Around The Horn

"All the hits the Nits missed."

In science news, the magazine ScienceNews recently printed an article about the successful teleportation of matter. A qubit was transferred between two atoms. It is my believe that a qubit is something that is so small that you've never heard of it before. We still have a ways to go before we can beam Coovo around the universe, but it's a start.

"But what would be the point of beaming Coovo around the universe?" you ask with a condescending tone, "Earth is the only inhabitable planet anyway!"

Not so fast. At a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in The Loop, astronomer Alan Boss recently posited that there is one earth-like planet for every solar system in the galaxy. There are about 10¹¹ solar systems in our galaxy (the good ole' Milky Way), and 10¹¹ galaxies in the universe. That's a lot of Earths.

How does he know this? He doesn't, of course. But the NASA's Kepler Mission launches on March 5, with the sole purpose to count the number of earth like planets in the Cygnus constellation. Now from my extensive research (the 90 seconds I spent reviewing the wikipedia entry) the Cygnus constellation has 6 known stars with planets. So I don't see exactly how this shows us that there is an earth in each of the 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 solar systems out there... but perhaps I just need to do more reading on the Kepler Mission. I'll admit this isn't the most thorough research ever blogged.

I wonder how many other earths invented baseball...

It's March, and the players are back on the field. While there are many players out there with numbers like 86 and 72, it's still baseball. Youngsters get a chance to turn some heads. Veterans prove they have a little left in the tank. And everybody else gets to warm it up.

In the next month, the Cards have to find a second basemen, figure out who will man the hot corner until Glaus returns, find a reliever or relievers to close games, and probably most importantly, see if Chris Carpenter is really healthy.

I'm reading Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" right now. It's a good, easy read that I recommend to all of you. The perfect book to read before bed.