2009-10-16

Unanticipated Outage!

The cats chewed through some cables. We're trying to get things replaced quickly. Sorry for the unannounced outage.

UPDATE (2009-10-16 20:41:00 MDT): Thanks to the efforts of a close friend, we managed to obtain a 50ft replacement cable and have now rerouted the cable away from curious fangs.

2009-10-10

Metric Day 2009

Happy Metric Day, everyone!

Today is October 10th (10/10).

For the next 10 days, I challenge you to acknowledge, observe, and use the International System of Units (aka SI or Metric). I suggest starting small, recognizing fun personal uses for SI which don't disrupt your interaction with others. For example try switching your thermostat to Celsius, observing the km/hr on your vehicle's speedometer, or converting your height to meters and/or your weight to kilograms.

I started like this a few years ago and I've enjoyed using SI ever since. These small steps can be both fun and educational; and, who knows, maybe one of those fun personal uses will make more sense to you than SI and will stick.

2009-10-08

Lab Testing Hyper-drive Propulsion

This bit of news [Technology Review] is quite exciting. It's being reported that it may be possible to test and confirm a form "hyper-propulsion" (or "hyper-drive" as it's known in Science Fiction).

This is a big deal. The article summarizes a paper presented by a physicist named Franklin Felber [arXiv.org] suggesting that this technology could be used for space propulsion. I suspect that this same design could be used as the basis for the generation of power as well.

It'll be interesting to see how this develops and if Felber has the chance to give this theory a go in a particle accelerator.