Cool!  Our first cloaking device.  Sure, it has its limitations, but it’s also the first attempt.  Again, cool!

“President Bush and congressional Republicans agreed [Tuesday] on a $70 billion package of tax-cut extensions that they hope will help halt the deterioration of their political fortunes.”  Imagine what $70 billion could accomplish were these tax cuts allowed to expire.

I read the entire USA Amnesty International’s Supplementary Briefing to the UN Committee Against Torture.  As an American, I am appalled and embarrassed, especially when at the same time there is new evidence to show the officials not only knew, they promoted the environment of torture before later acting shocked when Abu Ghraib photos and other scandals began to surface.

There’s a monolith growing on Mount St. Helens.  It’s already 300 feet (91 meters) tall and growing 4 to 5 feet (1.2 to 1.5 meters) per day.  This is fascinating.  That volcano never stops changing.

You can safely assume I will buy and read The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan.  Edited by his wife, Ann Druyan, it comes “a decade after his death from a rare bone-marrow disease” and includes “some of Sagan’s deepest thoughts on the ultimate questions … brought to light in a newly rediscovered collection of lectures…”  It should be out in November.

Remember Red Jr.?  That’s the new red spot on Jupiter that is about half the size of the Great Red Spot, a storm now at least 300 years old.  Red Jr. may well radically alter the gas giant’s entire climate.  This whole event is very interesting, and seeing it live through a telescope is overwhelming.

For some, answers just became much clearer.  For others, they became increasingly more difficult to answer.  You see, the question of the Big Bang has long been a point of conflict between believers in science and believers in religion.  What caused it?  It either just happened out of nothing, or it was caused to happen — if it even happened at all.  Now, a new answer not only addresses that question but also appears to solve an age old cosmological quandary: “The cosmological constant represents the energy of empty space, and is thought to be the most likely explanation for the observed speeding up of the expansion of the universe. But its measured value is a googol (1 followed by 100 zeroes) times smaller than that predicted by particle physics theories. It is a discrepancy that gives cosmologists a real headache.”  Until now.  The premise of a constantly expanding and collapsing universe appears to resolve both issues.  Sorry, but that’s another creationist/IDiot argument down the drain.

I’m disgusted.  Two girls posted on their MySpace page a video of them brutalizing a cat.  They wrapped it in plastic, then dropped, hit, and kicked it, all the while taunting it.  Thankfully they were caught — which serves them right for being cruel and stupid.

Go see today’s Day by Day cartoon.

Finally…  ¡Feliz Cinco de mayo!