brainwagon

I woke up around 8:30 Pacific Time today, and flipped on the television to watch my usual lineup of Looney Tunes cartoons to start my Saturday, but flipped through a news report that began with the words “unable to survive an accident at that altitude” while displaying a picture of the Space Shuttle. I had […]

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the the opening of King Tutankhamen’s tomb by Carter and Canarvan in the Valley of the Kings. I’ve been interested in Egyptology as an amateur for quite some time. Egyptian culture thrived for millenia before the Roman period, and produced a rich variety of art, literature and architecture. Recently […]

A long lost booster section from Apollo 12 has apparently reentered Earth orbit, for the time being at least. NASA’s Near Earth Object Program has found that a mysterious object labelled J002E3 was likely recaptured into Earth orbit in April of this year, and originally left Earth orbit in March of 1971. Their conclusions: The […]

I subscribe to Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter, because I have mostly passing interest in things having to do with cryptography. Today’s included a rather startling revelation: AES may have been broken. Bruce’s description of the work is intriguing, but it is far from clear whether this break is of more than strictly theoretical interest. Bruce […]

I read talk.origins quite a bit. It is mostly a grand waste of time, but I like to read about the topic of evolution and its anti-thesis, creationism. Every once in a while you find a discussion or link that is truly interesting. Today a nice link to www.actionbioscience.org was posted. It is a very […]

RSA encryption relies on being able to find large primes. For quite some time, the Miller-Rabin test has been known to be able to determine whether a given number is prime with as great a likelihood as you wish (say, with likelihood of error much lower than the chances that your computer made a mistake). […]

If you are looking for mostly irrational things to worry about, you could always worry about asteroid impacts. CNN is running a story about a potential impact of a 2km chunk of rock on Jan 1, 2019.

An interesting portion of the radio spectrum lies below the normal AM broadcast band. Amateurs are allowed to operate weak transmitters in the region of 160-190khz. Such amateurs call themselves lowfers, and experimenters are doing interesting work in propagation, antenna design, modulation and demodulation techniques, and signal detection. The Long Wave Club of America is […]

Just like the Energizer Bunny, many of our early space probes seem to be ticking along way past their original lifetime estimates. According to an article in Scientific American, the Deep Space Network recently reaquired the Pioneer 10 spacecraft which had not been contacted in nearly eight months. Not bad for a spacecraft that was […]

One of the most important and interesting question that science can ask is whether or not life exists elsewhere in the universe. The recent book Rare Earth by Brownlee and Ward hypothesizes that multicellular life is quite rare in the universe, so rare in fact that it is likely that we are the only intelligent […]