Author: Robert Zimmerman

The wimpy maximum continues

6:46 pm

The monthly updated graph of the Sun’s solar cycle sunspot activity was released today by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. I have posted the June graph below.

For the third month in a row, there was a decline in sunspot activity. Though the sun is producing sunspots quite regularly and there hasn’t been a blank day since January 16, the numbers of sunspots continue to fall far below the predicted level of activity as indicated by the red line.

All this is no longer a surprise or unexpected. As the solar science community noted last month, they have now gathered enough data to convince them that the sun appears to be going quiet, and might even follow this very weak solar maximum — the weakest possibly in 200 years — with a decades-long period of no sunspots at all.

This graph, however, is very intriguing. Even with an expected weak solar minimum, the sun should be producing more sunspots each month, not less, as shown on the graph. This suggests that the most up-to-date predictions for the next solar maximum might still be too high.

The sunspot graph for June 2011

Leave a comment

Prime real estate

2:32 pm

The south pole of the moon

Since the 1990s, scientists have suspected that water-ice might be hidden in the forever-dark floors of the polar craters on the Moon. If so, these locations become valuable real estate, as they not only would provide future settlers water for drinking, the water itself can be processed to provide oxygen and fuel.

Moreover, the high points near these craters, including the crater rims, are hoped to be high enough so that the sun would never set or be blocked by other mountains as it made its circuit low along the horizon each day. If such a place existed, solar panels could be mounted there to generate electricity continuously, even during the long 14-day lunar night.

Below the fold is a six minute video, produced from images taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) from February 6, 2010 to February 6, 2011, in an effort to find out if such a place actually exists. It shows how the sunlight hits the south pole across an entire year.
» Read more

One comment

Questions raised about the safety of China’s new bridge

11:53 am

Questions have been raised about the safety of China’s new bridge.

[China Central Television] said that workers were tightening bolts that could easily have been loosened by hand on the bridge, which has seen nearly 18,000 cars cross it every day since it was officially opened on June 30, on the eve of the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China.

Why does this remind me of the two shuttle accidents, where managers ignored engineering issues in order to satisfy political concerns?

Leave a comment

Global warming scientists blame coal use increase in China for recent cooling

8:25 pm

Global warming scientists have come up with an explanation for the cooling seen in the past decade: The increase of coal burning in China.

In other words, fossil fuels can cause global warming and global cooling!

Or to put it another way, climate scientists really have no clear understanding yet of the climate, and are merely guessing when they try to predict what’s happening.

Leave a comment

John Adams – the vote

8:01 pm

An evening pause: To close out my Declaration of Independence celebration that I began two days ago, here is the vote and public release of the Declaration, as portrayed in the 2008 John Adams mini-series.

To all government leaders, you ignore these words at your peril:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. [emphasis mine]

Leave a comment

Mining the moon for water and nuclear fuel

10:16 am

Mining the moon for water and fuel.

Texas-based Shackleton Energy Company has already begun operations aimed at mining the Moon within the next few years. 

The company’s plans for mining and refining operations would involve melting the ice and purifying the water, converting the water into gaseous hydrogen and oxygen, and then condensing the gases into liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen and hydrogen peroxide, all potential rocket fuels.

Shackleton CEO Dale Tietz says the water extracted would be used almost exclusively as rocket fuel to power operations both within Low Earth Orbit (LEO) – such as space tourism and the removal of space-debris – on the Moon, and further out into space. ‘We are a for-profit business enterprise moving forward, and so we are only going there really for one reason and that is to mine, prospect mine and harvest water for rocket propellant production,’ says Tietz.

Leave a comment

New York City business owners sick over ObamaCare

10:16 am

New York City business owners are sick over Obamacare.

Small to mid-size businesses, which generate close to 70 percent of US jobs, fear ObamaCare could bury them in colossal bills and future paperwork, and are now paying the price as premiums have soared in anticipation of the new regulation. “ObamaCare has been very negative for our business,” Moishe Heimowitz, principal at First Medcare, a 50-employee medical practice based in Canarsie, told The Post. “The high costs of ObamaCare and our present health-care costs have impeded our efforts to hire more people.” [emphasis mine]

Obamacare has done nothing it promised. Why don’t we just bite the bullet, show some courage, and repeal the damn thing before it does more harm?

Leave a comment

the Plight of Muslim Women and the left’s indifference

10:07 am

The plight of Muslim women and the left’s indifference.

It is a curious irony that feminists in the United States haven’t taken up the cause of Muslim women. The all-female Liberal activist group Code Pink has time to organize a flotilla protesting Israel’s blockade of the West Bank, but no time to stand up for an entire population of women (some of them Palestinians, no doubt) whose most basic rights are denied on a daily basis. Why the silence? Why the complicity? Hirsi addresses the issue of western diffidence towards the plight of Muslim women in her writings: “I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, through their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness. The experts may have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

2 comments

Dawn’s approach to Vesta continues

9:35 am

Dawn’s approach to Vesta continues.

Starting at the beginning of the approach phase on May 3, Dawn interrupted thrusting once a week to photograph Vesta against the background stars. These images help navigators determine exactly where the probe is relative to its target. This technique does not replace other means of navigation but rather supplements them. One of the principal methods of establishing the spacecraft’s trajectory relies on accurately timing how long it takes radio signals, traveling, as all readers know, at the universal limit of the speed of light, to make the round trip between Earth and Dawn. Another uses the Doppler shift of the radio waves, or the slight change in pitch caused by the craft’s motion. These sensitive measurements remain essential to navigating the faraway ship as it sails the interplanetary seas.

Despite the very slow approach, the distance is small enough now that observing Vesta weekly is no longer sufficient. To achieve the navigational accuracy required to reach the intended orbit in early August, last week the frequency of imaging was increased to twice per week. In each session, half of the pictures are taken with long exposures to ensure many stars are detectable, thus overexposing the much brighter disc of the nearby Vesta. The other half use short exposures to ensure that the rocky world shows up correctly so its precise location can be measured. The visible and infrared mapping spectrometer has been commanded to observe Vesta during three of these sessions, each time providing valuable information that will help scientists select instrument settings for when Dawn is close enough to begin its detailed scientific measurements.

Leave a comment
1 … 972 973 974 975 976 … 1,084