Chernobyl receives another burial.

Above: A ferris wheel on the outskirts of Chernobyl remains untouched
for over twenty years.

While we are all certainly thankful for the technology in our lives, we often forget the dangers posed by the world around us. Some of the readers of this blog may be too young to remember the terror inspired by the events at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the late 80s, while to many others the name "Chernobyl" conjures up nightmares of nuclear disaster.

For those unfamiliar with the horrific events of 1986, the events that unraveled at Chernobyl have forever changed the area of its impact into a barren wasteland. The failure of a nuclear reactor in late April of that year led to scores of people dying and to the radiation poisoning of several hundred thousand Ukrainians. To this day, much of the countryside remains deserted and infant mortality rates due to radiation are still high. More can be read here.

Above: An image from the abandoned neighboring city of Pripyat

An article posted Sunday on Yahoo! news chronicles the start of new construction Chernobyl. According to the article, titled "Doomed Chernobyl reactor to be buried in new coffin," states that a $505 million project maned by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has gone underway. The project aims to build a new shelter over the preexisting one encasing the reactor. The current shelter has been leaking radiation out for several years now and it is hoped that this new shelter will stop the issue of leakage once and for all.

It's important that people know about the horrors of Chernobyl. There are several websites which chronicle the event, but there is also a Discovery Channel documentary on the 1986 disaster. Hosted on YouTube.com, the documentary can be seen here.

A tiny slice of my childhood for you.

When I was a child, I was a real nerd - not that this should come as a surprise, mind you. I played chess, was likely the worst soccer goalie in the history of the sport, and read science fiction novels by the box-load. However, amongst the many tomes of fantasy and sci-fi novels I read was a series by Douglas Adams titled The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.


Some of you are no doubt familiar with the title. Maybe some of you actually read the tongue-in-cheek comedy series when you were growing up. Perhaps a few of you saw the movie adaptation that came out about three years ago (which is not bad, honestly). Regardless of whether or not the novels are familiar to you, they have always had a real cult following through the years. Truth be told, there was even a video game adaptation created in 1988.


The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Video Game came around in the era of text-based adventures. Far before the Nintendo hit American shores and every five-year old was playing Mario/Duckhunt, fans of Douglas Adam's hit novels were playing an interactive version of the first book in the series. In the game, the player plays through the game by giving instructions to it. For example, in the first scene the player is in pitch black room. By typing in "turn on light," the player continues forward.

So why am I mentioning all this to you? Well, BBC Radio 4 has created a new version of the classic game in honor of the 20th anniversary of the first book. It's web based, so there's no downloading necessary. This version of the game even gives the player a visual representation of where they are in the game. I really recommend that you give it a try. Who knows, you might even have a chuckle or two.

Are you wasting money too?

With the US economy slipping into a recession (or to the claim of many, already in one), a lot of people are doing the wise thing and saving up their money for tougher times. However according to an article from BBC News, some of us are still buying more than a few frivolous things.

In an article titled "Video games immune to US slowdown," it is reported that while our economy's currently is in a bad place, video game sales are way up. According to the article, $1.7 billion was spent on video game consoles, games, and accessories this month alone. At the top of those sales was the Nintendo Wii which sold 720,000 units.

At least it's nice to know I'm not the only person wasting valuable money on these time-wasters. The above article can be read here.

Leave the laptop behind.

Have you ever felt like going on a vacation, leaving all of your excessive electronic gadgets behind, and just enjoying wilderness? An article over at Forbes.com has given some great vacation ideas of where to go and what to do. Seeing that summer vacation is almost here for Rowan students, now would not be a bad time to start looking at some good hot spots.

The article, titled "World's Ultimate Unplugged Vacations," can be read here.

Military theft on the web; Hackers become more organized

I have come across two articles of note that deal with a common concern for web-users these days: online fraud and theft. Both articles were found on TopTechNews.com and while they are very short reads, I recommend taking a look at them.

The first article, titled "Stolen Military Equipment Found on Ebay," deals with investigators coming across items of military origin posted on both Craigslist and Ebay. The items themselves are on a U.S. Munitions list. While they are not exactly rifles or harmful weapons, they do range from hazmat suits to parts from F-14 fighter jets. The article in its entirety can be read here.

The second article is just as worrying. Titled "Online Crooks Face Tough Competition," the article claims that identity theft criminals are in such strong competition that they are going as far as actually organizing into more formal business operations. It's gotten to a point where they actually sell credit card information in bulk for low prices and are competing with one another for customers. The article can be read here.

Profile: Gregory Olsen

Photo courtesy of MSNBC

Everyone has had a childhood dream of becoming something amazing. Some children want to become veterinarians, while others play with fire trucks and daydream about putting out flames and saving lives. Yet for many growing boys, the greatest dream of all has been the desire to go into space. While only a few chosen elite can claim such a boisterous accomplishment, one jersey native achieved such an amazing goal only a few years ago.

Originally from Brooklyn, NY, Gregory Olsen was born in 1945. Shortly after being born, Olsen’s family made the trip from New York and decided to settle down in New Jersey. He attended Ridgefield Park High School where he soon became known as a troubled student. He received low grades in high school and was even convicted as a juvenile delinquent after being caught stealing hubcaps. Soon after this he turned his life around, dramatically increased his grade point average, and even went off to college. After graduating from Fairleigh Dickinson University, he went off to the University of Virginia where he received a PhD in Materials Science.

After college, Olsen went through a wide variety of career ventures. From 1972 to 1983, he worked as a research scientist at RCA Labs and developed new crystal growth methods for optoelectronic devices. In 1984, he founded a fiber-optic detector manufacturer titled EPITAXX and later also founded an infrared camera manufacturer. The two companies were bought and sold multiple times, raising hundreds of millions of dollars each time.

The successful entrepreneur didn’t fully achieve his dreams, however, until but a few years ago. After over five months and 900 hours of training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Moscow, Olsen was prepared to take off for the International Space Station. On October 1, 2005, Gregory Olsen left the Earth on a Russian rocket and became the third private citizen to orbit the Earth.

For ten days he was a guest at the International Space Station where he orbited the Earth over 150 times. Although some branded him as a “space tourist,” Olsen deplored the term. Prior to taking off from the launch pad, he was quoted as saying:

”The term ‘tourist’ doesn’t do justice to all the work I’ve put in, or the work that the people at the Gagarin centre put in preparing us.”

Featured above: Greg Olsen has a drink of water on the ISS

When he returned to Earth on October 11, Olsen returned to his job as founder and manager of GHO Ventures. At GHO Ventures, Olsen runs a series of programs and initiatives called Angel Investments. These programs range from an education program called Achieve 3000 to a company called Princeton Power Systems which produces electrical power conditioners.

Since that time, he has gone from school to school, discussing the details of his space trip as well as the space race and the possibilities for the future of space travel. He recently gave an in-depth interview with Kim Nagy of the Wild River Review where he talked about the particulars of his experiences in space. On March 27, Olsen visited Rowan University where he gave a lecture on these topics to students in the Rowan Hall auditorium.

In his Rowan Hall lecture, Olsen spoke to teachers and aspiring students alike about not only the intense training he underwent in order to go into space, but also the need to be determined.

"The lesson I learned when I was 60 was the same I learned when I was 16: don't give up," said Olsen. "Don't give up; that's really the secret to life. There's a lot of reasons why you can't do something and only one reason why you can and that is not giving up."

Featured above: Jim Clash (of Forbes) interviews Greg Olsen (2005)

And on the lighter side of technology...

It feels to me that so many people take the internet for granted these days. Seeing how this is crunch time for around six final projects that I am working on, I am spending pretty much every waking hour trying to contact different people and compiling my research. If I had to do this twenty years ago, I'd be spending every moment pouring over dust-covered tomes in some dank part of a library trying to get the information I need. Be it catching moronic car thieves or finding the phone number of a college professor within mere seconds, you can't help but be grateful for the web.

Once in a while you run across an article that just makes your day. Obviously technology news can be very dry, but I read a short story over on the NYTimes' website which I couldn't help but love. The story, titled "It Takes a Cyber Village to Catch an Auto Thief," chronicles how the owner of an auto dealership had a car stolen from him only to have the thieves caught via an internet forum. You can read the whole story here.