It's A Beautiful Day

Now What?

LED streetlights in Tokyo.

Those energy saving butterfly streetlights would be great in Pacific Grove.
I wonder if they come in monarch?

Save Birds and Energy

Blinking lights saves energy and birds.

Currently the law requires the red lights on towers to be steady. Birds, traveling at night, navigate by the light of stars and planets. The steady lights on towers can confuse them and many birds are killed when they crash into towers and power lines. Scientists have found that simply making the lights blink, can eliminate 70% of bird deaths, and save money from reduced energy use.

Some things have to be believed to be seen.

- Ralph Hodgson

The Philippine Tarsier

(Tarsius syrichta)

I recently got some new pictures of weird animals from Jo Anna, (Thanks.), and among them was this little primate. I tracked him down to an article that warned of this animals imminent extinction. Of course I had to know more. What I found was an example of the, "world information drought", that began around 1999-2000. The Philippine Tarsier Foundation was last heard from in 1997. I found a report from Wikipedia that was dated, Feb. 1, 2009, but it contained the same information as the 1997 report.

Cost Of War on Pirates...
3 Bullets

What our new military used to stop the pirates.

"For Mr. Obama, the episode ended successfully with the precision takedown of three pirates with three bullets and the recovery of Captain Phillips generally unharmed."

The wasteful military actions of the past, may be coming to an end. Instead of using a 125 million dollar cruise missile, the Obama armed forces achieved success with 3 bullets. We may salvage our economy yet.

Bullets per casualty:

• WWII- 25,000

• Korean War-100,000

• Vietnam War-200,000

• Iraq/Afghanistan-250,000

• Somali Pirates-1

I think we are on to something.


If you wish to be happy,
God is there to show you the way.

If you seek unhappiness,
you are on your own.
- Happy Phil

Nanontech Makes

Wood Planes Fly Again

Nanotubes bringing back wooden planes.

The first airplanes were made of wood, and the next airplanes may be as well.

Researchers in Canada have unveiled plans for a factory that will use nanotechnology to extract cellulose from wood and use it to form composite materials for airplanes. It's not so implausible when you consider that Boeing and Airbus are using significant amounts of carbon composite materials in their latest programs.

If "con" is the opposite of "pro,"

then what is the opposite of progress?

Today's Relatively Appropriate Song;

Tea for Two -Lester Young

It's Good to Be Alive

In The Zone

Fuel For Thought

Dead Zone in Gulf of Mexico.

This week, environmental arguments against corn-derived ethanol and mandates to blend more ethanol into gasoline got extra ammo with a new study showing that growing enough corn to meet renewable fuel standards will mean increasing the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, as the Wall Street Journal reports.

Life On Mars

Picture of Mars from Google Maps

Fingerprints

There was an article in Physorg.com, by Lisa Zyga, about fingerprints. It was in essence, a review of a study called;

"The Role of Fingerprints in the Coding of Tactile Information Probed with a Biomimetic Sensor." J. Scheibert, S. Leurent, A. Prevost, and G. Debregeas (13 March 2009) Science 323 (5920), 1503. DOI: 10.1126/science.1166467

via: CERN Courier and Science

I got the feeling that she didn't read the study, because her speculations were misleading and off topic from the report. It did however spark a lively bunch of comments from people who were perfect examples of our faulty educational system. The Article.

I felt the need to comment in the hopes of steering the discussion back to the role of fingerprints with the following comment from, Happy Phil;

"The natural world is constructed with fractal geometry. No two leaves, or snowflakes are exactly alike. The stuff we design and manufacture uses Euclidean geometry, (Circles, Squares, Triangles). The study did, however, create a sensing device based on the general dimensions and spacing of fingerprints that showed a greater signal at the same frequencies that our brain uses for the sense of touch. It seems our fingerprints are enhanced sensory devices."

Mt. Redoubt, indubitably.

Is that a bird or an airplane?

Apparently, a large petroleum storage facility was built in the path of the volcanic mud flow, and 6.3 million gallons of oil could be lost.

Nano Supercapacitor

The device is a supercapacitor, a circuit component that can temporarily store large amounts of electrical energy for release when needed. A team headed by Chongwu Zhou describes it a newly-published paper on "Flexible and Transparent Supercapacitor based on Indium Nanowire / Carbon Nanotube Heterogeneous Films" in the journal Applied Physics Letters (Vol.94, Issue 4, Page 043113, 2009).

Every day I find more and more advances in nanotech research and development. There was also an article about a surfactant separation method that could be applied to separating carbon molecules from oxygen molecules.

In the current Nature Chemistry , the IBN scientists report that this novel material, named IBN-9 after the research institute, is the first hexagonal nanoscale construct with 3 unconnected interwoven channels. It is by far the most complex mesoporous nanostructure to have been synthesized in real-life and represents a new class of mesoporous materials, which consist of pores of 2-50 nanometers in size.

America really needs to get on the Buckyball. Most of these breakthroughs in nano science are taking place in other countries.

DNA Nanoparticle Connection


(PhysOrg.com) -- Building on the idea of using DNA to link up nanoparticles — particles measuring mere billionths of a meter — scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have designed a molecular assembly line for predictable, high-precision nano-construction. Such reliable, reproducible nanofabrication is essential for exploiting the unique properties of nanoparticles in applications such as biological sensors and devices for converting sunlight to electricity.

Powerful Pulsar

A small, dense object only twelve miles in diameter is responsible for this beautiful X-ray nebula that spans 150 light years. At the center of this image made by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is a very young and powerful pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58.

At the center of this Chandra image, a pulsar -- only twelve miles in diameter -- is responsible for this X-ray nebula that spans 150 light years. This pulsar is spinning around almost 7 times a second and has a magnetic field at its surface estimated to be 15 trillion times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field.

What a miracle we are. Here we are, tiny creatures in an incomprehensibly vast universe, yet we are able to observe, marvel, and learn from objects like this pulsar, 150 light years distant. Life is amazing.

New Microphone

I received the MXL V63M microphone today. I like it.

Today's Relatively Appropriate Song;
Sultans Of Swing -Dire Straits

Life is good

Somehow This All Fits Together

Who Knew?

No Spots Until 2012?

Picture of spotless sun taken March 31, 2009

The sun hasn't been this quiet in over a century.
Scientists are still speculating.

Nanotube Batteries

Carbon nanotube based ultra-capacitator, battery 2.0

(PhysOrg.com) -- For the first time, MIT researchers have shown they can genetically engineer viruses to build both the positively and negatively charged ends of a lithium-ion battery.

Three years ago, an MIT team led by Belcher reported that it had engineered viruses that could build an anode by coating themselves with cobalt oxide and gold and self-assembling to form a nanowire.

In the latest work, the team focused on building a highly powerful cathode to pair up with the anode, said Belcher, the Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering. Cathodes are more difficult to build than anodes because they must be highly conducting to be a fast electrode, however, most candidate materials for cathodes are highly insulating (non-conductive).

To achieve that, the researchers, including MIT Professor Gerbrand Ceder of materials science and Associate Professor Michael Strano of chemical engineering, genetically engineered viruses that first coat themselves with iron phosphate, then grab hold of carbon nanotubes to create a network of highly conductive material.

Because the viruses recognize and bind specifically to certain materials (carbon nanotubes in this case), each iron phosphate nanowire can be electrically “wired” to conducting carbon nanotube networks. Electrons can travel along the carbon nanotube networks, percolating throughout the electrodes to the iron phosphate and transferring energy in a very short time.

Who Knew?
Autism and Hurricanes?
I found this in an article about Autism.
They believe that stress plays a central role in dysregulation of the LC-NA system, especially in the latter stages of prenatal development when the fetal brain is particularly vulnerable.

The central tenet of the theory, published in the March issue of Brain Research Reviews, is that autism is a developmental disorder caused by impaired regulation of the locus coeruleus, a bundle of neurons in the brain stem that processes sensory signals from all areas of the body.

As evidence, the researchers point to a 2008 study, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, that found a higher incidence of autism among children whose mothers had been exposed to hurricanes and tropical storms during pregnancy. Maternal exposure to severe storms at mid-gestation resulted in the highest prevalence of autism.

My sister sent me a link to a
birthday calculator website.

http://www.paulsadowski.com/birthday.asp

It has a bunch of commercials,
but you only need to use this;

This is just a picture. Use the real thing at the website.

I used it today, April 1, 2009
and the following appeared;

21 May 1945

Your date of conception was on or about 28 August 1944 which was a Monday.

You were born on a Monday
under the astrological sign Taurus.
Your Life path number is 9.

Your fortune cookie reads:
If you would be loved, love and be lovable.

Life Path Compatibility:
You are most compatible with those with the Life Path numbers 3, 6 & 9.
You should get along well with those with the Life Path numbers 1 & 5.
You may or may not get along well with those with the Life Path numbers 2, 7 & 11.
You are least compatible with those with the Life Path numbers 4, 8 & 22.

The Julian calendar date of your birth is 2431596.5.
The golden number for 1945 is 8.
The epact number for 1945 is 16.
The year 1945 was not a leap year.

Your birthday falls into the Chinese year beginning 2/13/1945 and ending 2/1/1946.
You were born in the Chinese year of the Rooster.

Your Native American Zodiac sign is Elk; your plant is Mullein.

You were born in the Egyptian month of Epipy, the third month of the season of Shomu (Harvest).

Your date of birth on the Hebrew calendar is 10 Sivan 5705.
Or if you were born after sundown then the date is 11 Sivan 5705.

The Mayan Calendar long count date of your birthday is 12.16.11.7.12 which is
12 baktun 16 katun 11 tun 7 uinal 12 kin

The Hijra (Islamic Calendar) date of your birth is Monday, 8 Jumadiyu'th-Thani 1364 (1364-6-8).

The date of Easter on your birth year was Sunday, 1 April 1945.

Your age is the equivalent of a dog that is 9.12954990215264 years old. (You old hound dog, you!)

Your lucky day is Friday.
Your lucky number is 6.
Your ruling planet(s) is Venus.
Your lucky dates are 6th, 15th, 24th.
Your opposition sign is Scorpio.
Your opposition number(s) is 9 & 11.

Today is not one of your lucky days!

There are 50 days till your next birthday
on which your cake will have 64 candles.

There was more info, but you get the drift.

No Tropical storms during mid-gestation.

I can sing and play most of the songs of 1945.

That might explain a lot.

Newborn Dipsomaniac Lullaby?

They look a little scary to me. Probably drove me to drink.

Rum and Coca Cola -Andrews Sisters

New Hat

A woman at the bakery said it looked good, so I bought it.

I figured I should get a new hat for summer. The other hat is a little warm when the temperature is over 100, and the winter that never happened is almost over, so I have been looking at summer hats. I was never a hat kind of guy until I moved to Redding. People had told me that the weather would be extreme, so I got a hat to keep my head warm. Last summer, I noticed it kept the sun out of my eyes and provided shade. Cool.

This new hat is even cooler.

High Tech Recording

Recording studio.

Adding bass part.

Cleaning up and adding tracks to songs in anticipation of the new microphone that I ordered. The time has come for me to polish up my wares and do some quality recording.

I have been putting the right equipment together over the past year, to help capture the "feeling" part of music, in a recording.

The right combination of microphones and recording equipment can put you in the song when you listen to it. A performance that gives you goose bumps or makes your heart ache, can be captured for posterity to be experienced again, when recorded with the right stuff. Or, the recording sometimes doesn't get it. Many a "perfect take" has been lost in translation between live and Memorex. My recordings are letting me know I am on the right track.

Everything seems to be on schedule and coming together marvelously.

Speaking of Time

American Clock-Salvador Dali Gallery

This from PHYSORG.COM ;

As if extra dimensions weren’t strange enough, new research has probed an even more mind-bending possibility: that spacetime has dimensions that change depending on the scale, and the dimensions could have fractal properties on small scales. In a recent study, Dario Benedetti, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, has investigated two possible examples of spacetime with scale-dependent dimensions deviating from classical values at short scales. More than being just an interesting idea, this phenomenon might provide insight into a quantum theory of relativity, which also has been suggested to have scale-dependent dimensions. Benedetti’s study is published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

What they are studying is how the scale of the sphere also determines the number of observable dimensions. I think they sum up their research with the following statement;

"In both k-Minkowski spacetime and the quantum sphere, the dimensionality becomes non-integral, which is a typical signature of fractal geometry."

It's nice to know that others see the universe in ways that are similar to my own observations and deductions.

This supports my thoughts regarding how God's Universe uses fractal geometry, and how human artifacts use Euclidean geometry.

I am so grateful that I am able to use the internet to find that other people have discoveries and observations similar to my own. In addition to being relieved to know I am not alone, it is exciting to see these concepts and theories being put into practical applications.

Today's Relatively Appropriate Song;
Till The End Of Time -Lennon Sisters

Life is Amazing

God is Good

Reality In Different Media

Collection

Thanks to Jo and Brandi for sending this in an e-mail.

If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

I have been wonderfully busy with many different projects to fill me with joy, wonder, and a sense of accomplishment. I am even completing some of the projects I begin.

An interesting combination of mediums is a video I am making for a little contest. Entries are supposed to explain nano science. To do mine, I have written and recorded a song called, "Fullerenes", to use as the soundtrack. This is one of 4 songs that are giving me, "hands on", experience with the new iLife '09, GarageBand. The on screen interface looks like this...

Song production with GarageBand,(Life Is What You...).

Next, visuals.

Chimney Sweep Mouse

I figure to use this little mouse to carry the storyline. He will sweep industrial smokestacks, collect CO2, and separate the carbon from the oxygen. From the carbon, he will extract Fullerenes, and Nano Tubes, by the ton. He will then give them to scientists and engineers to use in the construction of bridges, elevated trains, super conductive cable, nano circuits, and thousands of other applications. In the end the air is cleaner, America is the world leader in manufacturing, and the skies are not cloudy all day.

Well now, how the heck am I going to animate the mouse? I could hand draw a couple of thousand pictures, photograph them, string the photos together into a motion picture, and have my video ready sometime next year. I could just put a cutout on a stick and move it around. Or, I can figure out how to use the animation program I got today, and make it that way.

I think I will sleep on it.



Dorothy O'Neil's Garden Awakes

From Dorothy's backyard garden....3/10/09

I found this poking up out there too.

This was growing from a dropped bulb on the path.

What a nice surprise. I looked out behind building, "A", this afternoon and saw that flowers are beginning to adorn Dorothy's garden. I took some pictures and there may be another greeting card or two in the bunch.

Dreams
I had some very interesting dreams last night.

In one, I got to play some blues guitar for my Dad. He was my dad, only he looked like Ernie Kovacs. There was a great cast of characters and it took place on a dusty hillside. I played a red Gibson, double cutaway, solid body guitar, like I had for awhile in 1966, when I played in Houston.

In another dream, I was walking from banquet room to banquet room, to find the party for the disabled people, that someone had told me about. Finally, after twisting and turning through the back passageways, I came to a poorly lit room where there was a party with cake and ice cream. I looked past the people, to the other side of the room and saw Chrissy looking to catch my attention. I could see the light of love in her eyes. She had her wheelchair, and we made our way out of the building, where we came to a canal, or flooded street. (New Orleans?).

As she would often do, when she was alive, she drove her wheelchair right into the water to get to the other side. It was deeper than we thought, but she plowed on until the only thing above water was her head, moving along through the dark water, as her wheelchair kept on going. It was fun to see.

I wonder if there will be more to the story tonight?

Tonight's Relatively Appropriate Song;
Because

Sweet Dreams

The Large and The Small

March Ahead

Moon and Venus

The Moon and Venus as seen from my balcony. 2/27/09

It was splendid to see. The crescent Moon also showed the rest of itself, lit by light reflecting from Earth. My thanks to Toms Astronomy Blog or I would have forgotton to go out on my balcony and look.

Speaking of the balcony, the tree trimmers came, and gave the trees, a GI haircut.

Just A Trim, Please

It's a year of cutbacks.

What A View

The trimmed tree sure opens up the sky.

I was trying to describe my new setup with the Macbook and HDTV monitor, and thought; "Maybe a couple of pictures will help".


Editing A Movie

Phil the editor after tooth extraction. 2/28/09

Nice workspace.

Note that this angle is instrumental to give the scale.

Editing with iMovie '09

The mic is for voice-overs.

Muddy River

The rains wash, nutrient rich, soil into the river.

I went out to the store for food last night, while the moon and Venus were so wonderfully prominent in the western sky.

At the register, I was talking about the Moon and Venus display to the nice lady who was checking me out, when a woman came up and said;"What?, Did You say, Venus?, My name is Venus, and we have been driving I-5, for hours, using the moon and that star as our guiding light."

I said; "That is Venus."

The check out lady said, to the woman traveler; "You see, you were your own guiding light."

Today's Relatively Appropriate Song;
The Nano Song
-Nanomonster1

The Nanotation Web Site

Balance

After Extraction Thoughts

Honey vs sugar vs HFCS

Making Honey

Making Sugar

Making HFCS

Honey is all natural.

Sugar is just the boiled juice of plants, but is missing some key ingredients for healthy eating.

Table sugar lacks minerals and vitamins (hence it's been often called empty calories), they draw upon the body's nutrients to be metabolized into the system. When these nutrients are all used up, metabolizing of undesirable cholesterol and fatty acid is impeded, contributing to higher cholesterol and promoting obesity due to higher fatty acid on the organs and tissues.

Both sweeteners contain glucose and fructose. However, for sugar, in the process of manufacturing, the organic acids, protein, nitrogen elements, enzymes and vitamins in the sugar cane are destroyed, whereas honey, a natural sweetener, subjects only to minimal heating. Also, honey has certain beneficial antioxidant and antimicrobial properties which are not present in table sugar.

Sugar, however, is nowhere near as detrimental to our health as HFCS. (High fructose corn sweetener).

From Wikipedia;
The process by which HFCS is produced was first developed by Richard Off. Marshalle and Earl P. Kooi in 1927.^[4] The industrial production process was refined by Dr. Y. Takasaki at Agency of Industrial Science and Technology of Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan in 1965–1970. HFCS was rapidly introduced to many processed foods and soft drinks in the U.S. from about 1975 to 1985

Archer Daniels Midland ,manufacturers of HFCS, began in the late 1970s to finance a lobbying effort to strictly limit the amount of foreign sugar that could be imported into the United States. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan, signed into law draconian sugar quotas that remain in effect to this day. (The free-market champion must have felt sheepish signing this blatantly interventionist act.) The domestic price of sugar immediately spiked, and food manufacturers -- including, crucially, soft-drink bottlers -- quickly began substituting HFCS for sugar.

HFCS is cheaper than sugar.

That's why manufacturers began putting it seemingly in everything -- and U.S. sweetener consumption boomed along with obesity and diabetes rates.

Whoa, that's enough! I can see where this is going. I have enough information to form a relatively educated opinion;

Honey is made by bees.

Sugar is made by boiling beets, or cane.

HFCS is made by a corrupt corporation.

That clears it up for me.

Bed Bugs?

Stuffed Bed Bug

Once again, bed bugs made the news. I read a good informative article in Scientific American where I found out they aren't just in beds.
The article points out;
"They are found in all kinds of furniture, electric appliances, clock radios, computers, printers, behind pictures, books and, of course, bookcases. They are found in cracks and crevices in the wall and within walls as well as in electric outlets, wiring, pipes, plastic and metal conduits."

READ ARTICLE
They explained a couple ways to find out if you have them in your abode.
Very interesting.

I wrote back in the comments section;
Happy Phil at 04:24 PM on 02/27/09

This might explain the tiny bites I sometimes get after
sitting in that nice easy chair someone gave me.
I will look into it. First I get some coriander,
smell it, bang on the chair, and if it smells the same,
bedbugs? Great.

$2,500 Car

The Nano goes 60 mph and gets 50 mpg

From the TATA car company, (The same ones that sell the car that runs on air.), is this new Nano. 8.5 feet long, 5 feet high, this $2,500 car will seat 5 passengers.

Like the TATA air car, it is not available in the U.S., but maybe the new administration will let us catch up to the rest of the world in saving fuel and money.

Speaking of nano stuff;

Nano Tube Radio

Click on the Image above for the link to watch and listen to Nano Tube Radio, or click the link below to just listen.
The first part of the song is noisy while they tune to the radio station.
Layla (entire song)
I am always happy to find another use for Fullerenes. This radio is one I didn't know about. Amazing.
"Courtesy Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley."

Today's Relatively Appropriate Song;
Bach's Partitia in E
Vanessa Mae

Comforting Thoughts

It's A Smaller Blog

After All

Here are a few things I found while meandering on the web today;

Glacier Gloves

Review

If you are like me, and some of you are, your hands get cold easily. For most people, this is not a big deal, but for some people, the cold is just the first stage in a series of levels of pain that is best avoided. According to the review, these gloves will keep your hands warm, dry, and flexible under the most severe of conditions. You can find out more at Glacier Gloves

On line Doctor?

Wellsphere worked well for me

Wellsphere is one of the 5 medical sites I found in a review today. It worked well. The main page was open and uncluttered. (Must have been designed by someone like me.) I tried the search feature with the word, "hernia". It gave me a good choice of information links that led me to 2 video's.

The first video was an inside look at laproscopic surgical repair. (I wouldn't reccommended this for those who might be nervous or apprehensive about up-coming hernia repair surgery.) As far as I know, I am scheduled for Monday.

The second was a lengthy discussion, with pictures and arrows, that was very informative.

The written articles and information at the Wellsphere site were helpful, too.

If you have medical questions, you may want to try one, or more, of these;

5 Medical Sites

The Future Of Manufacturing
Nano Tubes

This model of a rotating Carbon nanotube shows its 3D structure.

I am still promoting the conversion of Co2 into Oxygen and Fullerenes.

Popular Science has published articles about the possible uses of fullerenes in armor. I hadn't heard of that one before.

The Hubble Telescope

Actual picture of Hubble Space Telescope in space.

Debris from last weeks satellite collision could keep the repair team from fixing the Hubble. Apparently the combination of bits and pieces from this Russian collision, and the leftover debris from the satellite the Chinese blew up with a guided missile, makes getting to the Hubble a dangerous endeavor for the shuttle. If the Hubble is not repaired and maintained, it will cease to function in about 2 years.

Hope For
Tropical Rainforest Recovery

Clear cuts like this can recover in 20 years or so.

From Discovery News-Deforestation is generally considered to be bad news, especially in the tropics. But there may be some hope: In many places, trees are growing back, according to new research, and some of the new forests are nearly as diverse as the old ones were.

Counting Stars

Image of M82 from Galaxy Zoo 2

Want to be part of the world of cosmology? You can. Visit https://www.galaxyzoo.org/. You sign up, and are given pictures to examine and classify. Your data is then combined with others observations to help catagorize the millions of new galaxy's and space phenomena that are being discovered.

Or, you can go there and look at the cool slide show like I did.

Here in Redding

Yesterday by the Sacramento river. 2/17/09

I was at the park by the river, under a gazebo, watching the rain fall and the river flow. What a great place to live. I am so thankful that I get to spend this time of my life here.

Todays Relatively Appropriate Song;
Ballad Of Bernie Madoff
-Flinch Studio

Laughter Is The Best