Long, Slow Burn

I hated to do it, but we’re under high wind advisories for today.

The kids were working hard on rockets with parachutes and other cool designs.  Wind is the bane of parachutes and I didn’t want the kids to get their hard work ending up in a tree.

Oh well.  Postponed until next Wednesday.

Hong Kong is currently going through a boom.  They have a budget surplus, so what are they doing?  They’re spending a little bit more … and cutting taxes a good bit!  Cutting taxes in turn, should increase the amount of business and, in turn, create more business!

Would that ever happen in the United States?  I think not.  First, spending less than we make in taxes, is unfathomable.  (Grrr!)  And if we did have a true surplus (A TRUE SURPLUS!  not just a budget surplus), do you think that our politicians would cut taxes?!?  Without a big fight?!?

Anyway, here’s the article: Booming Hong Kong cuts taxes as surplus soars

I’ve been saying this for years.  I’m really disappointed in our medical profession that more reliance isn’t placed on computer based diagnosis.  Computers could provide us better differential diagnosis, leading to better testing, quicker diagnosis, and lower medical costs on a patient by patient basis.  I have no clue on why us patients aren’t demanding a greater use of computers.

Here’s a great atomic example.  Computers are better able to determine whether brain scans indicate alzheimers, compared to normal brain scans.    BBC: PC beats doctor in scan tests

Here’s the story from CBC.ca: B.C. inventor wants to put pop bottle rocket into orbit

It’s cool that he’s earning a living at water rockets. Maybe someday I’ll be able to earn a living from it too.

Okay.  I’ve been inspired.  Valentines is just a couple of days away.  Well, us geeks have been busy creating valentines that really come from deep inside of our cardiovascular system.  I must say that I’ve been inspired by The Bad Astronomer and Ironic Sans.

Well, here’s the best I could come up with:

and

Which, properly formatted, gives you this document:  click here.   Valentine … taken care of!

There was some interesting news coming from the world of space exploration today.

First, I am pleased to announce that the Space Shuttle finally launched yesterday.  This mission is to deliver the Columbus module to the ISS.  Congratulations NASA on what appears to be a flawless launch, and congratulations to the EU for a major step.  Good news all around.  Read about it here.

The second article is in regards to SETI, a program that I’ve participated in the past.  SETI is starting to re-evaluate on whether we’re searching for ET intelligence in the best manner.  This is a great example of what science is all about.  Come up with a theory, experiment, if the results are not as predicted, re-examine, refine, and test again.  Bravo SETI.  Don’t give up.  Read more about it here.
One interesting fact from the story is that there are over 70 sextillion stars in the visible universe. Sometimes written as 7×10^22.  Let me write out what 70 sextillion looks like:

70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Very cool.  Gosh, we’re small.

A week ago we had the first launch day for the kids.  You should have seen their faces when they launched the rockets.  Priceless.  No one got hurt and they had loads of fun, and learned a lot.  Here are just a couple of pictures from the day:

You can see the kids and their families showed up for the launch.  This is a picture of the first launch of the day.  You can see how surprised most of them were on how high and how fast the rockets launched.

The kids loved getting involved and loved loading their rockets onto the launchers.  Some even custom painted their rocket.

This is an unusual picture.  It’s hard to capture a rocket during launch but sometimes we get lucky.  Here’s a great picture of the stream of water coming from the rocket on launch.

What a beautiful day.  Only a couple of weeks until the next launch date.