Today in Geek, 20091221

Today we reaffirm that we are living in the future. Hurray!

Politics

Mexico City Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage. Mexico City just legalized abortion two and a half years ago, but now they've jumped ahead 30 years to leapfrog over most of the United States. At least DC managed to pass it a few days before. Supporters of the Mexico City bill were chanting "Yes, we could!" That makes me smile a lot.

Entertainment

Focus on the Action to Avoid Headaches During 3D Movies. When you go see Avatar (if you haven't already), keep this in mind. Your brain really doesn't like stuff being 3D but out-of-focus, and trying to get around that gives bad headaches. Trust me on this one; I spent too much time on my second viewing looking at stuff in the background, and it played havoc on my head and stomach. I may have to go see it in non-3D so I can look for those extra little details (for example, that it takes place over several months leading up to August 24, 2154; Wikipedia says that's the anniversary of the patenting of the motion picture camera, I'm guessing that isn't a coincidence).

Astronomy

Video: The Asteroid That Will Almost Hit Earth. NASA produced a video of Apophis passing Earth on April 13, 2029. It'll pass just 18,300 miles above the planet's surface. Assuming we pass peak oil and civilization has fallen by then, I plan to remember that date to use it to secure a following in my post-apocalyptic cult; an asteroid passing that close should be interesting in the sky.

Medicine

Color-Shifting Contact Lenses Alert Diabetics to Glucose Levels. Soon diabetics will have a heads-up display of sorts, allowing them to see when they need a shot of insulin or a candy bar. Today diabetics, tomorrow killing machines sent back from the future!

Science

Groovy Teeth Suggest Dinosaur was Venomous. The story itself is cool, but it's also sort of an example of a (probably intentional) "crash blossom," a word I just learned this morning meaning "a headline that can be misconstrued." The New York Times claims that's a buzzword of 2009, but I think it's possible only the New York Times staff have heard that term.

Mad Science

Our of the Blue, DARPA Seeks Means to Manipulate Lightning. They all laughed when DARPA put giant red balloons all over the US, but DARPA's going to show them! It's going to show them all!! Muahahahaha!

Did I miss any geekery? Let me know in the comments.

Today in Geek, 12/16/2009

Today's headlines were full of geeky medical news, but I have to start with the story that has me nearly giddy.

Awesome

Nearby "Super Earth" May Have Oceans, Thick Atmosphere. We found a planet that probably has a huge ocean of liquid water. It probably doesn't have life, but we're getting closer. As a researcher put it in another article on the subject, "This planet is a harbinger of what’s to come. It’s not just that we can study this one object in more detail. It’s the torch, telling us about this new thing that’s going to happen." This planet has astronomers talking about the likelihood that we'll find an inhabitable (and possibly inhabited) planet soon, and that's just awesome.

Astronomy

Dying Star Mimics Our Sun's Death. Have you ever wondered what our Sun will look like after it eats the inner Solar System? Ok, probably not, but I have, and now I know. Researchers with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have released a video of a pulsating nearby star going through its red giant phase, the same phase our Sun will go through in about 5 billion years. Keep in mind that, at its largest, that star is roughly the size of the orbit of Mars.

Medicine

Synthetic Nano-Platelets Added to Blood Cut Healing Time in Half and Artificial Red Blood Cells To Aid Drug Delivery, Imaging. Two independent teams released news today about advances in fake blood. The first team produced "artificial red blood cells," essentially tiny packets that could be used to deliver drugs, dyes, etc deep into tissues (because they're small enough to fit through capillaries). It doesn't look like they could be targeted yet, but just getting them to fit into such small spaces is a big jump. The second team produced synthetic platelets to help stop bleeding faster. The nanoparticles work pretty much the same as platelets, crosslinking to clot the blood. Treating wounds with the nanoparticles—or injecting them to help with internal bleeding—cut bleeding time in half in rats. Assuming they can be mass produced and pass testing, I can imagine these being very useful to EMTs.

Scientists Decode Entire Genetic Code of Cancer. I'm still trying to wrap my head around what this one means. Cancers are caused by combinations of many, many mutations. No individual cancer patient has the same set of mutations as any other cancer patient. So I'm not sure yet exactly what they mean by this story, but scientists have apparently mapped the 30,000 mutations associated with melanoma (skin cancer), and the 23,000 mutations associated ith lung cancer. I'll have to dig deeper to figure out what that means, exactly, but it sounds like it's probably a big deal.

Nanotechnology

Crowds of Bacteria Turn Gears a Million Times Their Size. I love this video. The bacteria aren't really doing anything "useful," they're just swimming around randomly... but the shapes of the gears translate those random motions into work (turning the gears in the desired way). I love the idea of future devices being powered by the random motions of bacteria.

Today was a pretty big day in geek. Did I miss anything? If so, let me know in the comments.

The Month In Geek: July 2009

July was an interesting month for all things geeky. Here are some of my favorite stories from the last month.

Astronomy:
Jupiter got smacked by something big, probably an asteroid (because we probably would have seen it if it were a nice, bright comet). That thing left a black spot on Jupiter roughly the size of the Earth. Wow. The Bad Astronomer has been keeping me up-to-date on exactly what happened.

Entertainment:
Information came out last month about three big geek movies. First, Disney released details and clips from Tron Legacy, the sequel to Tron. I'm sure it's going to be cheesy and terrible, but it may also be awesome.

Second, the announcement came out that Sam Raimi is set to direct a World of Warcraft movie. I will cringe when they make the obligatory Leeroy Jenkins joke (those non-funny bastards were on my server, and I hated them before they made the lame movie and somehow got famous for it), but the possibility of Raimi making a videogame movie is... intriguing.

As if that wasn't enough, at the end of July it came out that Ridley Scott has signed on to direct a prequel to Alien. Ridely Scott, not just some random schmoe. Wow.

Technology/Geek Culture:

A firm in Abu Dhabi has ponied up money to Virgin Galactic. Part of the deal is to build a spaceport in Abu Dhabi (in the UAE), making it the second commercial spaceport (after the Mojave Air & Space Port in Mojave, California). I'm guessing that one will get quite a bit of use. Note to science fiction authors: Arabic will likely be spoken in space roughly as much as English, at least in the early days of space tourism.

Politics/Morality:

The UK Quakers are going to extend marriage services to same-sex couples. If that bleeds to the US Quakers, that would mean, when a state accepts one religious marriage ceremony as valid but not another, they are denying the religious freedom of that same-sex couple. I've often wondered what would happen if that tack were taken on the gay marriage issue. We might get to find out. Of course, the consequences could be dire.

I'm sure there were a number of geek stories that I didn't cover here. Let me know in the comments if I skipped any big ones.

Shared Google Reader Items, 6/20/2009

It's that time again: let's take a look at my favorite shared items from Google Reader for this week.

Car-Powered Supermarket Check Outs [Popular Science]

High-flying kites could power New York [Mongabay, via Slashdot; the original article won't load for me in Chrome, which is almost bad enough form for me to not link to it]

I love ideas about "free" energy--not the crazy, fake kind, but the kind where we find way to use energy that's already there to be harvested. These two stories definitely fall in that camp. The first one presumably steals a little gas to get the power, but, since the customers would be slowing down already, it's probably gas that would be used anyway. The second would take a lot of work to set up, but I love the image I get in my head trying to envision a city powered by kites.

With Iran Protests in Mind, State Department Blocks Twitter's Maintenance Outage [Popular Science]

Twitter had scheduled downtime for maintenance this week. That downtime was going to be during the day in Iran. Iranian protestors are using Twitter (among other things) to organize, so the US State Department asked Twitter to move the maintenance to the middle of the Iranian night. Mostly what I love about this is the chance (however slim) that Twitter (and other Web 2.0 sites) could help end the Islamic Revolution in Iran. It was interesting, for example, to hear a discussion last night (I think on Rachel Maddow) about how when Iran cracked down way back in 1999, they could cut protestors off from the world, but not so much in the 21st century. It's a strange world when things can be this different this quickly.

Network of Wi-Fi-Enabled Cyborg Insects Hunts Down WMDs [Popular Science]

I had read about insect detectors several years ago. In short, insects have amazingly good senses of smell (way better than dogs), and can be trained to react to the presence of certain smells (the example I read about was sarin gas, the stuff used in the 1995 Tokyo subway attack). But in the example I read, the insects were put into boxes, and their movements would set off the detectors. This article is about taking that process way to the next level.

In the new scheme, the twitching associated with the insects finding their target scent is detected by a chip mounted on the insect, and information about this can then be sent to other insects. Combined with systems that have already been developed by DARPA (is there any surprise that all of this is funded by DARPA?), the insects in the cohort could even be remote-controlled to help map whatever chemical they're being used to detect (for example, to find a perimeter around a gas release, and/or find the source if it's a chemical that doesn't affect insects).

Other than pissing off PETA, I can't come up with a down side of this research. I love this stuff.

US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive [Daily Telegraph, via Slashdot]

It's sad that it has to happen, but I loved the idea of shrinking Flint when I first heard about it. Basically, Flint is bigger than it needs to be anymore. The factors that led to Flint's growth (primarily the large number of GM plants that were once there) are gone, so the city is now larger than its industry can support. Many houses are empty, and that means garbage, buses, and police have to travel through a lot of empty areas to get to residents. The idea is to move the people in the outlying areas closer to the center of the city, and turn those empty areas into parks and such. It's a big change, but, since it will reduce crime and presumably increase property values, residents seem to support it.

Dan Kildee, the treasurer of Genesee County (which includes Flint), came up with the idea, and outlined it to Barack Obama while Obama was campaigning. Kildee has now been approached byt he Federal government to apply the idea to other cities that have lost the support to remain as large as they are.

Construction Begins on Spaceport America [Popular Science]

Virgin Galactic has broken ground in construction of the spaceport they'll use to launch commercial space flights. Construction has begun on the world's first spaceport. When this thing is done, it is officially The Future. Glee!

University of Colorado team finds definitive evidence for ancient lake on Mars [Eurekalert, via Slashdot]

A team at UC Boulder found the shoreline of a 3-billion-year-old lake on Mars, which was once 80 square miles and 1500 feet deep (the article says that's roughly equivalent to Lake Champlain, but Champlain is more than 5 times that area; Champlain isn't as deep, though, so I guess the total volume might be equivalent). More interestingly, they found deltas surrounding the basin, indicating that the lake was probably long-lived. And if there was water for a long time depositing material into deltas, we may have just found a very good place to look for evidence of life on Mars.

That's it for this week. As always, leave any comments on these or any of my other shared items below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 3/27/2009

It's been a busy couple weeks since my last shared items from Google Reader update. Sorry I took so long!

Science:

• Obama ended the ban on stem-cell research funding. Things that are stupid about the idiots who are against stem-cell funding:
  
  1. The things being used for research are blobs of cells. They're less human than a patch of dry skin that flakes off.
  2. The blobs of cells are incinerated when they aren't used in research. How is incinerating these blobs of cells less bad than using them to learn?
  3. The assholes love to point out that embryonic stem cells haven't shown as much promise as other types of stem cells... ya know, the types of stem cells that have received government funding for research. If embryonic stem cells are so great, why can't researchers learn things from them when the research isn't being done, huh??? Answer that!
• A chimp at a Swedish zoo hoarded rocks to later throw at people. In other words, the chimp planned for future events. That is very cool.
• These photos of undersea eruptions near Tonga are awesome, moreso after the confirmation that this event wasn't associated with a tsunami or anything.

Politics:

• Obama ordered his administration to consult with AG Holder before using the content of Bush signing statements (ie, to ignore them unless Holder says otherwise). Mostly awesome news, although he signaled that he might use them himself.
• Diebold admitted that its voting software had a flaw: it failed to record deletion of ballots. Um, that's a pretty big flaw.

Education:

• Students who listen to podcasts of lectures outperform students who attend lectures.
• Woohoo! The Texas board of education didn't ammend the science standards to include "strengths and weaknesses" garbage about evolution (an attempt to set natural selection apart as a weak theory, rather than one of the strongest). Hurray, science education survives in Texas!
• Er, survived in Texas. Six hours later, an ammendment to require teachers to tell their students that there are different estimates for the age of the Universe passed 11-3. Ok, technically there are different estimates, but they result in an age of 13.7 +/- 0.12 billion years. The young-Earth creationists on the board think that +/- 0.12 billion is close enough to the +/- 13.7 billion (to three sig figs) that they believe, and want to make sure students have room to think that their nonsense is backed by science.
• In better news, YouTube and a site called Academic Earth have each put together directories of the various educational videos available online. YouTube's offering contains over 200 full courses. Very interesting.

Technology:

• Sometimes I think Scott Adams is watching me.
• Research for my mecha is almost complete: UT-Dallas scientists have created nanotube-based artificial muscles, and European researchers are making microchips that physically mimic brains (I assume this will be useful for the complex control systems that my mecha will require).

Astronomy:

• I want to believe Space Bat survived his trip, and will return one day to save us from Mothra or something.
• The entire Cosmos series is now on Hulu. This needs to get hugely popular, inspiring someone to make a series somewhere near as awesome.

The Interwebs:

• You can filter google image searches by color by adding "&imgcolor=COLORNAME" (such as "&imgcolor=green") to the end of an image search. Neat!
• User scripts work in the beta (or dev) version of Chrome. I now have subfolder-labels in my gmail inbox. Woot!

Business:

• Peter Bregman at the Harvard Business blog says small businesses will win in this economy. I hope he's right.
• On a related note, a BusinessWeek column from 2000 wondering how Google will possibly ever make money (particularly since it's focused purely on search, not on the lucrative portal market like competitors [never heard of them] and [oh yeah, remember altavista?].

Psychology:

• Zenhabits had some good tips for beating procrastination. #7 is best: "Put something you dread more at the top of your to-do list — you’ll put off doing that by doing the other things on your list." I've been using it (combined with Gmail Tasks), and it works like a charm. Well, better than a charm, since charms don't work.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below (or on Reader if you use it, with the cool new comment feature).

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/20/2009

It's time again to discuss some shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Astronomy:

• This is at least the second article I've seen about liquid water at or near the site of one of our landers on Mars. Given the helpful diagram at the right (edited from a NASA image), can anyone tell me what I'm missing?
• It looks like part of the fireball seen over Austin last weekend has been found. Neat! Bad joke/question: It's a meteor in the sky, and a meteorite on the ground. If you throw it or take it on a plane, is it a meteor again?
• The good news: Europa was selected as the target for a big NASA mission. The bad news: we won't get there until 2025 or 2026. The worse news: ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
• Given that the Hubble repair mission was one of the first things I blogged about on here, news that Hubble might not get repaired due to the debris from the colliding satellites has made me sad.
• Luckily, I have this Flickr tagger thingy to make me happy again. You post an image of the sky to Flickr, a server analyzes it and tells you what's in it, and the people running the server get another shot to analyze to see if it has any info they missed. Awesome.

Technology:

• I was in love with this G1 Android-controlled robotic blimp the first time I saw it, but I think I've accepted that it isn't worth the $600 or so it'd take to put it together.
• I. Want. So. Bad.
• A new company is working on commercial, space-based solar power within a decade. Sweet. There's a cool Asimov story about that in I think it was I, Robot (the collection of short stories that has zero relation to the movie, if for no other reason than that the short stories are entertaining).
• Ok, bear with me. DARPA's remote-controlled insects are absolutely awesome, and not at all creepy. But I understand that it probably sounds like they're creepy. Here's the thing: Imagine a spy camera, tiny speaker, microphone, and transmitter on these things. Now imagine a rescue crew at the other end of the remote control, searching through rubble for earthquaker survivors or whatnot. Now imagine a cockroach crawling up to someone's ear and whispering, "Stay calm, we're coming for you." Ok, you're right. That's creepy. But it's still freaking awesome.

Politics:

• Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas is likely to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. I had heard her name when I wrote my picks, but I thought Daschle was a lock. Oops.
• This comparison of diagramming an Obama sentence to diagramming a Palin sentence is high geekery, and thus awesome.
• Teehee. The Obama Administration is setting the right-wing loonies up as foils. I love this strategy. "Look how crazy our opponents are." Giggle. Getting the right wing to either say, "These people don't speak for us!" or "Yes, we're crazy!" (leaving pretty much no other choice) is just beautiful.

Entertainment:

• Nate Silver has figured out who's going to win Oscars this weekend. Why bother having the ceremony? Ah, I see; we need to find out who wins Best Supporting Actress (apparently Kate Winslet won it in all the other awards, but she got nominated for Best Actress for the same role at the Oscars, and that threw his model off).

Atheism:

• Something is rotten in the state of Washington.

Art:

• Layer Tennis sounds absolutely awesome. I may have to try something similar (but on a non-competitive level) with McCarron.
• Every frame in this movie is a painting. Over 6000 paintings for a five-minute film. Beautiful, but I really wish the artist had chosen different music to set it to.

Science:

• Very briefly: One of Einstein's problems with quantum mechanics was that it allowed for entanglement of particles, leading to "spooky action at a distance," where things done to one particle happen to the other one, too. It turns out the human eye may be sensitive enough to detect it. If so, the people detecting it would briefly become entangled with one another. This is leading me to visions of the precogs in Minority Report or perhaps the pilots in Dune. Very strange, very potentially cool.
• Damn you, YouTube! How can you not have a clip of "Your Komodo Dragon" from The Freshman? Is it because only about six of us actually saw that movie, and nobody bought the DVD to rip it? My comments about this story of a thought-to-be-extinct bird being photographed and then promptly sold as food would now only make sense to the six of us. But seriously, isn't that tragically hilarious, fellow Freshman-viewers?
• I am absolutely going to have to buy one of these posters to frame and hang.

The Internets:

• Shaquille O'Neal Tweets, and is a bit of a tech junky. Neat.

Jeebus, this post has 26 links in it. As always, leave your comments on these or anything else (but seriously, you could probably keep it to these this time) below.

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 12/12

I skipped yesterday, so there will probably be quite a few shared items here. So, without further ado...

Hardware:

• Shut down your PC when you aren't using it. I still leave mine on, but this story might finally kick me into being better about power management.

Astronomy:

• A group of Dutch geophysicists have proposed that the Moon arose by a massive nuclear explosion 4.5 billion years ago. I don't think they'll supplant the impact theory (that the Moon formed when a very large object smacked into the early Earth, leaving its heavy bits behind and ejecting a bunch of the Earth's crust, which then coalesced into the Moon), but it's an interesting idea.

Politics:

• Obama is looking into changing the War Power Act, or, as I like to call it, the "Nanana I can't hear you the President can do what he wants nanana" Act. Er, well, one of such acts.
• Do not, as the New York Times did in their summary of this article, buy into the myth that the overpaid UAW is killing the auto industry bailout. UAW line workers, on average, make less than or equal to their equivalents at non-union, foreign plants in states like Kentucky or Alabama (according to Olbermann last night, at least). It just so happens that senators from those states are spreading this myth of the overpaid, obstructionist UAW worker. Funny how that works.
• Looks like I'm probably wrong about who Obama will choose for Secretary of Transportation. I haven't looked into it enough yet to know whether I'd prefer the Texas guy or the California guy.

Science:

• Japanese scientists have reconstructed images by scanning a human brain while it viewed those images. In other words, they, in part, read people's minds. That is fraking unbelievably awesome.

Zombies:

• Holy crap, it's Zombie Friday again already! The third one is hilarious. The first is pretty funny, but just wrong. The second is awesome but I didn't re-watch 'cuz I'd already seen, and the fourth is way too long.

Software and the Internets:

• Lifehacker had a feature on Open++, a program that lets you add anything to Windows right-click menus. I like.
• Lifehacker found an online Photoshop replacement that's even cooler than the Phoenix I linked to before.
• The Austin teacher who insisted there's no such thing as free software is calming down, as is the guy who started the story. It sounds like both sides were overreactive morons, but the teacher is the one who threatened legal action while being the opposite of right, so I still side with the Linux guy.
• NiceTranslator is badass. Set your target language, type a phrase, and it uses Google Translate to figure out what language you're typing in and give you a translation. Neat. Hey, wait. That's kinda sci-fi, even if it can only work with known languages. Neat.
• I recommend against the auction site called Swoopo, based on this write-up. Jeebus that can't be legal.

As always, comment on these or any other shared items (or items you'd like to share with the rest of us) below.

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 11/24

Oops, I almost forgot to post today. Here are today's shared Google Reader items.

Miscellaneous:

• I don't often share the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, but I read everything they post, because grammar mistakes make me point and laugh. When said mistakes occur on the sign for an elementary school (not even, semi-excusably, on the part that changes; no, this is on the permanent part), I have to share it.
• This isn't a shared item, but I'm watching Rachel Maddow without a DVR buffer since the Daily Show and Colbert were repeats, and I just saw a commercial for some hair-removal device. If you act now, you get a smaller one for "lips, chin, and sensitive areas." Do you really want to use the same hair-removal device on your lips, chin, and "sensitive areas?"

Atheism:

• Could it be? Is Obama as non-religious as I hoped he might be?? Didn't the right-wing nutjobs realize calling him an atheist would make him even more hated in America than calling him a Muslim??? Woot to Scientologists moving below us, at least.

Politics:

• Palin 2012! No, seriously, there are still people who want to get Palin on the ticket in 2012. I may have to give them money.
• Somehow it surprised me that Biden was replaced in the Senate by his former chief-of-staff, rather than by his son, Beau. Apparently everyone knew this was going to happen; that the chief-of-staff is holding the seat for 2 years presumably to allow Beau to run for it when he gets back from Iraq/finishes his term as Delaware Attorney General. How did I miss that?
• Bush has begun his end-of-term pardons. I shared this mostly for this sentence (emphasis mine): "Those issued reprieves had been found guilty of mostly garden-variety offenses, like Leslie O. Collier, who was issued a pardon for a 1996 conviction for the unauthorized use of a pesticide in killing bald eagles.

Science:

• A study has shown that napping boosts "sophisticated memory." I don't really have anything to add to that, except that it's awesome news; I'm not being lazy, I'm just pumping up my memory. Oh, and in the other story linked from that page, it says not to watch TV and/or read stuff off of a monitor just before going to bed. So, of course, I'm blogging and watching MSNBC before heading to bed. Oops.
• We're going to Jupiter in 2011, but not Europa. Why not Europa?? We know Europa is probably the best bet for finding life in the solar system. I can't imagine a bigger scientific find than extraterrestrial life. Why aren't we checking the place that we think offers the best chance of finding life??? To answer my own question, I know they're terrified that they won't properly sterilize the mission, and we'll find life only to have it killed off by bacteria on the probe. Well, that and we need to send some sort of drilling machine if we do it, because it'd have to go through tons of ice to get to the possible ocean. But we should at least plan to spin any probe that goes to Jupiter over to Europa to help us map that moon out for a future mission.

Technology?

• [most recent] McDonalad has applied for a patent for a "method and apparatus for making a sandwich." If it's as ridiculous as it seems to be, just... wow.

That's it today. Comment below.

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 11/12

Not much time today... and it's very likely I'm going to miss the whole weekend! Here are today's shared items:

• Keith Olberman on that pile of hateful crap from California, Prop 8:
  
  Exactly.
  
• This beautiful APOD photo pisses me off. If we were within 1500 light years of that, it'd fill 1/6 of the sky. That makes the stuff we have seem so boring.
• Hmm, I haven't noticed if my spam has dropped, but apparently the company that was responsible for 75% of it is offline.
• CA stops 'em, CT starts 'em. It's going to happen, conservative assholes. Stop resisting.
• For anyone looking (or being forced) to switch careers, Lifehacker has the 10 most recession-proof careers.
• A site has been set up to organize priorities for Obama's national CTO. I hope, once named, said national CTO takes this idea and runs with it.

That's it for today (and probably for a while). Comment below. I'm hoping to come back to more comments than I've ever had on a post!

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 11/10

I didn't have a "shared items" update yesterday, so there's probably going to be a ton today:

• This photo is awesome, but you need to read the explanation to appreciate why.
• I hope David at Ironic Sans posts the rest of this story.
• What brown and sticky? An inductee into the Toy Hall of Fame.
• Hook em, Obama!
• This particular story isn't super awesome, but I was happy to find Change.gov's RSS feed.
• The Wall Street Journal and Slashdot claim that a German doctor has cured AIDS. And nobody else does. My skepti-sense is tingling!
• According to a study, Daylight Savings Time increased energy use in Indiana. Except I've seen about equal numbers of studies pointing in each direction now. Tell me what's true, science!
• Dinsmore has a nice summary of a cool article about Obama. I'd summarize his summary here, but that just seems wrong.
• 538.com has begun covering the 2010 Senate races. Will my addiction ever get a rest?
• Woohoo, I completely forgot that the stem cell nonsense was an executive order. Obama's getting ready to try to catch us up with Europe, and that first step only requires him to repeal that order. Good stuff.
• I definitely want to do this. I just need to figure out what I'm going to do it with...
• If any of you use AVG Anti-Virus Free (and, really, why wouldn't you, if you use a PC?), it's probably a good idea to read this before running your next scan.

As always, comment below.

Hubble Makes Me Happy

YAY! Hubble will stay up to roughly 2013, around the same time that its replacement will be launched. Happy dance!

Bright White Disc

Just a quick note to make sure everyone sees today's APOD. Look closely. That picture has everything:
* A new discovery: from that angle, Cassini was able to show us new rings that we'd never been able to see before.
* The wonders of modern technology: We launched Cassini on October 15, 1997. Since then it has traveled the millions of miles to Saturn (first whipping around the Sun and passing just near enough to Venus, Earth, and Jupiter to get gravity kicks to send it out to Saturn), orbited Saturn itself several times, helped us discover 2 moons of Saturn (among many other scientific achievements, including a confirmation of Einstein's general relativity just for kicks), and, of course, lined itself up nicely to place Saturn between itself and the Sun and snap that wonderful picture.
* Humility: In case you don't read the description provided by NASA, that spec of dust on the left side of the photo, just above and outside the brightest rings, is the first planet discovered by man, although it took us thousands of years from the time we first named it until the time we realized it was anything like the other planets. That spec of dust, of course, is the pale blue dot we call home.

For those who won't follow that last link, you owe it to yourself to read what Sagan said about that pale blue dot, even without a giant planet in the foreground to make it seems even smaller:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

APOD Shuffle

Random thoughts inspired by NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD):

• Orion Nebula: This picture shows how the Orion Nebula looked 1500 years ago. Or, well, at least how it would look if we could see in infrared. But, really, it's only 1500 years on average. Stuff in the front of the picture sent that light out more recently than stuff in the back. The whole sky works that way. We see Proxima Centauri as it was a mere 4 years ago, while we see the Andromeda Galaxy as it was about 2.5 million years ago. If we somehow constructed a map of where the stars are right now and how bright they are, it would look different than the sky we're used to. Not only would some stars be missing and some new stars be added, but everything is also moving relative to one another. Those things that we see as they were 2.5 million years ago likely are quite a ways away from where we see them, for example.


• Horsehead-shaped nebula: This beautiful image of a horse's head (not to be confused with the Horsehead Nebula) is also a great example of the strange and interesting phenomenon called pareidolia. Humans are pattern-seeking creatures, so when we look at things, we try to assign them to categories. We look at this nebula, and we see a horse's head. We look at a hill on Mars,and we see a face (and some continue to do so even when a second photo shows that the resemblance in the first photo was coincidental). And, of course, some people look at a grilled cheese sandwich, see a shape that looks vaguely like a human female, and assume it's the Virgin Mary.


• Lagoon Nebula: Why couldn't whoever runs the APOD at NASA take the 5 minutes to make those two pictures line up (mouse over the picture to see what I mean)? Sigh. Still beautiful.


• 3D galaxy: It's amazing to me that that's a photo; strangely, it looks too real to me for me to immediately accept that it's really a photo. It's the kind of shot you might create for Star Trek credits or something. That galaxy is about 50 million light years away, but remember: the front edge isn't quite as far away (and therefore not as far in the past) as the back edge. However, compared to the total distance, the 30 thousand light year diameter of the galaxy is almost nothing.

Memorizing Very Exact Mnemonics Jeopardizes Science's Updatable Nature

"My very excellent mother just served us nothing. That is not nearly as yummy as nice pie. Darn astronomers stealing Pluto from our solar system."

That was what my sister sent me when she heard Pluto had been demoted from planethood. And, of course, she wasn't alone; many people were upset to "lose" Pluto.

Of course, we didn't "lose" Pluto. It's still out there, orbiting the Sun. You can even call it a planet if you want. All that happened is that the International Astronomical Union, for the first time, defined what a planet actually is, and that definition doesn't apply to Pluto.

Why did they do it? They tried not to. In October, 2005, they were set to define a planet as "Any object in orbit around the Sun with a diameter greater than 2000 km." That was a fancy way of saying, "A planet is Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto," since at the time they thought Pluto was bigger than all of the "potential planets" that have been discovered in recent years. Of course, that definition wasn't very precise, because the Moon (the one that orbits Earth) also orbits the Sun (if we lived on the Moon, we'd probably think of Earth as another planet sharing our orbit), and, with a diameter of 3500 km, it has no trouble squeaking in.

But then we got a good measurement of Xena. Xena, also known as 2003 UB313, is a ball of ice and rock orbiting the Sun in an orbit similar to Pluto's. Earlier this year, NASA pointed the Hubble space telescope at Xena, and found something interesting. Xena has a diameter somewhere between 2300 km and 2500 km. Pluto has a diameter between 2280 km and 2330 km. Xena is right around the same size as Pluto, and quite possibly bigger.

So why did the IAU eliminate Pluto from their definition of planet? Because they're scientists, and scientists have to deal with the real world, not with how they wish things worked. For the word planet to have any scientific meaning, we have to be able to rationally decide if some object is or isn't a planet. In order to do that, there have to be some sort of measurable criteria. Try as they might, the IAU couldn't come up with a definition that seemed important enough for what we've always meant by "planet," but still included Pluto.

But that's the great thing about science. As we find new information, we continuously tweak our explanations to match the data. As time goes by, and we get more information, we refine our predictions and explanations to make sure they still hold up. We constantly update what we think we know to match what we observe.

This is what allows us to make progress. This is why I'm able to write a blog on a computer that communicates through the rest of the world through the air, rather than writing letters that take months to cross the ocean. This is why we now have bathrooms in our houses, rather than in the yard. This is why babies dying at birth is a rare event now, rather than the norm.

And that's why now we know that we have eight planets in our solar system, plus at least three dwarf planets. That's the thing people seem to be missing. We didn't lose Pluto. We gained 3 dwarf planets (besides Pluto, one was formerly an asteroid, and the other was formerly one of those things that we didn't have a name for before). We gained slightly better understanding of the solar system in which we live.