An Inventions Quiz, 15 famous inventors and their inventions.
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I should tell you my score, but I will wait until you get a chance.

I have a better thought. I will leave a clue to my score in the text of this post. In fact, if you can puzzle out the clue, you can report my score. I thought of a way to give a clue, but I think I need to do better than that. I am positive I can do better than that.

Yes, there is a clue or more in this post. I found a way to give multiple clues. In fact, the number of clues I created points to a clue. Can you figure it out?

This is another post obviously trying to get more people to comment. I’m hoping an interactive post is the answer.

I’m having too much fun. I think it is time to stop.

The title of this article just got to me. For some reason it just tickled my sense of humor.
….NASA Sticks a Fork in Mars, I hope they remembered the knife and spoon.

Anyway, I do like the work the landers and orbiters are doing on Mars. In the past few years, we’ve learned a lot about the next planet out. I’ll keep on looking for updates on what exactly this probe finds, so I can make a comment or two on that.

Well I just saw the movie, now I’m going to explore some the science (or lack of it) involved in this journey. In Jules Verne’s original book, the center of the earth is a large cave like area with some sort of electro magnetic field producing light. Same in the movie.

Current Science views the center of the Earth as a molten metal core, mostly iron. This would be well above the temperatures that humans could survive in. But just for arguments sake, lets pretend there is a large cave with volcanic vents that connect between Italy and Iceland. Why would we have prehistoric dinosaurs and other animals living there. What could be the possible connection. I can’t really think of one, maybe my loyal readers could.

One other small problem, at least for the movie. The biggest plot mover in the movie is that temperatures will soon rise to unsurvivable levels. It is also indicated that it happened 10 year prior to this visit. How did the animal life stuck in the center survive, if it was so crucial that the intrepid explorers got out very soon. Must be something really special in the water that was going to evaporate in less than 3 days. I don’t think I can believe the quantity of life in the center of the earth if every few years it is going to become an oven.

I guess since they went that far with the science, that God is having a hand again in matters here on Earth or in this case under the Earth, a running a new version of creation every 10 or so years. That would explain everything. Hmm, I guess I’m saying that there isn’t a lot of science in the movie.

However, since I didn’t start thinking about this during the movie, it really didn’t matter. It took a while for it to settle in my brain.

I commented on something in another site, that got me thinking about time travel, instantaneous travel, and relativistic travel. Some heavy thinking for this late in the day, but I’m here now.

Time travel has been in our collective stories for centuries. The early stories were all using magic or wishes to go back in time. This was used to correct mistakes, make different choices or somehow get something you missed out on. I don’t have any of the myths and stories available to me at the moment, but I seem to remember a common theme. It generally didn’t work out the way it was planned. That doesn’t always mean bad things happened, just not the planned things.

In 1895 H. G. Wells published a book where a machine was used to travel back in time. The Time Machine was one of the early science fiction works on time travel. Many other authors have written works on time travel, and there have been many movies and even a TV show or two about time travel. As these stories progressed, the time travel paradox was brought up. What would happen if you went back in time and prevented your birth sort of thing. This stuff can get deep quickly, so I’ll leave it for another topic. I was just thinking about the time travel stories..

Then we have instantaneous or faster than light travel. Used in almost every Space science fiction story known this type of travel was invented by the story tellers out of need. They needed to get from one end of the Galaxy to the other without writing about long voyages or worse yet relativity. Transporters on StarTrek were made to save money on the effects of a shuttle craft landing. If you ever noticed the when a shuttle craft was used in the original series, it was always a plot device, and that justified the cost.

But of course, Einstein said that the Universe has a speed limit, the speed of light. That gets rid of the instantaneous/faster than light travel, but again brings back the time travel story. Space ship captain goes away an some high fraction of the speed of light, comes back to earth and finds out many many years have passed on earth and his twin brother is now a very old man…. I remember a story or two like that, but I don’t recall them at the present.

Just a few thoughts off the top of my head, so I can relax and get some rest….