IT Insights Blog

The dog days of summer are about to be replaced by the cool nights and changing leaves of autumn. The baseball season, however, is still rolling forth, with games continuing through the end of September. The Boston Red Sox have more wins (93) than any other team in baseball at the moment, though the rival New York Yankees are hanging in there and actually have more wins (82) than any team but the Red Sox.

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.

The U.S. observance of Labor Day had its first formal stirrings in 1887, when Oregon became the first state to make Labor Day a darn tootin', sure-as-shootin' public holiday. They're nothing if not progressive in Oregon, which is also where the first one-way streets in a U.S. city were laid out, as well as being the (highly generalized) location of the first facility to successfully breed harbor seals in captivity.

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.