There is something about the town that draws me back. Of course, that was the other hat I wear, storm chasing. Douglas County Emergency Management hosted a Severe Weather Symposium that is one of the great local chase events in Kansas. I'll blog about that later on http://www.ruminationofthunder.com/.
The great thing about Lawrence is the people. Yeah, there's a lot of young male "who-hoos" in the bar, chucking drunken high-fives over the March Madness BS, but you have street musicians and artists, a very liberal crowd, and the occasional conspiracy folk.
Mass street (the main drag for bars and food in Lawrence) has hosted a sit-in protest against Starbucks when they built a store downtown possibly driving out the local owned coffee shops (It didn't). Some of the population took couches down to the middle of Mass and had a sit in.This weekend when I arrived on Mass. I could see two huge spot lights working toward the middle of downtown. Liberty Hall was hosting the UFO ReyKAWvik Summit for UFO enthusiasts.
The UFO Censorship Must End cracked me up and made me think about a recent thing I heard (NPR, yes it's more than saving Big Bird) about the UK unclassifying several recent documents about UFOs, one that included a "First Contact initiative that almost happened, until they discovered the UFO was the work of a local artist. Are they among us? Are we them and they us? Personally, having a chemistry background, I believe life outside of Earth is possible. Life is an easy combination of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Hydrogen for its most basic level. We've found these elements far flung across the galaxy every time a star goes nova and recently discovered a creepy floating green cloud in space to be a huge cloud of oxygen.
So will we meet ET in our lifetimes? A recent discovery possibly found bacteria from a Mars based asteroid. Interesting if we've been looking for life in the far flung stars, only to find it at our neighbors.
