Stock some non-perishable food and stock up on batteries and firewood, minimum. If you are down wind of a nuclear power plant make an emergency evacuation plan. The window is roughly the next 12 months. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/aR8rEJgFlSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
My daughters and I have been reading Kaku's books. We're currently reading "Parallel Worlds." His best.
I think I'll pick that one up. If I can't find a torrent link I'll go to the store and buy a copy. I liked Kaku's contributions to the 2001 documentary Parallel Universes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7SDrj4Tjvk (there are 5 parts to the view to see the whole show) I had always hoped to encounter a plausible explanation for the big bang and for what lies beyond our universe sometime before I died. Upon seeing this show I feel reasonably satisfied that it has been explained. Just an amazing bit of work. I'm hoping his book is just as interesting. Thanks for the heads up Tom.
During the last solar maximum I was running communications for Sea Launch and we kept losing Intelsat satellite service to the vessels on the way down to the launch site (on the equator at 154-deg West). We would lose satcom twice on the way down and again twice on the way back to Long Beach. I conferred with some friends and a meteorologist and realized that it was ionospheric scintillation. I was able to predict it reliably after that and I got an Air Force grant to study it and they supplied some monitoring equipment that I put on the Sea Launch command ship (it used the degradation of GPS signals to detect and quantify the effect). It turned out to be scintillation in two bands about the geomagnetic equator and it was not previously thought to occur there (it was supposed to be a polar phenomena). I actually had a TV channel on the command ship where I looped a movie of some plots of predicted ionospheric scintillation that could be watched in peoples cabins or in the launch control center. One of the most fun things I did in my engineering career.
Looks interesting , swamped with papework right now but I'll view it when I get a chance. Lunch will be ready in 5 and I take a good nap after that on sundays. weekdays I'm lucky to even get lunch.
That's interesting OHMS. One of these days we'll get a big hit. Who knows when though. At least the window is somewhat brief on these so it's worth preparing for. Kaku is great. He's excellent at putting astrophysics in laymans terms.
I read Hyperspace a good 15 years ago. He definitely struck me as a good pop. science writer at the time but none of his subsequent works came up on my radar for some reason...
My girlfriend worries about Mayan calender priests. I worry about a random cosmic gamma ray burst that would incinerate life on earth in a few milliseconds. I regard our little star as being friendly by comparison even though it could destroy the electrical grid, kill every satellite in orbit and essentially put us back to the late 1800s so far as electrical power and communications are concerned. I know you are an EE so I imagine it holds some fascination for you like it does me. Its just amazing that we are close enough to a *star* to literally feel its heat. At one time I studied astronomy with the guy who runs the solar observatory on Mt. Wilson. He discovered the spherical resonance of the sun (it rings like a bell, if it weren't for the vacuum of space we could hear it). Solar astronomy appealed to me because you don't have to stay up all night in a cold observatory, you work in the day and have a normal schedule lol.
I think the Mayan's had some help from somewhere else. So, even though the Mayan calendar thing sounds ridiculous, we'll see. If something big happens there, then that will ruin other beliefs I hold stronger. So, although I find it interesting, I think it is a non-event. Gamma ray bursts are so narrow that I think our odds of losing it from other extinction (or near extinction) events overwhelms that probability. It is amazing how many ways we could be snuffed out so easily, though.
Ask you girlfriend if the fact that microsoft's calender runs out on dec 2099 bothers her. At least it does with my operating system.