'"
Kazakhstan's hardline president has switched off part of mobile and internet to try and stop an Arab Spring style uprising.

"Have you ever been spied on by a surveillance drone? No? Are you sure? Maybe it looked like a hummingbird. Or an insect. Or maybe it was just really high up. Maybe there's one looking in your window right now, and if so, there's no law that says it shouldn't. In a recent article in the Stanford Law Review, Ryan Calo discusses how domestic surveillance drones would fit into the current legal definitions of privacy (and violations thereof), and how these issues could inform the future of privacy policy. The nutshell? Surveillance robots have the potential to fundamentally degrade privacy to such an extent that they could serve as a catalyst for reform."

Getting older really sneaks up on you...

Coolest picture ever taken from my phone.

Someone's gonna need a new job soon.

TIL that Stanley Kubrick was approached by the Beatles to direct them in a film version of Lord of the Rings.

The speculative scrum driving up food prices. Bankers, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds are gambling on hunger by speculating on food supply.

Pink Floyd - Sheep

Huge ship in dry-dock. It looks like it would squash the workers like bubble wrap.

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Lookin' Out My Back Door

Mitt Romney put his dog in a crate strapped to the roof of the family car, and drove 12 hours. When the dog got diarrhea (out of fear) he got out and hosed the dog off...and then kept driving

We were nervous that our new puppy would be just an expensive entree for our German Shepherd..

The RIAA Pirated $9 Million Worth of TV Shows

If you live near Fountain Valley CA...go to Ellis and Ward...enter Apache River off of Ward To view this house now. Show starts at 4:00 PM to 10:00 PM


The Land of No Smiles: Photographer entered North Korea by posing as a businessman looking to open a chocolate factory; images rarely captured and even more rarely distributed in the West, show stark glimmers of everyday life in the world's last gulag

TIL that Francis Crick was high off of LSD, when he deduced the double helix structure of DNA

Steve Jobs Did The Same

Salt (ice?) encrusted pier.

Things I Think. By Michael Newnham

Pastor Michael is one of those guys that I would one day love to sit down with and talk over a good cigar while sipping Barbados rum...here is some of his latest thoughts:

1. We have left Iraq…and if you’re like me we leave not knowing why we went, why we stayed, and why now was the time to go.


2. If you could be part of the church I pastor, you would understand my love of the church…and why I loathe abusive churches.


3. A prominent Reformed voice made a “confession” the other day, admitting that he had become complacent toward the “evil” Obama administration and it’s efforts to further the gay agenda worldwide. He didn’t mention any complacency toward the millions of starving children, civil wars, drug wars, poverty, or oppression happening worldwide. There was no mention of concern over our own homeless, our own poverty, and our own corruption that is bringing terror within our borders. He repented of his ‘sin”. Me…I’m too busy trying to survive to worry about what’s going on in other peoples bedrooms. Oddly enough, the Bible talks about poverty about 1000 times more than this issue as well. I guess God didn’t know how nasty people were going to get…


4. I suspect that when Trey grows up there will be neither a post office or a bookstore in our area.


5. I have decided that I am now utterly opposed to satellite video churches.The heart of Christian fellowship is about real people sharing real lives and real meals together. Anything that puts an artificial layer of separation between people gathering together should be expressly condemned in the Body of Christ.


6. The biggest lie in the church today is that we gather on Sundays to receive and transmit information and the best churches are the ones that do the best job of transmission. Learn the difference between a fellowship and a school.


7. It’s interesting to note that the Bible never identifies a church by the name of the senior pastor….


8. One of the reasons that the Holy Spirit has been muted in the church is because a lot of leaders don’t want God talking over the top of the them…


9. Everywhere I look in our society…in politics, the church, and in corporate America, there is a huge leadership vacuum. I’m not much for end times madness, but it is a bit odd and scary.


10. Because of #9, I’m drawing much comfort and encouragement from the Revelation. I wonder if that’s why it was written…