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Entries Tagged as 'Science'

10 Free Astronomy Podcasts On iTunes

I guess it’s blog season for me again and I was just checking out some of my friends sites that I check regularly and I ran into a post from Bob Johnson my favorite astronomy blogger.

Bob ALWAYS has some cool stuff to post about. If it’s got anything to do with meteor showers, moon rovers, anything NASA, Lunar geology, upcoming astronomical events, black holes, star systems, or anything in space generally Bob is on it.

This time Bob shows us 10 places where you can download Podcasts on Astronomy for free.

This is great viewing for the whole family. It’s so much fun that your kids will love learning about telescopes and the rings of Saturn or check the Astronomy pic of the day at NASA’s official website.

There’s tons of stuff to be learned and I figure watching Astronomy Podcasts is a great place to start since it’s kid friendly, fun and doesn’t require much work :-)

Here’s a link to Bob’s post listing the 10 free Astronomy podcasts: http://blackholesandastrostuff.blogspot.com/2009/11/10-places-to-learn-more-about-astronomy.html

And when you’re finished watching you can let the kids check out this awesome Virtual Interactive Flash Tour Of Our Solar System. On second thought just send the kids to bed and check this out for yourself. Created by two high school students this cool interactive flash gadget let’s you explore the solar system and gather extensive data about it’s planets and features. I’ve been playing with this thing for about an hour now and I’ve only explored Jupiter and part of Saturn. This stuff is so interesting that as soon as I’m done writing this I’ll be back at it. :-)

I can’t wait any longer to get back to it so I’m goin…

See you guys later.

Bill

Meteor Showers Tonight Between After Midnight

I don’t know about you guys but me and Shirley are going for a drive out in the country to check out the metoer showers tonight. The best visibility is between 2 and 4 am with up to 100 to 200 meteors per hour.

We Don’t Understand Anything About Gravity

Seven things that don’t make sense about gravity – Gravity keeps our feet on the ground and our planet circling the sun, but we know remarkably little about it. New Scientist investigates the force’s greatest mysteries, including why gravity pulls rather than pushes, does life need gravity, and could we ever build a gravity shield? (New Scientist; July 10, 2009)

Plans Are Underway To Build The Nations Largest Solar Power Plant.

It’s about time people started realizing the sun, the water and the wind are here for us to use as our power sources and the blood of the earth should be left alone.

According to a news article from The Associated Press a giant solar energy plant is to be built the New Mexico desert and is believed to be the largest such project in the nation. Awesome!

The new Solar Thermal plant will sport a whopping 92 megawatts and could produce enough electricity to power 74,000 homes.

Click here for the rest of the story at firstcoastnews.com.

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Hey! Have you checked out My Strange And Cool Net yet? It’s a social network created just for our users. A place where we can share video’s, music, chat, make new friends, invite friends from your other social networks and a whole lot more.

Come check it out http://my.strangeandcool.net

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Expand Your Mind. Check Out This Electric Universe Thing

This is a totally new way at looking at the universe and alot of it makes undeniable sense. What if our scientists have been wrong. Well not “wrong” but “mislead” into thinking gravity is the main driving force between our celestial bodies? And what if Electrical and Plasma interactions are the REAL driving and connecting force between everything interacting in the universe.

The face of physics may be changing faster than we know because of all these social applications. Imagine scientists and specialists collaborating and combining ideas and research in almost real time thousands of miles away from each other in different labs. All because of the internet. I believe these technologies are developing much faster than we really think.

Here’s the video and some links for more information:


The Electric Universe Official Site

Explanation Of The Electric Universe

John Hutchison Is Performing Wacky Experiments Again

Man I love this guy. He’s always doing something crazy. Click on the video to visit John’s youtube channel and subscribe.

Post Update – How to build a working Mobious Ring or TPU Free Energy Device

I’ve compiled some interesting videos from youtube and replaced the old video in this post with the new material and updated the text a little. There’s lot’s more info about how to build a working mobious ring or TPU for those who would like to experiment with it. I’m still working on updating the text and links too so expect more changes.

I am urging anyone who works or experiments with electronics to build one of these and experiment with it in the hopes that we may one day have a new Independence Day. One that symbolizes the day we got off the grid, quit using fossil fuels and became truly free.

Techno Tokyo: Robot Worn On Your Body Can Increase Your Strength

Next up? Real life Stormtroopers? Will we be safe from our neighbors and co-workers? I doubt it.

At $20,000 per suit even the middle class could own one of these.

Great for work and productivity, great for the military, but this suit could lead to disaster if it falls into the wrong hands. Like your crazy ass neighbor.

I want one!


 

Understanding The Universe?

I wanted to share this essay I found written by James A. Putnam with you called “Understanding The Universe”. I just read it a week ago and again last night and it made me realize that maybe we’ve gotten our priorities screwed up a little.

It’s an Essay on learning the universal origin of intelligence. It discusses the relevance and irrelevance of theoretical physics for learning the nature of the universe.

“Wow cool!” is what I said when I first read it the description. “Holy Crap!” is what I said after I read it. Because it just kind of clicked in my heart ya know? It “rang a bell”.

So anyways if you know a little about physics from high school or college or books or whatever it’s a very good read and it might open your eyes a little. It did mine. Don’t worry though it’s not too deep. :-)

This is free info BTW, nobody is trying to sell a book here. :-) I just though you guys would like to read this it’s very profound.

Here is an excerpt:

The cause for the origin and operation of the universe is to be found in the reason for the existence of intelligence. This is the case first because that is what empirical evidence tells us. Our awareness and comprehension of the universe is completely dictated by our intelligent interpretation of information. The information travels to us. It is interpreted locally. It is always a report of the past. It is information about something that has already occurred. We do not see what is happening at a distance. Our reception of information is not experienced over distance. We only know about distance because we receive information that our intelligence interprets and uses to form a visualization of distance.”

This is awesome! I think he’s saying that we’ve been looking in the wrong place for the answer to the big question of “what is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?”

We asked the wrong question. I guess we should have asked “what is the reason for the existence of intelligence?”

instead of

“I wonder how small the smallest particle is?” or “What makes an electron spin continuously without any apparent source of energy?”

We’re looking in the wrong place. We should be looking inside ourselves.

Here is some more from the paper…
“It is continuity, order and unity that should lead us to answers about the nature of the universe. One problem we encounter is that we are no longer able to become knowledgeable in all fields of study. Specialization has become necessary for us to learn everything we need to know. Unfortunately specialization is not conducive to maintaining continuity. The work of physicists does not explain chemical properties. The work of chemists does not explain life or intelligence. The best answers are known only after the problem is in full view. We do not have the problem in full view. We have pieces of the problem divided up among persons having widely diverse expertise. Each area of study could be in error and we would find it hard to recognize this.

This has been a problem for decades. It’s getting really really bad now with all the specialist disciplines. It’s the same with doctors. Don’t get me wrong they do their jobs well but I think people should be given the flexibility to diversify and delve into other disciplines of interest to them and not be confined to just one. It takes them too long to combine their efforts to create something extraordinary. Whereas people who are diversified seem to be more flexible creatively. Like the electrical contractor who knew a little about computers and sensors so he built the first smart house. It’s becoming the house of the future. You watch. :-)

I could comment all day long on this Essay but I won’t. You should read it. It made me realize how much more important it is to interact with people in a positive way than it is to go seeking the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. The universe works the same as it always has. And it always will. But people? People change and people change things. We’re all here to learn how to work with each other to change things in a positive way. And I think that’s what it’s all about.

Click here to read the rest of the essay.

The Electric Universe?

THIS is really interesting. This was posted by mc2ts at TheRanchConsortium Group on Yahoo. It’s about how some of the strange, unexplainable phenomenon comets display may be related to electrical phenomenon and not gravitational phenomenon. Wow that’s a lot of phenomenons. :-)

I’ve been checking out this website “Thunderbolts Of The Godsabout how the universe is electrically unified, plasma is the main source of all matter, and the universe isn’t just a bunch of gravitational matter floating around. It’s more like an electrical circuit. (or something like that)

I’ve always wondered why scientists tend to leave out electrical effects when dealing with planetary motion and the strange behavior of comets and always turn to gravity as the basis for all of their answers.

I’ve always thought of the universe as being a gigantic copy (sort of) of the models of atomic structure and how they interact with each other that they used to beat into our brains in electronics class. Maybe I wasn’t wrong like my teacher told me. I mean doesn’t the model of an atom kind of look like a miniature solar system? Gee maybe their structures are connected in some way seeing as how the models are so similar.

If these guys are right we may be on the road to reaching a “unified theory of everything” IF they can get mainstream science interested enough to take them seriously.

Here’s the post from mc2ts

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Comet Holmes In The
Electric Universe
By Michael Goodspeed
Thunderbolts. info
11-7-7

“It’s a mystery to me how comets work at all.”
–Donald Brownlee, principal investigator of NASA’s Stardust Mission

No phenomenon in the observed Universe has been a source of more continuous surprises than comets. In fact, despite the exterior confidence by astronomers and astrophysicists that “all is well” in mainstream cometology, researchers have been so baffled by unexpected discoveries that conventional comet theory no longer exists! “We have now had four close encounters with comets, and every one of them has thrown astronomers onto their back foot.” -Stuart Clark, New Scientist, September 09, 2005.

Yet comets are still touted as “Rosetta Stones” allowing us to decipher the formation of the solar system. The “dirty snowball”hypothesis, considered theoretical bedrock for decades, has failed resoundingly at predicting comet behavior and, more recently, comet composition.

The most dramatic surprises began in 1986 with the discovery of negatively charged ions in the coma of Comet Halley, the signatures of energetic electrical activity, and the absence of water on the nucleus. In subsequent years, comets have produced a steady stream of “mysteries” that have left astronomers groping for answers:

1. Highly energetic supersonic jets exploding from comets’ nuclei.

2. The inexplicable confinement of these jets into narrow filaments, spanning great distances, up to MILLIONS of miles, defying the behavior of neutral gases in a vacuum.

3. Jets occurring on the dark sides of comet nuclei.

4. Comet surfaces with sharply carved relief — the exact opposite of what astronomers expected under the “dirty snowball” model.

5. Unexpectedly high temperatures and X-ray emissions from cometary comas.

6. A short supply or complete absence of water and other volatiles on comets’ nuclei.

7. Mounting evidence for the production of the OH radical in cometary comas, due to charge exchange with the Sun (the process that misled astronomers into thinking they were seeing evidence of water removed from the surface.)

8. Mineral particles that can only be formed under extremely high temperatures — the last thing one would expect from a chunk of dirty ice arriving from the outermost reaches of the solar system.

9. Comets flaring up while in “deep freeze,” beyond the orbit of Saturn.

10. Comets disintegrating many millions of miles from the Sun.

11. Comet dust particles more finely and evenly divided than is plausible for sublimating “dirty ices.”

12. Ejection of larger particles and “gravel” that was never anticipated under the idea that comets accreted from primordial clouds of ice, gas, and dust.

13. The unexplained ability of a relatively minuscule comet nucleus to hold in place a highly spherical coma, up to millions of miles in diameter, against the force of the solar wind.

All the above findings pose enormous problems for the “dirty snowball” model; all are predictable features of the electric model. Nevertheless, the odds are pretty good that you have never even HEARD of the electric comet hypothesis (although had you lived in the 19th century, when astrophysical journals frequently discussed the electric properties of comets, you might have). This is because the space sciences throughout most of the 20th century have been constructed on the theoretical assumption that bodies in space are electrically neutral. An electric comet would strike at the foundations of the theoretical sciences today.

The Electric Universe views comets as negatively charged bodies moving through the radial electric field of the Sun, the most positively charged object in the solar system. The most energetic cometary displays occur with comets that spend the most time in the outer regions of the solar system, where they acquire a strongly negative charge. As they race toward the Sun, moving into a more positively charged environment, the nucleus will be subjected to increasing electrical stresses, eventually beginning to discharge.

But what might occur with a shorter-period comet that does not move on a highly elliptical orbit? It happens that presently, we are witnessing an excellent example accompanied by many enigmas. In the past two weeks, the Comet Holmes 17P has made international headlines with an energetic outburst that has left astronomers speechless. The website skyandtelescope. com has called it “the weirdest new object to appear in the sky in memory.” “For no apparent reason,” the comet began to increase in luminosity, rapidly brightening from 17th magnitude to about 2.5 — approximately a million-fold increase in brightness. This is the not the first such outburst by the comet — its discoverer Edwin Holmes witnessed a similar brightening in 1892 followed by a second eruption 2-and-a-half months later.

In the span of a few days, the comet’s coma grew to such an enormous and bright disk that it could be seen with the naked eye, though it never gets as close to the Sun as the planet Mars, and when it suddenly erupted, it was moving AWAY from the Sun.

As the structure of the coma has clarified itself, jets have appeared streaming away from the center. The source of the jets is entirely enigmatic, if not preposterous through the lens of the usual comet assumptions.

“This is truly a celestial surprise”… “Absolutely amazing”, said Paul Lewis, director of astronomy outreach at the University of Tennessee.

The reason for astronomers’ amazement is that, given the comet’s distance from the Sun, solar heating cannot offer a plausible explanation for the eruption. Worse than that, it has been moving AWAY from the Sun! So now, astronomers trying to explain these anomalies have begun grasping at straws. After a bit of hair tearing, the most common speculation is that the source of the outburst is “sinkholes” in the comet nucleus. But the trivial, almost immeasurable, gravity of a comet could hardly justify this “explanation” — no force is available to cause the surface to “sink”!

The only other “explanation” could be that another object struck the comet, a scenario that, by the astronomers’ own estimates, is virtually inconceivable.

If, however, cometary displays are almost exclusively due to electrical stresses, the question remains as to why a comet moving AWAY from the Sun might exhibit a sudden discharge. In the case of Comet Holmes, one might suppose that neither the conventional view of comets nor the electric hypothesis can explain what we’re seeing. But in fact, the electric view, based on new knowledge of the solar system environment, does offer a plausible interpretation of Holmes’ behavior.

In its most recent visitation, the comet Halley provided an important clue. As it moved away from the Sun out beyond the orbit of Saturn, Halley experienced a major eruption that not only remains unexplained today, but seems to have conveniently slipped from astronomers’ memory. Other comets such as Hale-Bopp began erupting “prematurely,” while still in the icy depths beyond Jupiter’s orbit. And numerous comets have exhibited unpredictable outbursts exceedingly difficult to explain in terms of an evaporating chunk of ice. And several comets have, quite unexpectedly, exploded into fragments. (See When Comets Break Apart,
http://www.thunderbolts.info/ tpod/2006/ arch06/060119com ets.htm
)

In electrical terms, such unpredictable behavior can be related to the breakdown of the plasma sheath that forms around a charged body in space. This behavior is well documented in the laboratory. A plasma sheath insulates the charged body from the charge of the surrounding plasma, and across the wall of the sheath, called a “double layer,” there is a strong electric field. But when that wall breaks down, the result can be an explosive instability with accompanying electric discharge. In other words, the charged body may exhibit little unusual behavior until the breakdown occurs.

Such a breakdown can be provoked as one plasma sheath penetrates into another. This phenomenon seen in the laboratory draws our attention to the structure of the Sun’s plasma environment and to the unique plasma sheaths of the planets themselves. Wherever our probes have taken us, we have found new levels of structure, all with electrical implications. Within the “magnetosphere” of Venus, astronomers were amazed to find coherent ropes or “stringy things.” The New Horizons probe found curious cellular blobs moving down the vast plasma tail of Jupiter. The Sun itself is immersed in plasma structure with boundaries and double layers, a laboratory in space for intense investigation today.

So what might have happened to Comet Holmes? It is not a typical comet. The eccentricity of its orbit is minimal. It is always outside the orbit of Mars and inside the orbit of Jupiter. In fact, it is virtually as close to being an asteroid as it is to being a comet. And astronomers are slowly realizing that the distinctions between asteroids and comets are not as clear as they had once believed. Occasionally, asteroids sport cometary tails, like the asteroid Chiron, which was seen to develop a tail while orbiting between Saturn and Uranus around 1988 and 1989. It is now officially classified as both an asteroid and a comet. Since the electrical stresses on Holmes would be minimal, much like those on asteroids with modestly elliptical orbits, it is not unreasonable to assume that its plasma sheath remains largely undisturbed — unless it penetrates into or is penetrated by another sheath with sufficient differential across its double layer to cause an explosive breakdown.

It’s interesting to note that the diagram of Holmes’ orbit shows that it crossed the ecliptic (the plane of the planets movement around the Sun) quite close to the time of its closest approach to Mars. So it is certainly conceivable that Mars’ own plasma sheath, by penetrating that of Holmes, provoked the fateful breakdown. Though this would not qualify as a coherent hypothesis today, it is the kind of issue raised by the electric model that is systematically ignored by mainstream astronomers.

As of this writing, the space science community has fallen virtually mute on the enigma(s) of Comet Holmes. Comet science is in an undeniable state of crisis, and nothing short of an intellectual revolution will save officialdom from irredeemable embarrassment. It
is the hope of the electric specialists that the failures of the standard comet model, so nakedly obvious in the face of discovery, will inspire astronomers and astrophysicists to reconsider the real-world disciplines of electrodynamics and experimental plasma
science — disciplines that should never have been excluded in the first place.

For a review of the electric comet, see the index of comet pages on the Thunderbolts site:

http://www.thunderbolts.info/ tpod/00subjectx. htm#Comets