The fizzle continues
NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center today posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. As I do every month, I am posting this graph, which you can see below the fold.
» Read more
Category: Essays And Commentaries
Long essays or op-ed length commentaries on the issues of the day or on topics of special interest.
A Tea Party event today in Tucson
Last week I received an email from the local Tucson tea party, asking if I would be willing to attend a demonstration today in response to last week’s Supreme Court decision on Obamacare. To quote the email,
We would like to stage two simultaneous protests against the train wreck they call ObamaCare, at two separate locations Monday July 2nd, 4:00pm-5:45pm. 75 people at both locations are needed to make the necessary impact. They say the Tea Party is dead. What say ye? We need your commitment.
Today those protests took place at two different prominent street corners in the Tucson area. At each location there were about fifty people lining the sidewalk and holding signs and American flags out to passing motorists. My wife Diane and I went to one of those protests. Here are my impressions:
» Read more
Second Anniversary Bleg
Today, July 1, Behind the Black celebrates its second anniversary. Though I began posting a day or two before that, I consider July 1 to be the official premiere date. Since then I have published more than 6,200 posts, about 8.5 posts per day, focusing on issues relating to science, technology, politics, and space exploration. In between I’ve also added a sprinkle of popular culture and entertainment, for both my and your pleasure.
For those who have contributed to the website, either with intelligent comments or with financial donations, I thank you. I especially appreciate the quality of the comments, even from those who frequently disagree with me. We might disagree, but in general people have kept the discussion on a rational basis, with very few personal attacks. This is how it should be.
It is my hope to continue this blog for as long as I can, assuming I can afford to do it. Of course, the more donations I receive from my loyal readers, the more likely I will be able to keep it up. If you are a regular reader and would like to help keep this blog going, please consider giving a donation. The tip jar is located at the bottom of the column on the right.
And if you have already donated, thank you again. I can’t express how much it means to me as a writer, working alone in my office, to be recognized by others in this way. Not only does it help pay the bills, it helps juice the soul, making the daily grind easier to take.
The Stoning of Christians — in Michigan
Even though Dearborn, Michigan lost a $100,000 court suit for falsely arresting and denying Christians their freedom of religion during the annual Dearborn Arab Festival, it appears the police in Dearborn have not learned their lesson. Not only do they do nothing to prevent the throwing by Muslim children of rocks, bottles, garbage, eggs, and concrete at a group of Christians who are merely standing on the sidewalk holding signs, the police eventually force the Christians to leave. As one man tells the police, “You’re rewarding riotous behavior. You’re teaching that crowd that if they riot, they’re rewarded by that rioting by kicking out the people they don’t want.”
Watch the video below the fold. It is very important to note again that these Christians were doing nothing but standing there with their signs on a public street. The response of the Muslim crowd is hardly in accordance with American principles of tolerance, and reveals a savagery and hate that is horrifying. And the willingness of the police to allow the violence is despicable.
» Read more
The pork of Obamacare
The Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), created by Obamacare, announced its first round of grants today, part of a funding program of fifty “pilot projects” totaling $30 million.
It didn’t take much research for me to conclude that, while some of this work might be useful, most of it sounds like bureaucratic claptrap. For example, consider the description Nature gives for these three grants:
» Read more
The Moon: a desert after all?
The uncertainty of science: A new science paper, published Saturday in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets,, has found that there is much less water ice trapped in the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar poles than previously thought. From the abstract:
This means that all [permanently shadowed regions], except those in Shoemaker, Cabeus and Rozhdestvensky U craters, do not contain any significant amount of hydrogen in comparison with sunlit areas around them at the same latitude.
And from the paper’s conclusion:
[E]ven now the data is enough for definite conclusion that [permanently shadowed regions] at both poles are not reservoirs of large deposits of water ice.
The Sun’s fizzle continues
On June 4 NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. Now that I am back from Nevada, I’ve had a chance to take a look at it, and have posted the new graph for April below the fold.
» Read more
The real estate crash: We’ve only just begun
A real estate industry group today announced that there was a nine percent jump in foreclosures during the month of May.
RealtyTrac reported that 205,990 U.S. properties received filings last month, including default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions, marking the first monthly increase since January. Bank repossessions climbed steeply, up 7% to 54,844, after hitting a four-year low in April.
The report also noted that foreclosures made up 26% of U.S. home sales in first quarter and that more than 30% of mortgage borrowers were still underwater.
As someone who just moved to Tucson and spent more than six months searching for and finally purchasing a home, I can add a bit of personal experience to these dry statistics. And my perspective is sadly not encouraging.
» Read more
A global view of Vesta
The accumulating data from Dawn has now allowed scientists to compile a global picture of the varied surface makeup of the asteroid Vesta.
The colors were chosen to highlight differences in surface composition that are too subtle for the human eye to see. Scientists are still analyzing what some of the colors mean for the composition of the surface. But it is clear that the orange material thrown out from some impact craters is different from the surrounding surface material. Green shows the relative abundance of iron. Parts of the huge impact basin known as Rheasilvia in Vesta’s southern hemisphere, for instance, have areas with less iron than nearby areas.
It also makes for a very nice image of the giant asteroid.
Cave exploration in the western mountains
Anthony Smith struggling up a scree mountain slope.
I have only visited Nevada twice before, and those visits had been limited to the area around Las Vegas. Thus, my impression of the state had been similar to what most other people assume: a big ostentatious urban city surrounded by boring flat deserts.
Instead what I found is that Nevada is probably one of the most beautiful states in the nation. It has many mountain ranges, interspersed with wide flat valleys, a number of which have lakes or swampy areas because the water is trapped there, draining neither to the Pacific or Atlantic.
Yet, it is desert country. The limited amount of water means that the state is lightly populated, and the few farms or ranches that you pass actually act to amplify the feeling of emptiness. This is further enhanced by the frequent mountain ranges. Every time you cross over a range, you find yourself high in the air with a spectacular view of the vast valleys below.
The Forest Service job that I was part of this past week was focused on inventorying and surveying a number of known caves covering a large area in northeastern Nevada. The work had actually started several years earlier, so that this particular week was the final wrap up, mapping the last few known caves on the list while also ridge-walking several different canyons in an effort to find some new discoveries.
» Read more
Caving in Nevada
I finally have an hour free here in Nevada.
For the past three days we have been intensely hiking up mountains over a vast area of Nevada. The goal has been to locate and map caves for the Forest Service in some of the most remote areas of the state. So far we have focused on mapping known caves, putting the possible discoveries aside for later work.
» Read more
Off to Nevada
For the next seven days my daytime posting is going to be spotty, as I will be in some remote areas of Nevada working on an on-going Forest Service project to inventory and survey caves in an area in the northeastern area of the state. The project is mostly over, but as I have surveyed, sketched, and done the cartography for many eastern U.S. caves, the guy running the project asked if I would be interested in participating. Interested? I was thrilled.
Though we will be in a somewhat remote area, I still hope to post periodically during the week, not only about the usual topics but also about some of the caves we will have surveyed, some of which are rarely visited. I will also try to post some pictures of the spectacular country we expect to visit. (The photo on the right was provided to me by Tom Gilleland, who is running the project.) Stay tuned.
A failed public works project — from the year 1350 AD
Yesterday my wife Diane and I took my 94-year-old mother on a sightseeing trip to see the Casa Grande ruins southeast of Phoenix, “the largest known structure left of the Ancestral People of the Sonoran Desert.”
This four story high structure was built around 1350 AD from bricks made of concrete-like caliche mud, with the floors and roofs supported by beams of pine, fir, and juniper brought from as far away as fifty miles. (The rooflike structure above the ruins was built by the National Park Service in order to protect it from rain.)
Though impressive, I must admit I’ve seen far more impressive American Indian ruins elsewhere. Casa Grande, which means “Great House” in Spanish, suffered as a tourist attraction from two faults:
» Read more
Modern intellectualism: “Lie to the public.”
New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman on Friday suggested on HBO that scientists should get together and lie to the public about a threat of alien invasion in order to create a crisis that will force the public to agree to big government projects.
To quote him:
» Read more
“A Dragon by the tail.”
The berthing of the privately-built Dragon capsule with the International Space Station on May 25 requires a bit of perspective to make clear the importance of this achievement.
» Read more
Forecasting hurricanes
NOAA today announced its prediction for the upcoming Atlantic Ocean hurricane season, calling for between 9 and 15 tropical storms in 2012, with 4 to 8 becoming full blown hurricanes. The NOAA release can be seen here.
To me, the range of the prediction is so wide it really doesn’t mean anything. Moreover, I wonder about the reliability of these predictions.
» Read more
The conflict between exploration and history
The Google X Prize has agreed to recognize the guidelines created by NASA for protecting the historic first landing sites on the Moon.
In glancing at the guidelines, I found it fascinating that it only mentions the Soviet lunar rover sites as an aside, noting their value but stating that
» Read more
A rocket launch pushes Congress towards free enterprise
Several key elected officials who have generally been hostile to commercial space have commented positively to the successful launch of the Dragon capsule last night.
First, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) released this short statement:
» Read more
One step closer to a robust competitive space industry
Not surprisingly, last night’s successful launch of Falcon 9 has produced a large number of news articles. Rather than list them all, go to spacetoday.net for the links.
However, I think Clark Lindsey, in describing Elon Musk’s reaction to the successful launch, captured the most important aspect of last night’s success:
» Read more
Some thoughts on the scrub
Last night Falcon 9’s computers shut the launch down at T minus zero seconds after sensing a high chamber pressure in one first stage engine.
Two thoughts, one good, one not so good.
» Read more
Shut it down
Our government in action: An NIH nationwide study to track hundreds of thousands of children from birth to age 21 is wracked with budget and management problems.
All told, this study has already cost the taxpayers almost a billion dollars for the enrollment of only 4,000 children, not the 100,000 envisioned. That’s about $250,000 per child, an amount that seems incredibly high.
In addition to the above problems, it appears there are scientific ones as well:
» Read more
The McCarthyism of the left
A businessman who has been attacked by the Democrats and the Obama campaign simply because he has supported Mitt Romney has lost hundreds of customers.
Nor is this the first time the left has gone after private citizens who took political positions they didn’t like:
» Read more
The Sun fizzles in April
NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center today posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. I have posted the new graph for April below the fold.
» Read more
Killing private space
The financial foolishness in Congress, by Republicans this time, continues. In making its budget recommendations for NASA, the report [pdf] of the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee also demands that NASA immediately choose one commercial company for its commercial space program. (Hat tip to Clark Lindsey for spotting this.)
The number of ways this action is counter-productive almost can’t be counted.
» Read more
More problems for Dark Matter
A new study by astronomers has found a vast structure of satellite galaxies and star clusters aligned perpendicular to the Milky Way and extending outward above and below the galaxy’s nucleus by as much as a million light years.
In their effort to understand exactly what surrounds our Galaxy, the scientists used a range of sources from twentieth century photographic plates to images from the robotic telescope of the Sloan Deep Sky Survey. Using all these data they assembled a picture that includes bright ‘classical’ satellite galaxies, more recently detected fainter satellites and the younger globular clusters.
“Once we had completed our analysis, a new picture of our cosmic neighbourhood emerged”, says Pawlowski. The astronomers found that all the different objects are distributed in a plane at right angles to the galactic disk. The newly-discovered structure is huge, extending from as close as 33,000 light years to as far away as one million light years from the centre of the Galaxy.
An animation illustrating this galactic distribution is posted below the fold. You can read the actual preprint paper here.
The problem with this polar alignment with the Milky Way’s core is that the theories for explaining the distribution of dark matter do not predict it.
» Read more
It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law!
Mexico has passed its own very strict climate change law.
The new law contains many sweeping provisions to mitigate climate change, including a mandate to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 30% below business-as-usual levels by 2020, and by 50% below 2000 levels by 2050. Furthermore, it stipulates that 35% of the country’s energy should come from renewable sources by 2024, and requires mandatory emissions reporting by the country’s largest polluters.
Some predictions:
» Read more
A new launch schedule for Cygnus
Orbital Sciences has released an updated launch schedule for its Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule.
- Third quarter 2012 – Antares First-Stage Static Fire Test at Wallops
- Third quarter 2012 – Antares Test Flight for COTS
- Fourth quarter 2012 – COTS Demonstration Mission to ISS*
- First quarter 2013 – CRS Mission #1 to ISS
The significance?
» Read more
Dark matter disappears
The uncertainty of science: A new study has found no evidence of dark matter within 13,000 light years of the Sun, something that had not been expected.
According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighborhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit the observational facts. This may mean that attempts to directly detect dark matter particles on Earth are unlikely to be successful.
These findings will be as controversial as the now abandoned faster-than-light neutrino results last fall. Here, however, the new data is likely going to be more robust, which will cause the entire astrophysical community some real conniptions.
» Read more
Senate panel proposes major NASA/NOAA budget changes
A Senate panel today proposed shifting the responsibility for building weather satellites from NOAA to NASA.
It is very unclear from this article why the Senate panel proposed this shift. They claim it will save money but I don’t see how.
What I can guess is that there is probably a turf war going on in Congress over this money. For example, shifting these weather satellites to NASA almost certainly means that the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland will get more money, which is almost certainly why Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) is for it.
One thought however: NASA generally focuses on individual missions, not long term operational stuff like weather. I suspect it probably is not a good idea to give this work to NASA.
The same article above also outlined the panel’s proposals for other areas of NASA’s budget. To me, the key issue is the budget for commercial space. The White House requested $830 million. The Senate panel has instead proposed $525 million.
» Read more
Coming and going
There are really only two important stories today concerning space exploration. The story that is getting the most coverage is the big news that the space shuttle Discovery is making its last flight, flying over Washington, DC, as it is delivered to the Smithsonian for permanent display.
- CBS: Space shuttle Discovery viewing guide: Final flight Tuesday over DC.
- WTOP: Space shuttle Discovery salutes nation’s capital.
- Washington Times: Space shuttle Discovery ready for final flyover.
- Associated Press: Space shuttle Discovery ready for voyage to museum.
- Space.com: Space shuttle Discovery to take last-ever flight today.
- Discovery News: Shuttle Discovery begins new life as museum piece.
Of these stories, only Irene Klotz of Discovery News seems to really get it. This is not an event to celebrate or get excited about. It is the end of an American achievement, brought to a close probably three to five years prematurely so that the United States now cannot even send its own astronauts to its own space station.
The other news, actually far more important, has gotten far less coverage, and includes three different stories all really about the same thing.
» Read more