Revenge

I don’t know if this is for real, but … I sure like the concept!

Tired of receiving mounds of unsolicited letters and offers in the mail? Want to fight back? Want to get rid of that old tire in your garage that the garbage man won’t take? Then read on…

If you’re curious why this document was developed, it was due to the hundreds of unsolicited letters sent to me by a very annoying company called MCI. They love to mail people unsolicited letters 1-2 times per week despite requesting to be taken off their mailing lists. Well, here’s a completely LEGAL way to fight back against idiots like MCI. You can mail their junk back to them for FREE using their own postage-paid envelopes. The only catch is that it will be attached to 50 lbs of additional junk you’ve gathered from around your house (rocks, bricks, old shingles, etc.). This works, so please read on…

Read the whole thing here.

Doo Loo

Imagine this: you’re an intrepid Antarctic explorer, camping with your team on a long expedition of scientific discovery on the vast frozen ice plains. The flat, completely exposed frozen ice plains. When you need to take care of certain bodily functions normally not mentioned in public, and normally conducted in private, just how do you accomplish this? And add to that the unbelievably cold environment — what on earth do you do when you need to poo?

Simon has the answers:

From 75 Degrees South:

No discussion of Antarctic camping would be complete without some mention of the toilet facilities! For peeing we use the simple but effective pee flag, which is just a marker to indicate where to go. This keeps all the waste in one place and ensures we don’t contaminate the snow collection point (where we get our fresh water from). This is particularly important if it is a site which we use year after year. The girls can make full use of the pee flag too thanks to an invention called a pee funnel (I won’t go into any more detail on that one).

Although the pee flag is fine most of the time, when it’s four in the morning and blowing a gale outside it takes a lot of motivation to get out of that nice warm sleeping bag and put on all your outside gear just to relieve yourself. For moments like that you need a pee bottle! Yes, it’s just like it sounds - a wide-topped, screw cap flask, preferably well labelled to distinguish it from your water bottle. Although the use of pee bottles may be shunned by purists (and indeed hygienists), I challenge anyone to sit through a four day Antarctic gale and not be singing their praises by the end of it.

Of course when you spend several days or more in the field eventually you are going to need to go for a poo (although some people make a valiant effort to avoid this - I believe the record is 5 days). To make that a more comfortable experience we put together a “doo loo”. Upon arrival each pair of skidoos has a tarpaulin thrown over them and tied down to prevent snow from getting into the engines. One of these pairs is assigned as the doo loo and is set up slightly differently. The skidoos are parked a bit further apart than normal so that a wooden board with a hole in it can be fitted between the two skidoos. A deep pit in the snow is dug below the board. The tarp is secured with snow on three sides and at the front it is held down by a couple of Jerry cans of fuel. There you have it - your own windproof, private toilet cubicle. Because it’s so cold it doesn’t actually smell as bad as you might imagine and you can even fit a toilet roll neatly on the skidoo handlebars - luxury!

You should add his site to your regular reading — there’s always some fascinating tidbit up there…

Sounds of Saturn

In honor of Halloween, the JPL folks have put up a feature called “The Eerie, Bizarre Sounds of the Saturnian System”. You can listen to one of them here. The graphic at right is a spectragraph over time — a “sonic fingerprint” that’s interesting to examine as you listen to the sound…

From the Cassini-Huygens web site:

Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions, which have been monitored by the Cassini spacecraft. The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth’s northern and southern lights. This is an audio file of Saturn’s radio emissions.

The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these radio emissions in April 2002, when Cassini was 374 million kilometers (234 million miles) from the planet, using the Cassini radio and plasma wave science instrument. The instrument has now provided the first high resolution observations of these emissions, showing that show an amazing array of variations in frequency and time. In this example, it appears as though the three rising tones are launched from the more slowly varying narrowband emission near the bottom of this display. If this is the case, it represents a very complicated interaction between waves in Saturn’s radio source region, but one which has also been observed at Earth.

Time on this recording has been compressed such that 13 seconds corresponds to 27 seconds. Since the frequencies of these emissions are well above the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a factor of 260.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radio and plasma wave science team is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.

I think these guys are having way too much fun <smile>. But they deserve it — the Cassini-Huygens mission is already a spectacular success…