How about an "albertal"? Then future generations can have fun coming up with all kinds of strange (and wrong) reasons for the name. Maybe the LISA groups can claim that the latest signature from the collapse of an albertal makes the same sound as the closing chord of "A Day In the Life" which goes on forever just like a day would at the event horizon of...well, you know.

The radio amateurs ("hams") organized a big on-the-air event across the MF to lower-VHF spectrum (1.8 - 50 MHz) to make contacts that were monitored, decoded, and signal strengths measured by the extensive automated receiver networks that have developed over the past few years. (Morse (CW), PSK, and FSK modulations can be automatically monitored by SDR (software defined radio) software.) Well over a million automated signal reports were generated and many thousands of contacts were logged and those records submitted. Hundreds of Gbytes of digitized RF spectrum were also collected and are now being transferred to the data group by various means - perhaps a station wagon full of 9-track tapes? - including simply shipping hard drives to the researchers. The sponsor was HamSCI (http://hamsci.org/seqp) and the event was called the Solar Eclipse QSO Party (SEQP - QSO is ham shorthand for "contact"). Data is being collected by a team at Virginia Tech. Initial reviews of the data shows strong effects from the temporary interruption of solar UV which is responsible for creating the various structures in the ionosphere which affect MF/HF/VHF radio wave propagation. This wasn't a surprise but the exact nature of the effects and the correlation to models of ionospheric dynamics is where the most will be learned. It's rare to have such a well-defined and well-measured eclipse. Personally, I operated with a local team up until within ten minutes of totality (my station was on the path of totality this time), then watched visually and for a few minutes longer before resuming operating. The effects of the shadow moving across the continent were clearly observable to the ear as stations from different regions appeared and then disappeared (or vice versa). The daily, seasonal, and year-to-year changes in propagation from solar and atmospheric effects are the biggest reason I continue to enjoy ham radio with public service communications as the hams are providing in South Texas a close second.

Sorry - you live in Missouri. You're stuck with the crazies. Just drive anywhere not within 10 miles of I-70 for proof.

The problem with the Libertarians that, by definition, any group of them numbering more than one is unstable.

> With that in mind, there needs to be a discussion on how best to disincentivize this kind of extremely short-term behavior, where it is via transaction fees or via trading on heartbeats. Disallow trading losses and fees incurred on any financial instrument held for less than 24 hours when accounting for taxes on net investment income. i.e. - don't allow a firm engaging in HFT to count losses and trading fees against profits when figuring its taxes.

> If you're a long term investor, with a time horizon of many decades, this doesn't matter. Oh yes it does...this continuous and unproductive extraction of capital from the market drives the worst sort of short-term management practices and also saps resources from firms and investors that would otherwise be available for innovation and expansion. HFT is completely and utterly socially useless, to use Paul Volcker's phrase. It's no different, effectively, than a guy with a nail punching a hole in a pipeline to get petrol in a bucket. And all the other investors pay for the petrol, the bucket, and the nail. Oh, and the fire that starts eventually, as well. It's costing us big time.

Carly Fiorina was just doing the same "good business practices" as every other CEO and CEO-wannabe - the very same "good business practices" that shipped a huge amount of intellectual property out of the country and failed to replace it, preferring instead to concentrate on short-term revenue and stock price. These are the same "good business practices" that Mitt Romney is so good at and proud of. Hewlett-Packard is symptomatic of what has and is happening to a technology-driven economy being run into the ground by non-technical cargo-cult business managers. Sarcasm aside, we had better figure out how to take some of that cash being vacuumed out of the local and regional economies and cycle it back through as innovative product manufacturing or the US is toast for a while. There is plenty of time to turn things around but only if we start having an adult conversation about it instead of just pointing fingers and calling each other evil liars.

The US manned spaceflight program comes to an ignominious end at the same time the Texas school board votes on whether to teach evolution in science class. And people wonder why we've lost our leadership in science and manufacturing.

Just as funny as when the ones who want government out of everything are surprised to find the robber barons even more corrupt and destructive. Very snarky but typically useless. Shall we re-run the Standard Oil movie again for you? How about instead of trying to one-up each other with cute little remarks to impress "our side" we actually try to make reasonable rules that at least slow the corruption down? Something like the suggestion of a waiting-period for individuals with policy-level authority would help.

Joe Taylor is a Nobel laureate who got his ham radio license with his brother - both went on to have great careers and Joe (now K1JT) became a famous astronomer-physicist. He's now revolutionized weak-signal communication in the ham radio world, making exotic modes like bouncing signals off the Moon, accessible to hams with relatively modest equipment. (physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT) Even kids can aspire to do it - he is a real hero of the techies. Another couple of ham heroes are Chris Hurlbut (KL9A) and Dan Craig (N6MJ) who are both in their twenties and represented the US in the recent World Radiosport Championships (www.wrtc.info) held in Russia. They placed third in the world - very nicely done so far from home. There are many young hams very active in this wide-spread, but little known activity.

The ARRL Handbook was thoroughly updated for the 2010 edition - much better than an old copy and at fifty bucks way cheaper than Art of Electronics, even a used copy. Start with the chapter "Electrical Fundamentals" and go from there. Similarly, "Understanding Basic Electronics" (another ARRL publication - www.arrl.org) has been updated and the "Hands-On Electronics" book contains a lot of simple experiments that explain the theory behind the circuits. Pick up a used EE circuit course book like "Microelectronics" by Millman as deep backup to the introductory texts. If you live in a college town, the used bookstores near campus are good sources of cheap texts no longer being used for courses, but still fine as a workshop reference. Electronic project books are fun, but often don't explain very much about how the circuits work, so you'll need a supplementary text for that. For basic how-to-build circuits and common electronic construction techniques, try "Circuitbuilding Do-It-Yourself For Dummies". To build up your junk box and learn how stuff goes together, go down to the local thrift store and buy some junk electronic device, then tear it apart. You'll get lots of connectors, parts, hardware, and know-how for pennies. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a long-time ARRL member and licensed ham that learned a great deal of electronics through ARRL publications and by building my own gear and accessories.

I missed this earlier reference to Dyson Spheres. Actually, we do NOT know it's not a Dyson Sphere, but I suspect it's being discussed at JPL and other places. It would be very interesting to get some kind of mass estimate for the object, but with nothing orbiting it and it not in a orbit around anything obvious, that might be difficult.

I'm surprised that no one here has suggested the possibility that it might be a Dyson Sphere - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson. (apologies if I missed it) The surface temperature is not wildly different than the 300K predicted by Sagan in "The Infrared Detectability of Dyson Civilizations" (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1966ApJ...144.1216S). This could be very interesting, indeed. We may have just "made contact".

The best characterization of ham radio I've heard as the total experience is "Ham radio is the only hobby in which you can be an inventor, a collector, an emergency worker, an athlete, an engineer, a radio show host, a scaler of heights, a teacher and mentor, an astronomer, and a geophysicist. All at the same time. It remains the most powerful and flexible means of communication available to the private citizen in the world." Not bad. I've enjoyed playing the game for over 30 years.