This is enough to make you really appreciate good quiet neighbors. Galactic neighbors, that is. Imagine something as energetic as a jet of radiation being shot out from a supermassive black hole, one of those huge monsters with the mass of as much as millions of stars. The energy involved must be enormous and even over those distances is very likely deadly to any life forms in the way.
OK. I admit it. I really hope that our neighbor has a bit of bad luck. Of course I’m not alone. There are some planetary scientists and astronomers who agree with me. Of course the neighbor is millions of miles away, our planetary neighbor Mars. If you haven’t heard about this one, Mars has a chance for a visitor next month. Normally one would feel bad about wishing something “bad” on a neighbor but if this were to happen it would be the first asteroid impact on a rocky planet that we could watch, complete with orbiter and probes on the planet. If it does happen there should be amazing images and data next month.
The title of this blog obviously (or not) comes from the James Carville exhortation to the Clinton campaign in 1992. As surely as that message was important for that political campaign I think that remembering that it’s not the 1950s or any other decade/century in the past any longer at a deep level of understanding is important to discourse on every subject in the public sphere. People in their 50s or above who fail to understand why the truths they grew up with just don’t necessarily apply any longer irritate me no end.
As for me, I’m just a semi-elderly (for what I do) semi-geek who’s worked with PCs for 25 years while being an active science fiction fan as well. What do I mean by work with? Put them together. Keep them going. Program them. Network them. Explain them to other people. Troubleshoot them. Basically anything that has to do with a PC.
That having been said computer science was my third college major with the first two being chemistry and education with a speech and drama emphasis and english minor. What can I say? I also took classes that advisors frowned upon for not relating directly to my major(s). But they were interesting. A counselor once looked at my transcript and commented that most people are either good at the arts and social sciences or the hard sciences but my record looked pretty evenly balanced. Yep. When I retire I think I want to be a college student.
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