Not a Journal

So if you understood my lackluster title, this post is about stars. What are they? Where do the come from? How big are they? .... I was asking you... you.. you don't know? Well, I have bad news for you........... GOTYA! Why else do you come to this corner of the observable web? That joke probably went right over your head because it was completely unrelated to anything I may or may not mention later in this post which of course you haven't read yet. Okay, that's enough of that intro... Stars are, well, pretty simple actually. If you look at a periodic table, you know the one that's kind of a weird shape and has a bunch of letters and numbers on it and you probably have no idea what they are? Yeah, that table. Well, we're in luck. We really only need to look at the first two elements on it. Hydrogen and Helium. Now a star usually contains other stuff too, but for simplicity, we'll stick with the basics. Hydrogen is the 1st element on the periodic ...

Ladies and gentlemen! We are in a state of emergency. Okay, I'm overreacting. But still, I feel it is my duty to make this blog, even though it will likely never reach the people who this post is targeted to. Nonetheless, hopefully it's a little interesting for the regular readers, all 6 of you and the accompanying 40 bots and web crawlers I assume my audience includes. So I was made aware that it might not be common knowledge, or it is and this person just missed the 80 science classes I'm sure this was discussed in over the last 10 years of their education, that our solar system is NOT THE ONLY SOLAR SYSTEM OUT THERE. I CAN'T BELIEVE I HAD TO WRITE THAT. I ALSO FORGOT TO TAKE CAPS LOCK OFF and didn't want to retype any of that. Now I'm not trying to make fun of anyone, but let's go back to square one here. Next time you're outside at night, not you fake audience, just the real people, look up! Those twinkling white dots, those are stars! On a...

I wrote my highest viewed post a year ago.  Here it is if you missed it.  Look how helpful I am! That post was a discussion of the potential of solar power. We've made significant strides since then. Solar is now the fastest growing renewable energy production method in the world. Ignoring President Trump's public statements, solar has generated over 50,000 jobs in the US, Elon Musk - founder & CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, is investing a ton in solar with his Solar Roof initiative and PowerWall tech, and China is increasing their solar energy generation capacity by a great deal and abandoning coal (*cough* take notes, USA *cough*). That's pretty exciting if you ask me. In the post on solar from last year, I mentioned only one type of solar tech - where the solar panel acts as a concentrator of light to generate steam. Due to improvements in material science and electronics, there is another type of solar technology which is driving this upbringing of large-scale solar a...