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Category Archives: Science
Desert warfare training in live ghost towns, seen from the sky
I’ve been fascinated for years by what comes and goes at the Fort Irwin National Training Center— —in the Mojave Desert, amidst the dark and colorful Calico Mountains of California, situated in the forbidding nowhere that stretches between Barstow and … Continue reading
Posted in Aviation, Geography, Geology, history, Military, Science, Strange stuff, Travel, war
4 Comments
Everything we know is provisional
Dogs flew spaceships.The Aztecs invented the vacation. Men and women are the same sex. Our forefathers took drugs. Your brain is not the boss. Yes, that’s right: everything you know is wrong. — Firesign Theatre In The Half-Life of Facts: … Continue reading
Dig the Aurora
Here’s what the current geomagnetic storm looks like right now, data-wise: The visuals are in the sky, in the form of brilliant auroras, visible all over Canada and as far south as Michigan. The near-full moon doesn’t help, but the … Continue reading
Fun with distance
I’m listening to WGBH on 93.7 from Boston on my kitchen radio, on the low floor of an apartment building in Manhattan, thanks to an atmospheric condition called tropospheric bending, or “tropo” for short. Here’s my section of the current … Continue reading
Posted in Broadcasting, infrastructure, Internet, Science, Technology
2 Comments
Weather vs. Flying
Here in the temperate zones, summer is beaches and picnics and biking and dinner on the deck outside. It is also thunderstorms and airport delays. Right now a line of thunderheads is sliding northeastward across New Jersey. Here is how … Continue reading
Posted in Aviation, Geography, infrastructure, Research, Science, Technology, Travel, weather
Tagged new york
2 Comments
It’s Indie Time
Aral Balkan is doing a bang-up job getting Indie rolling as an adjectival meme. He’s doing it with his Indie Phone, Indie Tech Manifesto and a talk titled Free is a Lie. To put the Indie movement in context, it helps to realize that it’s … Continue reading
Posted in Business, Cluetrain, Future, history, Ideas, infrastructure, Internet, problems, Science, Technology, VRM
5 Comments
Into the dark
The power is out and won’t be back for awhile. That’s what the guys in the hard hats tell me, down where they’re working, at the intersection where our dead-end street is born. Many trucks are gathered there, with bright … Continue reading
Revisiting the last great comet
With Comet Ison on the horizon (but out of sight until it finishes looping around the Sun), I thought it might be fun to re-run what I wrote here in 1997 (in my blog-before-there-were-blogs), about the last great comet to grace Earth’s … Continue reading
West Fork Fire
On my way back to New York from Sydney on Wednesday, while flying east over the San Juan National Forest and the Rio Grande National Forest in southern Colorado, I shot what at first I though was a controlled burn, … Continue reading