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 Mr. Rockets fans,

I'm not sure what to make of this...I found it stamped onto the hull of an extravagantly designed airplane shortly before it took off for Morocco.  I snapped the picture right before it flew off into the night!  Do with it what you will.

In 2010 the eyes of the world will turn to Vancouver, Canada, to watch the 21st Olympic Winter Games. However, that's not the most exciting thing about 2010 (and I'm not even counting the launch of this fine apparel company!). On May 1, Singapore is hosting the next World's Fair. A new, dazzling display of architecture and industry, of great minds producing wonders. Next year's fair promises to not only produce, but show to the world that international expos like these are once again globally acceptable in today's modern world!

Shanghai's own pavilion, entitles "My Dream, Our Vision" is a pixelated skyscraper built from 3,866 glass and plastic cubes of varying opacity.  It was designed to serve as a physical manifestation of the intangible: digital information floating above the green landscape.  Visitors to the expo will be invited inside the pavillion to post their dreams of the future, in order to incite innovation!

A very... odd though interesting entry comes from Macau, China!  This towering building in the form of a rabbit represents a friend to nature, using little to no groundwater (a scarce and exploited resource in many parts of the world, believe it or not) in it's construction.  The pavillion itself will also feature solar panels to create energy, and will also collect rain water!  Oh, and the bunny ears are inflatable balloons, that will bob up and down!

Possibly one of my favorite entries is the Danish Loop!  This circular structure has been built to be a perpetual loop, featuring a city bike path, a nature playground, a harbor bath and an ecological picnic area.  What's so incredible about this, is that at it's very core is a fountain pool filled with water directly from the Copenhagen Harbor, shipped in to symbolize the magnificent work they have done cleaning up their harbor that was polluted with industrial waste 20 years ago.  At the heart of the fountain will reside Copenhagen's very own iconic statue, the "Little Mermaid", to watch over the pavillion during the length of the expo.

Romania seems to be pulling out all the stops as well, creating this very green park area.  They have decided to call it "Greenopolis" and it will cover about 21,527 square feet of space. The 5 levels will include music and cultural performance areas, plus restaurant, terrace, and office facilities. 

Many people don't realize that hosting the World Expo is the third best global event in terms of cultural and economical impact next to the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup.  It is an honour to host one, and provides the people with a glowing outlook of todays industry and tomorrow's opportunity.  I mean, just look at what Australia is building for the 2012 World Fair in South Korea!  That's intense!

My very home town - Edmonton, Alberta, Canada - is in contention for this honour in 2017.  One should keep in mind, instead of being disassembled and shipped back to their countries of origin, there have been numerous times that structures built by other countries have been left behind as gifts to the host.  This chance alone is why, starting today, I'm throwing my full support behind the promotion of the 2017 World Fair Bid in Edmonton, Canada!

You can visit the World Expo Blog website for a full listing of participating countries and a list of their entry websites.  While you're there, they have a number of interesting articles regarding the history of the fair and previous entries!

For more information on Edmonton's Expo Bid 2017, visit the website at the link!

Impossible is Possible,

-Dan

Greetings, fellow humans.

As most of you probably know, far off on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, 100m underground, CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire - European Council for Nuclear Research) has switched on the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC for short.  The end was nigh.

But here we are!  So now to understand what could have 'killed' us as a race of beings in God's creation.

The whole idea of the LHC is to provide humanity with understanding - something we've striven to achieve for the entirety of our intelligent existance.  The processes that will be performed inside the CERN laboratories using the LHC, will break down even the smallest known particles; they will display to us the very building blocks of creation.  This is where our understanding of this vast universe truly begins.

The LHC itself is a 27km ring of superconducting magnets, wherein particles will be accelerated and collided, studied and broken down, sent to and analyzed by a multitude of detectors in a grid around the world.  Tens if not hundreds of thousands of discs of data for the world's scientists to pore over

I'm not going to go into the smallest details regarding each experiment going on, but I will give a brief summary (with my limited understanding (hey, I'm not a rocket scientist, I'm a Mr. Rockets COO)). 

First we have the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) detector. This 26m long, 16m high and 16m wide 10,000 ton beast of a machine is located beneath St. Genis-Pouilly, France.  ALICE will, by colliding lead ions, recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, allowing scientists to examine a state of matter that existed for only a very very short time after the event.  The collisions inside this machine will create heat more than 100,000 times hotter than the core of the sun!

 Second we have ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS).  Destorying ALICE in size, ATLAS stands 46m long, 25m high and wide.  It is the largest volume particle detector ever constructed, and is located beneath Meyrin, Switzerland.  This device will - wait for it - search for extra dimensions, and particles that could make up dark matter.  The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), located in Cessy, France and standing at 21m long, 15m high and 15m wide, will also help detect these things, however two different processes will be used between the two.

Weighing in at 5,600 tonnes over 21m in length, 10m high and 13 m wide, we also have the LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty).  The LHCb experiment, located in Ferney-Voltaire, France, is meant to help scientists understand why we live in a Universe that appears to be composed almost entirely of matter, but no antimatter.  This will be done by studying a type of particle called the 'beauty quark' or 'b quark', and will rely on sub-detectors close to the collision point inside the machine.

This shouldn't be confused with the LHCf (Large Hadron Collider forward) simulators located in Meyrin, Switzerland (each of the two sized at only 30cm in length, 80cm in height and 10cm wide), where forward particles created inside the LHC will be used to simulate cosmic rays!

Finally we have the TOTEM (TOTal Elastic and diffractive cross section Measurement) experiment.  The Totem is stretched among 8  specially designed vacuum chambers called 'Roman Pots' located along 440 m of the LHC pipes.  These Roman Pots will be paired in 4 locations near the CMS experiment to monitor the collisions, where they will measure the size of the proton and monitor the LHC's luminosity.

So what does this all mean?

It's the future.  Simple as that.  It is higher scientific understanding.  It is what will allow humanity to proceed with scientific discovery far into the future.  The technologies that can be made possible by the further understanding of physics tested by the LHC could bery well allow humanity the ability to travel at light speeds.  It's not just science fiction anymore.

I know many people have seen J.J. Abrams' movie, Star Trek, and witnessed the destruction of the planet Vulcan due to a black hole generated on that planet and wonder: "Hey... if the LHC is planning on creating black holes on Earth, won't we all... DIE?!", I find it is comforting to heed the wise words of that wheelchair bound genius.

"The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on. The LHC is absolutely safe. ... Collisions releasing greater energy occur millions of times a day in the earth's atmosphere and nothing terrible happens."

Prof. Steven Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Cambridge University

 

"Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
-Spock, from Star Trek (2009)

-Dan

Now that it is officially past the half-way mark of November, I am beginning to get into what I call the pre-show for the upcoming holiday events. 

So with that in mind, I felt that this particular find was definitely worth a second glance.  As many know, the sequel to one of last year's most popular games, "Left 4 Dead", came out today.  What better to promote it's release than these delightful (if delightful can actually be used to describe these...) festive Season's Greetings cards!

The set of 10 cards were designed by artist Alexandria Neonakis and focus primarily on the new zombie classes beign introduced in the new release.  I think what caught my eye most about these cards was the extreme over-exaggeration of the zombies for the purpose of somehow attempting to make them adorable.

You can purcahse the set of cards from the Valve online store, or by simply following the link provided!

Don't let the zombies bite,

-Dan

As you all might have realized, at Mr. Rockets we're all about class, style and very very awesome things.  And nothing screams out those three qualities more loudly or in such extravagance as this beauty of a pool table.  So you see why I had to share it with all of you!

This, reader, is the Queen's Jubilee Billiard Table, made of black walnut, comissioned for the Queen Victoria Jubliee Exhibition in Manchester in 1887.  It might be hard to even look at any other pool table after seeing this Orne & sons Ltd. creation!

According to the website where I made this find, "The cushion friezes are decorated with ribbons of quotations from Shakespeare, Tennyson, Scott and Byron; themselves entwined with over fifty species of wild flowers and native British birds. Beneath the friezes are two long and six short panels depicting numerous countries through allegory, flora, fauna and industry."

BUT WAIT!  There's more!

You see those figures lounging about on the side panel?  Why, there you'll see William of Normandy, Henry I, Henry II, Henry III, Edward I, Edward II, Edward II, Edward IV, Elizabeth of York, James I and Charles I.  A pool table fit for royalty, in the absolute literal sense of the word.

If one were to purchase this item, one would also be purchasing that imposing cabinet that looms above the table.  There's your cue cabinet!  The cupboard was made to resemble a door within a frame, surmounted by a broken pediment enclosing a lion.

"The door is carved with seven panels; the upper four coats or arms show Victoria during the most important stages in her reign. The central horizontal section has a profile of Victoria and Albert beside Windsor Castle and the lower section depicts the royal residences of Holyrood and Caernavon. The second section also features slides which expose a game with stars and coloured counters, which can be rotated to form a scoreboard. The ormolu door furniture comprises a handplate and two push plates intricately worked with arabesques and lion masks."

So you've seen the table and are hungry to purchase this fine work or artistry mixed with the gentleman's game.  Well, for a low low price of one million pounds, the only thing holding me back is an apparent lack of pool cues to go in the cabinet. 

Shame.  I was so looking forward to this purchase.

Feeling outclassed by a billiard table,

-Dan