Richard Rathe's Reading Room

Time for a Mars update! First, both peripatetic rovers are still going strong almost two years after they landed!! Opportunity is on the edge of Victoria Crater. Spirit is has been all over the Columbia Hills. It gets better! The new Mars Reconnaissance orbiter snapped a photo of Opportunity from space. The resolution is good enough to see the little guy's shadow! And Mars Recon is the new kid in orbit. Mars Odyssey and Mars Express have been sending back high resolution photos for several years already. The animated Flight Into Mariner Valley is a must see!

Over the summer I had the privilege of working at the National Board of Medical Examiners. My major project was to design and implement software used to capture patient notes and related data during performance-based assessments. The Patient Note Engine (PNE) is now in early beta testing.

The PNE user interface is based on tabs, outlines and input slips. The latter are small HTML forms that appear on demand and then disappear. This is the first web application I've written using the new Ajax paradigm for robust interactivity.

With America "at war" on several fronts, I was stimulated to recall this wonderful and important book by the eminent historian Barbara Tuchman. The first line says it all...

"A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests."

Tuchman Quotations...

While vacationing on the Mississippi River we noticed this small steam-powered riverboat called the Julia Belle Swain. Then I recalled a John Hartford song by the same name (from his 1976 album Mark Twang). Sure enough, this was the very boat he piloted and sang about!

Mark Twain published his description of Life on the Mississippi in 1883.

High Resolution Photo by the Author.

Just back from my annual sojourn to the Everglades. I called this trip "Islands, Rivers and Bays" and we had a great time!

"There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth; remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them." - Marjory S. Douglas

NASA has two excellent sites summarizing the geology and ecology of the Everglades.

I make a weekly visit to the Cassini images Web site. The wonders there are too numerous to count, but here are a few of my favorites: Saturn Portrait, Rings Close Up, When Moons Align, Huygens Landing on Titan, Phoebe, Hyperion, Enceladus, and Zen Moon Garden. Update: Cold Faithful and Titan Landing videos. Update2: Backlit Beauty

This is one of the scariest books I've read in a long time—and it's not fiction! Published in 2002, it chronicles the strange tale of Smallpox, its world-wide eradication, and the lingering threat of its return. Millions are alive today thanks to the efforts of D. A. Henderson (2) (who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002), the World Health Organization, and an army of public health workers. Smallpox is probably the worst disease the human race has ever known, and now it's gone—well almost... The demon lives on in at least two freezers, one at the CDC in Atlanta and one in Russia. But there is no way to know how many other caches exist. In a cruel twist of fate, the fact that smallpox no longer exists "in the wild" makes it well suited for bioterrorism! It is the biological eqivalent of an atom bomb, and perhaps worse.