cevans
Posts by this author
November 8, 2006
The Explorer's Club is an American Institution founded in New York City in 1904 by the survivors of Frederick Cook's 1894 arctic expedition. Although its members are infamously eccentric (L. Ron Hubbard, for example, who carried the Club flag with him on several yachting expeditions) they have…
October 30, 2006
This just in from the NASA news wire: 11,000 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius, a massive galactic snake is slithering across the Universe. Of course, it isn't a real lizard (the appellation is just some weird NASA Halloween humor) but the core of a sooty cloud larger…
October 19, 2006
A few months ago, in homage to the last puffs of summertime breeze to caress the Pacific Northwest, I visited the largest computer in the world. Not exactly beach blanket bingo, and I probably could have found a more youthful way to celebrate the dog days of summer, but this monument to…
October 17, 2006
When our futures become the past, what will they prove to have been like?
As mind-bending as this question is, it lies at the heart of every successful science fiction story. Good writers in this underappreciated genre can be so forward-thinking that instead of asking, "What will the future be…
September 26, 2006
Or, In which two primary concepts of modernity are introduced, batted around, and compared, without much of a resolution to speak of.
In the year 2000, Stephen Hawking wrote that the "next century will be the century of complexity." Of course, he wasn't referring to political quagmires or…
September 17, 2006
These days, few things are as commonplace in the landscape of scientific research than the perpetual yowl of opposition. Despite the fact that huge announcements in the sciences often aren't, off the bat, that thrilling ("two galaxies a million light years away collided and we aren't sure where…
September 7, 2006
Of all the storied elements of our great folkloric misunderstanding of Chaos Theory, the Butterfly Effect has undoubtedly suffered most from popular conception. It was born innocuous, a slight allegory to explain how changes in a mathematical situation's beginning coordinates have an unprecedented…
August 20, 2006
A lot of people, sweetly, have been asking for the Universe(TM) perspective on this "new planets" issue. I've written about itonce before, of course, around the time that the latest new planet discovery really brought the question out into the astronomical limelight. This is, however, a long-…
August 19, 2006
For effect, I'm just going to say something here, something that your outer skeptic -- nay, even your inner skeptic -- might immediately buck against. Don't worry; I'm not going to start talking about the healing power of Lemurian Seed Crystals. I will only present you with this deceptively simple…
August 4, 2006
The Internet has long been a playground for deluded sociopaths. This is why the wise among us roundly deny Myspace.com friend requests from strangers, why paranoid parents install content filters on their children's computers, and why I just trashed an email with the subject heading "Will you be…
July 27, 2006
"It is to be remembered that despite the fact that you are accustomed to thinking only in dots and lines and a little bit in areas does not defeat the fact that we live in omnidirectional space-time and that a four dimensional universe provides ample freedom for any contingencies."
-- Buckminster…
July 22, 2006
This is upsetting.
NASA has deleted from its mission statement the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."
This edit was made in conjunction with the Bush administration's new Vision for Space Exploration, whose primary objective is to shift NASA's emphasis (and public attention) away…
July 21, 2006
Every day, under our noses, obsolete scientific ideas run rampant. I'm not talking about the maddening sabotage of science constantly perpetuated by ideological conservatives -- that, although a daily frustration, is not unnoticed. This is a transgression that we all unknowingly commit.
Although…
July 12, 2006
The second in a two-part distillation of a cover story about NASA, politics, and the new power generation that I just finished for the LA Alternative. To get up to speed, see the previous entry.
The CEV -- Ares, or whatever -- is not the first attempt NASA has made to replace its Shuttle fleet…
July 10, 2006
The following is the first in a two-part distillation of a cover story about NASA, politics, and the new power generation that I just finished for the LA Alternative.
From this surreal atmosphere, as close to the belt of the equator as we can get in this country, we send people into outer space.…
July 3, 2006
The history of information -- which is to say, the history of everything -- is littered with codes. Some are cryptic, designed to be understood by only a few, while others are made to be cracked. Numbers, for example, are symbols which translate the abstraction of mathematical information into a…
June 19, 2006
The NASA logo dates from 1959 and is commonly referred to as the "meatball" logo. The sphere represents a planet, the stars represent space, the red chevron is a wing representing "aeronautics," which was the latest design craze at the time of the logo's invention. The orbiting spacecraft going…
June 15, 2006
There are, as far as the layman is concerned, two kinds of scientific truth. At one end of the spectrum -- the gamma ray end, if we use the electromagnetic spectrum as a model -- there are the kinds of concepts we associate with science's grand design, the truths which permeate the dark depths of…
June 2, 2006
Though this may not come as a surprise to many, I have a confession to make:
I am not an accredited scientist.
In fact, I only just graduated from college. And although the pomp and circumstance has barely dissipated and I'm still getting checks in the mail, I'm already thinking of what the…
May 15, 2006
Growing up, I watched a lot of television. Not the good stuff, mind you: rather, I would gambol home from elementary school to watch hours of Designing Women re-runs and then laugh uproariously at Step By Step while enacting my early OCD tendencies in elaborate Lucky Charms marshmellow seperation…
May 9, 2006
Re: Video programs Inbox
UNARIUS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE to me
Dear Claire:
We would be most happy to meet with you at the Unarius Center
when you have the opportunity to make the trip from Los Angeles.
We are open from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM Monday through Saturday.
As you may have discovered on our web…
April 26, 2006
This is going to get deep.
I heard recently on BBC World Service that the Malaysian space program, itself a weird offshot of a 900 million dollar defense deal Malaysia recently struck with the Russians, is beginning to take shape. The 854 applicants to the program have been narrowed down to four,…
April 21, 2006
The Natural History Museum of LA County has its share of gems. A whole room of them, in fact. Hundreds of rubies, topaz, opals, obscure formations of marvelous multi-colored rocks and minerals -- even asteroids -- a veritable pageant of dramatically lit geological psychedelia. There are gems on…
April 7, 2006
In the lucid 1960's, the futurist Stewart Brand began a public campaign for NASA to release a satellite image of the whole Earth taken from space, an image which was at the time only rumored to exist. Brand, forever the "big-picture" thinker, noted that "this little blue, white, green and brown…
March 21, 2006
If you can't infer from the heady smell of musk and cheap cologne emanating from your computer screen, let me inform you officially and scientifically that this is the Universe Sex Issue. Although, as a serious science forum, Universe tends to avoid this terrifically subjective topic, I was asked…
March 19, 2006
Despite the completely irrational nature of the rainstorms that have been sporadically whipping Los Angeles, we on Earth are lucky, weather-wise. We don't have to deal with rains of sulphuric acid droplets, nor infinite giant hurricanes like those which make up Jupiter's red spot or the dark spot…
March 7, 2006
So you think the scientific world is one of cold, hard, facts and impassive objectivity, incapable of bringing tenderness and twee sentimentalism forth into the world? You think that NASA, that behemoth of a governmental organization, spends all its time censoring evolutionary scientists and…
February 26, 2006
If we take at least as hypothetical truth my previous assumption that the Internet bears uncanny parallels to the Universe, it is in interesting to begin a discourse on the translation of both the conceptual and physical properties of the Universe onto its microcosm -- the man-made web of chaos and…
February 25, 2006
I've always considered myself to be computer-savvy. After all, my Dad works for a major semiconductor manufacturer, I hung out deeply with MS-DOS when I was six, taught myself HTML in high school, and -- I promise you -- I have been on Myspace.com for much longer than you have. I've always scoffed…