The United States Department of Homeland Security has turned its attention towards the Sun this week in an attempt to determine the cause of some anomalous solar activity. President Bush has authorized a country-wide elevation of status to Yellow Alert until terrorist activity can be conclusively ruled out.

For the past two weeks, scientists have been reporting an unprecedented rise in the amount of solar activity coming from our Sun. This atypical activity began with a series of four flares on Oct. 22nd and ended 13 days later with the largest flare recorded since satellite observations began in 1976.

“It’s like the Earth is looking right down the barrel of a giant gun pointed at us by the sun… and it’s taken two big shots at us,” said John Kohl of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics last week. Because the Sun reached the peak of it’s 11-year activity cycle in late 2000, scientists are at a loss to explain this sudden rise in solar flares. “I have not seen anything like it in my entire career as a solar physicist. The probability of this happening is so low that it is a statistical anomaly,” Kohl added.

It’s precisely that low probability that has the government worried.
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Not too long ago a friend commented that I always seemed to find cool and interesting places on the Internet. He asked me why I didn’t have a section of my web page devoted to my favorite links. Honestly, the thought had never occurred to me.

I’ve rarely found the huge list of links that some people put on their web pages very useful. In theory, it sounds like a good idea to organize, categorize, and publish your bookmarks for the enlightenment of the online masses, but I never can seem to find a good implementation. One of the most annoying virtual experiences is to click on a link that someone professes to be worth your time… only to have a 404 error show up in its place.

Relishing my propensity to type, I thought I might take a different approach to sharing my favorites with you. Instead of supplying a list, I thought I would take some extra time to tell you why I link the site is worthwhile. (Apologies to those who come across this web log entry 10 years from now when all the URLs are broken.)

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I like science fiction. I’m hooked the way lonely housewives are addicted to romance novels and the Lifetime Network. I’ll watch the movies, I’ll quickly commit to a season of episodic television, I’ll read the novels and the short stories. I doubt there’s any one reason why I’m drawn to fantastic descriptions of utopian or dystopian futures, rather it’s probably the same combination of events in my youth that nurtured my fondness for hi-tech gadgets, comic books, and computer games.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the big conceits of sci-fi – interspecies communication. For each movie, show, or book there is usually a God-like device inserted to enable the author to get past the language barrier. Douglas Adams imagined the improbable Babel Fish (appropriately adopted by Altavista search engine geeks as the name for their web page translation tool), but it was Star Trek that introduced The Universal Translator into the public conscience.

Whatever the contrivance, the intent is the same: To shelve the language barrier in deference to the story being told. It’s understandable. As a viewer, can you imaging watching every sci-fi story with a realistic alien language barrier? You would either have to read a lot of subtitles or miss out on half the story. Of course, if written well, the process of communication barriers could be very interesting – but how many authors or scriptwriters have the ability to create entire languages while telling a compelling story?

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Way back in junior high, I had an English class in which we were assigned a writing project. I forget the details, but I do remember that when our teacher gave us the homework, we all thought that the minimum page requirement (Five pages? Three?) was extreme. Here we were in eighth grade and we’re supposed to write high school-length papers. Was she kidding?

The topic was something along the lines of, “What you would do if you were stuck on a deserted island?” I was freaked, but once I actually began writing, I found that I enjoyed the process immensely. I thought up the situation that put me on the deserted island (a shipwreck), described the survival materials I found in the wreckage, wrote in a fellow student as another protagonist, and then had us befriend a tiger. At some point along the way I discovered that writing five pages wouldn’t be a problem… keeping the story under ten would be.

I kept that paper right up until my unfortunate storage fire last year. I don’t think I ever actually went back and read it – I’m sure it was awful – but I do recall seeing the big “A++” on the cover page. If nothing else, I probably wrote more than any other student in the class.

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Sometimes it’s not easy to purchase a trendy pet. If you happen to live in a land-locked town of 30,000 people and your pet store is fresh out spiked animals, you’ll likely find that you’ll have to fly in, say, an African Pygmy Hedgehog.

Last year, for Oksana’s birthday, I looked into doing just that. I inquired at the Wee Fishee Shoppe first and it so happened that they had just parted company with their normal hedgehog distributor and had not yet found another. We scoured the Internet for information and learned that purchasing one in Alaska was at least legal, but we’d need to find a licensed… grower of hedgehogs first.

Fortunately, there is one in Anchorage. I called them up and got the important information: They sold hedgehogs for $125 each. It’s expensive, I guess, but not unacceptable. In further conversation, though, it became much more complicated.

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I like to take my lunches late. When you get back to work at two or three in the afternoon, the rest of the day just seems to fly right by. In the last couple years, I’ve slowly come to realize there are other benefits, as well.

For instance, the Drive-Thru at McDonald’s (Called the “Auto-Mac” in the Spanish-speaking world – how wacky is that?) is always empty and, at the intersection nearby, it’s actually possible to make a left turn (if you live in Juneau, you know what I’m talkin’ about!) And if, like me, you find yourself using your lunch break to run errands, it’s nice to know that the lines at Costco and at the bank are quite short at 2pm. For the most part, late lunches rock.

You know what totally sucks about a late lunch here in Juneau, though? Go on… Take a guess!

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Just slightly over a year ago, I had probably half of my worldly possessions go up in flames. I posted an account of it on my web site, but I always meant to follow that up with the (mostly) happy ending.

Barely two months before the fire caught us by surprise, my fiancée and I were engaged in engagement ring shopping. Throwing that whole “two month’s salary” thing right out the window, I had decided (without the DeBeer’s corporations input, thankyouverymuch) that a $1500 to $2000 ring would adequately demonstrate my love for her. We looked at Costco. We looked at over-priced jewelry stores downtown that typically cater to tourists with more money than I. Some rings were cheap, some we wanted to buy, but unfortunately, none of the ones we wanted to buy were cheap.

One day, Oksana was going through her old jewelry and pulled out a gaudy ring that could almost fit on my thumb. It had a gigantic, eight-pronged CLAW holding a diamond that was large enough and clear enough that we decided it just had to be fake. Long story short: It had been a gift her dad had given her mom way back in communist Russia and a $20 appraisal revealed that we really shouldn’t carelessly misplace it.

The choice was obvious: The ring had to go and the diamond had to stay. We laser-inscribed a single facet of the stone with her family name; created a custom, Oksana-original band; and promptly called USAA, my auto insurance company. They informed me that: 1) Yes, they’d insure the ring, 2) but it would be a “rider policy” hence we would first need to pay for renter’s insurance, and 3) we could save a lot of money by switching Oksana’s car insurance — but that’s beside the point.

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