Utilizing the Underwater Aquarius Laboratory, a multinational team from the US, Japan, and Canada is set to embark for 10 days on a series of undersea training to explore some of the problems associated with deep space travel and near earth asteroid (NEA) exploration.  As asteroids have extremely low gravity, the team will test tethering systems used to traverse their varied terrain. 

The facility is unique in its ability to simulate space conditions, and has been utilized by both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration since 1993.

Individual members of the team include Shannon Walker, who has worked aboard the international space station, Steven Squyres, who served as principle investigator for the Mars rover project, and astronauts Jack Talacek and Nate Bender, of the University of North Carolina Wilmington.  The university is responsible for the maintenance of the Aquarius facility.

[Nasa via PhysOrg]

Photo credit: NASA

For many people, making decisions is HARD.

Get out of bed today?  Coffee or Tea?  Mac or PC other crap operating systems?  Blue… no… Yellooooooooow!

For these people, and apparently those who like being told what they like (abused husbands come to mind) Hunch.com springs to life.  Utilizing what so many people love about Facebook (answering questions on silly quizzes) and a few catchy logos, Hunch deems that apparently I’d love The Daily Show (correct) Colbert Report (subsequently obvious… but correct) Wired Magazine (who doesn’t?) and The New Yorker.

Zing! Hunch… you missed that one.  I even subscribed to TNY by accidentally clicking on it while renewing my Wired subscription and gave it an honest try for 4 issues before realizing that only about 5% of the staggering amount of text it puts out actually interests/amuses me.

Three for Four isn’t too terrible if we’re playing baseball of course, but then again it’s also not very compelling that 9 out of 10 of the recommendations stem from the same network or publisher.

Is hunch just a marketing tool for NBC Universal? or instead is it to be the new oracle for the masses of consumerism?

Then again I have yet to read Infinite Jest… I’ve heard it’s good…

[Hunch.com]

To those who don’t watch the news, there was quite the hub-bub recently about my ship’s recent involvement with multi-national exercises. While it’s nice to have an influx of emails, when most contain articles talking about Kim Jong Il’s promises to nuke us all back to God, it does cause some time for introspection.

Luckily, as always, threats were idle and hardly taken seriously, but the other bonus that the GW crew, including myself, got some well deserved shore leave. Being my second time in Busan, I knew a little of what to expect, but while we enjoyed many food options (Kim chi is a personal favorite of the local traditions), Busan is an unfortunate illustration of how travel really isn’t travel when it’s with the Navy.

In spite of the Navy’s best efforts on “operation security”, typically an upcoming port of call knows of our arrival well in advance. Advance enough to raise hotel prices, advance enough to set up many colorful (misspelled) welcome banners, but more than anything time to prepare for our drunken stupidity. While the days of being expected to raise hell are largely over (international news media largely to thank), those that want to find compensated companionship, or very cheap and terrible liquor, can find both in copious quantities.

A perfect example is Texas Street. This street is typically a local nightlife district with many small bootleg shops, restaurants, and drinkeries. Queue the influx of young men with bloated pockets, and you’ve got a recipe for more than a bit of nonsense. For starters, expect to pay triple the normal cost for just about everything. A great example is when we went to a small Chinese restaurant on Texas St. and ordered a modest meal for three people. Each of us paid equivalent of $30 U.S. While a nice meal at a nice restaurant in the states wouldn’t make this out of the question, for dinner the same day we went to a formal sit down Italian restaurant right on the beach, and paid $20 U.S. for a 4 course dinner. The difference is a simple and painful lesson in economics, but more than anything shows how ridiculous the experience can be for Sailors vs. travelers.

Another prime example is the classic cab driver scam. By law, all cabbies in Busan are required to use their meters to allow the passengers to know exactly when they have to stop the car and get out, if need be. This law exists in Japan, Singapore, and a handful of other countries our ship has visited over the past year. The beauty is, if you don’t start your meter, and your passengers are uninformed, drunk, or American, it means that your company thinks you are looking for a fare, and they get to pocket all of the cash themselves. For a 20 minute cab ride from an honest driver, we paid $11 US.  Two hours later, a cab driver tried to charge us $90. Opportunistic scams like this are so easy, but when you’re part of a huge collective of drunken apes, refusing to pay can cause more trouble than it solves.  Lets be frank here as well, no one wants to have legal troubles in Korea.

As expected, all drills following our port visit when by without any real threat to safety, and so we continue on our dizzied course through the Pacific through the Summer.

To say the I enjoyed Inception would be a gross insult to the word enjoyed.  Critics have largely hailed it, and only good adjectives pop into my mind.  Namely: awesome.  If you haven’t seen the movie, drop what you’re doing, walk out of your office, leave that pot on the stove, abandon your little league game, put down the gun, get dressed and go see it.

The movie imposes a level of tension that isn’t quite panic, but suspense enough to make you truly not want to take a bathroom break.  Layers upon layers of complexity will confuse a few mainstream dullards, but the genius of the plot was enough to make me almost have a primal need to watch it again to clarify a few points. That, and it truly is a visual masterpiece that proves beyond any doubt that 3D is both unnecessary and unwanted.

Inceptionassumes that in the apparently very very near future (or present for that matter), there exists a way for people to manipulate someone’s dreamscape in order to steal information (of course, created by the army). The protagonist is given the previously impossible task of not stealing, but planting an idea. 

“What’s the most resilient parasite? An Idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules”

In the spirit of this, lets assume that inception is possible.  Furthermore, let us suppose that I am the one supplanting ideas.  Here are a few top priorities:

Nicholas Cage:  My hair is truly terrible.

Gandalf as he leaves Rivendell:  Moria is a bad idea.

Kristen Bell:  I am madly in love with Nick Bender

Kim Jong Ill:  This ‘mess with the South’ business is tiring…

Seth Rogan:  I should stop eating cupcakes… and making movies.

Kate Gosselin:  I should stop making babies.

Either of the Wayons Brothers: My work has never been funny.

Rod Blagojevich:   I should confess and get this over with.

Glenn Beck:  I’m a terrible human being, and need to stop. Everything.

Any teen girl in America: Team Edward will fail. 

Steve Jobs: I should eat… anything…

Lindsay Lohan:  I actually do deserve this.

Kermit: I really could do better.

Julius Caesar: I should stay out of Rome… indefinitely.

City of Oakland: No one’s fooled anymore, we might as well drop the “medical” stipulation.

Arthas Menethil: On second thought, that sword looks like bad news.

Nick Bender: Go to sleep already.

Kristen Bell:  I actually do seriously love Nick Bender

So I don’t know why, but every so often someone feels the need to inform me that I don’t write enough on my blog.  I struggle with this for several reasons.  Namely:

1. No one reads my blog, the fact that people know that I rarely write on my blog is probably just a lucky guess… or digital psychic ability.

2. Just because I spent most of my days doctoring photos of 1920s actors and putting them up on dating sites to get attention for alter egos does NOT mean I have amazing amounts of spare time.  I also have to consider pretending to read, thinking about working out and then not, and drinking red bull then complaining about being tired the next day.  My days are packed.

3.  I live on a boat right now… boats do the equivalent of one thing and one thing only… cookies.  When I say cookies I don’t mean chocolate chip… if it did it’d be the best thing ever invented.  People would run to the shore every time we pulled in like rabid kids running to the ice cream truck… except we have guns.  I’m talking about sea cookies, or “sookies”.  Imagine if you will you’re in a car with your friends and it’d the middle of winter and you’re outside Fred Meyer and your 1982 Carola that has the equivalent of a go-cart engine and you yank up on your e-brake going 40 mph for fun.  Got it?  OK now imagine your go-cart eingine is a nuclear reactor and your Carola is weighs 10 million pounds and your turning radius is about 3 miles.  Also, you’re not with your friends… you’re with zombies.  Repeat this process for 6 months at a time.

Every so often, your sookie spinning leaves the drunken frat boys (“navigators”) bored, so you decide to pull into an armpit.  Oh, wait, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say armpit.  I meant to say Asian country.  Before any of you go off on some rampage about how I’m some rabid jingo, understand that it’s not that I have anything against the people, the language, the food that kills my stomach, the knock-off Nike hats for sale, or the fact that everything smells like cat urine… I just really think that right guard would have a good market here.  That’s right, I’m commenting on economics… supply and demand. 

That last paragraph didn’t have a number… lets give this next one a name instead.

George.  Finally my last reason for not writing in my blog with frequency is because aside from a harassment from a zombie on the ship who is equally as bored as I am, or an random mentioning from an old co-worker I still have a huge crush on, I really just lack motivation. 

If you want me to post more… I require one of the following things:

1. A well drawn picture drawn in crayon, finger-paint, or MS Paint, reacting to this post.

2. Money

3.  A postcard.  Everyone loves postcards

George.  A comment on this post.  I grow tired of deleting Russian spam that isn’t even clever Russian spam.