The Lynnertic

It’s Star Wars Day

Collette — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:08:47 +0000

May the Fourth Be With You…

Star Wars was released when I was a kid and it captivated my entire generation. For years afterward most of our play-acting revolved around the series’ theme and characters.

Of course, every girl wanted to be Princess Leah.

Slave Leah Pillowfight is from DragonCon 2006

Sometimes competition for the role got a little out of hand. In that case, it was acceptable for a girl to take on the role of a robot or android instead. In what may have been a bit of foreshadowing, I played the part of the obnoxious know-it-all linguist C-3PO more often than not.

Some thirty-two years later, my little nieces have many different heroic characters to emulate in their games. But the character of Princess Leah was the first empowered woman I encountered in mass media.

By the way, if the Force is a space-age religion, wouldn’t she be a jihadist?

2009 Crop Circle Season Begins

Collette — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:42:45 +0000

The first crop circle of the 2009 season was reported on April 19, according to Crop Circle Connector. It appeared in a field of rapeseed (a.k.a. canola in America).

It reminds me of a symbol commonly used to designate Internet podcasts, such as this logo for Disneyland™ podcasts.

I believe it to be man-made because in two photos I can see lines defining quadrants in the circle running through the center disc, and one line (running left-to-right in the top image) is slightly off-center.

NASA goes all ‘American Idol’

Collette — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 18:48:19 +0000

NASA’s allowed the public to ‘vote’ on a star system to point the Hubble at.

Unfortunately I found out about this scant hours before voting closed. I got my vote in but wasn’t able to let many others in on the fun.

FEBRUARY 16, 2009
Star search

WEB POLL
You Decide

http://youdecide.hubblesite.org/

It’s not every day that we get to direct a $2.5 billion, school-bus-size instrument. But this month, NASA is celebrating the International Year of Astronomy by letting us decide which object the Hubble telescope should target next.

You get to choose from six heretofore unexamined regions of the universe: two planetary nebulae; two spiral galaxies, visible from different angles; the amorphous “Star-Forming Region NGC 6334”; and — the current front-runner — two “interacting galaxies” that appear to be merging and go by the joint name Arp 274. Voting closes March 1. NASA will post the results on March 2 and photos of the winner in early April

Mars: game on

Collette — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:53:21 +0000

Funny how this comes out the day after Obama’s Inauguration… almost as if more than one gag order has been lifted in the last week.

1. There is Lots of Water on Mars, and it’s Pure.

French researchers published a study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters claiming that the North Polar ice cap on Mars holds a volume of pure water that is about 100x the amount held in the Great Lakes of North America.

This and other NASA images of Mars’ polar ice caps are at the link

2. The good news that Methane plumes were detected on Mars (indicating the possibility of Life on Mars) was overshadowed by the other good news of successfully crash-landing USAir flight 1549.

Quote from this Marstoday.com article:

The key is in the soil and water, and how the two behave together at that site on Mars, not the expected confirmation of water ice at this stage in the mission, Mars investigators told Aviation Week.

The MECA instrument, in its first of four wet chemistry runs a month ago, found soil chemistry that is “Earth-like” and capable of supporting life, researchers said then.

It is intriguing that MECA could have found anything more positive than that, but NASA and the University of Arizona are taking steps to prevent word from leaking out on the nature of the discovery made during MECA’s second soil test, in which water from Earth was automatically stirred with Martian soil.

I wonder about the results of the second soil test. But it’s secret.

More Martian milestones:
July 31, 2008 (Thursday) NASA confirmed the discovery of water on Mars
August 1, 2008 (Friday) White House briefed on possibility of life on Mars
August 4, 2008 (Monday) NASA backpedals, explaining that the water they tested was tainted with perchlorate — rocket fuel — a substance that while so pervasive here in civilized portions of our Earth that it’s in almost all of our lettuce and milk, is detrimental to organic life as we know it, so hold off the celebrations.

Barack Obama’s Inauguration

Collette — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 12:37:53 +0000

Two million people visited the Mall to witness Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration. From the angle of the sun in this photo, I guess it’s close to noon. My brother and a few cousins are somewhere in the crowd.

I found this image of the Obama Inauguration as seen from Space at UniverseToday.com. I downloaded my own free high-res copy from GeoEye, the satellite company that Google uses for Google Earth and Maps images.

Author and Blogger Chris Knowles (The Secret Sun) has got me fascinated with a recent trend of viewing ceremonies from space. He wonders out loud who the audience may be.