Can't tell you more than I told you already
I got back from Mexico very early Sunday morning. I’ve sorted through a lot of the pictures Susan and I took while we were down there and am starting a web page for the trip. Right now I only have one day, but I hope to add the rest of the days by the end of the week even if I have to call in sick every day this week (I did call in sick today but won’t go into details; let’s just say I went to Mexico and leave it at that).
Anyway, the link:
I was poking around looking for information about smog-reducing gasoline (which Atlanta has to start using in 2005) and found this staggering statistic from the govment about why gas prices have risen:
>>Fuel demand continues to increase. The fuel economy of US fleet is the lowest in 20 years and Americans continue to travel more. Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) is up. Over the past twenty years onroad VMT has increased by 114% while population has only grown by 27%.<<
Once again, look no further than the end of your finger when blaming those who have made the gas prices rise. Not only are americans driving many more miles than they used to, they are using less efficient vehicles to do it in. While it seems fair that we are getting the higher prices we deserve, we're also raising prices for the rest of the world because of our waste and selfishness.
On one episode of The Flintstones Fred changes places with a millionaire who wants a taste of the normal life. Fred says he couldn’t possibly run a corporation but J. L. Gotrocks says it’s easy: You just go to the meeting and when they bring something up you say “Whose baby is that?” then “What’s your angle?” then “I’ll buy that.”
The other day I was walking to lunch past Atlanta City Hall. There was a lady on the corner talking on a cell phone. But she was talking very, very loud and was pretty perturbed about something but mostly just loud. It was odd enough to notice, but not really think much about. After we ate lunch we came back the same way. This was at least 30 minutes later. The lady was still on the cell phone and yelling. At no time was she apparently ever listening. As we walked by she got louder and it sounded like she was sort of addressing us. I think what she was doing was staging some kind of protest (there have been a lot lately with the Georgia legislature in session; one day the gay rights group faced off against the family groups that are against gay marriage) but she didn’t have a permit to do the protest. So she brought a cell phone and was just yelling to everyone. Then if anyone questioned her she could say she was just talking to someone on the phone, there are no laws against that.
One of my AvantGo channels I download to my Palm to read on MARTA is space.com. I’m not sure how they make money, but they have a lot of good space-related articles. Today they had one on space junk, all the pieces of old rocket motors, dead satellites, loose screws, and other pieces of debris in orbit around the earth travelling thousands of miles per hour. Even a paint chip travelling at 10,000 miles per hour can knock a hole in a satellite or spaceman. So it is a significant problem and there are all kinds of efforts to minimize any cast-off material or debris. Also there is a project to track every known piece of junk to make sure critical satellites, the space shuttle, space station, etc. can move out of the way if they are in danger of being hit.
This article is about a series of old Russian satellites that had nuclear reactors on board for elecricity. The Russians didn’t want the satellites to fall to earth with reactor cores in them so they included a booster rocket that would, after the satellite was no longer needed, launch the reactor core into a much higher earth orbit that would take thousands of years to degrade. By the time the core would re-enter the earth’s atmosphere so many half-lives would have passed that it would no longer be dangerous. So that was a neat idea right there.
But then it seems that after the cores were ejected, the leftover part sprung a leak in its liquid coolant. A stream of drops came out of the satellite. Each drop is a piece of space junk and some of the “drops” are a couple of inches in diameter. So now there are 10,000 drops of Sodium-Potassium coolant in orbit waiting to hit anything in space at extremely high speed. Oh, and each drop is radioactive.
Then they said that because these satellites were all at roughly the same orbit, that even the non-leaking ones are now subject to be hit by one of these droplets, causing further leaks and even more space junk. In fact they said people are doing research to see if there is already a “critical mass” of space junk that will just keep colliding into each other and producing even more pieces of debris that will cause more collisions and so forth.
Fifty years of exploring space and we may have already ruined it.