Syzdekistan

After finding a site to view the launch and marking in on the GPS so we could find it again on Monday morning, we drove east from Titusville across to Merritt Island.
Merritt Island is home to the Kennedy Space Space Center. In most cases where the government needs large tracts of land for safety [...]

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Caroline, Andrew and I stayed in Cocoa, Florida for the the next few days. It was a cheap motel, but perfect for our needs. My first order of business was to find a good spot to view the launch. We drove to Titusville and found a park you can see the launch pads and massive [...]

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Great video of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupting. I suggest watching the video in full screen and watch for some spectacular lightning at the end during a plinian eruption (named after Pliny the Elder’s observations of Vesuvius burying Pompeii). This video was shot for British Channel 4 News. Blogger Dean Armstrong has been in that valley [...]

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Wired has a great gallery of the coolest spiders ever.

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Since there are only four remaining Space Shuttle Launches, I have decided to take my two kids to the next launch scheduled for April 5. I’m guessing seeing a launch will be even cooler than a landing.
There was good news from SpaceFlight Now today:
2055 GMT (4:55 p.m. EDT)
With signs at the entrance of Kennedy [...]

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If you love wildlife, come down to Laughlin for this weekend’s Wings and Wildlife Festival. There’s a bunch of bird watching field trips, and a large number of seminars on a variety of topics. I’m giving a talk on wildlife of the upper Muddy River. The keynote speaker is Ted Floyd who is the editor [...]

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Both these cases were my kids. They’re fine and this was taken back in July.
I avoided getting infected from them but plan on getting the H1N1/09 vaccine as soon as it is available. I had two bad cases of the seasonal flu in the last decade and never want to experience it again. Here [...]

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As, many as you know, today there is a long total solar eclipse in Asia. What you may not know, is eclipses occur in cycles called Saros cycles. So exactly 6585 1/3 days ago (18 years, 11 1/3 days) ago, there was a very similar eclipse that I had the pleasure of seeing.
So on [...]

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As many of you know, I just returned from a family reunion in Texas. We spent some time with some family friends in Austin and met some other friends there at the Mexican free-tailed bat emergence on the Congress street bridge. Our Ausin friends videotaped the amazing bat emergence:

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