Author: cosmo

Woo hoo! Time to read George’s new budget!

Today is a real milestone for my web hosting company. My main web server has officially been running non-stop for an entire year.

That’s 365 days of “uptime”, meaning it’s not been rebooted and has been chugging away for 24 hours a day every day of the year. Amazing.

Last October I wrote about the discovery of two new moons around Pluto. The outer solar system continues to become more interesting, as a group of German astrophysicists report evidence that the “planet” Xena (technically named 2003UB313) is 30% larger than Pluto.

A few weeks ago Laralee and I taught our second-grade science class, and our topic was the solar system. The kids were fascinated to learn that there aren’t just nine planets– that in fact there may be quite a few more. They learned the names of three: Quaoar, Xena, and Sedna. Xena is way out there, taking 560 years to orbit the sun once; Sedna’s highly elliptical orbit is on the order of 10,000 years around.

There’s continuing debate in the astronomic community about whether these new objects can even be called “planets”, and the evidence that Xena is larger than Pluto– and we call Pluto a planet– makes the discussion all the more interesting.

I love this stuff. Indeed, we live in heady times.

Last night, President Bush delivered his State of the Union address. I didn’t watch it on television, so I thought I’d take a peek and read it online after it was over. A quick search on Google for “State of the Union” turned up the speech, and I settled in to read it. I was about halfway through it, chuckling to myself about things like his push to end dependence on foreign oil, increase scientific research programs, and fight the war on terror. At that point I ran across a long discussion of Saddam Hussein, which wasn’t too surprising either– until I noticed that he was talking about how Saddam was defying the United Nations and building weapons of mass destruction and so on… and I felt like I was in some kind of time warp.

Scrolling up the web page, I saw the date: it was three years ago! That’s right– I was reading Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. I’m not sure why that came up first in the search results, but oh well.

So tonight I found the correct 2006 address, and read it. It’s funny (or perhaps sad) that you could easily interchange the two speeches (minus the Saddam material) and never know the difference. All of his major talking points in 2003 were repeated ad nauseum in 2006. Fully a third of his speech this year centered on the war on terror and how swell it’s all going. I didn’t waste more time reading 2002, 2004, or 2005… but I suspect the similarities remain.

In other words, we hear the same tired diatribe from our president, but no real action is ever really taken. We’re still dependent on foreign oil– perhaps more than ever; we learn about continued oppression of scientific research; we’re still no closer to “winning” the war on terror. What’s changed in three years? Apparently nothing, including the creativity of the presidential speechwriters.

For grins, I counted the number of times Bush used certain words in his speech this year:

• terror/terrorist : 20
• free/freedom : 19
• al Qaeda : 6
• mass destruction/mass murder : 3
• September 11 : 2
• oil : 3
• “nu-cu-lur” : 3

I, for one, am shocked that he only used “terror” or “terrorist” a mere twenty times in his fifty-minute speech. And surely he could have thrown in a few more “September 11” references. He’s getting rusty.

This year, Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address fall in the same week. As Air America Radio pointed out:

Jonathon Sharkey is running for the governor of Minnesota.

Most people (even those living in the great state of Minnesota) may not have heard of Mr. Sharkey– possibly because his political party is called the Vampyres, Witches, and Pagans Party. Go independents!

Sharkey’s platform includes the following:

• emphasis on education
• tax breaks for farmers
• benefits for veterans
• impaling criminals on the front yard of the State Capitol

Those first three are fairly plain-jane political promises we hear from many candidates, and cause a fairly “ho-hum” response from potential voters. But that last one– which is completely true– certainly warrants a raised eyebrow. Apparently he thinks terrorists and other violent criminals should be impaled. Nice.

Sadly, we may never see if the proud citizens of Minnesota will be able to elect a governor even stranger than Jesse Ventura, because Mr. Sharkey was arrested on felony counts from his days in Indiana.

Oh, and lest we neglect the legacy of Governor Ventura, it should be noted that Mr. Sharkey was a professional wrestler using the name Rocky Flash.

“I had an epiphany a few years ago where I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends.”

— Moby

Truly, genetics is a mysterious thing. How can someone as goofy-looking as me have a daughter who’s so completely photogenic?

It’s amazing, sometimes, to consider the power of music. I listen to it almost every day as I work, and it strongly affects my mood… one day I might have a bunch of hip-hop dance music, the next I’m jamming to some heavy-beat trance music, and then I switch to soothing new age stuff. Soundtracks are a favorite of mine because– like trance– they don’t have words to distract me while I’m programming or writing an e-mail or proposal or whatever. Great background.

And there are certain songs, generally few and far between, that literally give me goosebumps when I listen to them. They either evoke a strong memory from the past, or they convey some sense of grandeur. I just bought the soundtrack for “The Island” (great movie!) and the final track, My Name Is Lincoln, which plays right at the very end of the movie before the credits, does this. It’s fabulous composition, and the scene in the movie is truly great. Before I bought the album I read reviews on Amazon, and everyone seems to agree that it’s a very moving piece of music.

It’s good for the soul.

“America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.”

— Evan Esar