I was in my freshman year in high school and remember the elation I felt after months of failed Project Vanguard flights in the wake of the Russian Sputnik launches.

Image credit NASA

Entering the Space Age

Through the combined efforts of JPL and the Army Ballistic Missile Ballistic Agency, Explorer 1 launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Jan. 31, 1958. There was a nail-biting wait before tracking stations confirmed that Explorer 1 had gone successfully into orbit around Earth. With the launch of Explorer 1, the United States officially entered the space age.

You may have noticed the “Damsel’s Water Zen” widget in the sidebar. This is the background behind it.

Damsel likes the light patterns that water makes when sunlight dances through it. Whether in a swimming pool, in a river, in a marina channel or in a shallow harbor, it doesn’t matter, she likes the shimmering ripples.

Last September (2007), we spent our anniversary, as usual, on Catalina Island. We go to Avalon every year since that’s where we got married. While we were there, we took a lot of pictures and a few movies.

While we were waiting on the Green Pier for our glass-bottom boat tour. I leaned over the rail and captured this short sequence of the rippling water in the harbor. I used my little Canon A710 IS digital camera in AVI mode. I pointed the camera straight down and captured about ten seconds of video. When I showed the preview to Damsel, she said it was relaxing like ‘Water Zen.’

So, when we got home, I converted the short video to Flash® and popped it in the sidebar as a remembrance to our time in Avalon and an opportunity to ‘gaze and relax.’

President Bush will be paying a visit to Robinson Helicopter in Torrance, California tomorrow. That’s about a mile and a half from our house. We’d like to go see and hear the President, but admission is by invitation only.

Bush to visit Torrance on Wednesday

President Bush will pay a visit to Robinson Helicopter Co. in Torrance on Wednesday as he urges Congress to pass three free trade agreements.

Bush will take a tour of the company, which is the world’s largest manufacturer of civilian helicopters, and deliver remarks to employees.

Robinson Helicopter posted a record year in 2007, largely on the strength of its exports to 55 countries. Much of that success is due to the declining value of the dollar, which makes American exports less expensive to foreign customers.

“We’re an unusual story because we’re not outsourcing everything,” said Kurt Robinson, a company vice president. “I think it’s pretty exciting that we get the president here. It’s fun to show off American manufacturing.”

In his State of the Union Address on Monday night, Bush urged Congress to approve trade deals with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, which would reduce or eliminate tariffs on American-made goods.

“These agreements will level the playing field,” Bush said. “They will give us better access to nearly 100 million customers. And they will support good jobs for the finest workers in the world: those whose products say ‘Made in the USA.’”

Read the article in the South Bay Daily Breeze.

Wadcutters tend to cut nice, clean holes in a paper target. A wadcutter is a bullet specially designed for shooting paper targets, usually at close range and with significantly subsonic velocities under 800 ft/s (244 m/s) such as are found in handgun and airgun competitions.

A wadcutter has a flat or nearly flat front, which acts to cut a very clean hole through the target, making it easier to score and ideally reducing errors in scoring to the favor of the shooter.

Occasionally, a grouping can resemble a celebrity mouse if you orient the target just right:

The spiral rifling gleams in the afternoon sunlight shining through the barrel of my Para Warthog after the weekly shootout and cleanup. The Strike Hold we now use to clean the firearms leaves them sparkling and bright.

The last storm brought the snow level in the San Gabriel Mountains down to about the 3000 foot level. I snapped this shot of some of the mountain peaks as we drove to the gun show today. More on the show later.

As this is being written, the rain has begun again, and will likely add to the snow in the mountains.

Click on the picture to view a panoramic view of the snow-covered San Gabriels.

Today we took a detour down by the ocean on our way for the weekly grocery shopping. It was just after a rain last night and the winds were whipping. We stopped at the L.A. Harbor breakwater by Cabrillo Beach and saw a number of sea birds including sandpipers, Caspian Terns, pelicans and several varieties of seagulls. The gull in the picture is a Heermann’s Gull, characterized by its black legs and feet and its red bill. Click on the picture to see the 1024×768 version in the image viewer.

From Wikipedia:

The Heermann’s Gull (Larus heermanni) is a gull resident in the United States and Mexico. Of the current population of about 150,000 pairs, 90% nest on the island of Isla Rasa off Baja California in the Gulf of California, with smaller colonies as far north as California and as far south as Nayarit. After breeding, birds commonly disperse to central California, and less commonly north as far as British Columbia and south as far as Guatemala. They are usually found near shores or well out to sea, very rarely inland.

MESSENGER, a spacecraft probe sent to explore the innermost planet, imaged the planet in multiple spectra last week. NASA/JHU image technologists re-assembled the image into colors detectable by the human eye. The result is this beautiful rendering of the delicate colors of Mercury. Click the image to enlarge.

By the way, Mars Rover OPPORTUNITY has been on the surface of the red planet for four Earth years as of today. Rover SPIRIT passed the four-year milestone January 3, three weeks ago. Congratulations to the Rover Team.

Here’s the MESSENGER article about this image.

Mercury - in Color!

One week ago, the MESSENGER spacecraft transmitted to Earth the first high-resolution image of Mercury by a spacecraft in over 30 years, since the three Mercury flybys of Mariner 10 in 1974 and 1975. MESSENGER’s Wide Angle Camera (WAC), part of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), is equipped with 11 narrow-band color filters, in contrast to the two visible-light filters and one ultraviolet filter that were on Mariner 10’s vidicon camera. By combining images taken through different filters in the visible and infrared, the MESSENGER data allow Mercury to be seen in a variety of high-resolution color views not previously possible. MESSENGER’s eyes can see far beyond the color range of the human eye, and the colors seen in the accompanying image are somewhat different from what a human would see.

The color image was generated by combining three separate images taken through WAC filters sensitive to light in different wavelengths; filters that transmit light with wavelengths of 1000, 700, and 430 nanometers (infrared, far red, and violet, respectively) were placed in the red, green, and blue channels, respectively, to create this image. The human eye is sensitive across only the wavelength range 400 to 700 nanometers. Creating a false-color image in this way accentuates color differences on Mercury’s surface that cannot be seen in the single-filter, black-and-white image released last week.

Continue reading » The Delicate Colors of Mercury

This is one of the “Hen and Chicks” variety of escheveria, which is a succulent native to the southwest.

Hen and Chicks (eschevaria elegans) is a stemless rosette that produces bright orange and yellow flowers spring through summer. Depending on the climate, they can also bloom again in the fall.

These are either late for fall or early for spring since I took this picture last weekend.

The media have been falsely savaging the economy for so long, that everyone now believes we’re doomed. Today’s mega market dump is the result of self-fulfilling prophecies of economical doomsayers - an outcropping of the hatred of the Republican administration.

Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics, an economics consulting firm serving institutional investors. Don analyzes this effect in Smart Money:

Panic Is Driving Today’s Stock Market

ARE YOU SATISFIED, all you permabears who have been preaching financial Armageddon — for years? Your patience in the face of reality has finally paid off. You’ve talked the American public into outright panic, and so now we’ve got the first real stock market break since the present bull market began in early 2003.

With the S&P 500 making new 52-week lows, having fallen 15% from all-time highs in October, as the Bard of Avon might ask, “There, art thou happy?”

Before I rant any further, let me get one item out of the way. I admit that I’ve been very wrong. I’ve been saying to buy stocks all the way down since the October highs. I was wrong. I repeat: I was wrong. If nothing else I get the satisfaction of being unique. How many stock market pundits do you know who will admit when they’ve been wrong?

So what do you do now if you’ve been wrong right along with me?

The first thing to do is to stop and think. You do not — repeat DO NOT — want to do anything hasty just because you’ve lost money, and you’re scared or angry or both. You’re not going to help by making another mistake by acting precipitously, just for the sake of “doing something.”

Continue reading » Let the Panic Begin

Damsel’s Para Ordinance Warthog still has the occasional hang up; it did it a couple times as she put 100 rounds through it at the range yesterday. At Rob’s suggestion, we purchased some Strike Hold cleaner/dry lubricant. After our weekly shootout, we came home and used Strike Hold for the first time to clean and lube all of the guns.

Image - Strike Hold and some dirty guns - click to enlarge.

I have to say that the cleaning aspect of Strike Hold was phenomenal. Up until this weekend, we have been using solvent to clean off residue and light gun oil to lube. Damsel also tried some of the Para-supplied lubrication. Compared to the solvent, the Strike Hold lifted off most residue and particles with literally half of the effort.

After cleaning, we spritzed a little Strike Hold on the slides and moving mechanisms for lubrication. After wiping off the excess, we put the guns away for another week. Next week, after Damsel takes the Warthog to the range, we will probably have another product report on Strike Hold. We’re hoping to be able to report that the Warthog fired the 100 rounds without any problems.

A product description and a link to where we ordered our Strike Hold follows:

Continue reading » Product Report - Part I

Here’s a recipe suggestion for Kini, who commented yesterday about fixing something other than chili in the crockpot.

This meal was adapted from a Rachael Ray recipe, with Andouille sausage, cubed chicken and shrimp. The original recipe calls to cook some of the ingredients in a skillet, but we toss everything in the pot and cook on low for six or seven hours. Everything cooks in the broth and the results are essentially the same. We don’t toss in the pre-cooked frozen, cleaned shrimp until about 20 minutes before serving time. We prepare the rice per the package instructions and serve the jambalaya over a scoop of rice in a bowl. Oh yeah, I forgot - we always chop up a couple cloves of garlic since the original recipe left it out for some reason.