Wikileaks published sensitive data allegedly from Stratfor

Austin based Strategic Forecasting, more commonly known as Statfor and compared at times to a private, shadowey CIA, has had a trove of emails stolen and published on Wikileaks by the hacker coalition known as anonymous. One rumor going around about the stolen data is it was not encrypted. If that turns out to be the case, it could spell real financial trouble for an agency that depends on secrecy and security. Fox News link below, with my apologies: [Read more…]

The truth about cats and dogs

I see a little brouhaha has formed here among the godless over cats vs dogs. It’s an issue that does elicit surprisingly strong feelings among pet owners. Of course, no one can settle the question of which is better, that’s a subjective call. But we can look at why dog and cats behave so differently. We just need to start at the beginning, with a little evolution and a dash of natural history! [Read more…]

Master of my own domain

I have a friend who enjoys working in the medium of wood. I can understand, there’s something about working with wood that seems to offer a Zen experience. Over the years he’s become quite good at it, in fact I would say at this point he’s an artist of sorts. Anyway, he’s making me a beautifully finished coffee table, shown above during construction, and when I looked underneath what signature did I see set skillfully into the Kos-orange, hand-crafted lacquer finish? [Read more…]

The Milky Way could be full of nomads

Artist's conception of a Jupiter-size rogue planet with the edge on disk of a spiral galaxy in the background. Image via the Wiki

In ancient times planets were easily distinguished from stars because they’d wander from one constellation to another. It was that feature that eventually led Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler to record exact positions — without the aide of telescopic lenses — giving birth to modern planetary astronomy. Now a new class of wandering planets has been proposed, and Kepler’s NASA namesake might play a role in learning about these mysterious objects too. Call them Nomads: [Read more…]

The endlessly evolving position of conservatives on stolen documents

There it is, first stolen documents were bad and the perps should be punished. But a year later when stolen emails were posted in misleading snippets to falsely portray an international conspiracy among climate researchers the conservative disinformation machine, including the Heartland Institute, was giddy with excitement. Now some docs reportedly indicating the lengths to which that same org will go have been published and they have suddenly rediscovered their moral compass and are back on the fainting couch. [Read more…]

The mysteries of Titan

Titan, locked in thick clouds, with Saturn and rings in the background. Image courtesy of Cassini/NASA/JPL

Titan has always excited planetary astronomers and science-fiction writers. For good reason. It’s a romantic place, orbiting lovely Saturn, the ringed celebrity of the solar system, and its the only moon with a thick atmosphere. Titan has an active surface carved by wind and rain dotted with oceans and rivers where natural gas falls in big fat droplets and volcanoes spew water like lava. In fact Titan is composed of so much icy stuff that if it were as close to the sun as Mars about half the moon would evaporate into a giant puffball, by some guestimates growing to half the size of Uranus, before the volatile gases took flight on the solar wind and blew away in a massive cometary tail. It would make for a spectacular sight!

But those icy layers offer a possible alien refuge for life, and to understand a hypothetical Titanian biosphere we don’t have to look into deep space for evil green slime, we only have to look beneath our own oceans for exotic microbes and bizarre metazoans. [Read more…]

The gubmint should stay the hell out of people’s bidness!

If there’s one thing my conservative friends agree on, it’s that the government is too damn big. It’s tyranny in the making, and those damn bureaucrats need to stay the hell out of people’s business! Well, except for what happens in womens’ uteruses. Outside of that the government should stay the hell out of the people’s business!

Wait, one more tiny thing, examining some people’s urine. But outside of womens’ uteruses and the people’s urine, the government should stay the hell out of the people’s business! [Read more…]