My blog that use to be “Leis on Life” and then “Cybernudism” has been imported into Frontier Channel. The old blog has been deleted and the cybernudism domain name parked.

I kept these properties separate in a half-hearted attempt to keep news reporting and commentary separate. However, there was a lot of overlap and they belong together. Future commentary posts will be flagged as such.

Notice a difference?  I am currently overhauling the Frontier Channel site by moving the old static pages into WordPress and designing a new look.  This move to content management software should make the site much, much easier to maintain and allow me to finally provide the first new content since March 2006.

The graphics that accompanied the original articles will be added back soon, after I decide how best to manage media.  The old pages are still around, and I recently discovered many of them have broken links.  Thank you for your patience.

Frontier Channel has been through a lot of changes over the years, but the changes going into effect over the next month are the biggest yet. The news site has been moved to frontierchannel.com from frontierchannel.tv, which will become “VIDEO Frontier Channel” and home to our first video content (coming soon.) The podcast “RADIO Frontier Channel” remains at radio.frontierchannel.tv, but will soon undergo its own face lift.

One major task remains: converting previous articles to the new layout and moving them from frontierchannel.tv to frontierchannel.com. So far the few articles from 2000 and 2002 have been successfully moved and the short format articles prior to December 2004 are in progress. The December 2004 and a majority of the 2005 articles are next but will take the longest to complete.

As a result of this move, links from search engines and other sites will be broken. The previous RSS news feed has been replaced with http://feeds.feedburner.com/frontierchannel. I apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your patience. This will likely be the last major hierarchical change made to Frontier Channel.

Along with the move comes a new look for Frontier Channel. Gone is the magazine format and here to stay is the news portal format. More color and variety has been added, the layout is cleaner, and soon there will be new pages to better explain Frontier Channel and its features.

Some things remain the same. For one, images continue to be large format. The overall emphasis of Frontier Channel has always been on images, because rapidly accelerating progress in science and technology is best presented and appreciated visually. A textual description cannot do justice to the recently discovered water ice plumes on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, for example. With this in mind, VIDEO Frontier Channel and an enhanced RADIO Frontier Channel will soon join Frontier Channel to bring you the wonders of the Great Frontiers in all their audiovisual splendor.

What is up with the name change? “Leis On Life” did not exactly fit what I am trying to do with this blog. Sure, this is me commenting on life, but it has become a bit more specific than that. I focus mostly on science and technology and how humanity is dealing with the rapid progress in both.

Cybernudism is a word I coined that represents that Internet-inspired drive to expose yourself to the world, in more ways than just visually and nakedly. Now that everyone and their grandmother seems to have a blog, every inane photograph and video clip is showing up on the net, amateurs are trying to be talk show hosts, and (unavoidably) all sexual mores appear to be well-represented somewhere in cyberspace, it is time to reflect on what it all means for humanity.

Cybernudism is also a response to “Big Brother” and “Little Brother”. The escalating invasion of privacy by the government and your next door neighbor can be combated with a philosophy that there are no secrets to exploit if you no longer keep secrets. Cybernudism suggests leaving behind anonymity (without any requirement to volunteer information) and instead taking responsibility for your own revealing to the rest of the world.

And then again, maybe not. The point of this blog is to discuss those possibilities, while highlighting the several ways science and technology are radically changing what it means to be human, sentient, and free.

I cannot express just how excited I am by tonight’s Deep Impact with Comet Tempel 1. Because all that energy has to go somewhere (my energy, not the impact energy), I decided to keep up on the latest images and scientific data all night while providing coverage on my own website, Frontier Channel. The articles and images will be available in the July 2005 issue of Frontier Channel and I plan to update a lot, especially tomorrow.

Furthermore, I am trying something new with my upcoming podcast about the Deep Impact mission. I hope to have it ready by tomorrow as well. Stay tuned.

If you are reading this post, and if you check out the coverage on my site, would you mind critiquing my effort? Let me know what you like, what you hate, what bored you to tears, etc. You can respond to this blog post or send me an email at frontierchannel@frontierchannel.tv with your comments. I’m planning to provide similar coverage in August when I attend the lauch of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter from Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA, and in November when I plan to attend the Immortality Institute Life Extension Conference. Any feedback you can provide will help me improve the site and practice for these future events.

NASA will have official coverage of the Deep Impact mission on NASA TV and on the Deep Impact Mission site. Space.com, the other space-related websites, and the usual news media suspects will all provide coverage as well. Space.com has a good list of webcasts that will be provided by several observatories as seen through their own telescopes. Sky and Telescope has good illustrations and instructions if you want to try spotting the action from your own backyard.

If you take any pictures, I would love to post them on Frontier Channel. Send a jpeg, description, and your name and/or website (for crediting purposes) to (address no longer exists) frontierchannel@frontierchannel.tv.

Thanks for the help!

To celebrate the one year anniversity of The Frontier Channel, I am introducing a brand new section called “ART at the Frontier” (Update: this section was later merged with the rest of the Frontier Channel site.  Category is “Media”.) In this section I will explore the intersection of science and technology with art. This is where the stereotype of cold technology collides with the heat of passion and aesthetics. The results are often beautiful, unexpected, and life altering. Please take a look and send in your comments.

The Frontier Channel is launching a podcast called Radio Frontier Channel on Sunday, February 20, 2005. Podcasting is the emerging phenomena of audio broadcasts on the Internet. The audio feeds can be automatically downloaded using podcast subscription software like iPodder using the RSS standard. Wikipedia has an article explaining what podcasting is all about.

Radio Frontier Channel will be available in MP3 format. My goal is to put a new podcast out every weekend. As I gain experience expect Radio Frontier Channel to evolve.

When I was in high school I thought I had important things to tell everyone. The teacher advisor for the school paper humored me and published the monthly column I wrote called “Leis on Life.” The title is a play on the pronunciation – “lease” – of my last name. Roughly double my age and I still think I have important things to tell everyone in a regular column. Now my outlet is digital, available to the world in my own public blog.

Beside the overwhelming urge to tell everyone what I think, whether I should or not, I also have the compelling urge to expose myself in cyberspace, a phenomenon perhaps related to nudism, a practice I term “cybernudism.” It is a personal dare, a risk, a smirk, a lie, but ultimately an attempt at the truth. No, I am not going to post nude images of myself. The concept of cybernudism includes a sense of responsibility for the material that you expose about yourself and awareness of why you are doing it in the first place.

I created Frontier Channel to showcase the beauty and wonder of science and technology, with the hope of imparting to readers some of the benefits of skeptical thinking and an aptitude for wonder at a time when both skills are needed more than ever. “Leis on Life” is much more personal than Frontier Channel (the views expressed in “Leis on Life” do not necessarily reflect the views of Frontier Channel.) Here I can be as subjective as I want while trying to show how the above skills can be applied to all aspects of our lives.

Welcome. I invite your comments and suggestions and I hope you find something useful here.

The Frontier Channel returns today from a remarkable new setting for observing the frontiers of science and technology: the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. In addition to being one of the premier centers for planetary science research in the United States and home to the upcoming Phoenix mission to Mars, UA is home to ophthalmologist Jim Schwiegerling. Dr. Schwiegerling is currently at work on a new generation of corrective laser eye surgery that should result in vision enhancement superior to current human abilities, by the end of this decade.

Rather than simply treating or correcting human medical conditions and diseases, research is poised to bring to the public technology to enhance human abilities. Bionic ears that are superior to the best biological ears, corrective laser eye surgery that results in 20/10 or better vision, drugs that decrease our dependence on sleep, and life-extension compounds are just some of the technologies that are expected in the next five years to begin confusing our definition of what it means to be human.

Meanwhile, I will be working on degrees in Physics and Astronomy and may volunteer as a human guinea pig.