Archive for the ‘Sciency Stuff’ Category

We have a Extreme Heat Alert here in Toronto on the first official day of Summer.  So while your brain bakes with sun stroke and your body is dessicated by the sun while all the Global Warming Deniers tell us that the Earth has actually cooling for the last ten years (according to the Heartland Instituate).  Let me share with you the unbelievable audacity of man’s desire to know the truth, and even when early man got it right but for the wrong reasons

When I say/think “I want a new scope” the song “I want a new drug” keeps going through my head, strange.   I have been contemplating buying a new telescope for a couple years now, but always held off because of my wife, now ex-wife.  It is a long story and I have no intention on going into it here.  All that said and done, in resent weeks my taste for astronomy has been on the up tick, especially since the discovery of a new supernova in the Galaxy M95.

When I was a teenager, I fell in love with the stars and stargazing.  The first Messier object I ever observer was M42, which you can see with the naked eye and is spectacular in normal 10×50 binoculars.  I soon found binoculars very limitings and want more power, more light, more magnification.  So I approached my dad and asked him if he would buy me a telescope.  To my amazement my dad never batted an eye and said yes (I don’t think he talked to my mom about it this purchase)  So I started to shop around and after many weeks I found someone who was selling a  home made telescope for $200.00, and believe me that was a staggering amount of money when I was kid.  My first telescope was a Newtonian Reflector with a 6″ hand ground mirror and had a whopping f-stop of f/13.5 (the light tube was taller than I was).  The telescope came with a hand made mount made from cement, steel tubing and plumbing pipe and was surprisingly stable, considering I could have attached a hose and used as a sprinkler to water the garden.

So with my brand new/used/home made telescope I began to explore to the heavens, and a few neighbours windows, but we won’t talk about that here.  For years I use to freeze my ass off in winter (when we had winters) and in the summertime I use gather large crowds at Sauble Beach.  It was a hoot showing people the red spot of Jupiter and rings of Saturn.  I would literately have 20 to 40 people laying in the cool summer sands of the beach, staring up at the stars, it was like people had never seen them before.  Soon, it was known that some geeky kid was giving free astronomy shows each Saturday night on the beach.  It was great fun seeing children squeal with joy when they saw Saturn, Jupiter and moon under high power magnification.

After 15 years of use, my old telescope gave up the ghost.  The soft iron shafts and brass bushings began to wear and there was to much free play in the mount.  The main mirror started to oxidize and the silver coating was actually starting to wear out in places.

Since then I stopped stargazing because other things took over in my life, and doing astronomy is not conducive to a marriage, unless your significant other likes it or doesn’t mind not seeing during the night for hours on end.

So now here I am, single again, with time on my hands and my eyes wander towards the heavens, but I do not have a decent size scope.  Ok, I do have a Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain D90 F/11.11 with dual focus, but it’s useful limits are really restricted to Mag +12 (under excellent view conditions) and I do not have an even half-ways decent mount for it.  It would make for an excellent piggyback scope and I do have the adapter rings to attach my Nikon D80 SDLR to it.

In the end, I want a scope,… and I have been shopping around and have narrowed my choice down to Meade LX90 series with either a Schmidt-Cassegrain 8″ F/10 or 10″ F/10 or the Celestron SGT series with a either a Schmidt-Cassegrain 8″ F/10 or 9.25″ F/10.

Any fellow nerds or nerdettes out there with an opinion on these kits or with a recommendation for a different setup?

Celeston SGT Schmidt-Cassegrain

Meade LX90 Schmidt-Cassegrain

I love/loved my ASUS-Tek EeePC 1000, it is was (nearly) indestructible.  It went to Mexico with me and returned several times, surviving airport security,… it went on many a dive boat in both fresh and salt water,… I lugged it all across Ontario,…  it went hundreds of kilometres with me on my bike,… it has been dropped,… it has even accidentally flown across the room.  The one thing thing that finally did it in was the May two-four weekend rain storm.  It got soaked while it was powered on in sleep mode, the battery in,…  This it could not take.

So I operated,…  The patient could not be revived,…

I extracted,…

These are the hard drives, the smaller of the two is a fast 8 Gig SSD (actually very slow compared to today’s SSDs), the other is a slower 32 Gig SSD.  These were the only two things I needed to work,… but it became obvious to me after several different Mini PCIe interface devices that the water that caused the motherboard of my EeePC to short out also killed my two SSDs.

Luckily, and not through any purposeful planning on my own, I had backups of my files else where.  It took a few weeks to piece it altogether again.  Accounting files, most of my music (lost some), The Wingnuterer files and all my software installs (a considerable amount of financial investment there).

Anyways, I have since replaced my ASUS-Tek EeePC 1000 with a ASUS-Tek EeePC 1015PN (with tint control).  The new EeePC isn’t as robust as the old, it has a mechanical HD, but I will replace that shortly,… until then,… and forever after,… backups!!!

Oh my gawd, oh my gawd, oh my gawd,… The end of the world is ni,… or is that nigh?  It seems that there is this huge space door near the Earth, and in this space door is a space keyhole, and flying through space is this huge space key called Apophis.  Got that?  It’s simple people, door, keyhole, key,…

Now an Apophis is like this huge piece of space rock that God left flying around after he created Life, the Universe and Everything.  Ya, that’s right, God, our Creator is a bit of a slob, never cleans up after himself, using sub-standard material (seriously, Dirt Man and Rib Woman,… Seriously?)

Now where was I,… oh ya, Apophis, God, Life, the Universe and Everything and the end of the world.  Ok, so in 2029, Apophis, the Great Space Key may or may not pass through the Space Keyhole in a giant space door that is orbiting somewhere within five Earth diameters of the Earth.  If the key, goes through the keyhole in the door way, then the next time the key comes around in 2036, the key will hit Earth (somewhere is the Pacific Ocean, off the west coast of America).  Is everyone clear?  It’s simple, key, keyhole, space door and end of life on Earth as we know it.

It’s Science Bitches!!! It works

So what’s Tim Whodat’s plan for dealing with this issue? Cheap Beer? Does Stephen Harper have a plan?  Tax Cuts? Well he had better if he wants to keep his Clean Air Act targets for 2050