Category: Behind The Black

Methane does exist in the Martian atmosphere

6:32 pm

The uncertainty of science: Curiosity has confirmed the presence, and fluctuation, of methane in the local Martian atmosphere.

SAM [Sample Analysis at Mars, one of Curiosity’s instruments] has been detecting basal levels of methane concentration of around 0,7 ppbv, and has confirmed an event of episodic increase of up to ten times this value during a period of sixty soles (Martian days), i.e., of about 7 ppvb. The new data are based on observations during almost one Martian year (almost two Earth years), included in the initial prediction for the duration of the mission (nominal mission), during which Curiosity has surveyed about 8 kms in the basin of the Gale crater.

Since methane has a short life expectancy, something must be doing something to generate it.

3 comments

The Honey Trees – Moon River

6:01 pm

An evening pause:

Moon river, wider than a mile
I’m crossing you in style some day
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker
Wherever you’re going, I’m going your way

Two drifters, off to see the world
There’s such a lot of world to see
We’re after the same rainbow’s end, waiting, round the bend
My Huckleberry Friend, Moon River, and me

Hat tip Edward Thelen.

2 comments

Homeland funding bill fails

5:49 pm

Good! A large number of conservative Republicans combined with most House Democrats to defeat a cobbled-together three week funding bill for Homeland Security.

As of midnight tonight many Homeland employees will either be furloughed, or have to work without pay (if their job is deemed essential).

The Republican leadership continues to brainwash itself into thinking a government shutdown will hurt them at the ballot box, when all the evidence from recent elections says exactly the opposite. After the 2013 shutdown the press screamed “Republicans did it!” as if it was a bad thing but the voters rewarded the Republicans one of its biggest landslides in almost a century in 2014. If anything, shutting the government down appeared to help the Republicans win elections. The public wants the government brought under control. Moreover, every shutdown helps prove how useless and unneeded that government is, the exact position conservatives have been touting for decades.

Let Homeland Security shut down. We didn’t need it for more than 225 years, and we don’t need it now.

Update: Congress has hurriedly passed a seven-day funding bill for Homeland Security.

The AP story linked above does the usual media hatchet job of spinning the story to make it all sound like the Republicans caused all the problems. As far as I am concerned, the failure here is the fact that not enough Republicans stood firm. A majority did, but we are still stuck with that handful of fake Republicans, such as Hatch, McCain, Flake, and Graham, that screw conservatives every time.

3 comments

A cold Pacific causing the lack of warming?

9:08 am

The uncertainty of science: Global warming scientists have concocted another explanation among dozens for the refusal of the climate to warm since 1998: a cold Pacific!

Where’s the heat? Greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, continue to be pumped into the atmosphere, but sometime around 1998, the rise in Earth’s average temperatures slowed, deviating from the rates predicted by models. Scientists have proposed that what some call “the pause” could be the result of a number of factors, including heat storage in deep ocean waters to unexpectedly high amounts of aerosols in the stratosphere helping deflect solar rays back into space. Now, a new study suggests that natural cycles in the Pacific Ocean are the culprit.

Since the end of last El Niño warming event of 1997 to 1998, the tropical Pacific Ocean has been in a relatively cool phase—strong enough to offset the warming created by greenhouse gas emissions. But, this is just a temporary balm: When the switch flips and the waters turn warm again, the researchers say, Earth will likely continue warming.

“What this study addresses is what’s better described as a false pause, or slowdown,” rather than a hiatus in warming, says climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Some climate change deniers have taken encouragement from the pause, saying they show warming predictions are flawed, but Mann, a co-author on the study, notes that “there have been various explanations for why [the slowdown is happening], none of which involve climate models being fundamentally wrong.” [emphasis mine]

Does no one at the journal Science notice the outright stupidity of the first two paragraphs above? In the first it is posited that all the climate heat we haven’t been seeing could be stored in the oceans. In the second it is posited that a cold Pacific Ocean has offset the warming, thus causing the lack of climate warming.

If the oceans are storing the extra heat, how is it possible for the Pacific to be unusually cold?

We should not be surprised by this stupidity, however. The third paragraph shows that Science is depending on Michael Mann for its climate expertise, a global warming activist who was exposed as a fake scientist, a fraud, and a dishonest corrupter of data in the climategate emails. That this journal still goes to him for his opinions tells us quite a lot about the lack of objectivity at Science. Their use of the word “denier” for scientists who raise questions about global warming also tells us that the journal hasn’t the faintest idea how science works. The very heart of the scientific method demands skepticism. To instead equate skeptics with those who deny the genocide committed by the Nazis suggests that much of the so-called science published by Science is not science but propaganda.

14 comments

Investigators say 32,000 Lerner IRS emails have been recovered

10:12 pm

Transparency! The Treasury investigators told a House committee on Thursday that they have been able to recover 32,000 emails by IRS official Lois Lerner that IRS officials had sworn were lost forever.

[Timothy Camus, a Treasury deputy inspector general for tax administration,] said it took investigators two weeks to locate the computer tapes that contained Lerner’s emails. He said it took technicians about four months to find Lerner’s emails on the tapes. Several Oversight Committee members questioned how hard the IRS tried to produce the emails, given how quickly independent investigators found them.

In other words, IRS officials lied to Congress when they said these emails were unrecoverable and couldn’t be found.

Unfortunately, the investigators have not yet gone through these emails in detail, and were not yet prepared to reveal what was in them. For that show we will have to wait a bit longer.

Update: During his testimony Camus also said that they are considering a criminal investigation into whether there was a real cover-up.

The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed. Investigators have already scoured 744 backup tapes and gleaned 32,774 unique emails, but just two weeks ago they found an additional 424 tapes that could contain even more Lerner emails, Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told the House Oversight Committee in a rare late-night hearing meant to look into the status of the investigation.

“There is potential criminal activity,” Mr. Camus said.

Camus also said that when his investigation went to the software people to try to get the tapes, they discovered that IRS officials had never talked to them, demonstrating clearly that IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was lying when he said the agency had searched high and low for the tapes and discovered them lost.

7 comments

Jet lag is worse on Mars

9:45 am

Research and actual experience has found that adjusting to the slightly longer Martian day is not as easy as you would think.

If you’re on Mars, or at least work by a Mars clock, you have to figure out how to put up with the exhausting challenge of those extra 40 minutes. To be exact, the Martian day is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds long, a length of day that doesn’t coincide with the human body’s natural rhythms. Scientists, Mars rover drivers, and everyone else in the space community call the Martian day a “sol” to differentiate it from an Earth day. While it doesn’t seem like a big difference, that extra time adds up pretty quickly. It’s like heading west by two time zones every three days. Call it “rocket lag.”

5 comments

Inspector General to report tonight on Lois Lerner email recovery

9:10 am

Transparency! The inspector general for the Treasury Department is scheduled to testify this evening before a House committee on his investigation into the IRS’s effort to recover emails of Lois Lerner that the IRS said were forever lost.

“House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz remains concerned the IRS potentially mislead the American people about its efforts to recover former Director Lerner’s emails. The IRS has claimed under oath that most of her emails from a key time period were destroyed by a crashed hard drive, that back-up tapes were erased, and were therefore unrecoverable,” a statement from the Committee says. “Through their ongoing efforts, the Inspector General’s office has discovered that the back-up tapes do exist, the data on them was never erased, and the emails are in fact recoverable.”

Should be quite interesting.

One comment

Fired for using the wrong word

9:03 am

Fascists: A student government representative was removed from his position at George Mason University because he used the word “illegal” in writing about his opposition to giving illegal immigrants state tuition aid.

GMU’s student body president, Philip Abbruscato, released [an] official message on Sunday boasting of the school’s “thousands of unique voices” and the student government’s “variety of backgrounds, cultures, ideologies, academic interests, and more.” Abbruscato also said that “demeaning” remarks from members of GMU’s student government would “not be tolerated at any level regardless of belief,” and removed Paglia from his position on Feb., 20. “While we all live in a society that permits us to express our opinions, we must also recognize that we live with the consequences of their impact on those we represent. [emphasis mine]

In other words, according to this fascist, you have freedom of speech as long as you don’t say anything that he disagrees with.

6 comments

Earth’s other moon

8:50 am

Link here.

What you might not know is that the moon is not the Earth’s only natural satellite. As recently as 1997, we discovered that another body, 3753 Cruithne, is what’s called a quasi-orbital satellite of Earth. This simply means that Cruithne doesn’t loop around the Earth in a nice ellipse in the same way as the moon, or indeed the artificial satellites we loft into orbit. Instead, Cruithne scuttles around the inner solar system in what’s called a “horseshoe” orbit.

2 comments

Second spacewalk in ISS reconfiguration completed

12:20 am

On Wednesday astronauts successfully completed the second spacewalk in NASA’s long term reconfiguration of ISS to accomodate two privately-built commercial manned spacecraft.

The reconfiguration will continue on Sunday with the third EVA for this crew.

The spacewalk had one minor issue that could be a cause for concern for future American spacewalks: The suit of one of the astronauts had a small water leak within it. While this problem was minor and not a threat to the astronaut, it is reminiscent of the more serious spacesuit leak that occurred in 2013 that almost drowned an Italian astronaut. Finding the cause of that leak took almost a year to track down, and though solved even now raises concerns. To have another water leak inside a suit, even a minor one, suggests that the design of the American suit has a design flaw that they are having difficulty correcting.

Leave a comment

The brightest spot on Ceres has a partner

3:51 pm

Ceres' double bright spots

Cool images! Dawn’s newest images have revealed that the brightest spot on Ceres, shown on the right in a cropped version of the full image, has a dimmer companion.

“Ceres’ bright spot can now be seen to have a companion of lesser brightness, but apparently in the same basin. This may be pointing to a volcano-like origin of the spots, but we will have to wait for better resolution before we can make such geologic interpretations,” said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The spots are still too small for Dawn’s camera to resolve. That they are inside what looks like a crater is very puzzling. If they are water-ice, why are they so bright and distinct? One one think the ice would pile up along the crater wall, but then, that’s what we think based on our experience here on Earth with wind, rain, and our heavy gravity. Ceres is cold, has no atmosphere, and a tiny gravitational field. Every geological process will proceed in a different manner.

6 comments

Russians confirm plan to leave ISS in 2024

8:59 am

The competition heats up: Russian space managers have confirmed that they have endorsed a plan to leave ISS in 2024, when they will assemble their own space station using new modules as well as a significant number of the modules attached to ISS.

On February 24, 2015, the Scientific and Technical Council, NTS, at Roskosmos, the main planning body at the agency led by a newly appointed chairman and the former head of the agency Yuri Koptev, formally endorsed the Russian participation in the ISS program until 2024. It would be followed by the separation of Russia’s newest modules from the ISS to form the new national space station. As previously reported on this site, the initial configuration of the station would include the Multi-purpose Module, MLM, the Node Module, UM, and the Science and Power Module, NEM. Notably, the original Russian ISS component — the Zvezda Service Module, SM — was not included in the plan, thus ensuring that its propulsion capabilities would be available for deorbiting of the outpost at the end of its operational life.

Whether ISS will be functional with just the Russian Zvezda module is not clear. NASA engineers now have about a decade to figure this out and to fix it.

In general the break up of the partnership running ISS will be good for space exploration. The competition between nations will spur development and innovation. It will also free each nation from the shackles of the partnership. The Russians in particular have wanted to utilize ISS for more daring and longer expeditions to research interplanetary travel, and were stymied by NASA’s bureaucracy. Once they start doing this sort of thing on their own station NASA will feel obliged to follow.

Obviously, competition between nations carries risk. As long as there is some agreed to framework for claiming territory on other planets (something that the U.N. treaty does not allow), the nations will be able to compete peacefully. Without that framework, however, will leave room for disagreement and conflict.

It is thus essential that the space-faring nations sit down and work out this framework, and do it as soon as possible before each nation has vested interests in space that are already in conflict with each other. Above all, this new framework has got to abandon the U.N. space treaty with its rules that forbid the claiming and controlling of territory by nations in space. Those rules were never realistic, and literally guarantee that nations will eventually end up at war with each other as they fight to determine who owns what in space.

6 comments

Christian florist tells her side of the story

10:51 pm

Watch the video of her television interview below the fold. As she says,

It’s not about the money. It’s about freedom. It’s about my eight kids and our 23 grandchildren and the future. There’s not a price on freedom. You can’t buy my freedom. It’s me now, but tomorrow it’s going to be you. You gotta wake up. [emphasis mine]

She added,

They are talking about bullying me into doing something that is against my faith. They can’t do that.

She also makes it very clear that she and the gay couple are friends, and that she has provided flowers for them many times in the past. And when she declined to do arrangements for their marriage, she provided them alternative recommendations so they wouldn’t be deprived of service, though not from her. And it appears that this gay couple never sued her. It was the ACLU and the Washington attorney general that sued.
» Read more

63 comments

What every conservative politican should answer when asked a stupid gotcha question by a journalist

10:30 pm

“You want my opinion? My opinion is that you’re not very good at your job and your boss should send someone else to do this. If you want to know about what they said, go ask them. If you’d like to talk to me about the issues or anything I said, feel free. Next question.” [emphasis in originial]

Read it all. It makes perfect sense, to demand better from these reporters. And it works! I remember listening to Margaret Thatcher as she did this to an NPR reporter back around the time of the Falklands War. Very quickly the reporter got focused on asking intelligent questions, and the interview for Thatcher turned out to be resounding success.

Leave a comment

Louisville Leopard Percussionists – Zeppellin

6:01 pm

An evening pause: To quote the youtube webpage, “The Louisville Leopard Percussionists began in 1993. They are a performing ensemble of approximately 55 student musicians, ages 7-12, living in and around Louisville, Kentucky. Each student learns and acquires proficiency on several instruments, such as marimbas, xylophone, vibraphone, drum set, timbales, congas, bongos and piano.”

Hat tip Diane Zimmerman

2 comments

Next Angara launch delayed

4:08 pm

The competition heats up? Industry sources in Russia noted today that the next launch of Angara will be delayed until 2016.

Previously the next Angara launch was scheduled for late 2015. This delay is not a disaster for Russia, as Angara is designed to work in conjunction with the country’s new spaceport in Vostochny, and that facility won’t really be operational until 2016 either.

Leave a comment

Obamacare taxes hit the poorest the hardest

11:20 am

Finding out what’s in it: An H&R report has found that more than half of the poorest Obamacare enrollees face a tax liability of around $500 at tax time.

The report also found that the Obamacare penalty for not having insurance is now averaging about $172. This number however will go up in future years as the full penalty is phased in.

But isn’t Obamacare the “Affordable Care Act”, as Obama and the Democrats named it? It can’t cost us more. They said so! They promised!

One comment

Watching politics eat away at climate science

9:29 am

Two stories today today illustrate how the field of climate science is being destroyed by politics.

In the first, a leading climate skeptic chortles over the resignation of Rajendra Pachauri, the man who has headed the IPCC since 2002, who has stepped down because of allegations of sexual harassment by an employee at the institute he heads in New Delhi. In the second, Willie Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist who has published numerous peer-reviewed papers raising questions about global warming science, is attacked for not fully disclosing the sources of his income.

In both cases, the two sides in the global warming debate are using these allegations as ammunition to attack the believability of each side’s stance on the scientific question of global warming. And in both cases, the stories raise literally no questions about the science itself that each man advocated.

I admit that I have attacked Pachauri numerous times in the past, but each time it was because he demonstrated outright ignorance of the field of climate science or had been caught making significant scientific errors. His resignation here however has nothing to do with the science published in IPCC reports, and should not be used as fodder to criticize the theory of human-caused global warming.

Similarly, none of the articles in the mainstream science press about the allegations against Soon have raised a single question about his actual results. All they have done is attack him for not revealing all of his funding sources. His research itself still appears valid. That the largest science journals, Science and Nature, have published articles attacking Soon, with the Smithsonian now piling on as well, without presenting any evidence that he had falsified any of his work, illustrates how corrupt this field has become. The science for these major science journals no longer matters. All that matters is destroying someone who was apparently successful in bursting the balloon on some global warming science.

Until everyone stops playing this game and focuses instead on the data itself and what that data is really telling us, we will get no closer to truly understanding the climate of the Earth. And tragically, I see far too little effort in the climate field to do this.

7 comments

X-Prize contestants team-up to create head-to-head lunar race

8:52 am

The competition heats up: Two Google Lunar X-Prize contestants have teamed up to use the same rocket to get to the Moon together, where they will literally race head to head to see who travels the 500 meter distance first to win the prize.

At a press conference in Tokyo on Monday, the leaders of two Lunar X PRIZE teams—Astrobotic and HAKUTO—announced a plan in which the two teams’ robotic rovers will travel to the moon together and touch down on the lunar surface at the same time. They will then race each other to cover the 500 meters required to win the first place prize of $20 million.

John Thornton, head of Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic (a Carnegie Mellon University spin-off), said in a call with reporters that the partnership with HAKUTO (a spin-off from Tokyo University) represented the first step in realizing his team’s goal of turning robotic moon missions into a viable business. That mission won’t stop with this single partnership. He said the team was in talks with more than half of the other 16 GLXP competitors to carry their rovers to the moon, too, in exchange for sharing the cost of getting there and splitting prize money.

If this happens as they propose, we could be watching as many as ten rovers line up for the race.

3 comments

Florist rejects attorney general’s deal to settle lawsuit over same-sex weddings

9:57 pm

The Washington florist whose entire assets a judge has ruled can be confiscated because she refuses to participate in a same-sex wedding because of her Christian religion has rejected outright a settlement offered to her by the state’s attorney general.

Ms. Stutzman [the florist] rejected Friday a settlement agreement offered by Mr. Ferguson [the attorney general] that would have required her to pay $2,001 in damages and legal fees after a judge ruled last week that she violated state law by declining to provide services for a same-sex wedding. “My primary goal has always been to bring about an end to the Defendants’ unlawful conduct and to make clear that I will not tolerate discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” Mr. Ferguson said in a statement.

The agreement also would require Ms. Stutzman to agree “not to discriminate in the future,” which means she must provide custom floral arrangements for same-sex weddings or stop doing weddings altogether, said Peter LaVallee, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office.

In rejecting the offer, Stutzman was very blunt about her reasons.

“Your offer reveals that you don’t really understand me or what this conflict is all about,” Ms. Stutzman said in a letter to Mr. Ferguson. “It’s about freedom, not money. I certainly don’t relish the idea of losing my business, my home, and everything else that your lawsuit threatens to take from my family, but my freedom to honor God in doing what I do best is more important.

“…I pray that you reconsider your position. … I kindly served Rob [the gay plaintiff] for nearly a decade and would gladly continue to do so. I truly want the best for my friend. I’ve also employed and served many members of the LGBT community, and I will continue to do so regardless of what happens with this case.”

She concluded, “You chose to attack my faith and pursue this not simply as a matter of law, but to threaten my very means of working, eating, and having a home. If you are serious about clarifying the law, then I urge you to drop your claims against my home, business, and other assets and pursue the legal claims through the appeal process.”

The mildness of the attorney general’s offer suggests to me that he is feeling some political heat. He looks like a tyrant and a bad guy who is trying to destroy this woman expressly because of her religious beliefs. He thus wants this case to end with a victory, but to end as quickly as possible.

12 comments

The collapse of corrupt unions in Wisconsin

6:59 pm

Link here.

[The reason unions fought Scott Walker’s reforms so hard] wasn’t because they were worried about employees as much as they were worried about losing political clout, earned mainly through forced contributions and closed shops. They used that money not so much to improve the lives of public-sector employees, but to hand-pick their bosses, who would also be their negotiating partners. Now that their cash flow has become so greatly restricted — and will likely become even more so — they have to focus on delivering value to members or watch them walk away. That’s exactly how it should have been all along.

Morrissey is commenting on a Washington Post article, which noted these facts:

Union officials declined to release precise membership data but confirmed in interviews that enrollment is dramatically lower since the new law was signed in 2011. The state branch of the National Education Association, once 100,000 strong, has seen its membership drop by a third. The American Federation of Teachers, which organized in the college system, saw a 50 percent decline. The 70,000-person membership in the state employees union has fallen by 70 percent.

The bottom line is that the use of force is almost always wrong, whether it is forcing people to join unions or forcing florists to participate in gay weddings. Forcing public employees to be union members didn’t so much improve their wages as much as encourage corruption in the public sector while simultaneously screwing the taxpayer.

2 comments
1 … 706 707 708 709 710 … 1,100