I just thought I should note quickly that my weekend cave trip was a spectacular success. John Harman, Pete Johnson, Nikki Fox, and myself surveyed almost 800 feet of beautiful and big virgin cave passage. I hope to have pictures soon.
Man, it is really fun to go where no one has ever gone before!
A headline that insists you read the story: Joe the Plumber (not that one) says he helped stop Gulf oil spill leak.
A preprint paper, published today on the astro-ph website but also accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, has confirmed what scientists have suspected about the dust and gas between the stars: As you travel closer to the center of the Milky Way galaxy this interstellar medium gets increasingly enriched with heavy elements. The scientists believe this is because the higher rate of supernovae in the inner galaxy sprays space with more of these atoms.
Since the field of extrasolar planets has also found that the more heavy elements a star contains, the more chance it will have planets, the new results above suggest that we will find more planets as we look inward towards the galactic center.
Brownshirt alert: Watch how these union participants at this union rally react to the fact that several citizens are videotaping the event:
Freedom of speech alert: Orders by government officials cause 73,000 blogs to be shut down.
A paper published on Saturday in Geophysical Research Letters by the American Geophysical Union attempts to calculate the total ice loss at the polar caps and how it will affect the sea level. Key quote from the abstract: “Rapid losses of Arctic sea ice and small Antarctic ice shelves are partially offset by thickening of Antarctic sea ice and large Antarctic ice shelves.”
The test flights continue for WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo. On July 15 the two ships, flying as a unit, made their first flight with two crew members inside SpaceShipTwo.
An evening pause: Though Vera-Ellen made only a handful of films and is not that well known today, during the late 1940s and 1950s she was one of Hollywood’s top female dancers. Here she performs a delightful dance number from the film Call Me Madame (1953).
An Evening Pause: Let’s have some more music, this time something so deeply beautiful it makes the heart ache: Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli singing Time to Say Goodbye.
Posting today shall be very quiet, mostly because I am out in West Virginia, exploring a previously unknown upper level in a cave we are mapping. This passage was only discovered last month by Aaron Moses, John Harman, and Pete Johnson, who did a bolt climb of over 70 feet to reach a high lead in the wall of the cave. This weekend we will be pushing and mapping these virgin passages. Below is a picture taken by Brian Masney of Aaron Moses as he worked his way up the wall, with Pete Johnson providing a belay. More of Brian’s pictures can be seen on his Flicker webpage.
An evening pause: One of the best television science series ever produced was The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. Rather than simply describe science and knowledge, Bronowski instead pondered the nature of humanity. The best episode of the series was Knowledge or Certainty, in which Bronowski compared the humane uncertainty of science with the terrible consequences of dogma. As Oliver Cromwell said, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
