7.22.2009
Totality
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A total solar eclipse was visible today from certain locations in the South Pacific, South Asia, and India.

Diamond-ring phase from Varanasi, India
Excerpt from an AP story - From the Ganges River in India to remote islands of the Pacific, the sun rose Wednesday only to vanish again, allowing the stars to twinkle into view in the longest total solar eclipse this century will see - a celestial show that inspired awe and fear in millions across Asia.

Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar
Click-through this link to see the path of totality across the globe (NASA) - in what will be the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century.

Diamond-ring phase from Varanasi, India
Excerpt from an AP story - From the Ganges River in India to remote islands of the Pacific, the sun rose Wednesday only to vanish again, allowing the stars to twinkle into view in the longest total solar eclipse this century will see - a celestial show that inspired awe and fear in millions across Asia.

Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar
Click-through this link to see the path of totality across the globe (NASA) - in what will be the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century.
Labels: 21st, nasa, solar, totality, varanasi

6.02.2009
Nobel Prize winner says Wind Power Full of Hot Air
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According to this piece. Instead, solar is the place you oughta be. So, they packed up the windmill and they moved to Beverly.
I'm still kind of bullish on the Dyson sphere....problem being the immense scale and construction cost...
another option is a configuration where the moon is used to bounce sunlight back to the earth or near-earth orbit using hundreds of thousands or millions of mirrors. the advantage to this is avoiding the atmosphere's effect on diluting sunlight and utilizing the fact that the moon is locked in earth-facing orbit all the time, which should be good for something...builds on archimedean concept
Labels: archimedean, archimedes, dysonsphere, hillbillies, liunar, solar

7.21.2008
Archaeologists to Re-Assemble Solar Boat
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Scientists are to Re-build a solar boat of the pharaoh Khufu (Cheops). The boat in the picture was excavated in 1954 and re-assembled. An adjacent boat pit was left unexcavated in 1954, to await future generations and perhaps, better techniques. I happen to have written a paper on the initial boat discovery which went into some detail on the construction techniques and materials used, which we will discuss below...
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Archaeologists and scholars will excavate hundreds of fragments of an ancient Egyptian wooden boat entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza's Great pyramid. They will then try to reassemble the craft.
The 4,500-year-old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces in 1954 from another pit and painstakingly reconstructed. Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid in the afterlife.
Starting Saturday, tourists were allowed to view images from inside the second boat pit from a camera inserted through the a hole in the chamber's limestone ceiling.
Professor Sakuji Yoshimura of Japan's Waseda University says the excavation of around 600 pieces of timber will begin in November.
The first solar boat is 43.6 meters in length (or 145 feet), displacing 94 tons and dates to 2500 B.C. It is built of planks of hewn cedar, which does not grow in Egypt. Cedar does grow in the coastal mountains of Lebanon and that is where these timbers were cut. The boatwright drilled through the wooden planks at regular intervals, leaving room for carefully inserted hemp ropes which lashed together the sides of the ship.
Crossbeams were of acacia and sycamore, and there existed a total of 467 tenon joints held together by cedar pegs. As water soaked the rope, it tightened, forcing the planks together, tensioned by the tenons - producing a water tight structure through the balance of two opposing forces and no nails, rivets, or glues.
The original hieratic cursive of the shipbuilders was visible on the wood pieces and was of great assistance in piecing together the vessel, which was completely disassembled and buried in a deep limestone pit sealed with 14 ton stone blocks.
In terms of scale, Columbus' flagship the Santa Maria was about 70 feet in length, and full-size Viking longships, capable of North Sea voyages, average about 100 feet in length - all smaller than this ship.
The ship shares some similarities with boats used off the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean for thousands of years. Similar Egyptian vessels presumably made the voyage to the land of Punt (probably Yemen) and could have journeyed up the coast to Lebanon in order to retrieve the timber (cedar was also used in building temples).
The wood was so well-preserved that the archaeologists who found it could smell the wood resins immediately upon moving the stone blocks. They noted that the wood appeared as if it had been buried the day before.
Purpose: It's speculated that the pharaoh's duties in the afterlife required a fine vessel such as this, both for practical and spiritual reasons
Labels: cedar, columbus, Khufu, Ship, solar, sycamore, vikings

5.15.2008
Two Tesla Tests
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Not one, but two Tesla tests...
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and Nikola Tesla...
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and Nikola Tesla...
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Labels: brain, energy, nikola, solar, tesla, voltage

12.10.2007
The Bent Solar System
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An image released by the Voyager Project on December 10, 2007. NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has found that our solar system is not round but is 'dented' by the local interstellar magnetic field of deep space, space experts said on Monday
link

