ML Starkey's Weblog: Service with a smile!
Providing Technical Support to Sun's customers and other topics

Saturday Afternoon Sci-Fi Theatre meets the University of California, Berkeley as scientists there create a "metamaterial" that reflects light around an object in the manner that water flows around a rock in a stream.[Read More]

I could hardly wait to catch up with (Dr.) Ken (Corum) the morning after MIT's spectacular announcement this past week. I had to ask him: is this what Tesla was doing with his wireless power experiments?

The answer is: not really. Tesla was interested in using the Earth as the conductor, not the air. According to the Daily Mail article linked above, the MIT experiment uses a different method:

"Rather than sending power from a transmitter to a receiver as a conventional electromagnetic wave - the same form of radiation as light, radio waves and microwaves - he could use the transmitter to fill a room with a 'non-radiative' electromagnetic field. Most objects in the room - such as people, desks and carpets - would be unaffected by the electromagnetic field. But any objects designed to resonate with the electromagnetic field would absorb the energy."

No matter what your method, I wonder if this will ever be available during my lifetime or the lifetime of my daughter. It seems to me that at least one of the hurdles that Tesla faced would apply here. Not technical hurdles, but economic ones. What entity would pay to develop a technology that could prove difficult/impossible to meter and charge for?

Along with "Bigfoot" and the "Yeti", "Nessie" is one of the world's best known cryptids.

Now, a new video of a large "something". According to this Yahoo link,, the video has the proper perspectives which " . . . means it was less likely to be a fake and provided geographical bearings allowing one to calculate how big the creature was and how fast it was traveling".

Nessie is not the only "Lake Monster" apparently sharing Planet Earth with us. There is also "Champ" in Lake Champlain, New York and "Ogopogo" of Lake Okanagan in the south central interior of British Columbia. Something I didn't know until I did research for this entry: there are also examples in Argentina and Vermont.

To be more precise, something very odd is going on at the 431-year-old Kronborg Castle in Denmark. I have to confess I never read "Hamlet" (my school focused on "The Merchant of Venice" and "Romeo and Juliet"). I love stories about haunted happenings and the historical angle here makes it all the more interesting.

This story isn't very unexplainable, it's just weird. I guess, at least in the animal kingdom, you really CAN eat until you burst! (Warning: gory photo included in the article)

Welcome to the inaugural entry in this category. I spend my working days deeply immersed in the tangible science of computers. But I've always been extremely interested in the world of the unexplained.

What struck me about the strange experience this Austrailan man had, was this quote: "We tested his clothes with a static electricity field meter and measured a current of 40,000 volts, which is one step shy of spontaneous combustion, where his clothes would have self-ignited". I wonder if this type of phenomenon could hold some explaination for human spontaneous combustion.