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Tom Petty, along with other artists like King Crimson and Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, have been responsible for many hours of zoned out internet surfing to some of my favorite sites. You've been there - putting on some tunes, firing up your browser, zoning out and surfing away...
Two minutes later, an hour has passed, the album has ended, and you've been around the world and back and hopefully learned something new.

That's just how I started off the other night. I popped Tom Petty's Wildflowers cd into the drive, cranked up the volume, and fired up the browser. I was immediately sucked in by the sweet acoutic guitar sounds of the title track. Click... Click... Click... You Don't Know How It Feels comes up, I hear the sentimental lyrics, and I drift back to my younger days... Click... Click... Click... Another 30 seconds rolls by and half the album's over... Cabin Down Below just nails me with the big fat Telecasters running through tube amps turned up to 11 sound... Click... Click... Click... I finally make it to Wake Up Time ... "Time to open your eyes... And rise and shine..." and...

I'm accosted by the stench of burning pl

Earth had large amounts of liquid water at least 3.85 billion years, possibly 4.3 billion years ago. Zircon samples have been found dating back that far that could only have crystallized in an aqueous medium.

There are some contradictions of do black holes even exist. Black holes have many unsolved theoretical issues that keep them outside of my belief.

Everything what's happening outside the hole sounds quite reasonable. But the stories of the world inside the hole are still quite awkward.

***
*Little man

If memory serves me correct, NASA / Russia have been using vibrations under astronauts' / cosmonauts' feet as therapy for those returning to Earth after long stays in space (ISS / MIR). Granted, this specific usage was to help increase bone mass in the legs, but we may have NASA to thank yet again for another cool discovery.

No one seems to be linking these in any way, but they are quite rare events. There's a fair chance the UK one was also the russian one, but that's at least 3 fireballs within a week. Is that a coincidence?

cool, here and here are some interesting links I found, thanks for the "oak" tip.

SPIE-The International Society for Optical Engineering captured the bulk of Dr. Hoover's presentation in an interview published in their December '96 magazine. This September 1998 article offers pictures of the fossils found, as does a July 1997 article. Another story announces a fossil find in another meteorite that fell on Murchison, Victoria, Australia.

Many people question the science, but it would seem people should question the scientific community which has held its hands over its eyes when faced with the prospect of life on other planets. The community is just now peeking between its fingers and beginning to accept that there might be life elsewhere. In the presentation I attended, Dr. Hoover noted that NASA set up rules in advance of the Viking missions - that any one of the several (4?) tests coming back positive would be indicative of life on the red planet, but once some of the tests came back positive, they decided that all of the tests had to be positive to confirm the existence of life on Mars. Such has been the distinctly non-scientific approach of the community when confronted with the distinct possibility of life on other planets.

More links:

• Evidence of Biomarkers and Microfossils in Ancient Rocks and Meteorites abstract.
• A collection of NASA (and other) news releases pertaining to evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Considering that we could be fried by a white dwarf accumilating mass from a nearby star, causing it to go supernova, I think a continent is the least we could lose:

http://www.cosmiverse.com/news/space/space05230202 .html
http://www.dispatch.co.za/2002/05/24/features/DU CK .HTM

Ever put a bug in a microwave? MUAH!

...here

What are the chances of this hitting somebody? People say the chances are slim to nill, and just recently a significant piece of equipment came down and I didn't here about anyone getting hit. But a couple years ago NASA printed an article that the odds of someone being hit by the falling Iridium debris were about 1 in 250. By my count, this is the third potentially hazardous satellite entry in as many years, leading me to believe that eventually, someone will be hit.

Unlike that 'distance learning' and other quackery, unconscious learning is possible. The brain can so some very wacky things that you aren't always fully aware of.

Man, I thought I read this article on a Slashdot link a few weeks ago, but I guess I read it somewhere else.

Black Holes Disputed

Scarpace writes: "Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and at the University of South Carolina in Columbia have proposed the existence of "gravastars" which are bubbles of superdense matter. If they are correct, the idea of a black hole with a singularity at the center may be just a fantasy.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Yes, and depending on which web site you visit, the shuttle has launched up to seven of these tdrs satellites (but I don't know if any were of the same weight as this one). If it can safely launch one, then I have to assume that (ignoring fuel leaks) it can land with one.

Given the following results of flipping a coin, what is the probability that the next flip will be a H:

HHHHHHHHHHH

Very few shift workers actually get enough sleep at night^H^H^H^H^Hday ;-); they have to fight their own circadian rhythms and the drudgery that most shift work comprises.

While to the best of my knowledge there haven't been any studies on shift workers in particular, there have been numerous studies in Scandinavia, where the high latitude and short winter days mimic many of the conditions shift workers experience. It's an interesting question to explore, while the human race self-immolates as it slowly descends into a new corporate dark age.