The Manic Mechanic

My email and messages began to light up yesterday evening from people sending me links to this YouTube video. "You're gonna love this", etc. Well, indeed I do love the hell out of this video. It has my two greatest "loves", science and music, assembled in a touching, awe-inspiring combination. And it's all real. Backstory: Cmdr Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency, is ready to bid farewell to the International Space Station after being aloft for five months. A sensation in his own right among Canadian science lovers and already a bit of a rock star in his own way, he, along with an Earth-based collection of musicians reworks Davis Bowie's 1969 masterpiece "Space Oddity" as a fitting end to his tour of duty. Definitely must-see TV.

This shows all the incredible things humanity is capable of when they put their collective minds together. I've been in awe of the space programs ever since my early youth. Even though trips into space had mostly become workaday outings that made most people lose interest, I still appreciated all that went into every trip. The recent Mars rover mission proved that there is still a lot of out-of-the-box thinking going on that rekindles that feeling of awe I had as a kid. I hope you enjoy this as much as I do.

Can what we hear be determined by what we are seeing at the time? Definitely. Called the McGurk Effect, situations can arise where one's perception of a sound changes if certain visual cues conflict with what we are hearing at that instant. This clip from the BBC show Horizon demonstrates this simply, yet very effectively. Keep your ears and eyes open for this one:

Ain't that some shit? This also explains why I get a headache watching Godzilla movies and get driven crazy when the audio and video are not synced when watching programs or clips.

Happy 68th birthday, Dr. Stephen Hawking.

I've always had a fascination with instruments. Musical, yes, I am a greatly lapsed axeman from way back, but those are not the instruments of which I speak here. No, I am talking about meters and clockwork and mechanisms. It's also no suprise that for over 24 years my primary occupation has been the repair, maintenance and calibration of electronic test equipment and instrumentation with forays into clockwork and meter movement repair and alignment. Recently, there have been renewed reports and news regarding a very old artifact known as the "Antikythera Mechanism", most likely Greek in origin, an ancient instrument thought to be a form of astrolabe. Originally found by a sponge diver off of Antikythera island over 100 years ago, the true function of this mysterious instrument was left to speculation till recently, when additional parts of the heavily corroded and fragmented instrument were found last year. With the now more complete instrument available for researchers to 'reverse engineer', they have come to the conclusion that the Antikythera Mechanism is actually a sophisticated, mechanical, analog computer that was able to track and predict lunar and solar positions, planetary movements, and from that things such as sunrise and sunset times, tides, and even eclipses. In short, a very sophisticated piece of equipment, even by fairly modern standards.

From CNN.com: The calculator could add, multiply, divide and subtract. It was also able to align the number of lunar months with years and display where the sun and the moon were in the zodiac.

The real kicker here is that this computer is over 2000 years old.

Think about that for just a moment. Over two freaking millennia! About a hundred years or so before "the time of Christ" there were people with the knowhow and abilities to produce such a device and use it for the betterment of their societies of the era. One can only imagine what else they were doing along those lines. It's fascinating. Nothing even approaching this level of sophistication would be found until over a thousand years later.

The scientific and astronomic communities are thrilled with the new findings and have begun a conference to learn more about this incredible device and the people who built and used it.

Makes me wonder what other incredible things may have been lost during the dark ages. And, sadly, how there is a growing pressure in today's society to put us into a similar 'dark age' if certain religious extremists have their way.