Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

Death by 1000 lashes for writing a blog post

12:30 pm

The religion of peace: The sentence of 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison for a Saudi blogger who wrote some mild criticisms of Saudi Islamic rule has been upheld by that country’s supreme court.

Words fail me when faced with this kind of barbarism. But hey, here in the states we have to deal with some real oppression, like the fact that women in business are sometimes addressed by the phrase “you guys!”.

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“It’s declassified and made public once it’s agreed to.”

9:43 am

Does the quote above, said by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) during debate over the secret Obamatrade bills, remind you of anything? Weren’t we forced to try this dubious legislative approach by Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and the Democrats with Obamacare?

Finding out what was in it after Obamacare was made law has very clearly turned out to be a disaster. The last thing the Republicans should be doing now is to repeat this corrupt practice themselves.

Update: Support for this foolishness in the House appears tepid at best:

According to The Hill, only 116 Republicans and 19 Democrats in the House are committed or leaning to supporting the bill, while 130 Democrats and 29 Republicans are committed or leaning to opposition. That leaves 139 up in the air, most of them Republicans. To get to 218, Boehner and Pelosi will have to find at least 82 more votes out of the 139, a tall order indeed.

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Is this Philae?

9:14 am

Philae?

Cool image time! The Rosetta science team has spent much effort trying to locate Philae, which attempted to land on Comet 67P/C-G in November. The image on the right shows what they think is their best candidate, the bright feature in the center. It was not there prior to Philae’s landing attempt.

Because there are many uncertainties, however, this might not be Philae.

Ultimately, a definitive identification of this or any other candidate as being Philae will require higher-resolution imaging, in turn meaning closer flybys. This may not be possible in the near-term, as issues encountered in navigating close to the comet mean that the opportunity to make flybys at significantly less than 20 km from the surface may be on hold until later in the mission. But after the comet’s activity has subsided, Rosetta should be able to safely operate in close proximity to the comet nucleus again.

The other possibility of further refining Philae’s location would come if the lander were to receive enough power to wake-up from its hibernation and resume its scientific study of 67P/C-G. Then, CONSERT could be used to perform additional ranging measurements and significantly reduce the uncertainties on the lander’s location. At the moment, Philae is still in hibernation, but the mission team remain hopeful that, as the comet moves closer to the Sun along its orbit, the lander will receive enough power in the coming weeks or months to wake up and transmit a signal to Rosetta.

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The crooked politics behind the Obamatrade deal

11:13 pm

And the crooked politics are coming mostly from Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin).

The problem here isn’t the bill itself, it is the manner in which Obamatrade is being enacted, written in secret and classified so that the public cannot read it. No elected official should vote for any bill or law that is not available for the public to read and review. Yet these guys are pushing it, a law that apparently will cede more power to the President at the expense of Congress. Knowing the language of such a law is critical.

It does appear that a growing number of Republicans in the House are going to oppose this travesty. I pray that enough come forward to stop it. And if the vote is taken and there are any Republicans who vote for it, such as did Cruz and Rubio (who hadn’t even read it), they will reveal themselves to be wolves in sheep’s clothing, not to be trusted.

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A compilation of robots falling down at the DARPA Robotics Challenge

12:18 pm

More information here. It seems that on the dry run prior to the start of competition, not many robots fell over. Then on Day 1, when the competition was for real, a lot had problems standing up.

The impressive thing about these falls is that, although they look pretty bad, the robots were just fine (well, most of them). After humans got them back on their feet and gave them a reboot, the machines were ready to run again. Team IHMC’s Atlas fell twice during their run and it still scored 7 points (of a maximum of 8). Team MIT’s Atlas had a bad stumble out of the vehicle and also went on to complete most of the course. So it’s a good thing that robots are falling at the DRC Finals—that’s how we’re going to make them better.

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Judge rules the arrest of a citizen during a local meeting illegal

10:26 am

The first amendment is such an inconvenient thing: A judge has dismissed criminal charges filed against a man who was arrested 40 seconds into his five minute allotted speaking period during a local council meeting when he asked the selectmen to resign.

“The arrest of (Clay) is found by the court to be a violation of (Clay’s) First Amendment right of free speech,” [the judge] Carroll wrote. The arrest amounted to “content-based censorship as the defendant was acting within the very rules promulgated by the (selectmen) as well within his constitutional rights under the U.S. and N.H. Constitutions,” Carroll wrote. Clay “complied with the board’s own protocol, established by the board for public input.”

I have embedded the video of the incident below the fold. Watch it. Essentially, the council didn’t like what Clay was saying and decided to shut him up. Granted, he was being very harsh, but tough, that is what free speech is all about. Note also that though they tell him they have ended the public input session, after he is arrested they then resume public input.

Everyone of these elected officials should be out of office. They have no understanding that their role as elected officials is to be the servant of the people, not their overlords. When a citizen is unhappy, you listen to them, and address their concerns as quickly as possible. As the least, you let the citizen air his or her complaints fully, and loudly, and then if you find they do not have merit, move on.

These thugs clearly do not understand these basic aspects of American culture.
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SpaceX begins planning a 4,000 satellite internet constellation

9:46 am

The competition heats up: SpaceX has filed papers with the FCC to begin testing the design and construction and launch of a constellation of 4,000 satellites for providing global internet access.

Musk’s FCC filing proposes tests starting next year. If all goes well, the service could be up and running in about five years. The satellites would be deployed from one of SpaceX’s rockets, the Falcon 9. Once in orbit, the satellites would connect to ground stations at three West Coast facilities. The purpose of the tests is to see whether the antenna technology used on the satellites will be able to deliver high-speed Internet to the ground without hiccups.

It appears to me that Musk’s constellation will be made up of cubesats, small and cheap to build, and easy to launch in large numbers as secondary payloads on every Falcon 9 launch. In other words, as long as SpaceX can get customers to pay for launches of large satellites on its Falcon 9, Musk will be able to launch and maintain his constellation of cubesats for free.

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New close-up image of Ceres’s double bright spots

9:32 am

close-up of Ceres's bright spots

Cool image time! The Dawn science team has released a some new close-up images of Ceres, including a much higher resolution image of the dwarf planet’s double bright spot, which now resolves itself into a cluster of two larger spots with a half dozen smaller spots scattered nearby.

The region with the brightest spots is in a crater about 55 miles (90 kilometers) across. The spots consist of many individual bright points of differing sizes, with a central cluster. So far, scientists have found no obvious explanation for their observed locations or brightness levels.

“The bright spots in this configuration make Ceres unique from anything we’ve seen before in the solar system. The science team is working to understand their source. Reflection from ice is the leading candidate in my mind, but the team continues to consider alternate possibilities, such as salt. With closer views from the new orbit and multiple view angles, we soon will be better able to determine the nature of this enigmatic phenomenon,” said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission based at the University of California, Los Angeles.

To my eye, these bright areas resemble a wide flat caldera of a volcano. Instead of being at the top of a peak, the caldera is like a lava pool, almost like a large lake. In this case, the large spots are lakes of frozen ice that periodically melt and flow. The smaller spots are likely smaller vents where water can bubble up from below during active periods. When not active, the water will be frozen. Since ice is white and Ceres is very dark, the pools and vents appear extremely bright in these images.

I am speculating however. We will have to wait for much better images to know for sure.

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The collapse of Russian scientific innovation

9:13 am

Link here. This report documents much of what I have been seeing in the Russian space industry: an aging workforce, a lack of innovation, and concentration of power to Moscow and the central government, and an exodus of the best minds to other countries.

It appears that all of the solutions that have been imposed by Putin’s government are exactly the worst things you could do and will only make the problems grow with time.

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Russia announces revised launch schedule for ISS

10:11 pm

As promised, the Russians today revealed their revised schedule of launches for ISS for the next few months.

The next manned launch will be on July 3, and though it will use a Soyuz rocket, it will not use the upgraded rocket version that had a conflict with its Progress freighter during the April launch. They have still not described what that conflict was, or how they plan to fix it on future launches.

Meanwhile, a Soyuz capsule docked to ISS suddenly fired its thrusters unexpectedly during testing of the station’s radio system. The burn changed the station’s orientation, which required other thrusters to compensate.

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Did some dinosaur soft tissues survive fossilization?

2:36 pm

The uncertainty of science: New research strongly suggests that within dinosaur fossils are found many preserved soft tissues from when the creature was still living.

As early as the 1970s, researchers captured images of what looked like cellular structures inside dinosaur fossils. But did the structures contain actual tissue? Proteins commonly decay hundreds to thousands of years after an organism dies, but in rare cases they have been known to survive up to 3 million years. In a series of studies beginning a decade ago, a team led by North Carolina State University paleontologist Mary Schweitzer reported that they had extracted what appeared to be collagen, the most abundant protein in bone, from a 68-million-year-old T. rex fossil. They sequenced fragments of the protein and concluded that it closely matched that of birds, dinosaurs’ living descendants (see here and here). But other teams haven’t been able to replicate the work, and others suggested that the collagen could be contamination.

The new study, led by materials scientist Sergio Bertazzo and paleontologist Susannah Maidment, both of Imperial College London, has a different strategy for hunting down ancient proteins. Bertazzo, an expert on how living bones incorporate minerals, uses a tool called a focused ion beam to slice through samples, leaving pristine surfaces that are ideal for high-resolution imaging studies. He teamed up with Maidment to apply the technique to eight chunks of dinosaur toe, rib, hip, leg, and claw.

What they found shocked them. Imaging the fresh-cut surfaces with scanning and transmission electron microscopes, “we didn’t see bone crystallites” as expected, Maidment says. “What we saw instead was soft tissue. It was completely unexpected. My initial response was these results are not real.” [emphasis mine]

It must be noted that the new research depends on many uncertainties that still need to be replicated or confirmed.

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$28 billion spent on poor biomedical research?

2:32 pm

The uncertainty of science: A new study suggests that $28 billion is spent on biomedical research that no one can reproduce.

I have no doubt that a vast amount of medical research is so poorly done that no one else will ever be able to replicate the results. However, the article notes that the way the researchers came up with the $28 billion figure is quite questionable, reviewing only about two dozen studies and then extrapolating their numbers across the entire research field. This is highly uncertain and should be taken with a grain of salt.

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Obamacare sets record for unpopularity with public

12:22 pm

Finding out what’s in it: A new poll has found that Obamacare, five years after it was passed, is more unpopular now then ever before.

Which is why the Republicans should do nothing to fix it should the Supreme Court rule against Obamacare subsidies in states with no health exchanges, and instead stick with full repeal followed by specific fixes to the previous laws.

I am even more convinced that full repeal is the right political approach after reading this leftwing reporter’s take on the situation. He thinks the above plan is stupid, knows the Democrats and Obama will never agree to it, but also knows that the public does not blame Obamacare in any way on the Republicans. As he notes,

And one of the reasons why Democrats should not assume that a ruling for the plaintiffs in King will totally backfire on Republicans is the cynical, but powerful, source of leverage that Thune is tapping into here: Democrats passed health care reform, and thus Democrats will get blamed for anything bad that happens to the health care system.

The above poll confirms this. The Republicans had better recognize this if they want to take full political advantage of it.

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Rare large meteorite stolen from Australian museum

11:18 am

In a heist reminiscent of a Hollywood movie, two thieves in hooded jumpers and white masks stole a 25 pound meteorite the size of a soccer ball on Monday.

The only value of such a meteorite is among collectors, but to sell such a large and unique meteorite without being noticed would be impossible. It is theorized that the thieves might chop it up and sell the pieces to collectors instead.

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Russia completes Soyuz launchpad at Vostochny

10:43 am

The competition heats up: Russia has completed assembly of the Soyuz-2 launch system at Vostochny a month ahead of schedule.

I must say that this story confuses me. Just this past weekend it was reported in the Russian press that they were abandoning efforts to build a Soyuz launchpad for manned flights at Vostochny and would instead focus on Angara. Why then are they finishing this Soyuz-2 launchpad now, and ahead of schedule?

One theory: The new launchpad might be for a new upgraded Soyuz rocket to be used for unmanned missions and thus different than the manned launchpad.

Or it might be that even though the government canceled it, workers continued to work on it and finished it, unaware of the cancellation. It is not unusual in big government projects for the right hand to not know what the left hand is doing.

UPDATE: My first theory was correct. Anatoly Zak of russianspaceweb.com has confirmed to me in an email that they only cancelled manned Soyuz flights at Vostochny. This launchpad will be used for an upgraded Soyuz rocket for unmanned flights.

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Hole in observatory door was not caused by bullet

10:26 am

Curiouser and curiouser: In a statement to the press the Subaru Telescope has said that the hole in its door was not caused by a bullet this past weekend but has been known about for months and was caused by wind banging the door against a piece of equipment.

But on Monday, the observatory said in a statement the hole was caused by strong wind swinging a metal door into an instrument fixture attached to a wall. “We at Subaru Telescope are relieved that this is the case and regret the confusion caused by earlier reports,” the statement said.

A detective investigated Monday and determined the hole from the bolt on the wall was there about six months, police said. The observatory’s statement says the day crews knew about the hole from a severe winter storm earlier this year. The observatory didn’t immediately explain why someone reported it to police Saturday night.

The contradictions between the story released today and what was revealed yesterday is quite stark. My guess would be that someone at the telescope, unaware of the hole previously, saw it this weekend and panicked, thinking it caused by a bullet and fearful because of the illegal presence of protesters on the road to the mountain. It is also possible that someone at the telescope saw the hole for the first time and wanted to smear the demonstrators. It is also possible that the rumor was spread by a demonstrator who wanted to smear the astronomers, knowing that the false story would be quickly uncovered.

I could speculate for hours, pointlessly. The bottom line is that the lack of good will from the demonstrators is successfully spreading the ill will to all sides.

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Parachute problems again for NASA’s flying saucer

5:06 pm

In its second flight today NASA’s engineering vehicle for testing Mars landing technologies, dubbed a flying saucer by the press because of its shape, had a similar problem as in its first flight, with its parachutes failing to inflate properly during landing.

More here. This test was not only to check out landing technologies, it was to check out the redesigned parachute that had failed in the previous test last year.

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Want a law passed? Bribe your Senator!

12:30 pm

Good work if you can get it: A survey of the Senators who voted for the secret fast track trade legislation — whose language has still not been published for the public to read — has found that they all received huge donations in the past few months from businesses that support the legislation, while the law was being written and voted on.

Some were Democrats who held back until they got a lot of cash donations, then voted yes. Some were Republicans who took the money up front and then wrote the legislation. All told more than a million dollars in bribes were handed over to senators to guarantee their “yay” votes.

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TSA fails to find links to terrorism of airport workers

10:46 am

Does this make you feel safer? An audit of the TSA has found that the agency failed to uncover the terrorist connections of 73 aviation workers when it did background checks of them.

According to TSA data, these individuals were employed by major airlines, airport vendors, and other employers. TSA did not identify these individuals through its vetting operations because it is not authorized to receive all terrorism-related categories under current interagency watchlisting policy,” the redacted report reads. “TSA acknowledged that these individuals were cleared for access to secure airport areas despite representing a potential transportation security threat,” it added.

The new audit comes on the heels of another damaging Inspector General report on TSA’s security measures, which found the aviation security body was unable to detect fake bombs and weapons in 95 percent of trial runs. Revealed last week in an ABC News report, the OIG’s findings resulted in the Acting TSA Administrator, Melvin Carraway’s, removal from the post.

The TSA is nothing more than childish feel-good theater used to convince Americans that the government has the right to sexually abuse them, if it wants. It does little to prevent hijackings or terrorist attacks. The smartest thing we could do is to shut it down, close down the security posts, and simply let Americans be armed on planes. Trust me, terrorists — being cowardly bullies who look for easy targets — would stay away, and no gun shots would ever get fired.

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Problems at Stratolaunch

10:29 am

In the heat of competition: Stratolaunch and Orbital ATK have quietly parted ways as problems have developed in building Stratolaunch’s giant first stage aircraft.

The company went with a radical engineering idea — using a giant airplane as their first stage — which might turn out great but could just as easily become a disaster and failure. Such ideas are by their nature filled with many unknowns.

In a sense, this story validates SpaceX’s approach to developing new space technology, which is to take known engineering and to upgrade it while refining the production methods for building it to lower costs. With this approach, you lower risks by reducing the number of unknowns you have to deal with.

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Bullet hole found in Mauna Kea observatory

10:20 am

Even as protesters continue to block the roads to the top of Mauna Kea to prevent construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), workers at the Subaru Telescope at the mountain have reported a bullet hole in one door that had been put there sometime over the weekend.

No one knows who did it, or even if the hole was caused by a bullet, though that is what it looks like. The leader of the protests has of course denied any participation and condemned it.

I found this quote from the first link above (which spends a lot of time describing the heroic protesters who have been camping on the road) to be very revealing about this whole affair:

In an email Saturday, DLNR spokeswoman Deborah Ward said the area is not permitted for camping but did not respond to the Tribune-Herald’s questions about why the department has allowed the protesters to remain at the site. “Both state and county officials are monitoring the situation,” she wrote.

Gee, don’t we all remember how government officials turned a blind eye to tea party protests? Not! They did however allow illegal trespassing for Occupy Wall Street. In all these cases, the government officials reveal whose side they are on.

I personally think the astronomy community should organize a boycott of tourism to Hawaii. If their island is so sacred that outsiders shouldn’t be there, maybe we should hold them to their word. We would then find out how serious they really are about the island’s sacredness.

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LightSail successfully deploys solar sail

9:58 am

Engineers have confirmed that the cubesat prototype LightSail has successfully deployed its solar sails.

This is I think only the second time a solar sail has successfully deployed in space. More significant to me is the fact that it is the first time this kind of complex engineering test has been tried using a cubesat. If cubesats can begin to handle these kinds of tasks, unmanned satellite technology is going to take a gigantic leap forward.

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Dawn makes a movie of Ceres

9:28 am

Cool image time! Using images that Dawn has accumulated since it entered orbit around Ceres, scientists have created an animation showing the dwarf planet as it rotates.

Video below the fold. Note that this is an animation. They have filled in the gaps between images to make the rotation smooth, exaggerated the scale two times to bring out details, and added a background of stars that is not visible in the original images. Even so, this video is scientifically useful, as it shows Ceres in its entirety. It is also very spectacular.
» Read more

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Jets on Comet 67P/C-G now persist into the night

9:18 am

jets from Comet 67P/C-G

Cool image time! Rosetta’s high resolution camera is now finding that, due to increased activity as Comet 67P/C-G approaches the sun, jets of material now continue to evaporate off the surface even after sunset.

“Only recently have we begun to observe dust jets persisting even after sunset”, says OSIRIS Principal Investigator Holger Sierks from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. In the past months, the comet’s activity originated from illuminated areas on the day side. As soon as the Sun set, these jets subsided and did not re-awake until after the next sunrise. (An exception poses an image from 12 March, 2015 showing the onset of a dust jet on the brink of dawn.)

According to OSIRIS scientists, the jets now occurring even after sunset are another sign of the comet’s increasing activity. “Currently, 67P is rapidly approaching perihelion in mid-August”, says Sierks. At the time the image was taken, comet and Sun were only 270 million kilometers apart. “The solar irradiation is getting more and more intense, the illuminated surface warmer and warmer”, Sierks adds.

Because the jets are now remaining active into the night, it is allowing us to see more precisely their points of origin on the surface, which can then be studied more closely in daylight. Previously it was difficult in daylight to pinpoint the exact spot where the jets began.

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