An afternoon whirlwind on Mars lofts a twisting column of dust more than half a mile (800 meters) high in an image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Sitting there bewildered of what just happened, I called 911.  After I told the dispatcher that I was on the 46th St exit, she told me they had it on video and she was going to transfer me to the person who was working on the case.

So the Minneapolis police had just pulled this drive over when he ran.  They were watching him on the camera and waiting for him to make his next move, with cops on the ready.   When he stared driving up the exit ramp, he saw the cop at the top waiting for him, so he thought it would be smart to back down the ramp instead.To bad they already have your licensee and know where you live.

The officer said he will arrest the driver late tonight, and they are adding evading the police and hit and run to his charges.

When we went into the other room, he was setting up the stage for something.  He then grabbed his girl, went up to the stage and started reading from the bible.  After reading First Corinthians, he proposed to her, then started talking about being reborn as a black man.  It was interesting to say the least.

You can see more infromation about this video on it’s Vimeo Page.

So now the question is, how do you eat it?

Light field technology captures all the light rays in a scene, which allows photographers to focus a photo after it has been taken. In traditional photography, photographers have had to focus the camera first and then snap. Lytro cameras, the company claims, will be able to be perfectly focus photos after the fact, forever into the future.

Below are a few samples of how it works, try clicking around on the pictures to refocus the shot.

And you can’t release or even talk about a new product without a video for it:

They were then able to track the craft via the iPhones on board GPS.

You can see more images of their flight or support their effort on their website brooklynspaceprogram.org.

“…the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator.

Many improbable occurrences conspired to create Earth’s human-friendly design, and they would indeed be puzzling if ours were the only solar system in the universe. But today we know of hundreds of other solar systems, and few doubt that there exist countless more among the billions of stars in our galaxy. Planets of all sorts exist, and obviously, when the beings on a planet that supports life examine the world around them, they are bound to find that their environment satisfies the conditions they require to exist…

Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed “in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design.”

That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many…”

My mind has difficulty wrapping itself around the concept that a “universe” can be one of many.  I don’t disagree with him, but I think I need to defer any ponderings about astrophysics and concentrate on the more prosaic aspects of life.

What I feel is important to remember is that we are Americans. We are members of a country that was founded not as a Christian country, or a Jewish one, but instead as a place for all to come and be free. Free of this sort of persecution.

Threw out our own history, we have started walking down this path before. The path of forgetting who we are and why we are all here. We destroyed the Native Americans, we enslaved the African people, we even went to war with the Mormons. All in the name of what, Freedom.

What is Freedom when we are not all free. Why should freedom be reserved for some, but not all?

In the famous words of Martin Niemöller ¹:

When [they] came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

I feel Keith Olbermann sums it up very nicely, tho I don’t agree with every thing he says. His main point needs to be heard.

So what are WE going to do about it?

Unfortunately it rain today so the ceremony was held in doors, but it was still a very bright and pretty service.

This Memorial weekend we were at the cabin and saw 2 beautiful Barred Owls.  The first evening there was a huge one and a smaller one.  The second evening around 4:30 we saw one of them again. He/she sat in a tree while we took lots of pictures and just stared at us.

Read my Mother’s post on their site.

Maybe Buca should move to the modern age and update their menu’s.

Odin playing in the snow

Odin playing in the snow, part 2

Odin in the sun room

Odin playing in the snow, taken on a BlackBerry Tour

Odin going snowshoeing, part 1

Odin going snowshoeing, part 2

I live on a sort of larger road named Ford Parkway.  The road gets its name from the Ford Plant down the road.  This is all fine and good since I live in a nice, quite neighbourhood, but they do drive a far number of semi trucks directly past my place.

Well on Christmas day, the plows were out, but were not out in the number the amount of snow and the rate of snow fall required.  Christmas day was also just warm enough that the salt they dumped on the road melted the snow, but it was still cold enough that slush re-froze once the cars, and semi trucks drove over it.  This ice then stayed on the road for about a week before the City of Saint Paul decided to finely plowed them off.  The problem was the ice was patchy in its placement on the road.

So now my road has hundreds of dents in it, not pot-holes, but dents!  It’s like driving down a really bad dirt road.

What just pisses me off about the whole thing isn’t the harm it’s doing to my car every time I go home, but that now they will need to redo the entire road just to make it drivable again.  As time goes on, the road will only get worse, until it is un-drivable.

• 1 (8 ounce) package egg noodles
• 1 pound ground beef
• 1 (10.75 ounce) can condensed cream of mushroom soup
• 1 tablespoon garlic powder
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Prepare the egg noodles according to package directions and set aside.
2. In a separate large skillet over medium heat, saute the ground beef over medium heat for 5 to 10 minutes, or until browned. Drain the fat and add the soup and garlic powder. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
3. Remove from heat and combine the meat mixture with the egg noodles. Add the sour cream, stirring well, and season with salt and pepper to taste.

When I opened iTunes, it informed me there was a problem with the database and it would rebuild it for me. After about 2 hours of working on it, iTunes  finished.  But it had lost all my music history, all my music was there, but it lost all my play lists and what not.  Not that big a deal I can always recreate those. 

So I spent the next few minuets recreating a few play lists from what my iPhone had on it, when it dawned on me. “I should just sync my phone and it would copy everything back” right?  But that is not what happened.

I synced my phone, and it took nearly no time at all (maybe a full minute). When I looked at my phone after the sync, ya everything was gone.

So today I start the lovely task of rebuilding my phone.

Thank you Apple!!!

What are your takes?

So far he seems like a nice pup, he’s sweet and always needs to be by you, but he is a runner.

You will also find more pictures of him in his Gallery Album.