Radio Show Commentary, 7/5/2010
I’m a self-admitted ‘space geek’. So to me, space exploration matters. But being the first to go somewhere in space … doesn’t.
Let me offer some historical context.
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Apollo 11 Mission Patch
Today I received a campaign email from Alan Grayson. His email is included here, below my response:
Dear Alan,
Even among those of us who support you and the Democratic Party, and even among those of us who despise Newt and the GOP and what they stand for, even among us … There are those of us who support an expanded presence in space and space exploration.
[Excerpts] …Paul Allen has … a pioneering vision for commercial space travel. Allen, on Tuesday, unveiled designs for an efficient air-launch system that resembled a giant airplane split into two fuselages. The craft will take both government and commercial payloads into orbit, with human missions as an eventual goal.
…Allen funded the development of SpaceShipOne, the first manned private spaceflight.
The commercial space transport system will be built by Stratolaunch Systems, Allen’s new company. Burt Rutan, an aerospace engineer integral to the development of SpaceShipOne, will be helping Allen develop his new project. The billionaire believes that the carrier plane lifting rocket ships to higher altitude will be both safer and more cost-effective than launching a rocket from the ground.
Article: http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/paul-allen-unveils-new-business-for-commercial-space-travel/
This image using color data obtained by the framing camera aboard NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows Vesta's southern hemisphere in color, centered on the Rheasilvia formation. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
News release: 2011-375 Dec. 5, 2011
New NASA Dawn Visuals Show Vesta’s ‘Color Palette’
The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-375&cid=release_2011-375
Vesta appears in a splendid rainbow-colored palette in new images obtained by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. The colors, assigned by scientists to show different rock or mineral types, reveal Vesta to be a world of many varied, well-separated layers and ingredients. Vesta is unique among asteroids visited by spacecraft to date in having such wide variation, supporting the notion that it is transitional between the terrestrial planets — like Earth, Mercury, Mars and Venus — and its asteroid siblings. Continue reading
This artist's concept shows NASA's two Voyager spacecraft exploring a turbulent region of space known as the heliosheath, the outer shell of the bubble of charged particles around our sun. After more than 33 years of travel, the two Voyager spacecraft will soon reach interstellar space, which is the space between stars.
Below is a copyrighted article from Mother Jones Magazine, printed in its entirety. I don’t normally do that (I’d normally excerpt and link to it), but I hope they’ll forgive my lapse of legal protocol in order to ensure its widest dissemination. – Mike
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—By Adam Weinstein | Fri Oct. 28, 2011 6:30 AM PDT
“Maalox is a must.” That’s one of the many tips to be found in “Defending Against Tear Gas,” a fascinating flier making the rounds on the internet today (and shown in full below—click to embiggen) Continue reading
Vesta is almost large enough to fall into what’s called “a relaxed state”; the term for a body with enough mass to pull itself into a sphere, like Earth.
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From the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: The View From Vesta
Video Advisory: 2011-293
Sept. 16, 2011
NASA’s Dawn Collects a Bounty of Beauty from Vesta Continue reading
Science matters. Discovery, understanding, application, improvement of our lives and our society; none of it happens without science, and science doesn’t happen without both money and the ability of scientists to follow their evidence wherever it leads them.
Below is the text of an appeal for scientific freedom. You can click on this link to see the full page, and opportunities to sign a message to NOAA Administrator Lubchenco: https://secure3.convio.net/ucs/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=2972&s_src=socnet&s_subsrc=twitter
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Help Protect Scientists From Political Interference
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is seeking public comment on a draft of its scientific integrity policy, which aims to protect science and scientists from political interference. While the policy represents significant progress, it can be further strengthened to ensure that policy decisions are fully informed by the best available scientific information.
File a public comment asking NOAA to strengthen its draft scientific integrity policy.
In the past, NOAA scientists were censored and told to change their research on issues from global warming to endangered species. While the draft policy would address some of these problems, it needs to be further strengthened to better protect those who report the abuse of science, give the public more information about who is meeting with NOAA officials, and allow us to hold agency officials accountable if they transgress.
It is critical that NOAA scientists can continue to provide national weather forecasting, manage coastal and deep ocean resources, and research global climate patterns without interference.
Help NOAA improve its scientific integrity policy by submitting a comment today–the deadline is August 20.
Please make your letter personal by adding in your own thoughts and concerns. Every letter makes a difference, but customized letters have the greatest effect!
You can find the full text of NOAA’s draft policy here and view NOAA’s scientific integrity webpage here. We have outlined some areas for improvement in NOAA’s draft scientific integrity policy that may be helpful to reference when drafting your own comments. Read our draft comments (pdf).
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You can click on this link to go to the participation page.
Better Move Your Library!
You may have heard, Borders Books is going out of business. If you ‘own’ any eBooks, particularly from Borders, you might be interested in the email I received recently:
Does the Universe suck, or does it blow? That could be an existential question.
I am neither a scientist nor a mathematician, not a cosmologist nor a quantum physicist. I simply know enough about a lot to be dangerous. Please as you read the following, understand that it reflects some thoughts I had and that I present as sheer speculation. A mind game akin to contemplating the sound of one hand clapping.
To the extent that it may provoke any actual scientifically-grounded thought, that would be exciting.
Mike
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What if we’re all really “matter chauvinists”? It wouldn’t be unreasonable. As thinking, reasoning matter, we’re kind of at the top of the “existence chain”, and that could make us a bit cocky.
But the problem with matter is gravity, and the problem with gravity is entropy.
Maybe nature does not abhor a vacuum. Or maybe nature is actually a vacuum chauvinist, and we just can’t ‘see’ it. (As the saying goes, if Nature abhors a vacuum, why is there so much of it?)
Continue reading
Andy Pope’s “Pattern Fills”, which has some different functionality from Eric Patterson’s add-in.
I admit that when I first went to Office 2007, I personally found “The Ribbon” quite daunting, but I ultimately found Microsoft’s logic – that there are features in Office that you wouldn’t even know you had with the old menu system, which are easily discovered with “The Ribbon” – to be true.
Even having arrived at the conclusion fairly quickly, it took a lot of ‘accustomization’ and tweaking of the Quick Access Toolbar to make Office 2007 or 2010 easy enough for the real advantages to become appreciable.
I made a fairly quick jump to Office 2010 because Office 2007 lacks some key advantages of 2010; particularly “Track Change” in Excel and PowerPoint.
Apparently, Microsoft Excel 2007 also lacks a key feature from Excel 2003: Pattern Fill for charts and graphs. This is a big deal if you print your charts or graphs in black and white, instead of color. 
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ThinkWingRadio So why are the damn parts for F-15s made in China?! RT @WILLROGERSUSA Key US senators slam China on military parts probe http://t.co/BaIHzMq
ThinkWingRadio I have a great idea! The Russians can make M-16s, the Chinese can build our military computers, the Iranians can build our rockets. BFFs!!
ThinkWingRadio What the hell has happened to our country? We don’t even make our own military equipment?Now China’s “The Arsenal of Democracy”?! Thanx GOP!
ThinkWingRadio What the hell has happened to our country? We don’t even make our own military equipment?Now China’s “The Arsenal of Democracy”?! Thanx GOP!
HOUSTON—Radiation has contaminated the underground pipes, water tanks, and plumbing that provides drinking water for much of central Texas and the famed Texas Hill Country, according to concerned city officials in the region who have tested the pipes with Geiger counters.
According to local officials, the contamination comes from years of exposure to drinking water that already tests over federal legal limits for radioactive radium. Of even more concern, they say, is that any water quality testing is done before the water runs through the contaminated pipes that could be adding even more radiation.
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The white paper, titled “Implementing the National Primary Drinking Water Regulations for Radionuclides,” was an internal assessment of the threat posed from radiation in Texas water, and was prompted by new federal regulations the Environmental Protection Agency adopted on Dec. 7, 2000. The Texas report states “over 200,000 Texans drink water from public water systems which are contaminated with relatively high levels of radium and other naturally occurring radioactive material.” <Entire article here>
Well, it’s that time again. Lots of interesting articles have crossed my path, but I can’t post or comment on all of them, so it’s time for another series of what I might call “Potpourri Posts”. Or maybe I should just call them “Post-pourris”?
(Suggestions for titles are invited.)
You can go to the different articles by clicking on the links embedded in their titles.
As oxymoronic as it sounds, I believe this to be true: If big business has a reputation for lying, obfuscating and being generally deceptive, they come by it honestly.
A case in point is the Corn Refiners Association‘s (CRA) recent petition to the FDA to allow them to change food ingredients labels from “high fructose corn syrup” (HFCS) to “corn sugar”. Continue reading
April 19, 2011
Business is humming if you’re in the business of extra-solar planets, exobiology or exoenvironmental studies.
Recently, it was announced that scientists had determined that liquid water and hydrocarbons were present on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. They made this determination using Cassini’s plasma spectrometer, which had found specific ions characteristic of water in motion. (It never ceases to amaze me how scientists can tease information out of data using the most obscure scientific facts.)
That makes at least 4 worlds (Earth, Mars, Enceladus, and Europa) in our solar system where liquid water and other ingredients necessary for life have been found to be present now or in the past, or probably so. Continue reading
I was referred to this article (“Scientists plan to drill all the way down to the Earth’s mantle“) by a tweet from @ebertchicago (Roger Ebert): Drilling five miles down into the earth’s mantle. What could possibly go wrong? http://bit.ly/g9qGVr
Learn more about this movie at the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com).
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Summary: A scientist tries to find a limitless, non-polluting energy source by drilling really, really deep into the earth. This can’t end ‘well’.
I first saw this film when I was about 14. Continue reading
Finding a 1-hour fire safe was easy. Finding a 2-hour fire safe is quite challenging. I found this item at Sears around 2005. (Currently Sears Item# 00957428000 | Sentry Model# A5882)
Our house burned to the ground in 2008. The flames burned for 10 hours, and we’re told that the temperatures probably reached 1200 degrees Fahrenheit at some times during the blaze. This safe was on the 2nd floor, and it took some days to recover it. Continue reading
http://i.usatoday.net/tech/graphics/iss_timeline/flash.htm
International Space Station Animated Assembly Graphic
This is what a clean sweep really is: RT @nytimes “Satellite photos of devastation in #Japan, before and after”: http://nyti.ms/hYQF9W (Also from Australian Broadcasting (ABC): http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/japan-quake-2011/beforeafter.htm)
Radiation weather forecast from The Weather Channel – “High-tech look at where radiation may go” http://wxch.nl/i7MD2y
Survivor of Oregon State tsunami. (Yes, there was one!): @wxchannel video – Dramatic rescue in #tsunami http://wxch.nl/gWtGMT
[UPDATE, 2011-APRIL 22: I have improved the links in this story. I’m sorry it took so long to do so. – Mike]
Contemporary journalism often frustrates me greatly.Good questions don’t get asked, spin is reported as news, and explanations necessary for the understanding of important events are often thin at best and non-existent or flat wrong at worst.
The reporting on the technical aspects of the Japanese nuclear crisis is an excellent case in point. If you want to know how high the tsunami was, the depths of the human tragedy, how much the main Japanese island of Honshu moved or the changes in the length of a day or the tilt of the earth’s axis as a result of the great quake, you’re in luck. There’s lots of that information to find.
If you want to understand what’s going on at the Japanese nuclear plants Continue reading
From Space.com. You can read the full article here.
CREDIT: Karl Tate, SPACE.com
CREDIT: USAF/Vandenberg Air Force Base
CREDIT: USAF
Just read this. Yes, it’s a second prototype, desginated the X-37B OTV-2 (Orbital Test Vehicle 2).
So now, the question becomes how many of these OTVs does the USAF have, and in what other variations?
If you’ve ever wanted to be a fly on the wall of a space shuttle during launch, go to this video.
At about the 47 second mark, the SRBs (Solid Rocket Boosters) separate. If you look closely at the right-side booster, it looks for a moment like you can see hot gases leaking from the seam of the nozzle segment as it rotates.
An SRB segment leak of hot exhaust gases was the prime cause of the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster.
Anyone know for sure if that’s what we’re seeing?
Love guns or hate ’em, this is a remarkable piece of functional art. Truly a brilliant example of creative work. One of the few videos which will leave you both awed and appalled.
The article which discusses it is here.
For more information on GarE Maxton’s work, go to: http://www.maxton.com/maxtongallery
