Science – Mike's home page

A little astronomical trivia

2014-05-312014-05-31 by mike

I was curious about a couple things and did a little surfing… Diameter of our solar system. First know that they use Astronomical Units (AU). One AU is equal the mean distance from the center of the earth to the center of the sun or 150 million kilometers, or about 92 million miles. The diameter […]

Historical Lake Travis levels

2010-03-082010-03-08 by mike

Data from http://www.lcra.org/water/conditions/historical.html Levels from 1940 to Updated 2015/05/31. Full size image: click here

Mars to appear as big as the moon!

2008-07-272008-07-27 by mike

Not! http://www.universetoday.com/2007/07/25/will-the-mars-look-as-big-as-the-moon-on-august-27-nope And, my own debunking; img

Get over it

2008-07-232008-07-23 by mike

Pluto is not a planet. Get over it. While there is some ambiguity in the definition of planet especially in the middle, there is little ambiguity at the extremes of the definition. Pluto is way out there. We were wrong to call it a planet. Now we know better. Let it go people. This is […]

Some ad hoc network performance observations

2007-03-082007-03-08 by mike

Network speeds Theoretical limits Speed Desc Bits/sec Bytes/sec 56Kbps modem 56,600 7,200 1.5Mbps T1 (symm) 1,500,000 187,500 4Mbps cable (asymm) 4,000,000 500,000 10Mbps ethernet 10,000,000 1,250,000 11Mbps 802.11b 11,000,000 1,375,000 54Mbps 802.11g 54,000,000 6,750,000 300Mbps 80211.n 300,000,000 37.5MB/s 100Mbps Fast ethernet 100,000,000 12,500,000 1000Mbps Gigabit eth 1,000,000,000 125,000,000 Observed Type Bytes/sec 802.11g (GC/yaupon(mkm) to blazer) […]

pi to 1 million digits

2007-01-052007-01-05 by mike

I’m not really a pi fanatic or anything. Shortly after PCs became powerful enough I did some experimenting with calculating pi out to many places. I printed this on paper in the late 80s on continuous form feed paper on a dot matrix printer. As I remember it took several days to print. I still […]

Get some perspective

2006-05-222006-05-22 by mike

I received these cool pics in an email. I thought they were interesting and was curious about some of the stars I’d never heard of. This lead to a round of Googling…

Googol not Google

2005-07-052005-07-05 by mike

googol One entry found for googol. Main Entry: googol Pronunciation: gu-gol Function: noun Etymology: coined by Milton Sirotta born about 1929 nephew of Edward Kasner died 1955 American mathematician : the figure 1 followed by 100 zeroes equal to 10100 – Websters 101 = 10 106 = 1,000,000 10100 = 1 googol or 1 followed […]