Curiosity has made its first test drive, moving about fifteen feet.
Saving the day for freedom: A 5-year-old Oklahoma kindergarten student was banned from wearing a University of Michigan t-shirt because it violated a city ordinance banning any apparel that didn’t support the state’s college teams.
Update: I have corrected the post, as I initially called this a state law, which it is not. Thank you Blair.
A Florida university has broken ground on a new hurricane simulation machine capable of recreating category 5 hurricanes in three dimensions.
The facility will not only allow scientists to study hurricanes, they will also be able to test the engineering of objects trying to survive them.
Michael Mann threatens to sue a conservative magazine. Their answer: “Get lost.”
The uncertainty of science: Are the glaciers in the Himalayas shrinking? A third paper published today falls between one study that said no and another that said yes.
The new estimate raises further questions about satellite and field measurements of alpine glaciers, and ”will set the cat among the pigeons,” says Graham Cogley, a remote-sensing expert at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. … Although the ICESat results show twice as much ice loss as the re-interpreted GRACE data, this figure is still three times lower than regional losses estimated on the basis of field studies.
P.J. O’Rourke: “Of thee I sigh: Baby boomers bust.”
My sad generation of baby boomers can be blamed. We were born into an America where material needs were fulfilled to a degree unprecedented in history. We were a demographic benison, cherished and taught to be self-cherishing. We were cosseted by a lush economy and spoiled by a society grown permissive in its fatigue with the strictures of depression and war. The child being father to the man, and necessity being the mother of invention, we wound up as the orphans of effort and ingenuity. And pleased to be so. Sixty-six years of us would be enough to take the starch out of any nation.
The baby boom was skeptical about America’s inventive triumphalism. We took a lot of it for granted: light bulb, telephone, television, telegraph, phonograph, photographic film, skyscraper, airplane, air conditioning, movies. Many of our country’s creations seemed boring and square: cotton gin, combine harvester, cash register, electric stove, dishwasher, can opener, clothes hanger, paper bag, toilet paper roll, ear muffs, mass-produced automobiles. Some we regarded as sinister: revolver, repeating rifle, machine gun, atomic bomb, electric chair, assembly line. And, ouch, those Salk vaccine polio shots hurt.
The Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik caused a blip in chauvinistic tech enthusiasm among those of us who were in grade school at the time. But then we learned that the math and science excellence being urged upon us meant more long division and multiplying fractions.
The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs were cool, but not as cool as the sex, drugs, and rock and roll we’d discovered in the meantime. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon in 1969, many of us had already been out in space for years, visiting all sorts of galaxies—in our own heads. And in our own heads was where my generation spent most of its time.
Read the whole thing. O’Rourke, in his witty style, captures the failure of my baby boom generation perfectly.
The day of reckoning looms: The Congressional Budget Office yesterday projected this year’s deficit to be $1.1 trillion dollars, making it the fourth year in a row that the deficit has broken the trillion dollar ceiling.
In the entire history of the U.S. the deficit never exceeded one trillion dollars, until Barack Obama became president. In fact, it never came close until Obama arrived.
A rose by any other name: NASA scientists are in a battle with astronomers over who gets to name things on Vesta and Mars.
This is not a new problem. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has maintained its power over naming everything in space since the 1960s, even though the IAU has sometimes ignored the wishes of the actual discoverers and explorers and given names to things that no one likes. For example, even though the Apollo 8 astronauts wanted to give certain unnamed features on the Moon specific names, the IAU refused to accept their choices, even though those astronauts were the first human beings to reach another world and see these features up close.
Eventually, the spacefarers of the future are going to tell the IAU where to go. And that will begin to happen when those spacefarers simply refuse to use the names the IAU assigns.
NASA can put a man on the Moon and a rover on Mars, but somehow it can’t comply with a Freedom of Information document request.
The request was an attempt by a newspaper to find out if NASA officials have been partying extravagantly at conferences, like officials in GSA. That NASA can’t provide the documents suggests that something stinks somewhere.
What do you do with a giant space station when its lifespan is over?
The article notes that no date has been set for deorbit, and that it likely will not happen before 2028. The article also includes information about some of medical and engineering problems of long term weightlessness that have been discovered on ISS, and how engineers have attempted to address them.
Unfortunately, some of these problems, such as the recently discovered vision problems, remain unsolved. It is a shame that while Russia wants to do multi-year missions on the station to study these issues, NASA continues to resist.
The competition heats up: Getting ready for the first Antares launch in October at Wallops Island.
Science marches on! New research has now proven that owning a cat will not increase your cancer risk.
One of Curiosity’s two wind sensors was apparently damaged in landing and is inoperable.
The Rems team first noticed there was something wrong when readings from the side-facing boom were being returned saturated at high and low values. Further investigation suggested small wires exposed on the sensor circuits were open, probably severed. It is permanent damage. No-one can say for sure how this happened, but engineers are working on the theory that grit thrown on to the rover by the descent crane’s exhaust plume cut the small wires. The wind sensor on the forward-facing mini-boom is unaffected. With just the one sensor, it makes it difficult to fully understand wind behaviour.
Freedom for me but not for thee: The atheist Freedom from Religion Foundation has threatened to sue 151 Mississippi schools if they allow students to pray using public address systems during athletic events.
In other words, according to this atheist organization, all expression of religion must be banned from the public marketplace of ideas. Only then will we have true freedom!
What is encouraging from this article is the increasing willingness of school officials, religious leaders, and students to resist this oppression.
An evening pause: New Music by Chinese lute player Shao Rong, from her second album, Orchid II.
Criminal charges have been filed against a German rabbi for performing circumcisions.
A doctor from Hesse filed a criminal complaint against Rabbi David Goldberg, who serves in the community of Hof, in Upper Franconia (northern Bavaria), according to the Juedische Allgemeine weekly newspaper. The chief prosecutor of Hof confirmed that charges had been filed against the rabbi. The charges are based on the controversial decision of a Cologne district court, which ruled in June that circumcisions for religious reasons constitute illegal bodily harm to newborn babies.
The article does not tell us anything about the doctor who filed the complaint. I wonder what that doctor’s motives are.
Life imitates art: A masked man attempting to rob a Las Vegas Dairy Queen with a 3-foot-long samurai sword was shot and killed by the restaurant clerk.
I am reminded of this:
» Read more
Monday’s successful spacewalk by two Russian astronauts has prepared ISS for the arrival of a new Russian module.
I should have posted a link about this spacewalk earlier. What is important however is that the Russians continue to move forward, though slowly. And they continue to come up with simple solutions to problems, such as the extra layer of shielding for the living quarters on ISS, installed during this spacewalk.
Coming soon to a country near you! In order to control the out-of-control costs of RomneyCare, Massachusetts has just passed a law that places the state in control of every doctor and everything they do in the practice of medicine.
It’s worse than you think:
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Astronomers have found what they believe is the first evidence of a planet consumed by its star as the star expanded and aged.
Sadly, for those of you out there who like the idea of watching planets getting destroyed, the event happened a long time ago, and all the astronomers have is circumstantial evidence that is most likely explained by such an event.
The invader prepares its attack: For the first time today Curiosity flexed its robot arm.
Astronomers have now confirmed 41 new exoplanets, first pinpointed by the Kepler space telescope.
One paper, by Jiwei Xie at the University of Toronto, confirms 24 new planets in 12 systems. Another study, by Steffen and his colleagues, confirms 27 planets in 13 systems. Five of the systems, and 10 of the planets, are the same in both papers. All in all, the new research adds 20 new planetary systems to the 47 that Kepler had previously confirmed, marking a more than 40 percent increase.
Among the Kepler candidates are five Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone, according to the vidoe at the link. However, this announcement does not tell us if any of those candidates were confirmed by these two papers.
NASA has announced its next planetary mission, a lander to Mars that will drill down thirty feet into the planet’s surface.
Though exciting in its own right, this mission is far less ambitious than the two missions which competed against it, a boat that would have floated on the lakes of Titan and a probe that would have bounced repeatedly off the surface of a comet. I suspect the reason this mission was chosen is the tight budgets at NASA, combined with Curiosity’s success which makes it politically advantageous to approve another Mars mission. As the NASA press release emphasized,
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The competition heats up: Scaled Composites has posted the results of its latest test firing of the rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo.
Though the test is dated August 9, more than a week ago, I expect the number of engine tests to go up in the coming months as the company works toward the first powered flights of SpaceShipTwo.
On August 13, 2012, Voyager 2 became the longest-operating spacecraft in history, finally topping Pioneer 6, which was launched on Dec. 16, 1965, and sent its last signal back to Earth on Dec. 8, 2000.
And Voyager 2, along with its partner Voyager 1, are still working, and engineers hope they will still be working for another eight to twelve years, enough time for them to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space.
A man was arrested in Toronto on Saturday for walking his dog in a public park, because the dog’s presence offended some Islamic demonstrators.
News you can use: A sofa that doubles as a cat tower.
