A more interesting and fruitful than usual bunch of books cheap in Kindle format: Continue reading Sex at dawn, Smart birds, Lincoln: Excellent cheap book deals →

The Kepler Space Ship, is this, via NASA:

The centuries-old quest for other worlds like our Earth has been rejuvenated by the intense excitement and popular interest surrounding the discovery of hundreds of planets orbiting other stars. There is now clear evidence for substantial numbers of three types of exoplanets; gas giants, hot-super-Earths in short period orbits, and ice giants. The challenge now is to find terrestrial planets (i.e., those one half to twice the size of the Earth), especially those in the habitable zone of their stars where liquid water might exist on the surface of the planet.

The Kepler Mission, NASA Discovery mission #10, is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets.

I heard something rather mind blowing about the hunt for planets elsewhere, and I’ve not followed up on it. Apparently, every single one of the one thousand or so plantery systems that have been found follow a similar pattern, except for our. The large planets (like Jupiter) are close to the sun, the smaller Earth-like planets are farther out, beyond the Goldilocks Zone. In other words, rather than the plethora of planetary systems signaling a high probability of life elsewhere, it may in fact turn out that the Earth-like scenario is very rare.

The Drake Equation now looks like this, if true: Continue reading Kepler Space Ship Death Imminent →

I like to think of myself as part South Minneapolitan. This is because I lived there for several years and adopted it as my community. A large part of me would prefer to live there than any other part of the Twin Cities.

So, I write this post with sadness as well as anger, because the fundamental core of society and politics in South Minneapolis — intelligent politics of inclusion and caring — have been sullied by stupid, selfish, and craven politics.

This is a complicated mess, and it will require some background for those not in the know about our local esoteric political system. If you already know everything about SD62 and recent events there, skip right to the big block of quote down below, and ignore my preface. Continue reading Something is Rotten in South Minneapolis →

The best batteries are lithium ion batteries. In these batteries, lithium ions are collected in one part of the battery, where they are held in place at the anode end by metal atoms, in the charged state. Pulling electricity out of the battery involves the lithium ions migrating away from the anode toward the cathode via a liquid medium. Continue reading Important advances on the battery front →

The premise is that you want to use cheap hot cocoa mix but you want it to be good. Chemistry can help you. Continue reading How to make hot cocoa. Using science. →