Interesting Facts

I am all for mysteries and one which has been cited by ancient alien theorists has to do with the carving of a spaceman on the front of the ancient church. How could it have been put there hundreds of years before space travel? The church is the Salamanca Cathedral in Spain. As many of you already know I like to report about mysteries, but this particular carving may not be a mystery anymore and if this is true it shows those ancient alien theorists did not do their homework. The reason I say this is even though the church was started in 1513 and completed in 1733. According to an article I have read there was damage to the front of the church and a restoration was done in 1992. This restoration is never mentioned when this carving is questioned. The tradition when restoring something on an ancient church is to include something from modern times according to the article so it is believed the spaceman only dates back to that last restoration in 1992. Why wasn’t this investigated before jumping to the conclusion the spaceman was an ancient carving? That is the question my friends and it puts in doubt some other finds of a similar nature and disappoints me greatly.

The oldest known mountains were the Appalachians which have been eroded down to their present size. If there would have been no erosion, some would have been higher than Mt. Everest. We have found more mountains which are about the size of the Alps which are over 100 million years old. The reason they are still so high is the fact they were found under the ice in Antarctica. The mountains are named the Gamburtsevs. Scientists believe erosion stopped in Eastern Antarctica when the ice sheet got large enough to cover it. The ice over the mountains is over 10,000 feet thick so no one has actually seen the mountains. The mountains were detected with ice penetrating radar. Wouldn’t it be something if habitation by early humans was detected if the ice thawed?

There is a new clock in town and it is king of all clocks. America’s master clock is able to count out fractions of a second to 0.0000000000000001 second at a time. The clock is so accurate that it would not have lost a second in 360 million years if it was around then, but wait this is not the most accurate clock I am talking about. There is a new clock at the University of Colorado Boulder. How accurate is this clock? In 5 billion years it would not have lost a second. This my friends is the king of all clocks, but don’t run out and try and buy one. It is the only one in the world and anyway you probably couldn’t afford it. There is a problem with time however and that is it doesn’t travel at the same speed everywhere. Time is traveling faster on top of Mt. Everest than Death Valley, because time somehow depends on gravity. The higher you raise a clock the faster it will go, but to us the difference is so slight we would never notice.

According to an article in the Daily Beast the Pentagon has asked Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson to design a space plane. I find this a little strange with all of the military industrial complex at their disposal except for the fact this might be cheaper. This was the reason given by the way, it was said Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Bezos’ Blue Origin companies had technology the Pentagon needs to reduce the high cost of space flights. Could we finally be waking up to the fact we have been overcharged ever since the space program started? I really don’t think so, but I guess we will have to see. It is hard to break the cycle of lobbying and contracts and I will be extremely surprised if we start giving some important defense related contracts to these guys. I remember when the a replacement was being looked for to replace the Warthog tank killing plane and Burt Rutan one of the most famous airplane designers proposed a plane which carried a huge cannon which could be built for only one million dollars and it was turned down. It wasn’t that the plane wasn’t efficient, it was the fact it took work away from the usual companies who drain our treasury. We could have had about 25 of these planes for the price of the cheapest ground support plane.

We are all told to protect our banking accounts, stock accounts, monetary accounts of different types, but in truth we really can’t. Everyone knows by now that just about every important bank or business is subject to being hacked and they are losing our records in huge amounts. This is not the fault of the customer, but the fault of the laws and of companies all over the world who are willing to sell software which is able to get past a lot of the encryption used. It is a shame when companies are selling this stuff and their home country is allowing it. Software is being sold to anyone which can take over computer, cameras and break encryption and yet in many cases nothing is being done about it.

It is being claimed we are in the most important time in human history. I don’t know if that is true, but we certainly are living in a time with many challenges. We now have the power to destroy the human race using several different methods. We could nuke ourselves into oblivion, poison our atmosphere so badly we would not recover before being killed or infect ourselves with some deadly germ or chemical. We might even alter our DNA so badly it destroys us. There is no shortage of ways we could be in danger, but one of the most dangerous is the fact we put cash above safety. Things are going on which are very bad for the earth because companies are making a lot of money doing them. You would think since the people running the companies have to also live on this world they would know better, but it seems money is more important than keeping future generations safe.

There is a claim being made that human-robot teamwork is about to increase the efficiency of manufacturing. It is said it will increase flexibility. An example of this is going to happen soon in a BMW manufacturing plant where a robot arm will travel around the floor helping workers by handing them tools and such and performing other tasks. Robot guards are being used in Silicon Valley, they are not armed of course. The robots which are going to be used at the BMW plant will be light weight and slow to increase the safety of human and robot interaction. The first human to be killed by a robot was in 1981 when a robotic arm crushed a Japanese Kawasaki factory worker.