New Hampshire is showing the signs of our impending primary. People brave the sub-zero temperatures and stand on busy corners waving Dean For America signs emphatically, while other corners are quiet and unmanned except for a Kerry or Clark poster.
Until this morning, that is. Zeke and I were out running errands and when we got to town a little grassy island at an intersection was flooded with Lieberman posters: a dozen in a 20x20 foot space. "Wow," I thought, "there must be an enthusiastic local group." Seemed like every corner after that was jammed with the same poster side-by-side with little regard for placement.
A few minutes later a pickup truck blasted by with a bed full of Lieberman poster materials. A few flew out from a gust of wind, the truck pulled over, someone got out and readjusted the cargo, and they drove off without picking up the posters laying on the highway.
What surprised me was that the truck had New York license plates. Here I thought local supporters were doing some kind of campaign blitz and instead it's a truck from out of state. For all I know they aren't even supporters, just a rent-a-blitz team with a poster planting quota to meet.
BTW, The Command Post has candidate news, schedules, and even blog feeds. Looks like a great resource.
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email thisRoland points to this article about the upcoming Gravity Probe mission put together by Stanford University and NASA to test Einstein's general theory of relativity.
The equipment for this measurement is pretty amazing. At its heart are four precision cryogenic electrostatically suspended gyroscopes: nearly perfect quartz spheres, finely coated in a super-conducting material.
However, imperfections of the gyroscope rotor spheres such as asphericity and inhomogeneity also cause drifts due to classical torques. It is therefore essential that these unwanted drifts be small compared to the effects to be measured. From an analysis of the electrical torques on the rotors it was determined that in order to reduce the drift rate due to asphericity to less than 0.0001 arc sec per year, the rotor spheres have to be polished to 1 micro inch (25 nm) or to deviate no more than ± 0.5 micro inch (12 nm) from a perfect sphere. - Precision Spheres for Gravity Probe B Experiment
These Technical Papers cover the gyroscopes, SQUIDS, cryogenic telescopes, magnetic shielding, suspension mechanisms, and of course the spaceship which houses them.
Check out the Volkswagenball sculpture over at the University of Vermont's Fleming Museum. [thanks SimianDesign]
For those of you outside the frozen state of New Hampshire here's a link to our local newspaper The Valley News so you, too can follow the New Hampshire Primary.
It was sad to read in the paper that Captain Kangaroo, Bob Keeshan, died this weekend at the age of 76.