Space Shuttle Discovery launches.

I just watched the space shuttle Discovery launch from Kennedy Space Center on tv a few minutes ago. It was pretty. Sorry I didn’t let you know about it in advance, I wasn’t keeping track of the launch schedule very well.

It’s a nice, cool day in Baltimore after some thunderstorms passed through the area. Here comes June! My birthday’s in two weeks… holy shit, I’m getting old faster and faster.

Phoenix lands undamaged on Mars!

I’m a bit disappointed in myself for not posting anything on this earlier. Most of you already know by now that on Sunday, NASA’s Phoenix probe successfully performed a rocket-assisted landing on Mars’ northern arctic plains.  It was the sixth successful attempted (of twelve total, worldwide) Mars landing.  Phoenix is a joint project of a number of international universities and space agencies, and its primary goal is to analyze the water ice covering much of the ground near Mars’ north pole.  In doing so, it will help researchers look for evidence of past or present Martian life.  I think we are on the right track with robotic exploration, as the ethical complexities involved in manned missions to Mars (at least in this technological era) are very limiting.

Anyway, the landing occurred at 23:53:44 UTC; that’s the Earth-received time.  That means the time that mission control received the first radio signals.  The landing really took place 15 minutes and 20 seconds before that, which is the amount of time it takes radio signals from Mars to reach Earth.  Forget what you know about relativity; Earth and Mars are too close together in space, and the relative speed between them is too tiny a fraction of the speed of light for relativity to matter in this case.  As far as we need be concerned, the Earth-received time minus 15m 20s is simultaneous to Mars time.  That’s one of the dilemmas that any future human Mars explorers would face: it would take over a half hour, at least, to receive any reply to a message radioed to Earth.  Keep in mind too that Mars’ and Earth’s orbits around the sun are not synchronous; the half hour delay is the best of scenarios!

A bit more info: Phoenix was launched on August 4, 2007 atop a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.  It took nearly ten months to complete the 680 million kilometer journey to Mars.  How about a picture of the launch, you ask?  Why, I’ve got one for you right here:

And so, dear readers, space exploration marches on!  I know it’s perhaps just a little unlikely, but I’m still crossing my fingers that I’ll be able to land on the moon before I die.  I know that may seem to contradict what I said a moment ago about robotic exploration being the right track, but things may change for the better.  We may discover safer, less expensive ways to escape Earth’s gravity, and better portable protection from solar radiation.  I don’t even care if it’s not really all that safe.  If I’m 45 or older, and I’m offered a seat on a moon shuttle, you better believe I’m going.  Hell, I’d go to Mars, too.  Apart from the obvious atmospheric differences, the terrain doesn’t look too different from the Black Rock Desert where I’ve camped at Burning Man several times now

The first image of Mars’ horizon sent by Phoenix:

The Black Rock Desert, Black Rock City, NV:

Until next time, kiddies.  Keep watching the skis… I mean, keep watching the skies!

Dense brittlestar colony discovered on Macquarie Ridge seamount.

Deep sea exploration is one of the last and most exciting scientific frontiers on our planet. The 10-year long Census of Marine Life project has already made some pretty cool discoveries. Last month, scientists aboard the Research Vessel Tangaroa of New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) discovered an seemingly unlikely colony of starfish-like echinoderms called brittlestars living at the summit of a huge seamount in the Macquarie Ridge, a large underwater mountain range between New Zealand and Antarctica (see map at the end of this post). These critters take advantage of the dramatic 4km/hr ocean current at the summit, capturing prey as it is blown over the seamount. 4km/hr may not sound like much, but you have to consider the immense breadth of the current. According to Dr. Mike Willams of NIWA, “This current is estimated to be 110 to 150 times larger than all the water flowing in all the rivers of the world.” Wow. The ridge where the colony was discovered was about 750 m above the ocean floor, and 90 m below the ocean surface.

While fishermen often catch rare organisms from these places (and toss them overboard), relatively little scientific exploration of the world’s approximately 100,000 seamounts that are taller than 1km above the sea floor has been done (less than 200 of them have been sampled in detail, by CoML’s count). Most have been dominated by corals and sponges, which is why the brittlestars were an unexpected discovery. It’ll certainly be exciting to see what else CoML finds. Check out the press release and the image gallery from the Tangaroa expedition to the Macquarie Ridge.

An adventure to the great outdoors.

If the trend of the last few weeks continues, this weekend will be here before I know it. I’m looking forward to it especially, because for the first time this year I’ll be going camping! My brother, some of his friends, my friend Don, and I (and others are welcome to tag along!) will be at Green Ridge State Forest. In my opinion, it’s Maryland’s best public camping area, with Assateague State Park in second place (because they don’t allow pets). There are great semi-primitive campsites with relative privacy (you typically can’t see your nearest neighbors) and backpackers are allowed to do real primitive camping.

I hope the weather cooperates so I can do a bit of stargazing. I want to camp as much as possible this spring/summer/fall. Who’s with me? Other places I’d like to camp soon include Buchanan State Forest (Pennsylvania) and Sky Meadows State Park (Virginia).

Alien Hand Syndrome… or, Autoerotic Degenerative Disease: the other ADD?

No disrespect intended to the late Aubrey Williams by following up with this post, but I just had to share. Anyway, I’m sure he’d have appreciated the humor in it.  My lady-friend C shared this medical journal article¹ with me that another friend had sent her. You needn’t try to understand all the medical jargon - if you just skim through the Abstract and Case Report (you can stop at the discussion), you’ll see why it’s funny.

It sounds like the patient himself didn’t find this very funny at all. Gee, I wonder why? What’s not funny about involuntarily cuffing the carrot in front of your nurse?

¹ American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Volume 79, No. 4, July/August 2000, pp. 395-398. Involuntary Masturbation as a Manifestation of Stroke-Related Alien Hand Syndrome, by Benson G. Ong Hai and Ib R. Odderson

A life well spent: Aubrey Williams

I checked the website of my former college’s anthropology department today, and I was saddened to learn that one of my favorite professors, Aubrey Williams, died a couple months ago. The story was in the Washington Post, and I feel like shit for having taken so long to find out about it. Aubrey (he insisted on being called by his first name, including by his undergraduate students) was one of those rare teachers who you inevitably remember fondly years down the road. He was also a humble guy; I didn’t know during his courses, for example, that he had been a B-17 gunner in the European theater of WWII. I did know, on the other hand, that he’d been actively involved in organizing protests against every war since, up to and including the present war in Iraq. I remember him telling my Cultures of Native North America class, for instance, of the time he was invited to partake in a peyote ritual with members of the Navajo church. He said that he’d gotten up and began running at right angles (in sort of a giant square pattern), and that it took four adult Navajo men to capture and restrain him until he calmed down. He also told of the time he was served psilocybin mushroom tea by an indigenous medicine woman in rural Mexico. He’d hallucinated that he was inside a soap bubble, and could see the world curved around him. Needless to say, that drew a lot of snickers from the wide-eyed classroom full of undergraduates. But I got the biggest kick out of it, having recently had my first experiences with that same entheogen.

At the end of my last class with Aubrey (I’d taken two), he invited all of us to a barbecue at his home in Tacoma Park. That was definitely one of the most unique experiences I had in college: hobnobbing with my professor and my classmates over cocktails, while our final papers sat on his living room table, waiting to be graded. When we spoke that night he said he was leaving soon to consider a job offer as the curator of ethnography at the national museum of Bhutan, one of the most isolated countries in the world and one where few westerners have ever traveled. As I later learned, that position was not funded as planned and it didn’t work out, but Aubrey still got to enjoy a rare vacation in the Kingdom of Bhutan. A selected autobiography of Aubrey Williams’ work can be found here.

I’ll always remember him for his intelligence, his humility, his passion, and his dedication to his students and his treatment of them as peers. His was truly a life well spent. Rest in peace, Aubrey, and thank you for making a difference in my life.

McCain won’t contradict the laws of religion.

This is from John Mcain’s campaign website. I’m not joking. Can you smell theocracy on the horizon? I hope America has the wherewithal to give this caveman the job he deserves: entertaining the museum visitors on the other side of his glass display window. Seriously, you crank, the laws of religion, and of God? At least he’s not hiding it.

Presenting science as art with interactive experiments.

This year, I’ll make my fourth trip to Black Rock City, Nevada for the annual Burning Man arts festival, which is, to understate, a bacchanalian explosion of radical self-expression. It’s also a pretty wicked extreme camping experience, set on a flat, alkaline plane of dust at 4,000 feet above sea level. Temperatures can soar to 44° C in direct sunlight during the daytime, and drop to around 5° C at night. The elevation causes you to receive a higher dose of UV radiation; this means unprotected skin burns faster. On windy days, there can be sudden gusts at speeds in excess of 120 km/h. All that said, it’s a fantastic experience—visitors are almost certain to witness the most gaudy, gauche, irreverent, and sublimely beautiful art they’ve ever seen. It’s a commerce-free event; although tickets are pricey (it costs a lot to build the city’s temporary infrastructure), nothing is allowed to be bought or sold once you’re inside the city limits. Black Rock City is built rapidly each year, with the overwhelming majority of the work occurring in the week before and the week of the event. The Leave No Trace ethic is fundamental to Burning Man, and each year the federal Bureau of Land Management gives accolades to the Burning Man organization for its remarkably thorough cleanup and restoration efforts.

Another important ethic at Burning Man is participation. It is not a spectator event - the subject/object dichotomy is constantly under attack, and this is generally agreed to be a good thing. However, in each of my past three attendances, I contributed relatively little to the overall interactive wacky-ness of Burning Man. This year I want to do something special to participate, and I have an idea of what it is. I want to perform (and invite onlookers to help me perform) science experiments. The point is to teach the value of skepticism and the scientific method, while having an entertaining time. I haven’t settled on any particular experiments, yet. So, dear readers, here’s where you come in. I need your input!

Please tell me your most memorable childhood experience involving a science experiment. Maybe it was something mom, dad, or a cool aunt or uncle showed you. Maybe it was a science teacher at school doing something wacky in the classroom. Maybe it was something you saw Mr. Wizard do on Nickelodeon. It doesn’t matter where you saw it. I’m looking for the most visual, most thought provoking, and most entertaining experiments you can recall. Once I get at least a short list together, I’ll start performing some of them to get a good idea of how practical they’d be to perform in the desert environment. If I can, I’ll record videos of them and post them here on Survival Machine. If you want to help me perform it (and even appear in the video) just let me know. I’d also gladly welcome video submissions of you performing the experiment yourself. If anyone actually does that, I’ll make a post just to feature your video!

So, brainstorm, and let me know what you remember from the exciting world of science experiments!

Geology, Wizardry, Astronomy, Obamanation.

I’m back, and I apologize for the recent lack of posts. Shall we get started?

First, the astonishing. The Chaitén volcano in the Andes in southern Chile erupted on May 2 for the first time in about nine millenia! You can read about it in National Geographic News. The powerful eruption is dramatic enough by itself, but the next day a huge dirty thunderstorm gave us this show. Sweet Flying Spaghetti Monster, I wish I were there to witness it (click on the picture for a slightly larger version)!

Second, the bizzarre. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomy blogger, drew my attention to this article: Magic trick costs teacher job. If you aren’t going to read it, here’s the short version: a substitute middle school teacher at a Florida public school was fired for… wait for it… wizardry. The guy did a 30 second magic trick in front of his class, making a toothpick disappear and then reappear, and then was dismissed for wizardry. In an attempt to cover his ignorant ass, a school official tacked on a few other accusations (e.g. “not following lesson plans”), and then claimed, “it wasn’t just the wizardry” — I can’t make this stuff up, folks. Anyone from Land’O'Lakes, Florida should be sobbing with shame right now.

And third, I finished my astronomy class! Unfortunately, buying a telescope is on hold until I finish paying for the class itself, but I learned some really cool stuff and have reinvigorated interests in things like the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is the world’s largest and highest-powered particle accelerator/collider. It was just completed and will begin operating this month to search for things like the Higgs boson, the only particle theorized by the Standard Model of physics that has not yet been observed. Confirmation of the Higgs boson and other new subatomic particles could lead toward the development of a Theory of Everything (also known as the Grand Unified Theory) of physics, incorporating the strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitation forces. Creationists everywhere, hold your breath: will we discover proof of god? Literally, hold your breath.

Finally, tonight was a big one for Barack Obama. I don’t see how Clinton can continue her campaign beyond the next day or two without being ridiculed by the press. That’s pretty great news. I find it fishy that cable news (CNN, FOX, MSNBC) led in calling the race “too close to call” into early this morning when the Obama campaign had conceded earlier, and when CBS news (with no late-night cable news program ratings to worry about) had called it for Clinton earlier as well. I think the numbers were there to call the race, and they lied about it to keep viewers in suspense and thus glued to their tvs. Seems like a pretty simple scam for a news director to justify with mere plausible deniability about the race’s outcome.

That’s it for now, I’m sleepy. But I’ll say more, and say it more coherently, soon.