Posted on Mar 18, 2021 by Bob Wickizer in Science and Technology Blog |
Warning: Reading this may cause you to be exposed to college-level statistics concepts.
Life consists of assessing the risks of any situation and making a decision about what to do. It doesn’t matter whether you are going to the grocery store, planning a political campaign, or designing a mission to Mars. There are no risk-free alternatives in life.
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Posted on Mar 10, 2021 by Bob Wickizer in Science and Technology Blog |
Modern two-legged primates of the species, homo sapiens, pride ourselves on our special place on the planet. After all, we are God’s chosen. It is true that when our ancestors traversed the Bering Sea ice bridge during an ice age, our entrance into the vast North American continent enabled us to hunt all of the large animal species to extinction. More recently, in the epic tale of Gilgamesh in today’s southern Iraq. Gilgamesh defies the gods by cutting down the forest. In return, the gods say they will curse the land with fire and drought. The Sumerians who created the story most likely deforested the land causing widespread desertification. By 2000 BC, soil erosion and salt buildup devastated agriculture. This forced the Sumerians to move north to Babylonia and Assyria as the first “climate refugees” in history. The first laws ever written to protect forests were decreed in the new Sumerian village of Ur.
Posted on Mar 3, 2021 by Bob Wickizer in Science and Technology Blog |
Huh? In the next few days, a probe named “Hope” built by the United Arab Emirates will touch down on Mars, a day later a Chinese rover, Tianwen-1, will touch down, and the following week, NASA’s “Perseverance” rover will touch down. If successful, Perseverance will be our nation’s fifth robotic vehicle to traverse Martian soil since 1997. Two earlier missions in 1971 failed.
Why should we go to another planet? Why spend $3B on spacecraft when we could feed the poor here or give more tax breaks to billionaires? We’ve already been there four times, what more can we learn?
Posted on Jan 20, 2021 by Bob Wickizer in Science and Technology Blog |
In a sermon January 3, I mentioned some statistics about children in the United States including childhood obesity which is, sadly, a rapidly growing problem. Later that week, a friend who heard the sermon and who is also a pediatrician mentioned an academic study about childhood obesity. I was aware of the general results of this study, but my friend went into detail.
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Posted on Jan 13, 2021 by Bob Wickizer in Science and Technology Blog |
In the wake of this week’s reprehensible political violence, I needed a side trip off the planet. No, I haven’t gone to the pearly gates, but I recently became aware of Mexican theoretical physicist, Miguel Alcubierre Moya[1], who has solved a specific case for Einstein’s field equations in general relativity to develop a serious proposal for matter traveling Faster Than Light (FTL).
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Posted on Dec 23, 2020 by Bob Wickizer in Science and Technology Blog |
This quotation from the book of Numbers was suggested by the daughter of the Patent Office Commissioner in 1844 as the first message sent by Morse code from a demonstration before the US Congress to a railroad station in Baltimore. The quote is my question in revisiting the tired old debate about climate change. Is the observable warming of the planet “anthropogenic” (human-caused) or “natural”?
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Posted on Dec 16, 2020 by Bob Wickizer in Science and Technology Blog, Uncategorized |
We hear these words of Isaiah in the Messiah and other church hymns this time of year. We are to clear a path in our souls for God’s return to us in judgement. But did you know we are discovering highways in space?
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Posted on Dec 9, 2020 by Bob Wickizer in Science and Technology Blog |
The National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) is an observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico and funded by the US National Science Foundation and NASA. Built in 1963, the 1,000 foot diameter radio telescope was the largest single-aperture telescope ever built until China built a 50% larger scope in 2016. Recently steel support cables holding the telescope 500 feet above a natural sinkhole began to snap. This week, the entire structure collapsed. Thankfully, no one was injured.
Posted on Nov 25, 2020 by Bob Wickizer in Science and Technology Blog |
These items were gleaned from a recent Sierra Club magazine. I offer them to you to help brighten your day and to show how real changes in policies, practices and priorities are often driven by business decisions more than politics.
Posted on Nov 18, 2020 by Bob Wickizer in Science and Technology Blog |
There are a variety of truly natural oscillations in our planet’s orbital journey that lead to periodic variations in global weather or climate Change. We can observe these true “natural variations” in different geological records. In fact, this year and for the near future, we should be experiencing a downward cooling trend in temperatures instead of the relentless upward trends caused by anthropogenic warming. Let’s take a look at global conditions during the last “Glacial Maximum” period which lasted from 23,000 years ago to 19,000 years ago. Yes, these natural variations last a long time compared to the span of a human lifetime, but from a geological perspective, such cycles and eras are the blink of an eye.
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