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My third son, Zachary Taylor, was born on January 14th at 8:08 PM weighing 8 lbs. 1 oz.   Since everyone asks… no he wasn’t intentionally named after our 13th President.  All three of our boys were born at the Rex Birth Center in Raleigh.  Below are pictures of each just about five minutes after they were born.    Zachary has been the quietest baby of all three.  He better learn how to get loud fast if he’s going to keep up with Connor and Logan.  He’ll always be our baby.

Zach was the only one Amy had without an epidural or any pain killers at all.  He came too fast.  We arrived at the hospital at 7 PM and he was here one hour later.  They nurse hardly had time to get an IV started.  We have a lot more pictures on facebook.

Within the next decade scientists believe they may find planets with atmospheres capable of sustaining life as “close” as 63 light years away.  So just exactly how far is a light year?  Pretty damn far.  Here’s the math:

5,000 years ago the Myans (and Egyptians) determined the earth completes one orbit around the sun (1 year) in 365 days 5 hrs. 48 min. and 46 seconds.
365x24x60x60=31536000
5x60x60 = 18000
48×60 = 2880
46 = 46
_____________

That’s 31,556,926 seconds in one Julian calendar year.

Light travels 186,000 miles per second.  So an interstellar body one light year away is about 5,869,588,236,000 miles away. That’s five trillion, eight hundred sixty-nine billion, five hundred eighty-eight million, two hundred thirty-six thousand.  Give or take a city block or two.

The fastest speed that can be reached by a space shuttle is 17,500 miles per hour.  At this speed it would take slightly over 38,263 earth years to travel one light year into space.   Or if someone wants to make the trip in six earth years we will need a ship that travels 111,600,000 miles per hour.  Consider that nuclear fission occurs at about 7% of the speed of light that’s much faster than our greatest source of power will ever achieve.  Of course this is all based on perspective because traveling in a space craft at these speeds would slow time compared to a stationary object on earth.  You know, that pesky relativity formula Einstein discovered.

While science fiction is cool, it’s just that….fiction.  Man will never travel 63 light years from earth in our current form.  All the more reason digital and electronic storage technologies will continue to progress as a part of human evolution.  Once the human psyche can be “digitized”, as in dumped on to a hard drive, we will not only be immortal but we may be able to travel in forms that could one day take us to these planets capable of “sustaining life”.  So in all probability the mere act of searching for such biologically hospitable planets or moons is pointless in terms of travel.  By the time we achieve a way to get there we will not even need a environment capable of sustaining life in biological form.  However such environments could sustain other life forms….. which have very little probability of ever meeting us.

So if there is other intelligent life out there it can’t get to us unless it (they) know how to fold space and time.  As depicted in the movie Dune they would need to be able to “travel throughout the universe without moving”.

This chart by Columbia University Statistician Andrew Geldman pretty much sums it up.  When the Congressional and Administrative idiots in Washington look at a chart like this and think that nothing more than a mandate for all Americans to buy into an already broken and overpriced system it’s beyond ignorant and partisan.  It’s practically criminal.  And once Obama signs this catastrophic mandate into law any remaining support I have for him is over.  That’s $7681 per person, per year folks – sick or not.  It’s embarrassing.  All of the corporatist ass-clowns supporting the insurance and health care provider profits are an embarrassment to the nation.  We should be insuring peoples health, not profits to shareholders.

Over the holidays I went to see Avatar at the Wachovia IMAX theater at Marbles Kids Museum.  Yuck.  While standing in line like cattle we watched as the people leaving the theater from the previous showing returned their 3D “glasses”, more like goggles, into a rolling metal rack.  This rack was then rolled over to the theater entrance doors where the goggles were handed to us as we were herded through the cattle stalls into the viewing area.  No cleaning, no sanitizing, and some even looked like they still had makeup on the nose bridges.   That’s just gross.

The 3D goggles were horribly uncomfortable.  Give me the regular, smaller, Real 3D glasses at a normal theater any day.  They come in a sealed plastic bag which has a notice insuring they’re new or sanitized if recycled.  So the IMAX screen is bigger.  Annoyingly bigger in my opinion.   I was expecting some type of other super surround effect because of all they hype.  But aside from the size I didn’t see any difference between the IMAX screen and a typical 3D movie theater screen.

Then there was the warehouse.  That’s what it felt like I was entering from the cattle stalls in the lobby, a warehouse.  The theater did not strike me as comfortable at all and they seats quickly proved my first impression correct.  They were no where near as comfortable as the seats at North Hills Cinemas.

For all the IMAX hype it was not an enjoyable experience.  The goggles were dirty and hurt my nose, the seats were uncomfortable and the warehouse theater itself was inhospitable.  I won’t do it again.  I’ll go see every 3D release at good ‘ol North Hills and leave IMAX experience to those who buy the hype.

Everyone knows that as of today you can’t text while driving in NC.   Duh.  As if it were OK before the law went into effect.  You also can’t let your python loose to kill your neighbor or a kid.  Apparently that was also excusable before today.  Here’s some more:

• fine motorists as much as $100 if they drive a car with a license plate frame that covers the state name or plate date. Drivers who are cited will receive only a warning through next November.

Translation: Don’t cover your license plate so the cops can’t see it.  Go ahead and give the ones that say “Blessed and Deserving” the fine now.

• ban the sale, possession and manufacture of Salvia divinorum, a hallucinogenic herb that’s become popular among young people.

Translation: Don’t get wasted on hallucinogenic herbs kids.  Especially the ones you can’t pronounce.

• permit people who lose their licenses because of repeat drunken-driving convictions to ask that their driving privileges be restored after a spotless record for 10 years.

Translation: Don’t drive drunk in the first place and you won’t have to wait 10 years to do it again.

• expand the law making it a felony to solicit a child by computer to commit unlawful sex acts to include cell phones.

Translation: Don’t molest children with your cell phone (or any other way).

We wouldn’t need so many laws if some people just had more common sense.

It is the second such fatality at that location. In October 2005, Todd Fletcher, 26, fell to his death not realizing that the bridges between the Outer and Inner beltlines were separated by open space.

via Police: Man fell to death from Beltline after crash :: WRAL.com.

The NCDOT Design Engineers deserve another moment of recognition.  Are they the worst state run organization in the US?  I certainly think they will take their sweet time in fixing this problem.  Might be a three death minimum required before making any repair or design changes.  And they might never admit fault.

Right now Verizon is starting to chew rapidly into iPhone marketspace with the new Droid.  The reason is obvious to the majority of AT&T customers, AT&T has a horribly bad network.  Coverage is sporadic at best despite AT&T’s postcard ads on TV where they claim coverage in 300,000 metropolitan areas.  Yep, very poor coverage.

The only reason AT&T has lasted this long following their Cingular aquisition was the iPhone contract they have to be the exclusive distributor for Apple.  But Apple is coming out with a new iPhone that may not be covered under this exclusive contract.  The iPhone 4G.

Foxconn is a company that manufactures the iPhone for Apple.  My CDW rep recently told me a story from his brother, who works for Foxconn, about another Foxconn employees mysterious suicide after he “lost” an iPhone 4G prototype. The 25 year old “jumped” from his apartment window.

Apparently the same employee, Sun Danyong,  had “misplaced” other iPhone prototypes before.  And for some strange reason he always came back to work beaten up around the same time he found the misplaced units.

“Foxconn has confirmed that Sun Danyong’s family was paid roughly $44,000 and given an Apple laptop as compensation for his death.” – Laura Dune -engadget

The comment section on WRAL articles is the most heavily censored forum I’ve ever seen on the Internet.  They actually hire censors, they call “moderators”, to read comments in real time and decide which are worthy of posting and which are not.  The guidelines for their decision making are vague at best and often seem biased.

No public opinion forum should be “moderated”.  It’s almost a violation of free speech.  It could be argued that it is undeniably a first amendment violation except for the fact that users agree to be “moderated”, or censored, at the WRAL staff’s discretion when signing up for a GOLO account.  That’s right, people sign up to have their freedom of speech suppressed.

I’ve decided that I don’t like using a forum where someone is paid to decide if my opinion, or how I chose to express it, is worthy of being posted in their pretentious little forum.  “Moderation” = censorship.    There’s no way to argue that it is not and there are very few arguments available to justify it.  It would serve WRAL and GOLO well to save money on the staff, put in an automated profanity filter, and let people state their opinion in their own words without some low paid Net Nanny deciding which comments meet their unspecified criteria.