catdynamics | August 10, 2009more occasional link fodder from the recent past
'cause y'know, linking is an inherent good
Jay Bookman reports on a editorial in the IBD which notes: "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K..."
"...where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless,"
Stupid blighters, the IBD.
Don't they know Stephen is a fellow of Caius...
Actually, good thing he got that dual appointment at the Perimeter Institute on this side of the pond, eh.
That way the Canadians can step in as…
catdynamics | August 6, 2009Google maps has a foreclosure map, of the entire United States.
h/t CR
map, which is apparently not entirely current, shows houses in foreclosure, owned by banks, or under notice of default.
It is awesome yet frightening.
View Larger Map
for example...
catdynamics | August 6, 2009NASA's Kepler Planet Finding Mission makes its first discovery announcement.
Announcement on NASA TV, from www.nasa.gov at 2pm thursday 6th of August, 2009.
Now with figures and press release info.
UPDATE: Kepler Early Results Press Release.
And, they're off... the announcement, as rumoured is what they could squeeze out of the calibration data.
In particular, calibration suggests photometry is good enough, and stable enough - at least over month time scales, and hopefully longer - that Kepler will have sensitivity to find Earth sized planets, at least for the less luminous stars.…
catdynamics | August 3, 2009Interesting things happen when corrupt idiots wielding obsolete laws from colonial times meet modern technology and communication infrastructure...
As you know, Bob, Iceland has been having a bit of a "Banana Republic" moment.
In particular, we were shocked, shocked, to discover that when the conservative Independent Party finally got to implement their dream of massive deregulation, the small number of well connected oligarchs not only managed to loot the treasury, they also indebted the whole country in a classic privatize-the-gains/socialize-the-losses game of moronic risk taking,…
catdynamics | August 2, 2009A couple of years ago, during a cold snap in winter, I noticed my hands were getting acutely chapped, with cracking of the skin and bleeding.
I come from a cold climate, I had never had problems with cold weather before.
Ah well, thought I, getting old; too much time in California made me soft.
So, I made a point of wearing gloves or mittens, even when the temperature was barely below freezing. Hands still hurt when it got cold, but it helped.
However, later that winter, I was traveling to an even colder, windier, clime, and I noticed my hands were fine. It was as if I had discovered some…
catdynamics | July 30, 2009As you may know, Landsbanki, one of the three former Icelandic commercial banks, left a few billion euros in uninsured deposits lying around, when it collapsed in ignomy.
Mostly in the UK and Netherlands.
The Dutch are getting irate about this...
For perspective, shortly after Landsbanki was privatized, in 2003, as I recall, I closed my account there in 2004 - I had had that account for about 30 years, and closing it was a significant inconvenience.
Y'all should have done as I did.
Anyway, through the gross incompetence of the Icelandic National Bank and various regulators, Iceland…
catdynamics | July 29, 2009apparently the 2010 department of defense appropriations bill is moving in congress, and someone wants to amend it, there should be a vote, I think.
Rep. Flake (R-Az) has offered 553 amendments to the bill
#1 Would prohibit funding for Enhanced Navy Shore Readiness Integration.
...
#556 Would prohibit funding for the MacDill Air Force Base Online Technology Program.
or, en bloc...
553. Flake, Jeff (AZ) #595 Would prohibit funding for various earmarked projects in the bill.
(yeah, I noticed the numbers don't add up, maybe some in the #300s were withdraw...)
Anyway, this is a serious…
catdynamics | July 28, 2009The precise measurement of the microwave background fluctuations by COBE, followed by the tour de force "concordance cosmology" results of the WMAP mission combined with decades of data on large scale structure, clusters of galaxies and distance ladder calibrations, up to and including type Ia supernovae, is one of the great pieces of modern complex physical science, and am endeavour which promises continued deep insight into the origin and properties of the universe, and the fundamental laws of physics.
Now with update and indirect word of WMAP reaction.
The current best estimate of the…
catdynamics | July 27, 2009That is when a prominent psychic in Iceland predicts there'll be a major earthquake.
Specifically in the Krýsuvík area in the southwest.
This is an area where there have been some minor earthquakes recently.
Ok... we'll see in a few hours I guess.
Quantitative value of "major" is not specified.
Personally I'd put it at magnitude 6 or larger.
She claims to have predicted the earthquakes in Iceland in 2000 and 2008, though I don't see a dated cite for this.
In case you're interested: she also claims to know where Madeleine McCann is, I'd like to think she'd tell Madeleine's parents this, soon…
catdynamics | July 24, 2009It is carnival time, and the hits just keep on coming...
40 years ago today, three astronauts in the command module Columbia, of the Apollo 11 mission, splashed down in the Pacific, having just come back from the Moon.
As one does.
Cheap Astronomy has the third in a series of Apollo 11 podcasts: Getting Back Again, while the Lab Lemming talks about what they returned with, and the science of Apollo.
Babe in the Universe was at the Moonfest, both at JSC and Ames, seeing that people still really do care.
21st Century Waves contemplates that Giant Leap, and whether it went nowhere or is the…
catdynamics | July 23, 2009Prof Henry Gates' account of his arrest
the police report
hm, lose a few billion from the endowment and all of a sudden there is no respect
the accounts are surprisingly consistent, but Prof Gates made one major mistake:
Skip, dood, you were in China and didn't stay for the eclipse!?!
what were you thinking...
oh, and sorry about the way the police treated you, bit of an overreaction there by the sound of it
PS: just in case anyone is confused by who I think overreacted:
Nightmare on Ware Street
catdynamics | July 22, 2009there's a persistent urban legend out there, that the three body problem can not be solved
this, of course, is not true:
so when XKCD promulgates the myth, the time comes when a stand must be taken
click to embiggen
sigh.
The classical problem of the solution of the motion of three bodies, moving under the influence of Newtonian gravitational dynamics only, is an old one.
The difficulty of the problem was quickly realised in the context of predicting the orbit of the Moon - just the Earth-Moon-Sun problem, though well posed, is extremely hard to even get to the point of having a formalism…
catdynamics | July 21, 2009So, Jupiter has now been impacted twice in 15 years: first by Shoemaker-Levy/9 in 1994 and now by the mystery Wesley's Object.
So what?
And, why didn't we see this coming?
impact 1994 - click to embiggen
SL9 was a respectably sized comet, probably a few km across, and it was spotted more than a year before it hit Jupiter.
SL9 was tidally torn apart by Jupiter before impact, leading to a chain of impacts, with associated transient "dark spots", bright in the infrared.
The current dark spot looks to be comparable to the first impact of the SL9 fragments, by fragment A, which was probably a…
catdynamics | July 20, 2009JPL scientists confirm new impact by a comet or asteroid on Jupiter using NASA infrared telescope in Hawaii. Independent confirmation by UC scientists using Keck telescope.
NASA's InfraRed Telescope Facility on Hawaii got near-IR images of the new dark spot on Jupiter.
As I speculated, a recent impact would bright in the infrared.
Sure enough, there it is.
Cool. Very cool.
NASA IRTF image showing infrared glow of new dark spot - click to embiggen
from JPL
Keck also got it.
Keck near IR imaging - Kalas et al - from Keck- click to embiggen
New Scientist story with Keck image
Here is the…
catdynamics | July 20, 2009"My son and I stand beneath the great night sky
And gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo And he says
"Why did they ever go?"
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cos where in the hell's that at?"
B.B.
I had to look something up on nasa.gov earlier today, and was met with the grainy footage of an astronaut descending the ladder to the lunar surface, exactly 40 years ago today as I start typing this, thanks to the "flash" script that grabbed my browser as I entered the site.
I hadn't forgotten, just not…
catdynamics | July 20, 2009yup, I'm doing a lot of these,
moon, high school, hard sci-fi and california among others
some randomly interesting stuff out there,
some of which I mean to blog about meself,
but real life interceded
click to embiggen
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Photographs Apollo landing sites - this is all over the blogs, Starts with a Bang has it
impressive imaging LRO does
112th Carnival of Space
- bunch of lunatics if you ask me...
The Angry Physicist is back - still angry
online Feynman lecture videos
- via the Pontiff, so I do not have to link directly to M$
- I sat through a number of…