David's Tangled Thoughts

I'm sitting here with the windows open, letting the evening breeze air out my apartment.  Every few seconds, booms and bangs ring out.  It'll continue for the next two weeks, culminating with the Independence Day celebrations.  I find it amusing that people are sending up fireworks while there are burn bans in effect.  The constant noise though, doesn't bother me too much.  The folks around here don't have anything on the Filipinos when they go all out for New Years.  There, it sounds like urban warfare has broken out. Also new is that Michigan now allows fireworks that you can shoot into the air.  I'm not too sure on the limits on them but before only fireworks that stayed on the ground were legal.  In practice though, local Michiganders would just cross the border into Indiana and pick up fireworks over there and bring them back.  I haven't heard of a case where state troopers stopped anyone transporting or setting them off.  Although, I do remember once, my

Earlier this week I read that Verizon was introducing a new phone plan called “ Share Everything .” There isn’t much growth room in the mobile phone market. Any real growth has to be by cannibalizing other customers from customers. So without new contract customers and existing ones decreasing voice and text usage, the revenue stream for providers is plateauing. Apparently Verizon has decided that revenue growth is going to be in data because that is the only thing that customers seem to want more of. And boy does Verizon intend to squeeze every buck out of you that it can. Under the new Share Everything plan, an account (not a line) is set up. This account is sort of like a pot in which voice, texts, and data will sit and can be “shared” with other devices that are plugged into the account. Voice and texts will be unlimited but the data will be capped and that determines the tiered charges. $50 for 1GB, $60 for 2GB all the way up to $100 for 10GB. The device fees are basical

My friend Kacey, who is also into astronomy, invited me to join her this evening at Notre Dame .  The university was holding an event for the transit of Venus that was opened to the public.  They had set up telescopes and passed out solar shades to those who showed up early.  Since the next transit is in 2117, I'll either be dead or downloaded into a cybernetic body so I thought that I should make an effort to see it. I was fortunate to get to see the planet during first contact--when it came into contact with the sun disk's edge.  It looked like the sun had a small nick.  We had thought that we wouldn't be able to see Venus using the solar shades.  We found out though that it is hard to see but it is possible.  We were able to see more of the transit on our own without needing to line up at another telescope. For most of the time though, we were inside where a lecture hall had a live feed from other telescopes.  In the room we were in, we could see a feed from Not