ABC News has a good story on NASA’s plans to crash the scientifically valuable Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory back into the earth next week. Should one of the telescope’s two remaining gyroscopes fail, it would crash uncontrollably, and it’s so large it would not completely burn on re-entry. Rather than risk life on the ground, NASA will crash it while they still have control. The story also talks about space junk and the new telescope in New Mexico that can track objects as small as buckshot(!) from the ground. While an astrophysics student in New Mexico, I got to tour the NORAD telescopes in the northern end of the White Sands Missile Range used to catalogue and track space debris. Both MIR and a shuttle were up at the time, and we could see both as if we were looking at a jet liner with nice binoculars. The astonishing part of the evening, though, was when we saw a cylindrical object tumbling end over end as it passed overhead, and were told it was a mere three feet long and an inch or so wide. (ObSimpsonsQuote: “Three cheers for this inanimate carbon rod!”) It’s a pity that we have to use telescopes so good to keep track of our junk.

My house mouse (or a relative) didn’t heed my warnings and ate some of a small piece of leftover poundcake. I set traps the last two nights, but the mouse ate the peanut butter without setting the traps off each night. Tonight, I’ll try to set them ever more gingerly. I tried looking up “How do I set mouse traps so they go off every time” on the various search engines, but couldn’t find anything of use, other than the knowledge that you can do plenty with mousetraps besides catch mice.

Call Your Grandma! I haven’t figured out yet if this site is liberal propaganda or conservative propaganda, but either way, if you give them your mailing address, they’ll send you a free 10 minute phone card so you can call your grandma (or whoever you want, I suppose) and tell her what’s at stake with prescription drugs and medicare. Or ask for cookies. Mmmmm…. sweet, sweet cookies…

So we drove down the east coast of Florida with no particular destination in mind. Drive until we didn’t feel like it and then stop at a beach somewhere was the plan. Cocoa Beach was where we ended up, in a motel built and owned by “The Original Seven Astronauts”. For those of you who didn’t watch I Dream of Jeannie , Cocoa Beach is just across the water from the Kennedy Space center. I’d been doing a very poor job of keeping up with the specifics, but I knew that a shuttle was on the launch pad, waiting to go up and do some work on the new space station. I knew it had been there for over a month, suffering from delay after delay. The latest delays were due to some unrelated rocket that was to be launched first. We could see the pads across the water, lit up very nicely. RVs and campers were lining all the roads, parked along the right-of-way along the beach. The hotels were jammed (though we got a room with no problem). Anxious people were everywhere. Without checking a paper or any official program, we determined that the latest schedule had the shuttle launching sometime Friday. It was a nice bit of luck that we just happened to be right there, right then. The launch itself occured at 5:30ish am, just a few minutes before sunrise. It was beautiful -- I’ve never seen anything like it. The fire, the smoke, the noise. The beach a few feet from the motel room was the perfect spot to watch it, too. Absolutely spectacular. Or so I was told. I didn’t wake up until 8. The first thing I did was flip through the TV to find out when the launch was supposed to happen. I found “The NASA Channel”, and they were already showing live video from space. Dagnabit. Again I say, dagnabit. Let this be a lesson for you: when you’re in Cocoa Beach, find out if there’s going to be a launch, and when it is, before you go to bed.

Thursday we drove down the east coast of Florida. I’d never been to Florida before, but I was looking forward to the drive. Florida has always been an enigma to me. So many contradictory images floating around in my head, all from TV, movies, and other media. Probably the same images you have – huge expanses of cities. Lots of orange groves (Florida Oranges: A Colorful Story). Produce farms. Theme parks. Beaches. Resorts. Swamps (and swamp-apes). Kidnapped Cuban boys. (Sorry. That was uncalled for.) More cities. A billion retired people living the good life. Also, the odd fact that Florida is the number one cattle producing state in the nation, growing more cows than even Texas (and they’ve joined the ranks of the cattle mutilation mystery). Don’t ask why I just happened to know that last fact. I know things like that for no good reason. It’s part of what makes me who I am (read: “A dork.”). But you see why Florida confused me. Those images just don’t go together, and on the map, Florida looks like too small of a place to have all that. On the map, it looks like a long curved beach with swamp in the middle. Where do the cows live? As it turns out, Florida’s much bigger than the maps let on. That long bit that sticks out into the ocean is really quite long. And filled with cows. And orange groves. And cities. And swamp. Usually, all within sight of each other. And there’s something that don’t show on the movies or TV (well, maybe on Dateline or 20/20 , but I don’t watch them): landfills. Big mountainous stinky landfills. Up and down the interstate, with condo subdivisions build right in their shadows. And they’re tall enough to have shadows, too (take a virtual tour here). I guess they can’t bury their trash in Florida, because they might poke a hole in the bottom and sink the whole state. I guess I’ll research that some and get back to you.

The wedding was on a pier jutting out into the bay.

The view from the pulpit.

The text of the ceremony. It was a fine wedding.

Well, shiver me timbers! (I drove on the “Buccaneer Trail” yesterday, so now my head’s full of pirate talk). The Amazing Randi has a weekly internet column, where he talks about all sorts of Amazing Randi skeptical-about-the-paranormal stuff. Yo ho ho!

I’m off in the morning to Key Largo to marry my college friends Jeff and Melissa. To each other. Because I’m an ordained minister. So I’ll be gone until Tuesday, making things mighty quiet around here until then. Just in case you find youself in the same situation I’m in – writing a wedding service – there’s a number of web sites to help: the alt.wedding resources (starring the wedding fairy!), religious humanist ceremonies, Bill Schulz’s secular wedding ceremonies, more secular weddings, and examples of non-standard weddings are a few places that caught my eye.

Hey! You put your Björk in my Shuttlecocks!
No, you put your Shuttlecocks in my Björk!
<…listens to the MP3 or realaudio…>
Not bad! It’s a quantum physics love song! “If only she’d let me, her love I would hork. Oh Björk, oh Björk, oh Björk! "

What with the rash of “last page of the internet” things going around, it was nice to see an actual study on web page connectivity. This study, done by researchers from IBM, Compaq, and Altavista, contradicts the study released last year claiming that any two web pages were separated by at most 19 clicks. Among the interesting result: 46% of all the web pages go nowhere (that’s 700 million “last pages of the internet”) and “about 30% of the unique documents on the web are rubbish.” Weblogs seem to fit squarely in what they called the “giant strongly connected component” – the 30% of web pages that are strongly interconnected and most useful for search engine indexing.