A Little Catching Up

It's time to catch up on the things that have caught my eye but have had to make room for the time-sensitive stories. In no particular order:

Baseball

When I was a kid, I was a St. Louis Cardinals fan, and one of the great things that happened was when the Padres moved into the National League. That meant that we could actually see Bob Gibson pitch, Lou Brock steal base, and all the other Cardinals play right before our very eyes in San Diego. My dad knew that the Cards pitched Bob Gibson every third game, so he'd wait until just before they came to town, check to see when he pitched last, calculate three games forward, and buy tickets for that game. I don't remember his plan ever failing.

But that was a long time ago. I grew up, got married, had kids and lost track of baseball. I seem to recall that the Cardinals left St. Louis. Or was that the football team?

Meanwhile, I listen to Hugh Hewitt's radio show most days on the internet at work. Usually it's on KRLA's live feed, but lately the network at work has had trouble connecting to KRLA's feed, so a couple days ago I remembered that KCBQ (San Diego) also has the live feed for the show. That's where I listened to Hugh yesterday and today. The local news has included mention of who the Padres will be playing, and they said "Detroit." Now, that sounded odd, because I remember Detroit being in the American League. Today, they said it again and also said that the Padres would be playing the Twins next. Another American League team.

Did they move the Padres to the American League? Did they completely rearrange the leagues as they've brought on new teams? I went to google and looked for major league baseball and found a list of the teams by League, and I was right about which teams were in which league.

Next, I hunted for a man at work who follows baseball. Jack told me that the teams play a number of games with the other league's teams, and he said they've been doing it for two years now. He even said it's pretty popular. I tried to make sense out of how the win/loss records might be affected, but it was too much for me at the end of a long day at work.

Today ended up being a reality shift for me in the baseball universe, and it's unsettling (like the earthquake we had today). Needless to say, I'm not a sport.

Progress in Robot Technology

There was an article yesterday in Live Science about an advance in robot technology made by NASA scientist, Vladimir Lumelsky. They're developing "skin" for their robots with over 1,000 infrared sensors. This helps the robots "feel" the obstacles they encounter, so they can decide what to do about it. The long-term goal for the skin-coated robots is for use in space.

Pretty cool.

Voyager I Leaves the Solar System

This one is a little older (May 25, 2005). AOL News reported that Voyager I has reached the region where the influence of the Solar System ends. But the article has so many terms for regions of space out there that I wasn't sure exactly when Voyager left us.

To refresh memory, Voyager I & II were sent on their missions in 1977 to explore Jupiter and Saturn, and it's from them that we got the photos of Saturn casting a partial shadow on its rings. It's also from them that we learned that Jupiter also has rings. Voyager II headed over to Uranus and Neptune, while Voyager I kept on going.

According to the article, "Astronomers tracking the little spaceship's 26-year journey from Earth believe Voyager 1 has gone through a region known as termination shock, some 8.7 billion miles from the Sun, and entered an area called the heliosheath." My friend, the astrophysics major probably understands this statement.

I've lived through times that saw our view of our world change drastically. We went from an earth-bound existence to a world that sent men into space, men who circled the moon and, for the first time ever, saw the earth as something small rising over the edge of the dark side of the moon. We sent Voyagers and Mariners to show us, close up, unimagined wonders of planets we could only have speculated about before.

And now Voyager is crossing another boundary to give us, hopefully, more wonders in the years it has left. I wish it godspeed.