Here’s an excellent space exploration mission: Orbit Mars, and return two humans safely in under 2 years. It can be done. Us humans could have several missions launching in 2018, but we just have to decide to do it. Besides the Mars One mission, this is how we expand pride in human growth. Let’s do it!
Tag Archives: life
Cats On The Net
This one goes back a few years now…
April 6, 2006 Thursday
Final Edition
SASKATCHEWAN: Mayor’s approval rating with felines is suspect
BYLINE: The Star PhoenixResidents of a village in southern Saskatchewan may want to be on the lookout for a cat that’s got a definite taste for politics.
The mayor of Wood Mountain says he spent three days in hospital last week receiving antibiotic treatment for an infection after the feline bit him.
Michael Klein says he was chomped while at the home of a business acquaintance. He perhaps should have seen it coming.
The same cat bit him a year earlier on the hand, forcing him to get antibiotics and a tetanus shot.
Klein says he is now fine, but the status of the cat is not so assured. It has disappeared.
Thinking Out Loud, But Not Online
Life doesn’t get any easier when problems are compounded by big mistakes. I’m taking a few days away from usual blogging and social media to think, so don’t think I’ve gone anywhere. I’ll probably pop in sooner than later.
Peter Kent Didn’t Age Well
Kent looks the same… but his mind has left him.
Amazing CBC coverage of climate change from the early 1980s. Bob McDonald, Peter Kent, and others make appearances:
Attention Washington: Peter Kent explains Climate Change (the briefing you won’t see).
“The natural preoccupation with the weather tomorrow, the next day, or even Thursday, has distracted public attention from the longer term implications of the Greenhouse Effect.” – Peter Kent, 1984 on CBC
“The Greenhouse Effect must be considered as the world’s most serious environmental concern.” Now he’s the nation’s Environment Minister, and he acts like a POS. What he says does not match his, or his government’s actions. “December 2011 [Kent] announced Canada will withdraw from the Kyoto accord. Canada is committed to getting a new agreement, he says, but it won’t be easy.”
Some of the best/worst parts of the video included “adaptationalists” thinking increased temperatures and acidified oceans can just be adapted to (as mass plant and animal extinctions go on around us while we supposedly soldier on). Mass delusion allows humanity to carry on as it does to its certain demise. I think I know how things will go if an asteroid is observed & predicted to hit Earth within a decade… nothing, until the crash. Humans are pathetically bad at taking immediate action to prevent long term ‘fuzzy’ catastrophes.
This video shows how the Canadian Environment Minister has known for THREE DECADES of a coming calamity to his country (and the world), and now he’s in a position of power to act, and does nothing. Worse than nothing, since pollution is still increasing. His duplicitous actions (or incompetence) make me sick, and they are sealing humanity’s fate.
Doing What’s Right Doesn’t Always Look Cool
“Finish your food; there are children starving in… Regina.”
When I first started recovering items from dumpsters, I was of course keenly aware of the social stigma implications. I consoled myself against the probable eventual ridicule by having a personal code, of things I would not salvage. I certainly wouldn’t salvage food, ick. In Regina’s dumpsters, not far from my home, I learned people were discarding money, and cans of food (not opened, not damaged or expired). I couldn’t bear not to save this food and use it, for the simple fact that it was an unexplained waste. I later learned that people around North America in particular see this sort of waste first hand when they go dumpster diving. Some people (not me) use it as their primary source of food, and eat very well.
Canadians waste over $26,000,000,000 worth of food a year. Who is being disgusting?
Not the Freegans.
People shouldn’t get arrested for stopping waste.
- My name is John, and I am a part-time Freegan.
Transportation: Where to go, and how to get there in #YQR
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Most of my speech as heard in the video above, and posted to my Regina politics blog:
I’m very pleased to have been asked to speak at Campion College about transportation issues. I got my Computer Science – co-op degree from here a decade ago, and I never imagined at the time that I’d wind up the President of a different sort of “co-op”, the Regina Car Share Co-operative. At the time, I had no idea that “car sharing” was even a thing. I’d heard of car pooling of course, but they are different. It wasn’t until I returned to work at the UofR, that I got an email about a group of people holding a pot luck supper in Regina to discuss forming a “car share”, and I thought that sounded like maybe a good way to use a car without the unpleasantries of maintaining one. A few years later, I was chosen to help guide a remarkable group of volunteers who make organized car sharing possible in our city, as it is in almost every other major Canadian and American city today.
Why am I interested in transportation? Well, I’m interested in nearly everything, but where curiosity meets reality is on the streets. Nearly everyone in the world has a daily need to move about the farm, town, or city they live at, and so modes of transportation are essential to how and where we live. If transportation isn’t timely or fun, people don’t enjoy where they live as much as they should. I don’t think car repair is fun, and feel dealing with SGI is about the worst thing that could administratively happen to someone (short of being charged with a crime). So I’ve set out to make transportation both timely and fun for myself, and it just so happens that I need to make it that way for the people around me too, in order to be successful.
Another big reason I’m interested in transportation improvement, is that it’s a major contributor to air pollution and climate change. These are not small, or easy problems to solve, but our little daily actions collectively point our society in either the right or wrong direction. Right now, Regina is unquestionably pointed in the wrong direction, and among our collective actions pointing us there is how we get around every day. Since public talks are always more fun with interaction (I think so anyway, because otherwise I tend to get sleepy especially if the speaker has a mono-tone voice like mine,): How many people got to University today by themselves in a motor vehicle? How many car pooled? How many took the bus? How many biked or walked?
Continue reading
More of Lafleche Main St. Destroyed
The last of the old Lafleche Red & White grocery store, and the former butcher shop that adjoined it to the north, has burned down. Most recently it was M.O.M a coffee shop and store. The main part of the Red & White had been torn down years ago. It was one of the many local grocery stores which my family used during the 80s and early 90s. I remember the three aisle store well, and its toy section at the back corner where I’d ogle the Transformers for sale, but out of my spending power. Instead, I blew my money on candy and 35¢ baseball and hockey cards.
ADDED: Some CTV video.
Russian Chelyabinsk Meteorite Injures People – UPDATED
Shocking, exciting news from Russia early this morning as coincidentally [because they were on different orbits reports CBC Radio] on the same day a major 50m asteroid (2012 DA14) is set to fly by Earth, a meteorite has struck Russia. Reports are that there are injuries, which have been very rare for meteorite impacts until now.
The camera person nearly lost their poop. Sonic boom of doom, anyone?
[UPDATE: dead link youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c-0iwBEswE&w=560&h=315%5D
One of my dreams in life is to shoot a video at least this awesome, of a fireball.
UPDATES: So many incredible videos!
Here’s a dash cam from this site.
A lot of unlikely, and wrong details in this RT early report.
There is confirmation from scientists that the report of the Russians “shooting” this down are erroneous boasting.
@colbycosh absolute nonsense that they shot it down. Moving 8km/s according to @BadAstronomer regardless, very cool—
Ryan Hastman (@RyanHastman) February 15, 2013
ADDED:
NBC has some more video, and the following video that streamed for me was about 2012 DA14 which flies by later today and has no chance of an impact with our surface or atmosphere. We’ll be talking about the Chelyabinsk meteorite for a long time after today.
Watch this one to the end, it has more sonic booming. It gives a sense of how far that sound wave had to travel to hit at the camera.
MUCH MORE:
Meteorite shook Chelyabinsk this morning. Shook my whole building and woke me up! #челябинск youtube.com/watch?v=4ZxXYs…—
Michael Garnett (@MichaelGarnett) February 15, 2013
RT has photos of smashed windows, and a hole in a brick building.
ADDED: Globe and Pail has details of how many injured, it’s over 500.
“Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said the meteorite was travelling at a speed of 30 kilometres per second and that such events were hard to predict. The Interior Ministry said the meteorite explosion had cased a sonic boom.
Russia’s Emergencies Ministry said 514 people had sought medical help, mainly for light injuries caused by flying glass, and that 112 of those were kept in hospital. Search groups were set up to look for the remains of the meteorite.”
FRIDAY Morning CST: Fragments may have fallen into a frozen lake. Fragments of a meteorite were found on a Saskatchewan pond’s icy surface several years ago after video helped lead searchers to the area.
UPDATE: At 10AM CST, the Russians are reporting 985 injuries took place. I feel bad about all of the people who rushed to windows to see the flash of light, and wound up with a face full of exploding glass as the shockwave hit. It would be me too, if I’d been there, and hadn’t had a quick way out onto a balcony. Duck and Cover isn’t drilled into me.
ADDED: Compilation video including some with windows breaking off screen.
ADDED: This is one of the more amazing ones I’ve found:
V-Day Bellydance Flash Mob
Here’s an interview to explain what this flash mobbing was all about.
More women joined the mob after my video recording stopped…
There’s an encore at a mall tonight at 7:30; watch the videos for details.
Medical Tricorder
I got to use a device at lunch-hour today that had aspects of a medical tricorder, the near magical medical scanning devices used first by the fictional Dr. McCoy on the Starship Enterprise. This modern, non-invasive scanner can look at skin and detect signs of diabetes, giving the user an indication if they do or do not need further screening soon.
I got a negative score of less than 50. Woo Hoo!
This continues my longstanding tradition of sharing my non-embarrassing medical test results on the Internet, so I don’t feel so bad when eventually Sask Health or a doctor loses/destroys them ;-)
Check out Aspen Medical Centre on Twitter. They have a new website too.
“www.leaderpost.com/health/story.html?id=7378570
Oct 12, 2012 – Aspen Medical Canada recently purchased the Allied Health Centre at the University of Regina.”
