D Day

 

D Day, September 13th 2001. Two days after 9-11 I was staying in Normandy, out of Paris until the flights to North America resumed. I visited the Normandy beaches. Each year we remember Normandy, and we should equally remember Saipan, where my father and thousands of others attacked and stormed the beaches, allowing the annexing of Tinian, the airfield for B-29s and Hiroshima. 

Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant

The gladiators fought with their gladius, the mid sized sword used in the Roman legions. The gladius was often chipped from battle, made of a Roman steel blend, iron with a charcoal mix of carbon, then heated and sharpened.

I gather the White House has installed a Roman like gathering with brutal fighters. Gold fixtures, all we are missing is golden leaf crowns! 

Never Thought of This One

 Going to the moon and staying there has its hazards. But NASA presents a new one.

A mobile wastewater treatment system built at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida that can help prepare for long-duration missions on the Moon and Mars departed the spaceport and arrived at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. Graduate students at the university will test the technology under conditions designed to closely mimic the challenges of operating on another planetary surface. The Divergent Deployable Wastewater Treatment Facility is designed to turn crew wastewater into useful resources, which future explorers will need every day. At the University of North Dakota, teams will integrate this new wastewater system with the university’s Integrated Lunar/Martian Analog Habitat. Student operators and NASA researchers will study how the facility performs when connected to a habitat-like environment and exposed to the kinds of operational limits crews could face on another planet.

 Imagine human waste, with both human and other DNA, floating around the universe, landing on different planets, finding new homes, creating new aliens! 

Never thought of this in old days, just brought it back with you! 

 

An Interesting Geography Problem

 DHS has proposed removing ICE from airports in regions where sanctuary cities/states are. That would be Newark here in NJ.

Now the geography of Newark is below:

 Note Terminal A is NOT in Newark, Terminal C and Terminal B is kind of. So all international flights could be shuttled to Terminal A, recently upgraded and the rest would be domestic. 

Guess that would work. Not any good for New York however.  

Oncolytic Viruses

 

Viruses have the ability to enter cells and kill them. Oncolytic viruses are a class of modified viruses which attack only, actually "for the most part", cancer cells, do not harm benign cells, and can go after a large cancer growth.

We have just posted a Technical Report analyzing them and we believe that they may have some merit but are not as effective as antibody drug conjugates.

It may be worth a read. 

55 Years Later

 In June 1971 at my doctoral ceremony, the only one I went to in those days, all others I got via mail, we had a a small short ceremony. Viet Nam was still afoot, there were no job recruiters on campus that year, Nixon's economy was starting to explode, off gold standard and massive tariffs, so we had no useless speaker, and we all were trying to figure out how to support ourselves. Frankly we could not even get drafted! Too old and probably physically exhausted.

Now above is this years Engineering doctoral students. You could not recognize this class if you were from 1971. First we never had hats, second the doctoral gowns were black, the hoods were simple. Below is MIT 1960.

 

One wonders what these folks will contribute 55 years from now?