By The Way I'm Mowing My Lawn

I Don't think anyone realizes how fantastic 2013 really is! The only thing missing is a FTL drive and that just might be around the corner.

Remember those little writing pads the crews in Star Trek would walk around with, or bulky clipboard for all you Classic Trek fans? Well I got one, It's an iPad Mini.

Remember when Worf needed a new backbone and they grew one for him? Well, we are now at the point where we can grow kidneys, use cadaver bone for repairs, or regenerate shattered bone.

And those greasy fast computers on the starship?  You can now buy a quantum computer from D-wave.

How Fucking cool is that?!?

Good Thing! we don't have true Holodeck technology, Because that would end the human race.  Do you remember LaForge lost in romance or Lister hanging out with the bad girl in the trashy detective novel?  Maybe it's just me but if you give me a magic box where I could spend all day with (and the List is Long Folks): Handfuls of Movie Starlets, Several Porn Stars, Many High School sweethearts, A Plethora College Crushes, and Too numerous to count Random hot women I've met on the street and who would not give me the time of day!

Yeah go ahead and use your quantum computer for speech recognition, code breaking, and breakthroughs in Astrophysics.  Mine is providing the best 3d, five senses, experience with the women of my dreams and nightmares.  Yes!  I'm 48 and I'm that shallow.

Of Course, the clean up of my personal holosuite is a bit of a chore.

I just had to share theses pictures because I think there are so cool. I needed to rewrite a lab exercise on laser diffraction and I needed some pictures. Normally, you can't see a laser beam from the side, much less photograph one. In Hollywood, smoke makes the beam visible, but you can't smoke in any of the building on campus. What you see here is me banging to blackboard erasers off camera and blowing the dust into the frame shot. My lab assistant is pushing the button on the digital camera. I think they turned out great.

How High are the Iowa City Fireworks?

If you saw the firework in Iowa City you know I had some time on my hands. It seems the city planners decides to stretch out the show bit by resting 5 to 10 minutes after each volley. I guess someone kept dropping the match. So using a few physics, astronomy and math I came up with some cool numbers. The two key numbers were based on two facts. The speed of sound in warm air is about 1145 feet per sec. Using my digital watch the time between the "flash" of the firework and the "bang" of the explosion was about 1.25 seconds. The second piece of information is your fist held at arm length subtends about 10 degrees. That mean the fireworks were about 40 degrees off the horizon.

After doing the math here are the result. The height for the fireworks was about 880 feet. this goes nicely with a NOVA special I saw on fireworks. The average diameter of the display was 480 feet. Another number that fits nicely with know data. The muzzle velocity of the shell is at least 162 mph. Most Firework shells are round and fired like a mortar round, so there is air resistance. This number is probably low.

Wanna check my work?