Fossett joins the many mysteries of the Sierras
The mystery of Steve Fossett is most likely solved, but the gray granite peaks of the Sierra Nevada may never give up the secrets they hold of missing aviators and long ago wrecked planes.
Searchers spotted Fossett's battered single-engine plane Wednesday night, more than a year after he took off from a Nevada ranch. Wreckage indicated a high-speed impact at about 10,000 feet. Small pieces of human remains were found with the wreckage, said National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Mark Rosenker.
The location — far from the main search areas farther north — didn't surprise the amateur sleuths who spend years in search of missing planes in these mountains.
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Friday, October 3, 2008
First frost last night.
I don't know if it got the tomatoes up here on the hill, but that's ok if it did. It's actually a little late this year. I laugh at people that act surprised by winter and frost every year. Some cover all their plants, as if this is just a temporary and unforeseen fluke of nature. No, it's not. It's supposed to happen. Winter and frost have descended upon us every year for awhile! Right? Where does the surprise come from? Winter always used to be, and is becoming again, my favorite season of the year.
I haven't seen one of these salamanders since I was a kid. I thought they were all gone. This little guy was hiding under a tire (that I needed to replace a flat yesterday), getting ready to hibernate. I took his picture, showed him to the girls, then put him under the next spare tire in line!
- Quads, hailing from Grand Marsh Observatory atop Elk Castle Hill!
I don't know if it got the tomatoes up here on the hill, but that's ok if it did. It's actually a little late this year. I laugh at people that act surprised by winter and frost every year. Some cover all their plants, as if this is just a temporary and unforeseen fluke of nature. No, it's not. It's supposed to happen. Winter and frost have descended upon us every year for awhile! Right? Where does the surprise come from? Winter always used to be, and is becoming again, my favorite season of the year.
I haven't seen one of these salamanders since I was a kid. I thought they were all gone. This little guy was hiding under a tire (that I needed to replace a flat yesterday), getting ready to hibernate. I took his picture, showed him to the girls, then put him under the next spare tire in line!
- Quads, hailing from Grand Marsh Observatory atop Elk Castle Hill!
Net-talking toaster to burn news onto bread
Many things have appeared on toast: Marmite, Vegemite, jam and even Cylons. Now a designer’s invented a toaster that can burn pretty much anything onto your morning slice, including the news.
The Scan Toaster connects to a PC over USB and downloads everything from local weather conditions and the current time to the morning’s news headlines.
Inside the toaster is a network of toasting “modules”, each heated by a hot wire. Each module can move by 30° and, once the user selects what they want on their toast - excluding a topping, of course - the modules align themselves and burn the appropriate content onto the bread.
The appliance is a finalist in design competition run by manufacturer Electrolux and designer Sung Bae Chang said he got the idea whilst - you guessed it - making some toast.
No plans to manufacture the toaster on a mass scale have popped up yet.
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Many things have appeared on toast: Marmite, Vegemite, jam and even Cylons. Now a designer’s invented a toaster that can burn pretty much anything onto your morning slice, including the news.
The Scan Toaster connects to a PC over USB and downloads everything from local weather conditions and the current time to the morning’s news headlines.
Inside the toaster is a network of toasting “modules”, each heated by a hot wire. Each module can move by 30° and, once the user selects what they want on their toast - excluding a topping, of course - the modules align themselves and burn the appropriate content onto the bread.
The appliance is a finalist in design competition run by manufacturer Electrolux and designer Sung Bae Chang said he got the idea whilst - you guessed it - making some toast.
No plans to manufacture the toaster on a mass scale have popped up yet.
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Thursday, October 2, 2008
Fossett items found near Mammoth Lakes
Searchers have renewed their hunt for the remains of missing millionaire Steve Fossett, after a hiker found the aviator's identification papers in Madera County near Mammoth Lakes.
The documents are the first pieces of physical evidence linked to the disappearance of the adventurer, who is believed to have died in a plane crash after taking off on a pleasure flight from a private airport south of Reno on Sept. 3, 2007.
They were found in a mountainous region of the Inyo National Forest 200 miles southeast of the rugged Nevada terrain that was the focus of previous searches.
Just before dark Wednesday, one aerial spotter said he saw what appeared to be wreckage of an airplane.
"Our teams are going in to that area, and we hope to know whether it is really plane wreckage, and if it is Fossett's or someone else's, by morning," Madera County sheriff's spokeswoman Erica Stuart said late Wednesday night.
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Searchers have renewed their hunt for the remains of missing millionaire Steve Fossett, after a hiker found the aviator's identification papers in Madera County near Mammoth Lakes.
The documents are the first pieces of physical evidence linked to the disappearance of the adventurer, who is believed to have died in a plane crash after taking off on a pleasure flight from a private airport south of Reno on Sept. 3, 2007.
They were found in a mountainous region of the Inyo National Forest 200 miles southeast of the rugged Nevada terrain that was the focus of previous searches.
Just before dark Wednesday, one aerial spotter said he saw what appeared to be wreckage of an airplane.
"Our teams are going in to that area, and we hope to know whether it is really plane wreckage, and if it is Fossett's or someone else's, by morning," Madera County sheriff's spokeswoman Erica Stuart said late Wednesday night.
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Saturday morning I got up very early, put on my long johns,
dressed quietly, made my lunch, slipped quietly into the garage to
load the car with rifle and stand, and proceeded to back out into a
torrential downpour.
There was snow mixed with the rain, and the wind was howling. I
pulled back into the garage, turned on the radio, and discovered
that the weather would be bad throughout the day.
I went back into the house, quietly undressed, and slipped back into
bed. There I cuddled up to my wife's back, now with a different
anticipation and whispered, "The weather out there is terrible."
She sleepily replied, "Can you believe my stupid husband is out hunting
in that shit?
Thanks Mike!
- Quads, hailing from Grand Marsh Observatory atop Elk Castle Hill!
dressed quietly, made my lunch, slipped quietly into the garage to
load the car with rifle and stand, and proceeded to back out into a
torrential downpour.
There was snow mixed with the rain, and the wind was howling. I
pulled back into the garage, turned on the radio, and discovered
that the weather would be bad throughout the day.
I went back into the house, quietly undressed, and slipped back into
bed. There I cuddled up to my wife's back, now with a different
anticipation and whispered, "The weather out there is terrible."
She sleepily replied, "Can you believe my stupid husband is out hunting
in that shit?
Thanks Mike!
- Quads, hailing from Grand Marsh Observatory atop Elk Castle Hill!
ET is coming on vacation.
Reminiscent of a bad script from a science-fiction movie, Earthlings are being warned in a bombardment of Internet postings that the aliens are coming. And, their date of arrival is October 14.
While sceptics are brushing off the messages as something that will give ufology a bad name, others are saying the messages received by two mediums on opposite ends of the globe are real.
The mediums, Blossom Goodchild, an Australian actress, author and direct-voice medium, and Mike Quinsey, a well-known United States-based medium, say they have been contacted by the galactic Federation of Light who have made it known that they will park their massive space ship over Alabama "in the south of your hemisphere" on October 14, and will remain there for three days.
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Reminiscent of a bad script from a science-fiction movie, Earthlings are being warned in a bombardment of Internet postings that the aliens are coming. And, their date of arrival is October 14.
While sceptics are brushing off the messages as something that will give ufology a bad name, others are saying the messages received by two mediums on opposite ends of the globe are real.
The mediums, Blossom Goodchild, an Australian actress, author and direct-voice medium, and Mike Quinsey, a well-known United States-based medium, say they have been contacted by the galactic Federation of Light who have made it known that they will park their massive space ship over Alabama "in the south of your hemisphere" on October 14, and will remain there for three days.
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Fermilab Looks for Visitors from Another Dimension
The detection of extra dimensions beyond the familiar four—the three dimensions of space and one of time—would be among the most earth-shattering discoveries in the history of physics. Now scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., are designing a new experiment that would investigate tantalizing hints that extra dimensions may indeed exist.
Last year researchers involved in Fermilab’s MiniBooNE study, which detects elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos, announced that they had found a surprising anomaly.
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The detection of extra dimensions beyond the familiar four—the three dimensions of space and one of time—would be among the most earth-shattering discoveries in the history of physics. Now scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., are designing a new experiment that would investigate tantalizing hints that extra dimensions may indeed exist.
Last year researchers involved in Fermilab’s MiniBooNE study, which detects elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos, announced that they had found a surprising anomaly.
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Wednesday, October 1, 2008
It's snowing on Mars
Scientists studying the coded signals from the lander Phoenix on the planet's arctic surface detected the snow falling lightly from clouds drifting across the sky some 2 1/2 miles above the spacecraft, said James Whiteway, an atmospheric scientist from York University in Canada.
"Nothing like this has ever been seen on Mars before," he said.
Whiteway, whose team built the weather station aboard Phoenix, said the ice crystals appeared to vaporize before they reached the red Martian ground.
Not that snow was unexpected. Whiteway said his instruments have watched the clouds drifting across the horizon every morning after the sun rises.
The scientists must work fast now, for winter is indeed approaching. During the spacecraft's first three months on Mars, the sun never sank below the horizon, leaving plenty of solar energy for Phoenix to power all its instruments. Now, however, the sun sinks beneath the horizon for more than four hours every Martian night, according to Barry Goldstein, the Phoenix project manager and chief engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It's also getting colder, and that drains power from the instruments because they must be kept warm in order to operate, he said.
Before the end of October, Goldstein said, there won't be enough power left to keep the lander's robotic arm operating, so digging into the soil and scraping ice samples from beneath the soil will have to stop. By November, Phoenix will be standing rigidly in the pitch dark, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will encase it in ice like some otherworldly frozen mummy - at more than 150 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
That should make a weird picture, and Goldstein said the Phoenix team will ask NASA to have the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter high above send images to Earth of what it looks like.
There isn't much chance that Phoenix will recover once sunlight returns next year, Goldstein said. His engineers have created a "Lazarus mode" software program to wake the spacecraft up.
"But I don't really believe it's possible," he said.
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Scientists studying the coded signals from the lander Phoenix on the planet's arctic surface detected the snow falling lightly from clouds drifting across the sky some 2 1/2 miles above the spacecraft, said James Whiteway, an atmospheric scientist from York University in Canada.
"Nothing like this has ever been seen on Mars before," he said.
Whiteway, whose team built the weather station aboard Phoenix, said the ice crystals appeared to vaporize before they reached the red Martian ground.
Not that snow was unexpected. Whiteway said his instruments have watched the clouds drifting across the horizon every morning after the sun rises.
The scientists must work fast now, for winter is indeed approaching. During the spacecraft's first three months on Mars, the sun never sank below the horizon, leaving plenty of solar energy for Phoenix to power all its instruments. Now, however, the sun sinks beneath the horizon for more than four hours every Martian night, according to Barry Goldstein, the Phoenix project manager and chief engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It's also getting colder, and that drains power from the instruments because they must be kept warm in order to operate, he said.
Before the end of October, Goldstein said, there won't be enough power left to keep the lander's robotic arm operating, so digging into the soil and scraping ice samples from beneath the soil will have to stop. By November, Phoenix will be standing rigidly in the pitch dark, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will encase it in ice like some otherworldly frozen mummy - at more than 150 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
That should make a weird picture, and Goldstein said the Phoenix team will ask NASA to have the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter high above send images to Earth of what it looks like.
There isn't much chance that Phoenix will recover once sunlight returns next year, Goldstein said. His engineers have created a "Lazarus mode" software program to wake the spacecraft up.
"But I don't really believe it's possible," he said.
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Farmers See 'Mark of the Beast' in RFID Livestock Tags
A group of community farmers, some of them Amish, are challenging rules requiring the tagging of livestock with RFID chips, saying the devices are a "mark of the beast."
Federal authorities say the radio frequency identification devices (RFID) will help monitor the travels of bovine and other livestock diseases.
"Use of a numbering system for their premises and/or electronic numbering system for their animals constitutes some form of a 'mark of the beast' and/or represents an infringement of their 'dominion over cattle and all living things' in violation of their fundamental religious beliefs," according to the farmers' lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
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A group of community farmers, some of them Amish, are challenging rules requiring the tagging of livestock with RFID chips, saying the devices are a "mark of the beast."
Federal authorities say the radio frequency identification devices (RFID) will help monitor the travels of bovine and other livestock diseases.
"Use of a numbering system for their premises and/or electronic numbering system for their animals constitutes some form of a 'mark of the beast' and/or represents an infringement of their 'dominion over cattle and all living things' in violation of their fundamental religious beliefs," according to the farmers' lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
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