holy cow I remember making little pictures in MacPaint as a child
I AM VERY OLD, YOUNGLINGS
THE FIRST COMPUTER I USED WAS AN APPLE LISA
IT WAS NEW AND EXCITING AT THE TIME

Here’s something really cool: Electric Sail (E-sail) propulsion system, invented by Dr. Pekka Janhunen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute, has been funded by NASA. It’s exciting for many reasons.

Once operational, its technology is expected to revolutionize the space travel within our solar system.  The innovation is based on using long centrifugally spanned and electrically charged tethers to extract the solar wind momentum for spacecraft thrust. An E-Sail propelled spacecraft can travel 100 AU (astronomical unit, roughly the distance from the Earth to the Sun) in less than 10 years. Also, the system can provide rapid transits so researchers could begin to get data back from outer planetary missions faster.

What’s more, both Finland and Estonia are involved in testing the technology (satellites Aalto and ESTCube), so I’ve had a chance to hear about possible future missions. I have chatted with the inventor himself in Estonia for a couple of times, and he’s a really smart and nice person. He was impressed with my blog!😄 😄

A Wichita State University mathematician sued the top Kansas election official Wednesday, seeking paper tapes from electronic voting machines in an effort to explain statistical anomalies favoring Republicans in counts coming from large precincts across the country.

Beth Clarkson, chief statistician for the university’s National Institute for Aviation Research, filed the open records lawsuit in Sedgwick County District Court as part of her personal quest to find the answer to an unexplained pattern that transcends elections and states. The lawsuit was amended Wednesday to name Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Sedgwick County Elections Commissioner Tabitha Lehman.

Clarkson, a certified quality engineer with a Ph.D. in statistics, said she has analyzed election returns in Kansas and elsewhere over several elections that indicate “a statistically significant” pattern where the percentage of Republican votes increase the larger the size of the precinct.

While it is well-recognized that smaller, rural precincts tend to lean Republican, statisticians have been unable to explain the consistent pattern favoring Republicans that trends upward as the number of votes cast in a precinct or other voting unit goes up. In primaries, the favored candidate appears to always be the Republican establishment candidate, above a tea party challenger. And the upward trend for Republicans occurs once a voting unit reaches roughly 500 votes.

“This is not just an anomaly that occurred in one place,” Clarkson said. “It is a pattern that has occurred repeatedly in elections across the United States.”

The pattern could be voter fraud or a demographic trend that has not been picked up by extensive polling, she said.

“I do not know why this trend is there, but I know that the pattern is there and one way to establish that it is or is not election fraud is to go and do a physical audit of paper records of voting machines,” she said.

Clarkson wants the hard copies to check the error rate on electronic voting machines that were used in a voting station in Sedgwick County to establish a statistical model.

A spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office said in an e-mail that the office has not received a copy of the lawsuit and is therefore unable to comment on it. A phone message left at the Sedgwick County elections office for Lehman was not immediately returned.

Clarkson became more interested in the issue after reading a paper written by statisticians Francois Choquette and James Johnson in 2012 of the Republican primary results showing strong statistical evidence of election manipulation in Iowa, New Hampshire, Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabama, Louisiana, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Kentucky.

Clarkson said she couldn’t believe their findings, so she checked their math and found it was correct and checked their model selection and found it appropriate. Then she pulled additional data from other elections they hadn’t analyzed and found the same pattern.

Aiming to bring low-cost illumination to residents of the Philippines, a nation of 7,000 oceanic islands, the Salt Lamp uses a free and abundant resource to reduce fire risk from candles and replace the cost of traditional lighting.

Developed by engineer Lipa Aisa Mijena of De La Salle University, theSalt Lamp requires a single glass of water with two tablespoons of salt to provide a night’s worth of a light (complimenting approaches likeLiters of Light that work in dark spaces during the day), but, best of all, it can run off the naturally salty water of the surrounding ocean.

(Fact Source)

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