Libertarian Longhorns

One of the very few student groups I have chosen to associate with is the Libertarian Longhorns. Very, very recently we have started a blog which I will assist in contributing to. This probably means that there will be fewer posts of a libertarian nature in my personal blog. We'll just have to see, perhaps I'll cross-post everything I write...

In the meantime, add the RSS feed for the Libertarian Longhorns blog to your feed reader and keep up with what's going on!

How the Death Star Works...

The Galactic Empire tells all in a HowStuffWorks Exclusive!!!

But Timothy McSweeney is still skeptical about the trash compactor.

Ron Paul loves homeschoolers...

"Dr. Ron Paul has been a consistent supporter of home schooling and
educational freedom while serving in Congress. He has introduced
several pieces of legislation which would return to parents the freedom
to teach their children at home and in the manner they think best.
Additionally, he has introduced bills that would provide tax credits
for American families to help pay for education expenses. As President,
Ron Paul will continue to fight for the rights of parents to provide
their children with the knowledge and values they believe are most
important."

Congressman Ron Paul on Home Schooling

This is HUGE

This is a major breakthrough, although I doubt we will see any commercial items using this technology for a number of years. Wireless power would have a MAJOR effect upon electronics as we know it.

The Power of Induction: Science News Online, July 21, 2007
Excerpt:

When Soljacic first presented the principle, it was unproved. All he could show were his calculations. "I expected that some people would think I was a crackpot," says Soljacic, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "This was pretty far out."



Perhaps it also didn't help that the participants at the symposium—a celebration of the 90th birthday of Charles Townes, who pioneered the laser in the 1950s—included 18 Nobel prize winners and dozens of other luminaries. Much to Soljacic's relief, he sold the scientists on his presentation.



A year and a half later, a bulb lit up in an MIT lab—unplugged. Soljacic and his collaborators had demonstrated a new way of coaxing magnetic fields into transferring power over a distance of several meters without dispersing as electromagnetic waves. The demonstration ushered in a technology that might eventually become as pervasive as the gadgets it could power. Laptops, cell phones, iPods, and digital cameras might someday recharge without power cords. With the proliferation of wireless electronics, perhaps it was just a matter of time before power transmission would go wireless, too.



The device that Soljacic and his collaborators put together had a disarming simplicity. On one side of the room, hanging from the ceiling, was a ring-shaped electrical circuit, about half a meter across, plugged into the wall. Hanging adjacent to the circuit, but with no physical connection to it, was a slightly larger copper coil looking like an oversize mattress spring. A few meters away hung a similar system with an ordinary lightbulb attached to the circuit. When the physicists sent power through the first circuit, the bulb lit up.



As expected, some energy was lost on its way to the lightbulb. However, a surprising amount reached its destination, the team reports in the July 6 Science. "The efficiency was 40 percent at the biggest distance we probed [more than 2 meters]," Soljacic says. At shorter distances, the efficiency was much higher.

The coils of this demonstration device would be too big to fit inside a laptop, let alone a cell phone. But this was only the first and simplest of several prototypes that the physicists have in mind. More tests are to come. The MIT team and other physicists say that in principle they see no obstacle to making such devices more compact and more efficient.

Farscape is back?

Is Farscape on another ticket to comeback? Maybe there is hope...

JUL. 23, 2007 | News | SCI FI Weekly

Farscape Revived On SCIFI.COM

SCI FI Channel will revive its popular original show Farscape as a Web-based series of short films on SCIFI.COM's SCI FI Pulse broadband network, part of a slate of new original online programming.

SCI FI has ordered 10 webisodes of Farscape, to be produced by Brian Henson and Robert Halmi Jr. and produced by The Jim Henson Co., in association with RHI Entertainment.

The series will expand the Farscape universe, but the network had no announcements on casting or premiere dates.

Other new online series include SCI FI Tech, a companion to SCIFI.COM's SCI FI Tech blog, and Invent This!, which sets out to find the world's quirkiest inventions and get into the minds of the inventors behind each creation.