Mountain lion in St. Louis County! -- This doesn't happen too often. A night-time wildlife camera captured a mountain lion in suburban St. Louis, less than ten miles from our home. We're a little more used to opossums, raccoons, deer, and wild turkeys around here. I don't worry too much about mountain lions when hiking …
Category: Technology
Renewable by 2030?
From National Geographic: Going "All the Way": With Renewable Energy? In a world where fossil fuel provides more than 80 percent of energy, what would it take to go completely green? Could the world switch over to power from only the wind, sun, waves, and heat from the Earth in only a few decades? The …
Arthur C. Clarke and GPS
Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke was not only one of the first persons to conceive of geostationary communications satellites, he may have also been the first to come up with the idea of the Global Positioning System (GPS). From the Winter 2010/2011 issue of ArcNews: Rendezvous with Reality -- Arthur C. Clarke Sees the …
Airplanes of the future?
From FoxNews: NASA Shows Off Planes of the Future Grace and Peace
Bad fish, bad Wikipedia
I use Wikipedia quite a bit, mainly for getting public domain images for classroom PowerPoint lectures. I occasionally run across vandalism, such as this: That is the entire article on "Fish." I guess that is what you get when you have a "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Ninety percent of the time, Wikipedia is …
Shooting down a spy satellite
An animation of last week's spy satellite shootdown is available from Analytical Graphics.
All the computer I’ll ever need
Speaking of 1980s computer technology, I wrote my thesis for my Master's degree on the first Macintosh computer, which came out in 1984. It had an internal 3.5 inch floppy drive, and no hard drive. I remember thinking, "I can write a report, edit it, and even draw pictures. What else would I ever want …
Tried and true
My laptop computer, with a recent repair to its internal power supply, is running well. It does what it needs to do: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, internet browsing, Google Earth, so I am happy. It is coming up on four years old, which is old for a laptop. I guess NASA might feel the same way …
Shift Happens — The world is going to change a lot in the near future
Technological changes in our society tend to be exponential rather than linear. Some examples of this include: The density of transistors on integrated chips doubles every 24 months. Hard drive capacity increases about 40% per year (do you remember when that 20 MB hard drive seemed huge?) Computer RAM has gone from kilobytes in the …
Continue reading Shift Happens — The world is going to change a lot in the near future
Stewart Brand, builder of the world’s slowest computer
There's an interesting story in today's New York Times about a man named Stewart Brand. Brand was the publisher of the original Whole Earth Catalog, and an early leader of the environmental movement. Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. …
Continue reading Stewart Brand, builder of the world’s slowest computer
Giant excavator
This 200 meter (600 foot) long excavator looks like something out of Star Wars. I got the image from Astronomy Picture of the Day, November 22, 2006. Here's the description from APOD: The machine pictured above is a bucket-wheel excavator used in modern surface mining. Machines like this have given humanity the ability to mine …
GeoChristian 