Weather Radar

My dedicated weather monitor: An old 2004 Hewlett Packard Pavilion Desktop A744X Intel Pentium 4 running Ubuntu 16.04LTS and hardwired to an internet router. It displays local radar via 10News with three different possible geographical views and two NOAA GOES infrared satellite animations and one still from of the Gulf of Mexico. The page refreshes with updates automatically every five minutes. I leave it up and running all the time. I have another old computer with a sub woofer sound system and big HD monitor for movies and another for browsing and such. A fourth old PC with multiple hard drives serves as an archive and repository for personal data.

WHY I DO NOT EVACUATE OR GO TO A SHELTER DURING HURRICANES:

I am NOT in an evacuation level or zone. Those are determined by the land. My home is 52 feet above sea level. I do not live in a manufactured or mobile home. No matter what evacuation zone all mobile home owners are required to evacuate. My home is CBS - Concrete Block Structure - it was built in 1962 and utilizes steel reinforced concrete blocks with cement poured inside the blocks around the reinforcing rods. My next door neighbor installed galvanized metal hurricane shutters and ruined 10 diamond drill bits making the anchors in the walls. A wooden structure cannot withstand a telephone pole impacting at 100MPH. Mine can. The structure is built on a concrete slab. Nothing can get under it and the slab stays cool. In my neighborhood the houses are very close together. This is further protection from the full force of hurricane winds. Houses on a corner lot do not have this full protection. I am not on a corner. My most vulnerable side is the front facing the street.

Currently my only drawbacks are the lack of hurricane shutters and a wooden roof. The original construction included concrete tiles on the roof. As a consequence the roof is supported by double the number of rafters for the extra weight of the tiles. I had my roof replaced with asphalt shingles in 2003 but the rafters provide the extra protection of a fallen tree. Hurricane anchors for the roof may still be required to keep it from becoming unattached during 150MHP winds. Always a possibility.

Most hurricane shelters DO NOT TAKE PETS. We have two cats. Once you enter a shelter they do not let you leave until the storm is over. I would go crazy with nothing to do and not knowing how my house survived the storm. My friend took his children to a shelter and brilliantly took a tent and set up inside the shelter for privacy.

My telephone is a landline. A real 1960s copper hardwire. When the power goes out and cellphones lose their connection my phone still works. It always has. My neighbors have similar houese and do not evacuate either. We all work together after the storm to help clean up and combine resources to provide each other with necessities. The rest of the time we pretty much leave each other alone. I like that. We are only two miles from the Gulf of Mexico but I am confident we could withstand a cat5 from the west at full force. Should the roof blow off we have a small hallway 3ft x 8ft. in the center of the house where we would literally "hunker down".

If there is a hurricane we will be home. Call us. When the power goes out there is nothing to do.

Biological warfare experiment

In late 1968 the Deseret Test Center conducted a biological warfare experiment at Yeehaw Junction, Florida. 

The experiment was part of Project 112 and was labelled DTC Test 69-75. Stem rust of wheat or Puccinia graminis tritici, was known as "Agent TX" and was being tested to determine its effectiveness against a wheat crop in time of war.

The tests were conducted over a period of one month from October 31 to December 1, 1968. Live agent was sprayed by a U.S. Air Force McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom fighter jet on seven different occasions and dead agent, consisting of spores that were killed by a gaseous mixture of ethylene oxide was sprayed four occasions. The stated objective of Deseret Test Center (DTC) Test 69-75 was to investigate the effectiveness of the F-4/A/B and 45Y-2/TX weapon systems to reduce soviet wheat crop yields in selected geographic areas. The objective was subdivided into other tasks: determine the downwind travel of agent TX released from the A/B 45Y-2 spray tank; estimate the yield reduction and loss of wheat crops attacked by the weapon system; study the effectiveness of killed TX as a simulant for agent TX; and, evaluate the adequacy to predict downwind dosages of TX.^[8] The tests were unknown to local residents and officials until October 2002 when Senator Bill Nelson demanded details of the tests from the U.S. Department of Defense after knowledge of the test was eventually revealed during a larger congressional inquiry of potential effects on participating veterans of chemical and biological testing. Eglin Air Force Base, Avon Park Air Force Range Panama City, Belle Glade, and Fort Pierce, were additional sites in Florida of biological agent production and testing

Verses

Dreams of Star Trek

Will technology ever catch Voyager I?

Dreams of Star Trek.

Launched in September 1977 the Voyager program was a Grand Tour to study the outer planets. The Grand Tour would take advantage of an alignment of the outer planets discovered by Gary Flandro, an aerospace engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1960s. This alignment, which occurs once every 175 years, would occur in the late 1970s and make it possible to use gravitational assists to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto with very little fuel. It took a year and a half to get to Jupiter, another year and a half to get to Saturn. The big planets were used to speed up the spacecraft and after Voyager passed Saturn it was moving over 39,000 mph.

It still is.

August 25, 2012 Voyager I entered interstellar space. It took 45 years just leave the influence of the solar wind. It is now 13 billion miles from Earth but still in the gravitational range of the solar system. Sedna, a dwarf planet discovered in 2003, orbits 90 billion miles from the sun taking 11,400 years to complete. Beyond that is the Oort Cloud, a theoretical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals believed to surround the Sun to as far as somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 AU (3 light years, 19 trillion miles).

So insteller travel is still way beyond our technology. Way beyond. Even "locally" we've discovered Jupiter has deadly radiation belts extending out 7 million kilometers from the planet making sight seeing possible only from a distance. It took Voyager II twelve years to get to Neptune. Interplanetary travel is also way beyond or technology.

Star Trek the dream is only that. Nothing more.

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov