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I produced my first YouTube video at the Intel Developer’s Forum last week. Its 2 minutes of asking Intel employees whether 2010 is a ‘Tick’ year or a ‘Tock’ year. You need to know that Intel updates chip clock speeds in Tick years, and chip micro-architectures in Tock years = your basic Intel Inside high-tech humor.

If you like the video, please click the “Like” button before 24-Sep-2010. There are nice prizes Intel is giving away for the most votes. So spread the word, and enjoy!

Okay, its Autumnal not Vernal, but can’t an Equinox go by without egg balancing, and the obligatory reference to the Bad Astronomer’s explanations.  According to the Astronomy Picture of the Day (available as a Windows background), edited by Robert Nemiroff, who has a free Astronomy course online, and Jerry Bonnell, apparently no.   APOD again published the picture of BA Plait (whose new book is out October 20th) balancing eggs in his kitchen.  The kids above show Phil up by balancing eggs on their (Blefuscudian) small end.

Update: eggPOD

Break out the Tortuga rum cakes and sing-a-long with Cap’n Slappy and Ol’ Chumbucket – it’s Tallk Like a Pirate Day! Now that’s a moray.

First EMC competitor, Hitachi, publishes an attack ad video starring Mr.(“M” as in “Mister”) T.  Now EMC is doing viral video marketing at fun with tape starring Bob + Joe.  Is that a chocolate mustashio on Bob that harkens back to the California Milk Board’s Got Milk? campaigns by GS&P, namely, cow abduction and the insanely elaborate planet in need? With milk prices at record highs, about the same per gallon as gasoline, which does nothing for strong bones (nyuk, nyuk, nyuk), the real question is Got Cash?

Update: A new Hitachi attack video starring Mr. T is out on youtube.

You may have noticed the column of web widgets in the sidebar on your right.  Eaton Web – The Blog Directory is one of them.  When I signed up I thought it was another blog stats counter like so many others.  But they actually have a human look at your blog and write a review (or they have a great AI program that even mispells).  They said some nice things, so I thought I’d bring it up.

 

A search for “star trek” in Time Magazine‘s archives from 1923 through the present (which used to be for subscribers only) produces over 200 mentions - like the recent interview with Leonard Nimoy celebrating 40 years since the first episode.  Of course there is a Time Timeline:

I think the timeline ends there.  Star Trek TIME began with the TV lineup for September 8, 1966 (remember these?):

But there is more interesting and sometimes offbeat human history in the stories. 

1967 – Real People Take Notice
Physicist William Pickering, whose Jet Propulsion Laboratory has directed U.S. unmanned space probes from Explorer 1 to Surveyor 6, likes a preposterous piece of space fiction, Star Trek. Incidentally, Time also reported Barry Goldwater says he “doesn’t see much TV” but favors Walter Cronkite or the local news from Phoenix.

1975 – The Trekkie Fad [as in passing fad]
Jesco Von Puttkamer, a NASA scientist who gave two S.R.O. lectures at the convention, said that the show “reflects a positivistic attitude. It’s a mirror to our present world with some adventure thrown in.” Another academician who gives the show high marks is Astronomy Professor Leo Standeford, who has conducted a one-credit course in Star Trek at Minnesota’s Mankato State University. His esteem is shared by the Smithsonian Institution, which has acquired a model of the Enterprise.

1977 Feb. – Entering the Culture
NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base. There it will begin tests that will culminate in flights that could do for space colonization what the prairie schooner and the railroads did for the settling of America.  When moving day arrived, OV (for Orbiter Vehicle) 101, christened Enterprise to the delight of thousands of Star Trek fans, was jacked up and loaded onto its transporter.

1977 Aug. – Space Tec Aps
Having no power and weighing as much as 40 Chevrolet sedans, the shuttle was essentially an overweight glider. But despite the still-unexplained failure of one of the ship’s five computers, her brief flight went exactly according to plan…Between 1980 and 1992 NASA is planning for 560 flights at a rate that will eventually reach more than one a week…Astronomers are hoping to send a space telescope into orbit aboard the shuttle. Freed from the interference caused by earth’s atmosphere, man will be able to look unhindered into space—to find out, for example, how stars and planets evolve.

1979 Jan. – The Movie
Roddenberry guesses that there are 10 million “hardcore” fans, along with kids and kooks, such well-known names as Senator Barry Goldwater and Science-Fiction Author Robert Heinlein.

1980 Jun. – The TV Movie
DIED. Teddy DeVita, 17, whose struggle to conquer a rare bone marrow disease in an 8-ft. by 9-ft., germ-free isolation room at the National Cancer Institute won him wide attention as the courageous “boy in the glass cage”; of complications from repeated blood transfusions; in Bethesda, Md. Teddy was nine when he developed aplastic anemia, which destroys the body’s ability to fight off any infection. His life in his sterile sanctuary, portrayed by John Travolta in a 1976 TV film, was poignant: he sometimes threatened to walk out to virtually certain death, but mostly he tried to live normally: he liked Shakespeare, played the electric guitar and became a sci-fi buff; at a Star Trek convention, which he attended clad in an astronaut-type pressure suit, he was delighted to be mistaken for just another imaginatively attired Trekkie.

1992 Aug. - The Next Generation
Someone who grows up with his own gas pump and dog cemetery, and is heir to the greatest newspaper dynasty in the country, has to work hard at being a regular guy. For Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who succeeded his father as publisher of the New York Times this year, this means taking public transportation, not owning a country house or a car, and touring Europe by secondhand BSA 175 motorcycle. His signature sport is not golf or squash but rock climbing. The new Star Trek is his favorite program.

1993 – buy’ nqpop
Not only is Klingon a real language, sort of, it is the fastest growing language in the universe (if you consider that it started with a base line of zero speakers in the mid-1980s). It was invented by a linguist named Marc Okrand.

1993 – Hawking appears on STNG

1993 – Technobabble
TIME consulted Michael Okuda, one of the Star Trek technical experts.

We need to remodulate the main deflector dish.

Deflectors are devices that protect starships by setting up an energy field. Dishes, which operate at specific frequencies, control the deflectors. Remodulating the frequency boosts the strength of the deflectors against incoming attacks.

We can do it if we reconfigure the lateral sensor array.

Sensors are used to detect objects, life forms or anomalies in space. Reconfiguring them simply adjusts them, like focusing a lens. Watch for terms like “reconfigure” and “remodulate”; they’re the workhorses of the Trek vocabulary.

It should be possible if we decompile the pattern buffer.

Transporters can send people instantly from one location to another by converting their molecules into energy, then reassembling them. Every living being has a distinct pattern of molecules; the pattern buffer fixes the configuration by adjusting for the Doppler effect — the apparent change in the frequency of the energy waves caused by motion.

I’ll verify the Heisenberg compensators.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that you cannot know a subatomic particle’s exact position and its exact direction and velocity at the same time. To transport people you have to know all those things, so the Heisenberg compensator was devised to overcome that problem. It’s an attempt by the Trek writers to signal that they are at least aware of the issue. And how does the Heisenberg compensator work? “It works very well, thank you,” says Okuda.

Post-Star-Trek aka Modern TIMEs:

Apr. 21, 1997 MADRID: There was no coffin or graveside eulogy, just a simple Pegasus rocket traveling at 6,200 mph and 22 lipstick-sized metal vials containing the ashes of Timothy Leary and “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, among others, for the first commercial burial in space. Celestis also is launching Mercury astronaut “Gordo” Cooper and actor James “Scotty” Doohan died Jul. 24, 2005.  Beam him up.

July 8, 1998, 8:45 a.m.: Descision by the USPO to issue ST stamp.

 

And we go from the ridiculous Feb. 2000 Shatner interview:

Q. Have you made more on priceline stock or on 30 years of milking suckers for everything they’re worth at Star Trek conventions?
A. When priceline asked me how much it would cost them to do their commercials, I named my own price.
Q. Do you even know what a good price for Cheerios is?
A. $1.25 is a good price for a very large box of cereal.
Q. Not even close. You starred in the only movie ever made in Esperanto. Can you say bad career move in Esperanto?
A. Malo carrero.

To the sublime Aug. 200051 article:

Coincidences in the TIMEline:  In Aug. 2000, astronomer WILLIAM COCHRAN discovered a Jupiter-size planet in the same orbit as Vulcan…and the Earthling who first made contact with the Vulcans was ZEPHRAIM COCHRANE–just an extra e away from Texas astronomer Cochran.

Star Trek came on unceremoniously 40 years ago today with a love story between a doctor and what turned out to be a salt-seeking creature disguised as a former lover.  I was immediately hooked.  I didn’t even realize that Kirk was the main character – Bones had the lead role that episode.  With the remake of TOS with modern special effects, Christie’s auction of ST artifacts (ironically Bones used what in reality was a salt shaker as his diagnostic tool), a Star Trek XI movie in the works, and lots of fan-made productions (like New Voyages), I just want to say where can I get one of those time portals and get my 40 years refunded?  Happy 40th!

Want to send a large file to someone – too big to email?  You can use yousendit to send a file up to 100 MB (1 Gb with $4.99/month subscription) in size.  The recipient gets an email with the download location.  So send me that large file.

Of course, the logo will never win any paper airplane contests.  But you can use NASA lesson plans and software to design your own paper airplane.  You could learn something like:

You are flying an F-117A fully equipped, which means that your aircraft weighs 52,500 pounds. You want to maintain equilibrium in straight and level flight at an altitude of 30,000 feet, cruising at 400 knots to conserve fuel. The aircraft’s wing area is 1,140 square feet. At what angle of attack should the F-117A be set to maintain equilibrium?