NoPlate

I live in the LA area of So California. I was driving home from work late (11:15pm thereabouts) and saw two distinct flickering greenish flashes light up the western horizon. They were perhaps 10 seconds apart and lasted for not more than a couple seconds each. To my eye they looked exactly as a large exploding bolide (meteoric fireball) might look if it occurred waaaay out over the Pacific. Nothing on the news that I've seen and I enjoy tracking such things. Anybody hear anything?

I don't use this feature. Every time I go to the Classic Mail page a Y!M box opens telling me some porn queen wants to make contact - it's irritating and I'm tired of it. How do I make this function go away?

(Maybe trivia would have been a better place for this...) During the era of weekend space hero serials there was a trailer mounted rocket mock-up pulled into neighborhoods for kids to play in. The inside had consoles, switches, dials, lights - the whole works. Kids would be invited to sit at the consoles and the "space crew" would guide them through imaginary missions. I'm trying to locate info on this - a website... anything.

Anyone else remember this?

A truly whacked-out question... I was speaking with a coworker and it got me wondering. Initial conditions: A typical supercell thunderstorm perhaps 25 miles across, and a one megaton thermonuclear warhead. If this warhead were detonated at the geometric center of the stormcloud what would the effects be on the storm? I am *not* advocating doing this (for obvious reasons); it's just an interesting thought experiment. I have a hunch the superheated fireball would instantly create conditions under which a storm would not be possible. Any ideas?

I think I struck the queen mother of weird dreams. Just for grins, I'd like to get people's reaction to it. Mean anything?

I'm walking across an open, wide lawn. The lawn is wet enough to go squish as I walk. Twice people walking nearby (don't ask me why everyone is out walking on wet grass) deliberately shoulder me as they pass. Both times I leaned into them as they did so and we both ended up down in the mud. The second time the other person is covered in gooey mud, so I'm straining to look around and see if I'm the same. I feel something on my shoulder and glance around to find a HUGE black spider about 6" across climbing up my arm. I frantically swipe it away in a violent motion - and wake up... but it's into another dream. I find myself in a college dorm room. I'm lying in bed. My wife and an old friend are sitting there talking. As they talk my wife is casually beating a stick against the ceiling, breaking up a pile of rocks into gravel - on the ceiling. I'm puzzled. How do they stay up there? My wife's friend explains that somewhere else there's a pile on the floor, so they kind of cancel each other out. Just then I notice a HUGE black beetle with spiky legs crawling toward me. Again there is violent motion as I struggle to scramble away from it. The trashing sets off a painful leg cramp - a classic Charlie Horse. This cramp wakes me up for real.

Very strange...

I'm reading the book "Black Hole War". In it the author suggests our universe is actually a holographic projection from the event horizon of a black hole. That's almost bizarre enough to be true. A question, though... if true hows does information from that "hologram" move faster than light (much faster) to enable us to experience the universe in real time?

I was up at Pyramid Lake near Frazer Park in California some time back and plucked a roundish rock from the water. It was floating near the shore - kind of bobbing there in the wavelets. It is about the size and shape of an avocado and appears to be a large number of small globules of pumice soft-melted into this rough lightish brown tear-drop shape.

My first thought was "wow, meteorite!" but instantly realized this wasn't possible. It *looks* like a piece of volcanic pumice ejecta, or bomb. Anyone knowing that area will tell you there has been no volcanic activity in that area for about as long as that area has existed. Anyone have any clue what this might be?

Sorry! No pictures. I no longer have the piece :(

I'm probably missing something here. I'm reading The Black Hole War, which goes on endlessly about the problem of black holes destroying information - something anathema to physicists. A book I read quite a few years back gave a hypothetical first-person account of what it would be like falling into a black hole (disregarding disintegration... it's a thought experiment after all!). In this account the "pilot" sees the black hole in front of him and the universe outside. As he approaches the universe seems to speed up. As he reaches the event horizon the universe plays out like a crazy high speed film, coming to an end and burning itself out before he actually reaches the horizon. This is a severe form of time dilation caused by relativistic effects. The moral is that objects falling into a black hole ***never actually get there***. They fall endlessly, always speeding up but never reaching their destination. In this scenario no information is lost because none of it ever actually crosses the event horizon. It's all just piled up against it. Not retrievable, but not destroyed. This seems elementary enough that I'm stunned it's not discussed by astrophysicists. ...so what am I missing?

Small rocket stage vs. huge planet sized rock. Who won? You tell me. Anyone feeling the least bit ashamed about all the end-of-the-world hype?

No tsunamis, killer storms, asteroids... do any of the doomsayers feel even a little bit silly?

If Space is cold is it possible to freeze your tounge to the outside of an Empire Star Cruiser?

I'm researching a science fiction story (my first). I'd like to have an extended dialog with someone knowledgeable about astrobiology about what might or might not be possible in alien physiology. If anyone cares to do this, could you contact me through YA?

Many thanks!

I'm tinkering with an idea for a short story. It involves human explorers on an extra-solar planet trying to establish communication with an obviously intelligent, but entirely non-technological native life-form. Are there any on-line discussions about such contact and what the current prevailing theories are about what form it would take and what it would look like?

I'm most certainly not looking for aliens contacting Earth and ushering us into a cosmic wonderland. In this story the humans are the aliens, contacting a different species which did not expect our coming.

Web links would be most appreciated!!

I am looking at buying a home in Monrovia, CA. The home is on the historic register. I have never owned a historic home before. Before I commit to this, can anyone point me to a list of homeowner requirements? I understand there will be responsibilities on my part, but I do not seem able to find out what those responsibilities are! I most certainly do not want to find myself in a situation where the government tells me what brand coffee I can brew.

By peace I mean no armed conflicts in progress anywhere on the globe. I can't think of any time when this was the case. Can anyone else?