(no subject)

[ladynox25]

An article on the recovery and analysis of the Genesis probe left me laughing at the following:

Some of the containers hold as many as 96 pieces of the wafers, which are composed of silicone, gold on sapphire and geranium.

Geranium? They were sending *flowers* into space? Or maybe they meant germanium?

Also, for eftychia, who said not too long ago:

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep I was wondering whether they could use ground-penetrating radar to get a better idea what a volcano (specifically Mt. St. Helen's) was doing. Since I hadn't heard of anyone doing that, my guess was that it only works through soil, not rock. Now that I'm up I can hit Google to find out.

And to which I replied:

Would you *really* want to volunteer to drag a GPR thingy across the top of a smoking volcano that might just erupt in a minute or two? Not to mention the earthquakes might shake your apparatus up a bit.

I do apologize, as it seems I was mistaken. According to this, they *did* use GPR on Mt. St. Helens, and they can now do it remotely, without risking volcanologists.

Finally, police are looking for the guy who shot up Siegfried & Roy's house September 21. Apparently, the suspect is a former NFL place-kicker. I just want to know, what did he have against Siegfried & Roy?

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_constantine/]

I don't get it. We can build CIA Predator drones that can pursue, target and destroy a moving vehicle, but we can't build a drone that can just fly back and forth above a random piece of geography? And we can build and operate roving vehicles that can move across the surface of another planet, but we can't have a rover trundle out across the lava dome a few miels away to take a ground reading?

Sounds like someone isn't trying hard enough.

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

My Dean made a comment along those lines a few weeks ago, when informed that IT couldn't give the medical school the option of setting the student print quota to any other values other than 400 pages a year or infinite: We can build spaceships that fly to Saturn but we can't do variable print quotas?

Hee. :-)