HAL

I suspect the terrorists don’t really expect the women to be released. There are only two of them and both of them were Saddam’s lackeys. I think they’re doing this for the PR value, trying to show less-informed Muslims they are protecting Muslim womanhood from Godless heretics. If anything I feel worse for Bigley than for the two Americans who were executed. They were killed fairly quickly. Bigley’s being led to believe that there is at least a hope if he pleads hard enough, abjectly enough… There is no hope. This is only another form of torture carried out on the world stage instead of a darkened police room.

Well that's interesting. Another little window of opportunity to find out what is really going on.

Someone has thought of this before apparently. I ran across this today while reading about SETI. "It has been proposed that advanced civilizations may explore distant stellar systems using intelligent robotic probes, commonly called von Neumann probes (after John von Neumann , an early thinker on self-reproducing automata). Such probes could maintain themselves, and even reproduce themselves, using raw materials found during their wanderings. It could be that virtually all interstellar exploration is done by von Neumann probes. Such probes could reproduce like bacteria, multiplying their numbers in a characteristic period of time (the generation time). A single von Neumann probe could produce 1012 progeny, one probe for every star in the Galaxy, in only forty generations. Even if the generation time is as long as one million years (you have to include the time it takes for each probe to travel to another star), it would only take forty million years for the descendents of a single probe to visit all the stars in the Galaxy. This is a short time in the scheme of things. Since we don't see these things all over the place, some conclude that there are no von Neumann probes. But we should not jump to this conclusion; it could be that all of the von Neumann probes ever deployed were programmed only to observe, and not to interfere with living planets. This would seem to imply something about the motives of all advanced civilizations that deploy such devices (if there are any)." So maybe this is what is behind all those UFO sightings.

There is a quote from a book from the ‘50’s called “The Mouse that Roared.” That comes to mind. It goes something like this, “The pen is mightier than the sword, but the sword holds sway at any given moment in time.” People are impressed by loud, violent, brutal things. Explosions in movies, car chases, rap music, the World Wrestling Federation, and so on. Part of the appeal of the rise of the fascists in the 1930s’ was that fascist leaders were ‘men of action.” In the United States today, an obviously stupid President, prone to the use of violence is leading in the polls against an opponent who speaks in complex, compound sentences. In the short term violence prevails, but intelligence is subversive, turning violence against itself and prevailing by default. Violence is finite. Intelligence is infinite.

We did broadcast a signal once, in 1974, a 20 trillion watt omnidirectional broadcast that should be detectable anywhere in the galaxy with a receiver similar in size to Arecibo. It was a one-time thing, largely a token effort. We would like to think that any race intelligent enough to send and receive such signals would be friendly, but do we really know that for sure? We have frightened ourselves enough recently with such movies as Independance Day and Mars Attacks. Perhaps whoever is out there is also waiting for someone else to make the "first move." With the distances involved it seems unlikely that we will ever be visited by another race. It will be hard enough just to say hello.

I've been running the SETI screen saver for years now. Currently up to 1185 data units, but my poor old computer is so slow now that it takes days to complete a data unit. I hope they do find something in my lifetime. I think it will change everything. It will focus our attention outward and cause us to think more seriously about finding out what is out there. Of course it will probably take years to understand the signal once we find it. More years debating how or even if we should reply. Then decades, if not centuries for our reply to reach the destination. I have a question: How far can a radio signal travel before it is obscured by noise?

Sorry - thought I replied already' date=' but when I came back here I didn't see the reply. I have one of these. [img']http://mysite.verizon.net/res0bpko/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/corvette3.jpg[/img]

I’m on a river just south of Tampa. Moderately worried about Ivan. We’ll probably be okay, but the thing about Tampa Bay is that it is like a large, shallow funnel. If the hurricane makes landfall north of Tampa the winds push a lot of water up Tampa Bay, big storm surge, lots of flooding and all that. Charley didn’t hurt us here much because it came in south of us in Port Charlotte (and beat up the center of the state pretty badly). Francis was bigger and slower and exited the state north of Tampa. We got a moderate storm surge but not much wind damage. Downtown Tampa flooded and water started to come up the driveway where I live, but stopped short of the house. As it looks now, Ivan will be far enough out in the Gulf I think so we shouldn’t get much flooding. That may be wishful thinking, but after two nasty storms already, I’d rather not believe the worst-case scenario. BTW - They changed the hurricane naming system some time in the ‘70s I think it was to alternate between male and female names.

Back when the Soviets were still in the game they were holding a joint news conference for one of the Soyuz – Apollo missions. They asked the American scientists what benefits were expected from the missions. They replied with the usual prattle about spin-offs, the general increase in knowledge, etc. When they asked the Soviets the same question the reply was much more straight forward. As I recall, it was something like, “You must be joking. We must explore because we are human. We must always explore because it is an essential part of being human.” Well good riddance to the Soviet Union. It was a corrupt rotten system, but there were some things they did very well. Something I learned from teaching: If you concentrate on getting all your ducks lined up in a row, discipline, management, materials, etc., before you start to teach, you never get around to teaching anything. The way to be really productive is just to jump in and start teaching, get the momentum going and don’t let anything divert you. The other things will fall in line if you are moving in the right direction. Space exploration, or any productive activity is like that. If we fret about bureaucracy, terrorism, poverty, etc., before we get around to exploring, it will never happen. We need to get out there and explore space as if it were a global human activity. The other things will take care of themselves.

Just saw this movie last night. Local movie reviewer gave it a D+, But I liked it. Lots of big noisy toys zooming around crashing into things. Not very deep or profound, but a heck of a lot of fun, especially if you are with a 10 year-old. It’s patterned after the ‘60’s Saturday morning series, for those that are familiar with it. So it’s kind of like a big Saturday morning show, but it’s well worth the price of the ticket and a heck of a lot better than some of the better advertised flicks that are in the theaters now. Link to Thunderbirds Trailer

Good question. We don’t know exactly how to do it. If we were even close there would be half a dozen venture capitalists pouring big bucks into the project trying to nail down the essential patents. That said, people are ingenious. Aircraft, submarines, nuclear power, computers, and all kinds of other things were visualized centuries before they were possible. And when these inventions were brought to fruition, they were not exactly as they were visualized, but we have them nonetheless. But force fields that can be used as a defense against projectiles I think will take a bit more work. We need more experience using and manipulating energy fields as well as more complete theory of sub atomic structures. Maybe string theory will give us the understanding we need to use and project different types of forces at will. Maybe not. It is probably too early to tell if a Star Trek force field is possible, but it is also too early to say that it is impossible. I think we will eventually find a way to do virtually the same thing, but maybe not the way it is seen on TV.

Got a little off-topic on the post above. Sorry. Personal rant I guess. I remember reading “I Robot”. It was an excellent book. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but from what I’ve seen of the trailers, it doesn’t look anything like what the book was about, which was a series of short stories that Asimov wrote to try to illustrate the impact that he thought robots might have on society. There was one story where a robot killed a man, but that was more of a detective-type story about a single incident, and there was nothing about robots taking over society. Here again, maybe it would have been more honest to have called the movie, “Robots Go Crazy And Try to Take Over The World”, or something like that. On the other hand, it is at least good to know that someone in Hollywood remembers that there was an Issac Asimov and that he did write about robots. So maybe at some time in the future someone else Out There will take another look at the stories and give us something a little more intelligent.

Very true! There is also the tendency to take great works of literature and historical events and twist them to whatever appeals to the popular sentiment at the moment. Disney’s "Hunchback of Notre Dame" and the latest Titanic movie are two prime examples. Victor Hugo’s original story was a heart-wrenching unmitigated TRAGEDY. But it was powerful and enduring because it said something true about the human condition. Disney’s version, while entertaining for children, was a travesty and an insult to the memory of a great man. Would have been better if they had called it “The funny man who lived in the top of a church in Paris.” Don’t know why it was necessary to debase the memory of Hugo like that. And Titanic – Almost as bad. Creating two fictional characters and set them chasing each other’s gonads around a ship filled with real people who would shortly die in one of the twentieth century’s seminal tragedies - Just strikes me as a little obscene. “A Night to Remember” (done sometime in the 1930s) I think, while not completely accurate, at least treated the event with some respect, and was a very powerful movie in its own right.

Hi. My name is HAL. I used to teach history, but now I run a network. I am most interested in Cosmology and have been trying to understand string theory, but am beginning to realize that this may not be possible. Nevertheless, I have been finding out some astounding things and I was hoping that by hanging out in places where people were talking about these kinds of things I would be able to understand a little more. I have a medium-sized Samoyed dog. His name is Fig. He’s my buddy. And I am a bit of a car nut. Lots of fun. Used to hang out on some of the car forums, but there were too many right-wing gun nuts, so that was kind of a drag. Anyway, I am still finding my way around. Looks like a very interesting place.