Ambiguous Ramblings of a Life in total immersion

Something new!

Its that time!

Ask The Deryck!

Ok, So we got some emails in and here they are. I was impressed with the response,

You can ask the Deryck At Thederyck@att.net

Amy in Oklahoma City asks:

Deryck, What were your favorite science projects in elementary school?

Well, I have Three Favourites, My most favourite would have to be measuring the length of Television waves using a bit of cardboard covered in foil and a yard stick. i got accurate measurements of of each of the major news stations (confirmed by telephoning them) and "presented my findings".other years i did projects on phototropism and osmosis

Walter in Tulsa Asks:

What exactly is the difference between Hard Scifi and Soft scifi? i can't seem to find a decent answer on this?

This is actually a good question and no longer a topical one, since in my opinion,this question relates more to the classical science fiction literature prior to the cold war. Hard science Fiction in a literary sense, focuses on scientific detail especially in the sciences of Astronomy, Physics, And so on. Soft Science Fiction focuses on primarily on other fields like Psychology, or Anthropology for that matter.

Good writers to look at for Hard Science Fiction would be Asimov, the Strugaskys, Aurthur C. Clarke, And Stephen Baxter/
For Soft Science Fiction, i would recommend Ray Bradbury or Philip K. Dick.

Shawn (no location provided) asks:

I want to due the geeky wine charms for a party i wanna throw for my bud's birthday but my local radio shack only carries cell phones and laptops?

I had to research online for this but i found alot of electronics components retailers online with google, i recommended shopping around there.

Vaughn in Norman Writes:

Mr. Deryck, will you help me complete my biology homework?

well it depends, if you need help with dissection, then i would love to help out, if you just want me to answer your questions, then no, that is what your overpriced textbook is for :)

Cassidy in Oklahoma City writes:

Deryck, we met at sauced a few months ago and had a conversation about Mars, you mentioned that you have you name on a CD that was sent with the Mars Phoenix Lander, how did you manage that?

I am Glad to hear from you and thanks for checking out the site, even though it is still in its infancy, its easy! all you have to do is be a member of the Planetary Society! a leading space advocacy group founded in part by Dr. Carl Sagan. Since in your email you provided you address, i took the leberty of sending you a one years gift membership! to renew its only 25 dollars after this year, you should get a packet from them shortly, on a related note, when i was younger my parents bought a star and had it named after me. this used to be a novelty gift back in the day, i think you can still do it actually, but dont try to take out aline of credit on it, the banker wil look at you like your crazy!

As soon as the pictures are ready, i shall be posting how to make your own non newtonian fluid, as well as add some new arcticles about exciting new research being done in several fields, i just need to peruse a few science journals.

Coming up next week

New NASA updates!
How to make your own non-newtonian Fluid
And answers to emails at "ask The Deryck"

Profiles. A new Monthly article.

Dr. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (Russian: Андре́й Дми́триевич Са́харов) (May 21, 1921 – December 14, 1989) was an eminent Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and reforms in the Soviet Union. Life and career Sakharov was born in Moscow in 1921. His father was Dmitri Ivanovich Sakharov, a private school physics teacher and an amateur pianist. Dmitri's grandfather Ivan had been a prominent lawyer in Tsarist Russia who had displayed respect for social awareness and humanist principles (including advocating the abolition of capital punishment) that would later influence his grandson. Sakharov's mother was Ekaterina Alekseyevna Sakharova (née Sofiano and of Greek ancestry). His parents and his paternal grandmother, Maria Petrovna, largely shaped Sakharov's personality. Although his paternal great-grandfather had been a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church, and his pious mother did have him baptised, his father was an atheist and religion did not play an important role in his life, though he did believe that a non-scientific "guiding principle" governed the universe and human life. Sakharov entered Moscow State University in 1938. Following evacuation in 1941 during the Great Patriotic War, he graduated in Aşgabat, in today's Turkmenistan. He was then assigned laboratory work in Ulyanovsk. During this period, in 1943, he married Klavdia Alekseyevna Vikhireva, with whom he raised two daughters and a son before she died in 1969. He returned to Moscow in 1945 to study at the Theoretical Department of FIAN (the Physical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences). He received his Ph.D. in 1947. On World War II's end, Sakharov researched cosmic rays. In mid-1948 he participated in the Soviet atomic bomb project under Igor Kurchatov. The first Soviet atomic device was tested on August 29, 1949. After moving to Sarov in 1950, Sakharov played a key role in the next stage, the development of the hydrogen bomb. The first Soviet fusion device was tested on August 12, 1953, using what was called the Sloika design. In 1953, he received his D.Sc. degree, was elected a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and was awarded the first of his three Hero of Socialist Labor titles. Sakharov continued to work at Sarov, playing a key role in the development of the first megaton-range Soviet hydrogen bomb using a design known as "Sakharov's Third Idea" in Russia and the Teller-Ulam design in the United States. It was first tested as RDS-37 in 1955. A larger variation of the same design which Sakharov worked on was the 50MT Tsar Bomba of October 1961, which was the most powerful device ever exploded. He also proposed an idea for a controlled nuclear fusion reactor, the tokamak, which is still the basis for the majority of work in the area. Sakharov, in association with Igor Tamm, proposed confining extremely hot ionized plasma by torus shaped magnetic fields for controlling thermonuclear fusion that led to the development of the tokamak device. Sakharov proposed the idea of induced gravity as an alternative theory of quantum gravity. Turn to activism From the late-1950s Sakharov had become concerned about the moral and political implications of his work. Politically active during the 1960s, Sakharov was against nuclear proliferation. Pushing for the end of atmospheric tests, he played a role in the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, signed in Moscow. In 1965 he returned to fundamental science and began working on cosmology but continued to oppose political discrimination. The major turn in Sakharov’s political evolution started in 1967, when anti-ballistic missile defense became a key issue in US–Soviet relations. In a secret detailed letter to the Soviet leadership of July 21, 1967, Sakharov explains the need to "take the Americans at their word" and accept their proposal "for a bilateral rejection by the USA and the Soviet Union of the development of antiballistic missile defense", because otherwise an arms race in this new technology would increase the likelihood of nuclear war. He also asked permission to publish his manuscript (which accompanied the letter) in a newspaper to explain the dangers posed by this kind of defense. The government ignored his letter and refused to let him initiate a public discussion of ABM in the Soviet press. In May 1968 he completed an essay, Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, where the anti-ballistic missile defense is featured as a major threat of world nuclear war. After this essay was circulated in samizdat and then published outside the Soviet Union, Sakharov was banned from all military-related research and Sakharov returned to FIAN to study fundamental theoretical physics. In 1970 he, along with Valery Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov, was one of the founders of the Moscow Human Rights Committee and came under increasing pressure from the regime. He married a fellow human rights activist, Yelena Bonner, in 1972. In 1973 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and in 1974 was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. He was awarded the Nobel prize in 1975, although he was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union to collect it. His wife read his speech at the acceptance ceremony. Sakharov's ideas on social development led him to put forward the principle of human rights as a new basis of all politics. In his works he declared that "the principle 'what is not prohibited is allowed' should be understood literally", denying the importance and validity of all moral or cultural norms not codified in the laws. He was arrested on January 22, 1980, following his public protests against the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and was sent to internal exile in the city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, a closed city that was inaccessible to foreign observers. Between 1980 to 1986, Sakharov was kept under tight Soviet police surveillance. In his memoirs he mentions that their apartment in Gorky was repeatedly subjected to searches and heists. He remained isolated but unrepentant until December 1986 when he was allowed to return to Moscow as Mikhail Gorbachev initiated the policies of perestroika and glasnost. In 1988 Sakharov was given the International Humanist Award by the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He helped to initiate the first independent legal political organizations and became prominent in the Soviet Union's growing political opposition. In March 1989, Sakharov was elected to the new parliament, the All-Union Congress of People's Deputies and co-led the democratic opposition. Soon after 9:00 pm on December 14, 1989, Sakharov went to his study to take a nap before preparing an important speech he was to deliver the next day in the Congress. His wife went to wake him at 11:00 pm as he had requested but she found Sakharov dead on the floor. A sudden heart attack had taken his life at the age of 68. He was interred in the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery in Moscow. Influence The Sakharov Prize, established in 1988 and awarded annually by the European Parliament for people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms, was named in his honor. An Andrei Sakharov prize is also to be awarded by the American Physical Society every second year from 2006, "to recognize outstanding leadership and/or achievements of scientists in upholding human rights". Andrei Sakharov Archives The Andrei Sakharov Archives and Human Rights Center, established at Brandeis University in 1993, are now housed at Harvard University. The documents from that archive were published by the Yale University Press in 2005. These documents are available online in English and in Russian. Most of documents of the archive are letters from the head of the KGB to the Central Committee about activity of dissidents and recommendations about the interpretation in newspapers. The letters cover the period from 1968 to 1991 (Brezhnev stagnation). The documents characterize not only the Sacharov's activity, but that of other dissidents, as well as that of highest-position communists, and the KGB. No Russian equivalent of the KGB archive is available. Trivia Sakharov and the "Sakharov Drive" were mentioned in Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2010: Odyssey Two. The drive is not described in detail and the principles on which it is based (presumably imagined by Sakharov) are not given. Sakharov is mentioned briefly in Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake. One of the Enterprise-D shuttlecraft in Star Trek: The Next Generation is named for him. During the 1980s, the block of 16th Street NW between L and M streets in front of the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. was renamed "Andrei Sakharov Place" as a form of protest against his 1980 arrest and detention.

Synechdoche

"The Deryck feeds my mind with stimulating conversations, my heart with provoking creative medias and my body with delicious homegrown foods. It is very seldom that you meet a man so wholly good for you."

~~~~~~~Alex Reed

QUOTES PAGE HAS BEEN UPDATED

Geek Entertaining

Volume One: The Cocktail Party

Did you know? you can spend less than ten dollars at your local Electronics store and make your own geeky wine charms?

Resisters Obtained from my local Radio Shack
Just Bend the ends with some fine tipped Needle nosed pliers (easily obtained at your local scrapbooking store, or even Lowes)
Voila! Decorative, and Geeky Wine charms. Next i want to try Solder small LED's around the stem attached to a button battery, they should light up at least long enough for the party to make its way....... D

Anyone out there know about this?

if this lock is for real? where to buy it? still working on holiday entertaining guide. new years recycling guide. and NOW more news from NASA.

Apple Pie Anyone?

Coming in December, More NASA updates, Responses to "ask the deryck" And Geeky holiday decorating

Biometrics for your home? yes!

I asked Jon, my Locksmith and friend about these, he agrees that it is a great system as far as the biometrics are concerned, nonetheless he states that Kwikset is the most common lock and key system in America, so the chances of one key fitting another lock are close to 1 in 20, so if you can bypass the biometrics in the lock with a working key, the science behind the lock becomes useless. I am also curious how long the batteries in this biometric lock last, and does it have to be completely reprogrammed if they go dead? ill stick to my Abloy locks with patented key control and pick resistant locking mechanism. You can read more about Abloy Protec Locks for rental properties, home, businesses and just about everything else here