Resonant Constellation

My good friend and next-door neighbor, Pete, often asks me:

Are you going to use your powers for good, or for awesome?

The answer is obvious; as Dark Helmet says in Spaceballs, “Evil will always win, because good is dumb.” Now, I’m not saying that I’m evil–as I often state, the thing keeping most of my friends and I from becoming evil geniuses that you see in comic books is a general lack of motivation (”I want to rule the world…but it’s so much work!”) or apathy (”I could rule the world…but meh.”). You have nothing to worry about-we’re content just doing our science.

So why am I telling you this? Well, it is the perfect preface to why I like explosions so much. Are explosions good? Most of the time, I’d say no, they are not good. But they are awesome, this is an indisputable fact. At the moment, I am watching the spacevidcast for the launch of STS-127 (found here), which is basically a barely controlled explosion used to hurl people and machinery into space. Afterwards, I am going to watch the SpaceX Falcon 1 launch. These are both live feeds of vehicle launches into space. How cool is the world that we live in that I can be at work, writing my programs, processing images, and I can watch a live feed of these launches, one on the opposite side of the country, the other from the Kwajalein Atoll in Malaysia-almost on the other side of the world.