Category Archive

Ahhhh!  Home away from home.  For the first time, they’ve discovered a planet which is like Earth in atmosphere.  They think it has water, and may support life.  Its temperatures range from 32 degrees to 102 degrees.  And it’s 1.5 times larger than our Earth. A few downsides — the year there is only 14 days. Since we’ve all but … Read More

Another good article, this time in the New York Times, about the strange and sudden disappearance of bees, a phenomenon now being called "colony collapse disorder".

Arista 730E from Barista.  Pretty cool: The 730E has a big bright color touchscreen on it that provides on-screen help and graphic tutorials, all powered by Windows. The system does even more than just sewing – it also can quilt and do embroidery. It’s packed with a stitch library with over 850 stitches, over 100 embroidery designs and an assortment … Read More

Well, not yet.  But if this goes the same way that the whole dog food-wheat gluten thing went, they just might recall my car soon: NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Ford is recalling 527,000 Escape sport-utility vehicles because of a problem in the antilock braking system that could cause fires, the company said Tuesday. Missing or incorrectly installed wiring harness seals … Read More

For those of you who think you’re all that because you can do three things at once, the latest studies are here to tell you that you’re not doing anything better: Think you can juggle phone calls, e-mail, instant messages and computer work to get more done in a time-starved world? Read on, preferably shutting out the cacophony of digital … Read More

Bush State of The Union, 2006: Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms; creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling or patenting human embryos. Like many, when I heard Bush talk about human-animal hybrids, I was preplexed.  Great, I thought.  … Read More

Believe it or not, NASA had already figured out this contingency — long before the Lisa Nowak incident: It turns out NASA has detailed, written procedures for dealing with a suicidal or psychotic astronaut in space. The documents, obtained this week by The Associated Press, say the astronaut’s crewmates should bind his wrists and ankles with duct tape, tie him … Read More

Gee.  I’m surprised this hasn’t happened in the 43 year product’s history. I mean, it’s a colorful toy that requires eight year olds to place small pies up against a searing hot 100 watt light bulb.  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, they’re not quite like what we see on Star Trek, but "ray guns" are here. Right now, firing rays requires a dish antenna mounted on the back of a small humvee.  Although the rays can reach a distance of 500 yards (17 times the range of most bullets), they don’t actually kill anything.  In fact, all they do is … Read More

If you get an email with that subject line, delete it. That’s the subject line of an email Trojan Horse which is hitting personal computers globally today, according to this breaking news article: Storm Worm," one of the larger Trojan horse attacks in recent years, is baiting people with timely information about a deadly, real-life storm front, security researchers said … Read More

My computer nagged me to get the updated version of IE 7.  So I did. It’s a vast improvement over the old one.  Really good features, including tabs, pop-up blocking, phishing protection, etc. I heartily recommend it.  Microsoft doesn’t always do things right or intuitive, but this time they did well.

NASA plans permanent moon base: NASA announced plans Monday to begin building a permanent base on the moon by 2024, four years after the space agency starts sending crews of four astronauts there for weeklong exploratory missions. The base would probably be located near the lunar south pole and be staffed by rotating teams of international astronauts for up to … Read More

Professor Orin Kerr: Maybe I’m just too skeptical about our federal government, but I have a feeling that NASA’s announcement today of a plan to set up a permanent base on the moon won’t go much beyond NASA’s announcement today of a plan to set up a permanent base on the moon.