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We do seem to like lists – “the best places to live,” the “front runners” in the presidential campaign, our bucket list as so on. Even “geekiness” is fodder for list makers. According to Forbes Magazine – Lowell, Massachusetts is #6 on the list of the 20 “geekiest” cities in…
Read More »On my last post, there were a number of comments, but I wanted to highlight one thing Cliff wrote. I thought that this part of a comment he left was worth a full response. Quoted directly: “We can pound Gov Perry for pandering to those of his supporters who don’t…
Read More »Read the latest from NASA on today’s planned launch of the Juno spacecraft for its journey to Jupiter five years from now. “Juno will help us understand how the solar system formed, and how all the planets formed, from the solar nebula some 4.5bn years ago,” said Jack Connerney, deputy…
Read More »This is an extraordinary announcement from Forbes Magazine. San Jose Calif, Boulder Colo., Framingham Mass., Huntsville Ala., and Durham N.C. are the five regions listed as more Geeky than Lowell (figures based on percentage of workers in science, technology, engineering, and math-based jobs). See the list here. Both the City Manager…
Read More »MassMoments reminds us that on this day – July 23, 1846 – Henry David Thoreau after walking from his Walden Pond cabin to do an errand – found himself in the Concord town jail for refusing to pay his back taxes. His was just an over-night stay – as someone…
Read More »On Friday July 8th, at 11:26AM NASA will launch the space shuttle Atlantis on STS-135, the final shuttle mission. It marks the end of an era that began on April 12, 1981 with the first flight of Columbia. 135 missions later, the United States’ fourth great space program, the successor…
Read More »I wrote this sketch several years ago just after the Fourth of July. The Cassini-Huygens space probe, according to Wikipedia, “entered into orbit around Saturn in July 2004,” and it is expected to transmit data about Saturn and its moons until 2017. In January 2005, the vehicle landed on the…
Read More »Who knew? There’s a sustainability trap in the cable TV box. Front page report in NYTimes today about the energy-sucking cable TV boxes and allied home entertainment gadgets that are not designed with “green” in mind at all “because nobody asked us to use less [energy],” according to one “box…
Read More »Rain List Poem . rain rainbow rainbow cactus rainbow trout rain check raincoat raindrop rainfall rain gauge Rainier III Rainier, Mount rainmaker rainmaking rainspout rainsquall rainstorm rain-wash rainwater rainwear rainy rainy day Rainy Lake, Ont. . —The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1970 edition)
Read More »“The findings are significant as we will have to change our view on how the Sun interacts with particles, fields and gases from other stars, and this has consequences that reach down to Earth,” commented Arik Posner, Nasa’s Voyager programme scientist. Bbc.com reports that NASA’s Voyager spacecrafts launched in 1977 are…
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