Michael Martin Murphey & the Rio Grande Band – Wildfire
An evening pause: The piano and guitar solos are marvelous.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Author: Robert Zimmerman
Ingenuity successfully completes 11th flight
Click for full image.
Ingenuity has successfully completed its 11th flight, safely touching down at approximately its planned landing spot. From the science team’s tweet:
[Ingenuity] has safely flown to a new location! Ingenuity flew for 130.9 seconds and traveled about 380 meters before landing.
The image to the right, reduced to post here, was taken mere seconds before landing, and shows the helicopter’s shadow directly below it on the ground.
This particular flight was the first that did not push Ingenuity’s abilities, merely flying in a straight line to put it in a good position for later flights and to keep it ahead of Perseverance.
So far they have only released five images from the flight. Expect the rest to be downloaded from Perseverance in the next few days.
As thousands of teachers endorse critical race theory, home schooling surges
What apparently Critical Race Theory sees as education for
elementary school kids.
In the past few months state legislatures across the country have passed resolutions that ban schools from teaching the Marxist and bigoted program dubbed Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Not surprisingly, the leftists who dominate our school systems have fought back. The very leftist Zinn Education Project immediately created a petition calling for teachers to defy such laws and to continue to teach CRT, which teaches children to hate whites and to give minorities privileged status.
In the two months this petition has been on line almost 6,000 teachers have signed it, with many adding comments of defiance. This one is typical:
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Curiosity: Nine years since landing on Mars and the way forward
Click for full image.
In today’s Curiosity update written by planetary geologist Abigail Fraeman, she noted this significant fact:
Project scientist Ashwin Vasavada pointed out a great fact at the beginning of planning today: At around 4 o’clock in the afternoon on Sol 3199 (the first sol in the plan we are creating today), Curiosity will begin its 10th Earth year on Mars. In the last nine years, the rover has traveled 26.3 km [16.3 miles], climbed over 460 m [1,509 feet] in elevation, and collected 32 drilled samples of rock.
Her update includes the first image taken by Curiosity upon landing, a view of Mount Sharp using the rover’s front hazard camera. In that picture, the mountain is far away, as the rover was sitting on the flat floor of Gale Crater.
The photo above, cropped and enhanced to post here, was taken yesterday by one of Curiosity’s navigation cameras, and looks out across the rocky mountainous terrain the rover is soon to travel. As Fraeman also notes,
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China’s Long March 6 launches two military technology test satellites
Using its Long March 6 rocket, China yesterday successfully placed two military technology test satellites into orbit, designed to test “new interference suppression technology for Ka-band mobile communications satellites.”
The launch occurred at one of China’s interior spaceports. No word on whether the rocket’s first stage crashed near habitable area.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
25 China
20 SpaceX
12 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman
3 Rocket Lab
The U.S. still leads China 30 to 25 in the national rankings.
Details on the Russian movie to be shot on ISS in October
Link here. The article provides a lot of details about who will fly, who will do what, and who is slated as back-ups if the primary crew of actress and director fail their training. However, I found the description of the movie to be the most interesting thing:
Shipenko revealed the script is still being fine-tuned, but the plot involves a cosmonaut who suffers a cardiac arrest during a spacewalk and, although he survives, he will require surgery to ensure he can handle the Soyuz return to Earth. A female cardiac surgeon, named Zhenya, has to be sent to the ISS to perform the procedure with only a few weeks to prepare for the trip.
Unlike the American space films like Gravity, this story is incredibly well grounded in reality. The Russians have actually experienced examples of station astronauts getting so sick in space that their missions had to be aborted early. In one case it was a prostate infection. In another it was the mental illness of the entire crew.
This story is also comparable to situations that have occurred in Antarctica, a very similar environment to the station. In the early 2000s the doctor in Antarctica had to perform surgery on herself because she had developed cancer. Then in 2016 Buzz Aldrin had to be evacuated due health issues.
If done right, this could not only make a damn good movie, it will also do so by revealing the true dangers of going to space.
August 4, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Seven Brides for Seven Brothers – Lonesome Polecat
An evening pause: This song, from the 1954 MGM classic musical, was one of the first evening pauses I posted back in 2010. As Diane and I recently rewatched the musical, I think it time to repost it. As I said then,
This haunting song from the movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is notable not only because of the beauty of the music and dancing, but because the entire number is shot as one take, no cuts. Everyone, from the actors with their axes to the crew moving the camera on its dolly and crane, had to be right on cue for everything to work.
Having spent almost twenty years in the movie business, I can promise you that this is not easy.
The 2010 evening pause uses the original voice of red-haired Matt Mattox, which was dubbed for the movie.
White blobs on Mars
Click for full image.
Time for another “What the heck?” image. The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on May 18, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what appears to be a series of white circular features aligned with a ridge line.
Are these eroded craters? Maybe, but their alignment with those ridges suggests otherwise. If you look at the full image, you will see further parallel ridges to the north and south, also with similar circular blobs lined along them. Furthermore, the flat surrounding terrain, part of the northern lowland plains north of the resurgences from Valles Marineris, has a scattering of very normal looking craters, with distinct rims and even some glacial material within. As this is at 44 degrees north latitude, the presence of glacial material inside craters is not surprising.
Thus, the white blobs are likely not craters, but some form of eruptive material from below, coming up along those ridges which are probably faultlines. The whiteness suggests that material is water ice, but this of course is unconfirmed.
The question is of course, why? What would cause water ice to erupt along these faultlines? And why are such features not seen elsewhere? Faults and underground ice are common on Mars. Yet, I don’t remember seeing features such as this in any other Martian images.
Today’s blacklisted American: Cybersecurity experts want people fired for expressing unpopular opinions on line
Mao’s cultural revolution in 1966, what the leftists
at Respect in Security want for America and the world.
Persecution is now cool! A new project being developed by leftist cybersecurity experts calls for corporations to use their software to identify and fire individuals that their software identifies as having expressed what they define as “offensive” speech online.
Cancel Culture and Big Tech are a match made in hell, as cybersecurity experts call to target the livelihood of internet users who get too edgy online. “The initiative, called Respect in Security, was launched on Tuesday by two cybersecurity experts. According to the founders, several companies have already signed up,” Reclaim The Net reported. “For a lot of people, it’s a no man’s land,” founder Lisa Forte and Red Goat Cyber Security employee told the BBC. “It can feel like the platforms do nothing, the police don’t do a lot, lawyers are expensive and the publicity legal action generates can be negative.”
The BBC reported that co-founder and Trend Micro Vice President Rik Ferguson said “many companies had anti-bullying policies but they tended to focus on internal behaviour.” In what may be a reference to his Respect in Security program, he wrote a few weeks ago: “Inside my ‘Projects’ email folder resides a subfolder called ‘Kill Trolls’ and it is now only a couple of weeks away from becoming a real thing (sadly not with that name).”
Free speech advocates concerned about Ferguson and Forte’s work may have good reason to be. Forte explained her clear fix for people saying offensive statements via the internet: “The best solution we have, if the culprit is identifiable, is to approach their employer.” [emphasis mine]
It is bad enough that the big social media companies — Google, Facebook, Twitter — are routinely banning conservatives for expressing opinions or even facts they don’t like. Now the storm troopers above want to extend the blacklisting to get those same people fired for daring to speak their mind publicly. From another story:
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Ingenuity’s 11th flight scheduled for tonight
Click for interactive map.
The next flight of Ingenuity on Mars is now scheduled for this evening, and will be a much simpler flight than the helicopter’s previous trip.
The map to the right shows the route in blue. The flight is mainly a transfer flight, intended to keep the copter ahead of the rover as they leapfrog from point to point in Jezero Crater. It will actually be the first flight by Ingenuity that does not push its engineering in any major way.
This map, the most up-to-date available, is at this moment about five sols out of date. Perseverance is likely slightly south and to the west of the location shown.
The present plan is for Perseverance to travel to the northwest along the dark ridgeline that Ingenuity will land next to. The rover will then retreat, returning more or less to its landing area and then north to circle around the largest crater on the map and then to head west to the base of the delta to the area labeled “Three Forks”, which is their entrance to the delta’s geology.
Gil Levin passes away
Gil Levin, a instrument project scientist for one of the science experiments on the Mars Viking landers in the 1970s, has passed away at 97.
Levin deserves special mention because he believed for years that his experiment, called “labeled release,” had possibly found evidence of life.
Dr. Levin’s experiment employed a nine-foot arm to scoop Martian soil into a container, where it was treated with a solution containing radioactive carbon nutrients. Monitors detected the release of radioactive gas, which Dr. Levin interpreted as evidence of metabolism.
“Gil, that’s life,” Straat said when they saw the results.
The findings held true for both Viking 1 and Viking 2, which took samples from different regions of the planet. Other experiments aboard the Viking, however, used different methods to conclude that Martian soil did not contain carbon, an element found in all living things.
Dr. Levin stood by his findings, but top NASA scientists disagreed, saying that the response he observed was the result of inorganic chemical responses, not biological processes. “Soon thereafter,” Dr. Levin told the Johns Hopkins University School of Engineering Magazine last year, “I gave a talk at the National Academy of Sciences saying we detected life, and there was an uproar. Attendees shouted invectives at me. They were ready to throw shrimp at me from the shrimp bowl. One former adviser said, ‘You’ve disgraced yourself, and you’ve disgraced science.’”
I met Levin once and interviewed him several times. With amazing grace and cheerfulness he always emphasized that his results needed to be confirmed, and there was certainly room for skepticism, but to reject them outright was not how the scientific method worked.
Levin however was never awarded another NASA project, essentially blackballed because of his 1970s claims, even though later research hinted at the possibility that he may have been right.
R.I.P. Gil Levin. Though the overall data we have gotten from Mars in the half century since still favors a non-life explanation for his experiment, the uncertainty remains quite large. He could have been right.
More important than his uncertain result, however, was his dedication to the proper scientific method, where you let the data speak for itself and never dismiss any possibility if that is what the data shows you.