IT Insights Blog — certification

Once upon a long-forgotten time — well, mostly forgotten, at any rate; we couldn't tell you this story if nobody had ever remembered anything — a massive invading army of from Persia attempted to overwhelm a vastly outnumbered detachment of Greek soldiers at the coastal pass of Thermopylae. A company of about 1,000 Greeks, notably including 300 Spartans, held its ground against a Persian force more than 100 times as large for three full days of battle.

At some point in the near future, possibly as soon as 25 or 30 years from now, a tiny spacecraft accelerated to one-fifth the speed of light (134 million MPH) by an Earth-based laser could arrive at the Alpha Centauri star system. Alpha Centauri contains three stars and at least two known planets, and we'll probably find out a lot more about our nearest stellar neighbor after the "nanocraft" arrives.

Fall is just around the corner, meaning that it's almost college football season. Some people question why that matters to anyone. Other people spend hours driving and walking to and from large outdoor stadiums so that they can sit cheek-by-jowl with strangers for up to three hours and yell at slightly-more-than-teenaged young men who are running around on grass plowing into each other at full speed.

There's an old 19th-century Christian hymn written by British-born immigrant historian John Jaques that attempts to frame the oft-thirsted-after concept of capital-T "truth." In Verse 1 of "Oh Say, What Is Truth?," Jaques declares that truth is the "fairest gem that the riches of worlds can produce," while in Verse 2 he acclaims it the "brightest prize to which mortals or gods can aspire."

The IT Inights blog is on the road until Aug. 20. Because we know how much you love us, however, we didn't just slip out the back door and leave you with nothing for an entire week. We're posting photos of some of the landscapes we'll be visiting, along with a link to a classic IT Insights blog post.