I recently heard the TEDx Talk below by NASA space engineer Nagin Cox, who, along with her teams and other teams, operated the rovers on Mars. Specifically, she focused on the logistics challenge of the Martian day that is 37 minutes longer than the Earth day, and what that meant. Because the rovers could not operate at night on Mars, to make the best use of its time there, NASA scientists and engineers had to work Martian night shifts, essentially, processing what the rovers sent back during Martian daylight while it rested during Martian nights, before giving the rovers new instructions for the next day. The challenges they faced, though, led me to want to try this as a challenge, and let others know about it in case they wanted to try themselves! I mean, seriously, how much closer are you ever going to get to living on Mars than this besides also moving to the polar ice caps for the same temperature simulation?
Writing
Renaming the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tomahawk Missile?
In thinking about content for this blog, there’s a lot I don’t think I can either write 500 words about, which is my warm-up minimum word limit for these blog posts, or do the research to get that much, by which time I would feel I need 5000 words to cover the topic. So what I’ve decided is that I would collect these into posts until I get 500 words and post them. If nothing else, they will serve as a repository for me for potential future posts. Hopefully, they will be enjoyable, if not thought-provoking, for you.
The Six Numbers of My Universe
Among my favourite books is The World in Six Songs, by Daniel Levitin. I loved it so much I wrote a series of blog posts in 2009 about a songs challenge I came up with, and even got to talk to the author about it! Recently, I heard about scientific book involving the number six, called Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe, by Martin Rees. This one didn’t interest me that much, with “deep forces” being beyond what I could fully understand, or at least be willing to commit the time to doing, seeing what those numbers were. Before I went to do that, though, I thought of the six numbers of “my universe”, as in a balance of the physical universe I knew and understood, as well as the emotional one that had the most meaning to me. I did it to see if I could hit at least one of those numbers in Just Six Numbers, to see if what I thought were the important numbers were truly as important as someone more knowledgeable of the “deep forces” of the universe deemed them to be. The results are below, but before you read on and maybe get influenced by my choices, try making a list of just six numbers in “your universe”, with “your universe” being whatever ways you want to define it.
I’m a Dangerous Comic
I recently heard Jamie Foxx on a Tim Ferriss show episode from 2015, indirectly describe a “dangerous” comic as a comic who makes jokes that are highly questionable in taste, at least among the general public, if not any audience. The moment I heard that, I realized that’s exactly the kind of comic I was when I did amateur stand-up, and still is now but not as a stand-up because conservative Nova Scotia just can’t handle that kind of stuff! That’s even when I’m obeying the unspoken rule of subject matter hierarchy for what and whom you can make jokes about. Continue reading
The Women Sharing Their Underwear Pics with Fellow Citizens
Facebook Marketplace has a lot of stuff on it. That was not surprising to me. It made selling stuff easier than on other platforms, where you had to create a separate account for that purpose only, and you didn’t know a lot about the seller since it was often a small profile, without real names, and and only with ratings on the seller’s reputation as a seller. Facebook Marketplace made selling seamless, essentially, and even curated deals for you by prioritizing items sold in your city or town, or nearby rather than somewhere across the continent or even on another continent. What was surprising, to me, was some of the completely legal, not even risqué, stuff being sold on it.
Digital Citizen 