Update 7:25 am Sunday: I was up at 6:20 am this morning in order to arrive at Kennedy Space Center before they close the gates. I've been monitoring the NASA control center audio feed and after announcing that one of the four fuel sensors has failed during fill a little after 7 am, they have scrubbed today's launch. The revised rules required that all four sensors work properly for a launch. More from CNN.

Every once in a while I'll come across something that almost makes living in Florida worth it. This time it's the space program two hours east of Tampa over at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. On Thursday, Shuttle Atlantis (STS-122 in NASA terms) was due to launch in order to deliver a European-built science laboratory called Columbia to the International Space Station (Atlantis is shown in the photos). The Thursday launch was scrubbed because two of the four fuel level sensors failed prior to launch. From what I can gather, it would be like driving your car on a road trip and you can't tell when your gas is getting low because the indicator is broken. Except with Atlantis the malfunction could mean disaster. The Atlantis rocket has four such fuel sensors and the program currently requires that three of the four work properly.

I found out yesterday that NASA was aiming for a Saturday afternoon launch so I decided to buy a ticket to be able to watch from the Kennedy Space Center visitor complex. As is my luck, a few hours after I bought my ticket online the launch was scrubbed again and moved to Sunday afternoon. My ticket is still good though and unless something else happens I'll be driving over to Cape Canaveral to experience a once in a lifetime thing. If it's scrubbed again, the team has until December 13 to launch before it has to wait until next year (when I'm long gone). Worst case scenario my ticket is still good for the whole Kennedy Space Center tour.

Point of the story, I've become a space junkie literally overnight and while I don't know how long it will last I'm hoping I get to see a shuttle lunch in my lifetime. No telling the future of NASA and the space program, or how long we'll have an non-militarized space to launch in to.

Here are some links I've been visiting frequently.
NASA Shuttle page (latest official info)
Kennedy Space Center
Spaceflight Now (really up-to-date info about the launches)
A photographer's website about viewing launches
Read about the crew in this NY Times story.

An extremely rare and intricately carved "death vase" has been discovered in the 1,400-year-old grave of a member of the Maya elite, scientists say.

The vase is the first of its kind to be found in modern times, and its contents are opening a window onto ancient rituals of ancestor worship that included food offerings, chocolate enemas, and hallucinations induced by vomiting, experts say.

Archaeologists discovered the vase along with parts of a human skeleton while excavating a small "palace" in northwestern Honduras in 2005. (The dig was funded by the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.)

Soil samples taken from in and around the vessel were found to contain pollen from corn, cacao, and false ipecac, a plant that causes severe nausea when eaten.

These traces suggest the vase may have been used in ancient rites the Maya practiced to produce trancelike states through intense physical purging, said Christian Wells, an anthropologist at the University of South Florida who lead the excavation.

"The way to have contact, to communicate, with ancestors is to have visions," Wells said of the Maya rituals.

"And you have a vision either by cutting yourself and bloodletting—which there's really no evidence for in this case—or by having some very powerful chocolate enema, or by drinking your brains out and throwing up.

"We think this beverage [in the vase] may have contained ipecac, which would have made the person who's drinking it throw up—a lot. Then, by throwing up a lot, they could've had visions that would have allowed them to talk with the ancestors."

Read the full story here.

Abstract

My research examines the spatial relationships among prehispanic and modern buildings, activity areas, and natural resources in the Palmarejo Valley in order to evaluate the applicability of the concept, "quebrada community," for understanding human-environmental relationships in this area during the Late Classic period (A.D.650-850). The goals of my research are: 1) to review the current debate surrounding prehistoric communities and the models used to explain them in order to frame the present research within that discussion, 2) to construct a geographic information system (GIS) which synthesizes existing archaeological and geological datasets with community-level spatial data, and 3) incorporate statistical and spatial analyses into a Cultural Site Analysis model to suggest ways in which prehistoric and contemporary communities were/are influenced by natural resources. A contextualized definition of "quebrada community" will contribute greatly to contemporary rural development initiatives designed to assist local farmers with more sustainable landscape management strategies.

Ecologists have photographed a little-known nomadic tribe deep in Peru's Amazon, a sighting that could intensify debate about the presence of isolated Indians as oil firms line up to explore the jungle. Carrying arrows and living in palm-leaf huts on the banks of the Las Piedras river, the tribe was glimpsed last week by researchers flying over the Alto Purus national park near the Brazilian border to look for illegal loggers. "We saw them by chance. There were three huts and about 21 Indians -- children, women and young people," said Ricardo Hon, a forest scientist at the National Institute of Natural Resources. Hon said an indigenous group using the same kind of huts was seen in the region in the 1980s, and advocacy groups said they appeared to be part of the Mascho Piro tribe. The sighting of the indigenous group comes as Peru's government is encouraging foreign companies to look for oil in the rainforest.

Birthdays:
1207 - Henry III, king of England, 1216-72
1685 - Charles VI, German emperor/king of Spain, 1711-40
1924 - Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize
1924 - William Rehnquist, 16th Chief Justice of the United States (d. 2005)
1963 - Mark McGwire, American baseball player
1982 - Will Klinger, Archaeologist

Events:
1811 - The first steamboat to sail the Mississippi River arrives in New Orléans, Louisiana.
1891 - In the U.S. state of California, Stanford University opens its doors.
1903 - Baseball: The Boston Americans play the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first game of the modern World Series.
1946 - Nazi leaders sentenced at Nuremberg Trials.
1957 - First appearance of "In God We Trust" on U.S. paper currency.
1971 - Walt Disney World opens near Orlando, Florida, United States.
1982 - Sony launches the first consumer compact disc player (model CDP-101).
1982 - Will Klinger born in Houston, Texas
1989 - Denmark: World's first legal modern same-sex civil union called "registered partnership"

Holidays:
National Day of the People's Republic of China (1949)
Republic of Cyprus - Independence Day (from Britain, 1960)
Nigeria - Independence Day (from Britain, 1960)
San Marino - two Captains Regent, elected by parliament, take office for six months.
Tuvalu - Independence Day (from Gilbert Islands (Kiribati), 1975)
French Republican Calendar - Cuve (Barrel) Day, tenth day in the Month of Vendémiaire
World Vegetarian Day
Singapore - Children's Day
World Health Organization - World Hepatitis Awareness Day
Armenia - Teachers' Day
Worldwide - Will Klinger Day

Numbers Guy reader Sabahat Chaudhary noticed the recent spate of press coverage claiming that half of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered, with one dying every two weeks. The New York Times, the Associated Press and Reuters all reported these alarming statistics, released by linguists associated with the Enduring Voices project, which aims to preserve and document languages.

But not all these threatened languages face equal risks. Linguists do agree that hundreds of languages are nearly certain to expire in the next few decades, but many of the other roughly 3,500 languages defined as endangered have a much better shot. These include languages still spoken regularly in small but stable communities, but considered “endangered” because a natural disaster might wipe out the speakers. Other languages, such as Sora in Eastern India, are defined as “endangered” because city dwellers have shifted away from them, though rural speakers haven’t.

...

These are estimates in a field where exact numbers are difficult to pin down. First, defining a language compared with a dialect is difficult. Two people generally are speaking in dialects if they can understand each other, but Catalan and Spanish qualify as separate languages even though there is generally mutual intelligibility. The distinctions “don’t always jive with socially perceived language barriers that exist in some communities,” Dr. Anderson said. Nonetheless, linguists generally agree that there are between 6,000 and 7,000 languages in the world — nearly half of them in two diverse language groups, the Austronesian (mainly from Pacific islands) and Niger-Congo. Establishing the extent of language usage is also tricky; relying on national censuses doesn’t suffice because many countries don’t conduct regular counts, and those that do may not report languages spoken by fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, Dr. Anderson said.

Read the whole thing here. It's pretty interesting.

During the 2005 Spring semester at UNC Wilmington I took a philosophy course taught by Dr. Schmid entitled "The Art of Living." It was my senior year, and in retrospect proved to be one of the most important learning experiences of my life. The class was a seminar that focused on various philosophies related to what it means to live a fulfilling, moral life. Far from being some new age checklist of how to become one with God or nature, it was more an exploration of what it means to live a life in the best way possible, for yourself and everyone you come in contact with. The course didn't teach me what I needed to do to be happy. It taught me what I needed to do to figure those things out on my own. It was a refreshing alternative to what I had been taught in church and in popular culture, both of which I became disillusioned with as an undergraduate.

Part of the Art of Living course was to keep a blog for the semester where we talked about readings, philosophers, personal reflections, etc. Mine was appropriately entitled Will's Art of Living. I was browsing it tonight for a little nostalgia and came across the following passages. It reminded me of those all to short critical semesters when I learned much more than any textbook or academic could teach me. Sometimes while writing my thesis I get very frustrated and want to throw my research materials out of the window. This wouldn't be a good idea because library books are rather expensive. Instead, I take a break and think about what's really important in my life: family, friends, and freedom. My philosophy courses, and one teacher in particular, truly made me the type of person I am today. If you're so inclined, I've included some passages from my Art of Living blog that helps me put my current situation in perspective. They're below the fold. Thanks, Dr. Schmid.

Today's monkey picture: a monkey utilizing a water resource? Was he part of a community? Prove it!

"War does not determine who is right - only who is left." ~Bertrand Russell