Imagine a bathtub draining. All the water molecules feel a downward pull to the center of Earth’s mass. The tub floor is tapered slightly, causing the water molecules to flow in one direction. There are about a dozen holes in the drain cover, where the downward pull is exponentially greater.
All the molecules in the tub gather here, eventually passing the cover. The convenient shape to balance these known forces is a vortex.
Zip, off you go.
Out on the Great Plains, East of the Rockies, hundreds of miles of cooler drier moves down from the North.
Warm, moist air rolls up from the South and East, mostly from the Gulf of Mexico.
These differing air masses have different densities, temperatures, and directions of motion. Warm air holds more moisture, and rises. Cool air is harder to lift. Breezes kick up. Clouds heap on the horizon.
Huge complexes called supercells form. These cloud-machines can rise up to 50,000 feet, seeming to collect all the smaller storms around. They have a center called a mesocyclone which rotates. They have a gust front ahead, and downdrafts behind.
On the gust front, perhaps something like our water in the bathtub, rising air is being fed into the supercell quickly enough; the air molecules forced upward intensely enough, that vortices form (the pressure releasing against gravity).
A lot of the power of this cloud machine becomes concentrated. Cyclonic ropes and columns spin down from cooler parts of the storm. These anti-cyclonic (our hemisphere) ropes and columns of rising air stack up in one area.
Zip…off you go.
If you’re anywhere near a tornado you’d hear a guttural roar of wind. It’s described as a loud, terrifying sound you haven’t quite heard before.
Your ears would pop. You’d be pelted with rain or hail, then pierced with dirt, mud, rocks, splinters of wood and bits of tree bark. Aluminum siding might fly by, or structural materials and other larger objects might slam into you. If you found yourself inside, you’d be desperately gathering your loved ones in the safest place possible.
You’d be hoping whoever built this building built it well.
You’d be hoping wherever this tornado moves, it’s away from here.
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This monster just passed through Greenfield, Iowa. The people there could use some help. Sometimes help is for the right reasons, and pretty easy.
‘The same idea occurs in Schopenhauer, for whom the truth of the world is Will, which cannot be represented in concepts. Schopenhauer devoted roughly 500,000 words to this thing that no words can capture…’
‘…I too am tempted to eff the ineffable. like my philosophical predecessors, I want to describe that world beyond the window, even though I know that it cannot be described but only revealed. I am not alone in thinking that world to be real and important. But there are many who dismiss it as unscientific cast of mind are disagreeable to me. Their nerdish conviction that facts alone can signify, and that the ‘transcendental’ and the eternal are nothing but words, mark them out as incomplete. There is an aspect of the human condition that is denied to them. ‘
Scruton, Roger. “Effing The Ineffable” Confessions Of A Heretic. Notting Hill Editions Ltd, 2016. Print. (Pgs 87 & 88).
Personally, I’m not sure that all naturalists and people in the sciences I’ve known wish to reduce the world to strictly mathematical laws, nor consign all domains of human endeavor to ‘non-science.’
Some people, I suspect, have the onboard wiring and have pursued learning which make them profoundly interested in order, patterns, and logic. Some people are just really smart and dedicate themselves to a particular problem or two, maybe possessing the genius and courage, even, to define a new problem after years of hard work of mastering a field, leading to genuine new knowledge.
I am grateful for the Mars Curiosity Rover, and the hundreds of engineers that worked for much of their professional lives to land this thing on Mars. It’s still yielding valuable data.
But, I”m guessing there’s lot of waste and bureaucratic stasis at NASA. Perhaps a similar regression to the mean within institutions towards narrower ideas and ideologues happens here, too (if only x were removed, y will occur).
I see such outcomes partially caused by the decay of things, partially by design, and partially as a process of secularization (beneath the idealist and systematist lie human nature and reality). Such incentives don’t necessarily lead to leadership by the most knowledgeable, but over time, rather to leadership by administrative fiat and distant political winds.
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Now, there’s arrogance, hubris and false pride to be in all of us, to be sure, and many sharp thinkers are no exception (in some cases the bigger the brain (or ego), the bigger the fool). I don’t find foolish and/or earnest conviction in any short supply on this Earth.
To be fair, I don’t think this proves, nor does Scruton even attempt to prove, that the ineffable, therefore, exists (or if the ineffable does exist, as it reveals itself to us, that it requires saying or expression through us, nor through Handel or Bach or post-Kantian German thinking).
Such expression surely offers me consolation, though, for I take refuge in works of art. I am profoundly grateful to walk at evening and listen to a few minutes of music:
I am profoundly grateful that I may share in someone else’s pain, suffering and disconsolation, across centuries, transmuted into an act of beauty and wonder, through a centuries-developed form and method (an orchestra is rather a thing of technical achievement, too, just as is a store-bought guitar or a Korg).
Sure, there’s much epistemological ignorance amongst some in the sciences and, frankly, within all of us.
Come to think of it, I think most of us manage one or a few things well, and mess up at least a few areas of our lives without even trying. It’s also very, very tempting to talk about that which we know very little (this blog, for instance), as though something is known.
This may make me no more than a 2nd or 3rd rate idea man, taking, essentially, more than has been given.
You’ll likely need an energy source (not necessarily our star, the warping effects of other massive bodies will do) and tens, if not hundreds, of millions of years to sustain an environment conducive to life. You’ll likely need lots of protection from cosmic rays and short-wave radiation as some kind of shield. If your planet, moon and/or body doesn’t possess an atmosphere, and is too small to maintain an electro-magnetic dynamo like Earth, then sub-surface water under a protective shell might be enough.
On the recent findings of at least 1/17 observational days of water plumes near the surface of the Jovian moon, Europa:
‘They used a spectrograph at the Keck Observatory that measures the chemical composition of planetary atmospheres through the infrared light they emit or absorb. Molecules such as water emit specific frequencies of infrared light as they interact with solar radiation.’
and:
‘Paganini and his team reported in the journal Nature Astronomy on November 18 that they detected enough water releasing from Europa (5,202 pounds, or 2,360 kilograms, per second) to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool within minutes. Yet, the scientists also found that the water appears infrequently, at least in amounts large enough to detect from Earth, said Paganini: “For me, the interesting thing about this work is not only the first direct detection of water above Europa, but also the lack thereof within the limits of our detection method.’
This is potentially good news for the upcoming Europa clipper mission. Otherwise, how are you going to get at all that water beneath an icy shell at least 10-15 miles thick?
‘From its orbit of Jupiter, Europa Clipper will sail close by the moon in rapid, low-altitude flybys. If plumes are indeed spewing vapor from Europa’s ocean or subsurface lakes, Europa Clipper could sample the frozen liquid and dust particles. The mission team is gearing up now to look at potential orbital paths, and the new research will play into those discussions.
“If plumes exist, and we can directly sample what’s coming from the interior of Europa, then we can more easily get at whether Europa has the ingredients for life,” Pappalardo said. “That’s what the mission is after. That’s the big picture.”
Aren’t you getting a little excited at the prospect?:
Via a reader: John Searle on The Philosophy Of Language as part of Bryan Magee’s series:
It’s always a pleasure to observe someone with deep understanding explain a subject clearly.
There’s some interesting discussion on modernism and postmodernism too, or the tendency for the ‘moderns’ to focus on language itself as a problem to be re-examined and possibly solved, or the study of linguistics to be put upon a foundation similar to that of many sciences.
As we’ve seen in the arts, the poem, a novel, the very written words themselves can become subjects which poets, novelists, and writers examine, doubt, and in some cases ‘deconstruct.’
As to that tribe in South America, cited as evidence against Chomsky’s claims of necessary recursion and the existence of a universal grammar, Searle has some things to say in the interview below.
‘But evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years. It is dying so slowly because, as physicist Max Planck once noted, older scholars tend to hang on to the old ways: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
Dan Robinson was the guy heading south, then rapidly east, in the hopes of staying on a parallel northward track to the May 31st, 2013 El Reno, Oklahoma tornado. I can appreciate a man driving towards such a thing.
‘I was not trying to get close. I knew from how the tornado first appeared that it would be very large, violent and dangerous. My goal was simply to remain in a good position for photography and video, which I felt would be best with the tornado backlit by the bright skies to the southwest. I wanted to be just close enough to have a high-contrast view. ‘
It turns out that particular evening, many of the variables leading to supercell formation, and even EF5 tornado formation, were in place. So many were in place, in fact, that this became one of the most violent and dangerous tornadoes ever recorded.
It changed directions suddenly. It slowed down to 5 mph and sped up to nearly 50 mph. 2.6 miles wide at one point? 300 mph wind?
Eight people died.
The guy in a Toyota Yaris, slipping on a wet, gravely Oklahoma road unable to disable traction control doesn’t exactly come off a hero. The guy suddenly racing for his life, enveloped in the outer wind-field, is easily criticized. Bigger balls than many? Maybe. Stupid enough to get killed? Possibly.
Thanks, Dan, for chasing on your own dime, sharing your information, and respecting the wishes of the families of those in the car behind you. That was the last anyone saw of them.
It is what it is.
From the Weather Service video below: A small percentage of the world’s surface supports the kinds of extreme clashing air masses found on the U.S. plains. Very few thunderstorms become supercells, and very few of those supercells form tornadoes. Even fewer tornadoes become violent F4 and F5 monsters which spawn sub-vortices and anti-cyclones.
The El Reno, Oklahoma tornado from 2013 took the lives of eight people, including experienced stormchasers known for their judgment and contributions to the rest of us.
I tend to be skeptical of guys who, upon their deaths, freeze their heads into perpetuity. Probabilistically, though, I suppose it could be a bet worth taking.
We could use more outside-the-box thinkers with real-world experience making bets on where to fruitfully think.
Our institutions have more rot than usual, and dangerous capture. There are too many prizes, too many piles of old money, and not enough brains and courage.
I’m of a mind to say Nature is beyond value judgment (I judge things all the time, but Nature doesn’t seem to care). The people I love and who love me, do care about me (as long as we’re here).
God? Maybe. The universe: Unclear. The little I know of the laws of the universe suggest more of the same Nature I’ve known here on Earth.
Beauty plays a key part in understanding the world. It can both anchor us into our own bodies and experiences, while keeping us searching for new experiences. Truth has a clear empirical element in my thinking, and refers to a world I believe genuinely exists. Collecting data about the world is a lot like actually referring back to the book you’re quoting, or asking the other person what they’re really thinking…then listening.
Beautiful and dangerous. Maybe the tornado is telling you something? Maybe not.
Roger Sandall, Australian critic of romantic primitivism and the Western’s Left’s penchant for the Noble Savage: His home page where his essays can be found. Here’s “The Rise Of The Anthropologues“ and…
Optical devices were likely common practice more than is commonly known these days, way before the camera, the television etc.
As previously posted:
Just as optics revolutionized the sciences and the boundaries of human knowledge, from Galileo to Newton and onwards, Tim Jenison wonders if optics may have revolutionized the arts as well.
‘But still, exactly how did Vermeer do it? One day, in the bathtub, Jenison had a eureka moment: a mirror. If the lens focused its image onto a small, angled mirror, and the mirror was placed just between the painter’s eye and the canvas, by glancing back and forth he could copy that bit of image until the color and tone precisely matched the reflected bit of reality.’
Good Vermeer page here for a refresher on the Dutch master.
Penn & Teller helped make a documentary which has gotten good reviews, entitled ‘Tim’s Vermeer.‘
‘Mirrors and pools of water work pretty much the same way. Light interacts with electrons on the surface. Under the laws of quantum mechanics, each photon interacts with ALL of the electrons on the surface, and the net result is the sum of all possible pathways. If the surface is perfectly smooth, then most of the pathways cancel each other out, except for the one where the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. ‘
Click through for the illustrations to help explain Feynman’s theory, which fascinated me when I first came across it; much as I understand of it.
Have you ever seen sunlight reflecting off a body of water from a few thousand feet up in a plane? A rainbow in a puddle with some oil in it? A laser reflecting off a smooth surface like a mirror?
Somewhere up in the clouds of Venus, there’s Phosphine [possibly]. So far, there’s no known naturally occurring reason for this, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. On Earth, when bacteria farts in our guts and in swamps, that’s when you get Phosphine. I’ll bet it smells nice.
Maybe in those clouds of sulfuric acid, racing above surface temperatures high-enough to melt lead, there’s some ammonia? Maybe this ammonia is neutralizing the cloud PH balance enough for some kind of bacteria to survive?
These are questions to which a little exploration can provide answers.
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You know the moment you notice that the world has fallen away for awhile? You’re leisurely enjoying a photograph, or a painting, or a poem…
‘In the critical terminology of the time, Ghirri’s close-up photographs of the details of atlases and other maps question the link between signifier and signified, referring to a supposedly ‘natural’ environment that has long since become a simulacrum, and revealing the specific aesthetics harboured within ‘objective’ representation.’
The NIGHT of the BLURB! It’s postmodern, it’s (S)elf referential, it’s….alive. It’s dead. It’s…subjectivity and objectivity combined!
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And now for a ‘modern’ poem.
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
You’ll likely need an energy source (not necessarily our star, the warping effects of other massive bodies will do) and tens, if not hundreds, of millions of years to sustain an environment conducive to life. You’ll likely need lots of protection from cosmic rays and short-wave radiation as some kind of shield. If your planet, moon and/or body doesn’t possess an atmosphere, and is too small to maintain an electro-magnetic dynamo like Earth, then sub-surface water under a protective shell might be enough.
On the recent findings of at least 1/17 observational days of water plumes near the surface of the Jovian moon, Europa:
‘They used a spectrograph at the Keck Observatory that measures the chemical composition of planetary atmospheres through the infrared light they emit or absorb. Molecules such as water emit specific frequencies of infrared light as they interact with solar radiation.’
and:
‘Paganini and his team reported in the journal Nature Astronomy on November 18 that they detected enough water releasing from Europa (5,202 pounds, or 2,360 kilograms, per second) to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool within minutes. Yet, the scientists also found that the water appears infrequently, at least in amounts large enough to detect from Earth, said Paganini: “For me, the interesting thing about this work is not only the first direct detection of water above Europa, but also the lack thereof within the limits of our detection method.’
This is potentially good news for the upcoming Europa clipper mission. Otherwise, how are you going to get at all that water beneath an icy shell at least 10-15 miles thick?
‘From its orbit of Jupiter, Europa Clipper will sail close by the moon in rapid, low-altitude flybys. If plumes are indeed spewing vapor from Europa’s ocean or subsurface lakes, Europa Clipper could sample the frozen liquid and dust particles. The mission team is gearing up now to look at potential orbital paths, and the new research will play into those discussions.
“If plumes exist, and we can directly sample what’s coming from the interior of Europa, then we can more easily get at whether Europa has the ingredients for life,” Pappalardo said. “That’s what the mission is after. That’s the big picture.”
Aren’t you getting a little excited at the prospect?:
Thanks for stopping by: I’m just a layman, and these links are for people who might know more, who might know less, or about as much as me. I’m not specially trained in any space-science, but whenever I get a few extra minutes, I learn a little bit more.
Dear Reader, maybe you’ve got some time to kill. Maybe you’re waiting on someone and they haven’t shown up yet. Maybe you’re at the airport and your flight got delayed a few more hours.
S.E.T.I–Aliens!
Frank Drake brings some realism to the S.E.T.I. (Search For Extraterrestial Intelligence) debate. The space-time distances are a huge hurdle, and the challenges of becoming a spacefaring civilization make the journey to nearby star systems fairly impractical at the moment.
The less evidence and fewer data points there are, the more rampant the speculation, inventive the Sci-Fi imaginings, and important the foundation to create such new fields of knowledge.
I maintain a healthy, healthy skepticism. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence..
As consequential as it is, it’s just another G class star:
We owe our lives, our weather, and our current home to this thing.
To be honest, I’ve stared at the sun for a few seconds with only some airy cirrus clouds, about 10 miles of atmosphere, and 93,000,000 million miles between me and this fiery furnace. I felt my retinas burn, blinking and blinking, and minutes later I still saw a bright patch in my field of vision, where my rods and cones were overloaded.
Maybe don’t do that.
It’s normally hard to see this ball of hydrogen, helium close-up.
Enjoy!
Mercury-Tidally locked (the same side always faces the Sun), small, and blasted by all that radiation (all the short-wave stuff we can’t see). Not too friendly.
Venus-The former Soviets/Russians have done the most work so far.
Imagine an Earth-sized twin, but with a runaway greenhouse effect, and such enormous pressures and temperatures at the surface as to melt lead. Toxic, acidic clouds.
Maybe high enough in those Venutian clouds there’s a belt of reasonable temperatures.
Kinda like hell, but interesting.
Earth-What can you say? It’s all most of us will ever know, and as much experience as we gather in our short lifetimes and can hope to pass on to our kids and their kids, it’s not so much.
As for me, while driving up to Mt. St. Helens (having erupted in 1980), I had a realization: The cone of this still-active volcano was still smoking.
Could…this thing blow again?
Nah, don’t be scared now, the odds are miniscule.
But…still.
Seeing the miles and miles of devastation, the valley still relatively barren 30 years on, and hearing the stories of lost lives and swift death, I thought for a few minutes.
Maybe conditions on Earth can get so bad that the Earth ain’t no permanent home, or maybe this place is a temporary home at best.
Earth’s Moon (our Moon):
Which kinds of people have the experience, training, temperment and balls to go on such a trip?:
Bob Zubrin at The New Atlantis: ‘Moon Direct‘. He’s a fan of creating a moon-base.
‘If we want to explore the Moon, and prepare to go beyond, we don’t need a space station in lunar orbit — but we could use a base on the Moon itself.’
There was a pretty tense atmosphere these past generations, as the primary geopolitical contest was between the United States and the Soviet Union:
Here’s actual video (just kidding):
Mars-What happened there will tell us a lot about what’s happened here. It used to have liquid water (billions of years ago), and it has ice beneath the surface, but with 1% the atmosphere and just 40% the gravity it not’s very nice now.
Mars has got some dust devils and what we might call seasons, but no water cycle (like ours). The Martian surface is blasted by the sun’s radiation and rusted toxic red.
Think of the driest desert, the coldest ice-field, and imagine yourself hanging around a mine-shaft with no oxygen nor air to breathe. No help is coming.
Would you sign-up?
Did we already find traces of microbial life on Mars?:
Jupiter: The ol’ 1994 Shoemaker Levy comet impact.
‘Holy shit!’:
Jupiter’s (Jovian) Moon Europa: It’s got an icy shell 5-20 km thick, and it very likely has liquid water beneath that ice. It’s pretty tiny compared to Earth.
In fact, Jupiter is so enormous, spewing out so much radiation, and warping space-time so much that these moons (what little to no atmospheres they have) are toxic places. Some mass sizes larger and Jupiter could have become a star.
Life very likely needs water, and a source of energy (heat energy), and at least a few hundred million years to get going and stick around.
Maybe….just maybe:
and:
Saturn-Another gas giant, tilted over and with rings and rings of rocks an dust around it.
Saturn’s Moon Titan
Yeah, it’s got a surface, and liquids on that surface and an atmosphere, but it’s liquid methane, man. It’s so very cold and so very strange, yet so very familiar…
We floated a probe right down to the surface, thank you very much:
Saturn’s Moon Enceladus: Even tinier and further away than Europa, it’s another ice-shell with liquid water beneath.
Big ol’ Saturn and tiny Enceladus do a dance, and this dance pulls and pushes and creates heat energy on Enceladus. The heat energy emerges through an ocean floor and rises. This heated water erupts out of the surface ice on the South Pole. Through that icy plume emanating into space, we flew a spacecraft.
What could be down there?
Uranus-Okay, this is freaky:
Neptune-I hear summers are nice.
Pluto-Listen to one of the guys who helped design the ‘New Horizons’ mission to Pluto. What a weird place.
Oumuamua-Sometimes random stuff just passes through, and we don’t have much time to notice.
‘Measurements of trace gases in planetary atmospheres help us explore chemical conditions different to those on Earth. Our nearest neighbour, Venus, has cloud decks that are temperate but hyperacidic. Here we report the apparent presence of phosphine (PH3) gas in Venus’s atmosphere, where any phosphorus should be in oxidized forms.‘
Despite being a near twin in size to Earth-mass and gravity, Venus spins too slowly for an electro-magnetic dynamo to create a EM field, enveloping and protecting the planet. With ninety times the surface pressure of Earth, and temperatures up to nine-hundred degrees Farenheit, to say it would be hellish would be an understatement.
Yet, it once harbored liquid water oceans, and maybe, just maybe, some kind of microbial life has migrated up into the fast-moving clouds. Click through for a visual.
Or listen to a podcast while you work, walk, or clean:
Addition: Anton Petrov sheds some light:
Next to Enceledaus, a tiny moon being warped by Saturn, this is probably the most important indicator of extra-terrestial life going right now:
If you listen to the above, with the sound turned off on the visuals below, you will arrive into the future (once the backbeat fills in, ‘Chase’ becomes more bodily percussive and rhythmic).
Don’t let this ruin your mental focus:
After traveling eons, you will arrive to a quiet room. There, a Japanese classical guitarist will be playing Handel’s Sarabande in D minor.
Such pomp, nobility and grief! Somewhere beyond the dancer and the dance might lie the truth.
On that note,
One can imagine an intelligence just ahead of ours, or wildly ahead of ours, with benevolent, indifferent or malevolent (evil demon) intentions.
Or perhaps one can imagine a story told using the the current popular visual narrative; a Sci-Fi novel played to classical music, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The first monolith seems to inspire a string of causation and hominid evolution which leads to humans discovering the second monolith buried on the moon three million years later. This monolith is found to be directing a signal to another, possibly transponding, monolith found orbiting Jupiter.
A mission is sent to this third monolith as the new HAL 9000 integrated and artificial intelligence on board knows some knowns and unknowns, and proceeds to act accordingly. Methodically and chillingly, the HAL 9000 kills all but one crew member, perhaps in ‘Self-‘preservation or according to some unseen logic, or just because he’s broken and crazy).
David Bowman, the last remaining crew member, after a batle of wits, disables the HAL 9000 and catches up with the third monolith, in order to complete the mission. At the end of the film, Bowman seems to transcends his earthly body, space-time, and ends up gazing over earth with the innocent eyes of a placental StarBaby, born anew.
Meh, the deisre for transcendence hasn’t gone too far beyond here, has it?
Solar radiation: We live within the envelope of Earth’s electro-magnetic dynamo, protected from the life-destroying short-wave radiation our star is constantly spewing. Over time (billions of years) this has helped create a relatively stable atmosphere and biosphere; stable enough for the life we know on Earth.
Despite this stability, of course, we know the star-energy we eventually consume as food and water to be scarce as such conditions are coded at the cellular level (and since we’re being depressively realistic, there’s vulcanism, earthquakes, cold, heat, other people, parasites and viruses to contend with). Such facts define us as does the occasional catastrophic event and the eventual catastrophe awaiting each of us. There’s love, friendship, knowledge, music, hope, beauty and a whole world to explore.
Okay, enough of that for now.
Zero or altered gravity: On the surface of Earth, we live x units away from a mass ball at the bottom of a gravity well. In space, we wouldn’t feel this force at all, and on Mars we would feel it about 40%. What if blood vessels contract/expand or slowly atrophy in zero Gs for reasons yet unknown? What if this dims your vision slowly, over time, and impairs cognitive functioning, especially during the reproductive process, pregnancy or early childhood? Wouldn’t you like to know this before it starts happening to you on the six-months-plus journey to Mars?
Once we know about such problems, we can figure out some solutions.
If there is life on Mars (a possibility, still, as of 2019), it’s probably microbial, living on an energy source beneath the surface. Up top, all that solar radiation has created a toxic layer of perchorates, oxidized, rusted dust and rocks, apparently hostile to life as we know it.
Imagine a place colder than Antarctica, drier than the driest desert, with so little atmosphere the atmosphere’s barely there. The EM dynamo and envelope petered out long ago. You look around and see a barren landscape, familiar yet strange; alien.
Imagine, one morning, stepping from a rover on an exploratory mission, feeling a deep nervous tension and excitement. You focus in on the scripted tasks and procedures the next few minutes require.
You know that if your suit becomes compromised, your blood would alternately freeze/boil and you’d die almost instantly. You know some little, unplanned problem can become a big problem. Any sort of help/supply lines would be pretty much impossible, at least six months but at least a year in coming, and probably not coming at all.
Yet, here you are:
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As posted: It looks like Gale Crater has its advantages.
‘Research suggests habitable conditions in the Yellowknife Bay area may have persisted for millions to tens of millions of years. During that time rivers and lakes probably appeared and disappeared. Even when the surface was dry, the subsurface likely was wet, as indicated by mineral veins deposited by underground water into fractures in the rock. The thickness of observed and inferred tiers of rock layers provides the basis for estimating long duration, and the discovery of a mineral energy source for underground microbes favors habitability throughout.’
Why was Mt. Sharp chosen for the Curiosity Rover landing site, and what about those rounded stones that it photographed, indicative of long ago ankle to hip-deep water? If the Martian surface is likely so full of perchlorates and life-hostile, irradiated soil, what are the chances of pockets of microbial life below ground?
The discussion later moves to Venus, Jovian moon Io, and the Chinese lander on the dark side of the moon in the final minutes:
Event Horizon discussion with Emily Lakdawalla.
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Imagine sub-freezing temperatures and free radicals bombarding the near atmosphere-less Martian surface (oxidized and rusted red, barren), but below the Martian surface lurk big blocks of briny ice; ice with freezing cold, incredibly salty water around them and maybe just enough O2 to support some microbes.
Worth thinking about.
What are you doing with your imagination?
Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported today https://t.co/zLkJwUESiPpic.twitter.com/aAt6hnMxI2
‘Due to the scarcity of O2 in the modern Martian atmosphere, Mars has been assumed to be incapable of producing environments with sufficiently large concentrations of O2 to support aerobic respiration. Here, we present a thermodynamic framework for the solubility of O2 in brines under Martian near-surface conditions. We find that modern Mars can support liquid environments with dissolved O2 values ranging from ~2.5 × 10−6 mol m−3 to 2 mol m−3 across the planet, with particularly high concentrations in polar regions because of lower temperatures at higher latitudes promoting O2 entry into brines’
I An old man sits In the shadow of a pine tree In China. He sees larkspur, Blue and white, At the edge of the shadow, Move in the wind. His beard moves in the wind. The pine tree moves in the wind. Thus water flows Over weeds.
II The night is of the colour Of a woman’s arm: Night, the female, Obscure, Fragrant and supple, Conceals herself. A pool shines, Like a bracelet Shaken in a dance.
III I measure myself Against a tall tree. I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun, With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way ants crawl In and out of my shadow.
IV When my dream was near the moon, The white folds of its gown Filled with yellow light. The soles of its feet Grew red. Its hair filled With certain blue crystallizations From stars, Not far off.
V Not all the knives of the lamp-posts, Nor the chisels of the long streets, Nor the mallets of the domes And high towers, Can carve What one star can carve, Shining through the grape-leaves.
VI Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right-angled triangles. If they tried rhomboids, Cones, waving lines, ellipses As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon Rationalists would wear sombreros.
I quite like this one. Perhaps it’s because of what I see as a Romantic sensibility fitted to imagistic purpose.
As to that final stanza: That’s a lot of very lush language to describe what are, to my mind, very visual-field, mathematical concepts. Stevens was a poet of lush language, celebrating it like the old dandy he was, but also translating the Romantic arrangment of language to the spare, image-based aims of modernism. Make it new and strip it down.
Perhaps, this is more the tension occurring here rather than that of a frustrated mathematician.
I’ll try and stir the pot a bit:
‘…modern rationalism is what commonplace minds made out of the inspiration of men of discrimination and genius.’
Oakeshott, Michael. Rationalism In Politics And Other Essays. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991. Print. Pg 6.
One might ask what kind of genius? Artistic, linguistic and poetic? Or rather mathematical and physical? Parts of this debate could be said to stretch back to the Greeks, at least. They exist [such debates] all around us today, within our universities, politics and lives.
Personally, I’m reminded of many modern debates over reason, what it can do , what it can’t, and also many rationalist/anti-rationalist reactions to it.
The Romantic impulse generally involves a return to Nature and the countryside, away from civilization. The poet and the artist also invite one back to one’s own sense experience anew; the ambitious attempting to celebrate the emotions and grand themes without a hint of irony (love, death, war).
At least, many try and show us as we are and can be to ourselves.
But, this is also having some downstream effects, at least in German theory: Tom Wolfe on Max Weber on one conspicuous use of art in the ‘modern’ world:
‘…aesthetics is going to replace ethics, art is going to replace religion, as the means through which educated people express their spiritual worthiness…‘
Why was Mt. Sharp chosen for the Curiosity Rover landing site, and what about those rounded stones that it photographed, indicative of long ago ankle to hip-deep water? If the Martian surface is likely so full of perchlorates and life-hostile, irradiated soil, what are the chances of pockets of microbial life below ground?
The discussion later moves to Venus, Jovian moon Io, and the Chinese lander on the dark side of the moon in the final minutes:
Event Horizon discussion with Emily Lakdawalla.
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As posted:
Imagine sub-freezing temperatures and free radicals bombarding the near atmosphere-less Martian surface (oxidized and rusted red, barren), but below the Martian surface lurk big blocks of briny ice; ice with freezing cold, incredibly salty water around them and maybe just enough O2 to support some microbes.
Worth thinking about.
What are you doing with your imagination?
Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported today https://t.co/zLkJwUESiPpic.twitter.com/aAt6hnMxI2
‘Due to the scarcity of O2 in the modern Martian atmosphere, Mars has been assumed to be incapable of producing environments with sufficiently large concentrations of O2 to support aerobic respiration. Here, we present a thermodynamic framework for the solubility of O2 in brines under Martian near-surface conditions. We find that modern Mars can support liquid environments with dissolved O2 values ranging from ~2.5 × 10−6 mol m−3 to 2 mol m−3 across the planet, with particularly high concentrations in polar regions because of lower temperatures at higher latitudes promoting O2 entry into brines’
Recently, a visitor from beyond our solar sytem passed pretty closely to Earth.
With the observed and limited data, Oumuamua was clearly anomalous. It likely had a 10/1 length to width ratio and was reflecting a lot of light, data which suggests a wobbling oblong or something nearly pancake-shaped (perhaps containing iron or other metals because it’s more reflective of the red, longer wavelengths on the visible light spectrum and it’s got to be of durable enough material to be so thin while surviving the roughness of interstellar space).
Our solar system is a fairly flat disk which is moving in relation to other star systems, all of which are traveling very quickly relative to Oumuamua, which was relatively stationary to these other systems when it came in at an angle to ours; speeding up again on its way out (perhaps not due to outgassing).
Dr. Avi Loeb has been working on lightsails, or thinking about how a civilization might travel and explore space and/or create something like a message in a bottle. Below, he is interviewed on Event Horizon.
His not-ruled-out hypothesis will probably attract some UFO and alien public interest, but it seems, in my limited understanding, that as an anomaly, this is a discussion with a first-rate astronomer performing an interesting exercise in taking past experience, current knowledge and conventional explanations to their limits in trying to creatively identify something new.
It’s a big universe out there after all, and we’re just starting to get some better tools with which to view and understand it:
Here’s my brief layperson’s summary after watching:
Both moons Enceladus (Saturn) and Europa (Jupiter) demonstrate evidence of huge oceans of liquid water protected by thick, icy crusts. The Cassini probe passed through water plumes emanating high above Enceladus’ icy crust. This water has been forced out of four long, deep cracks in the surface.
After analysis, the folks in the video above have discovered many chemicals within these Enceladus geysers (ammonia, carbon dioxide) but most importantly: Hydrogen they think might be coming from hydro-thermal vents on the rocky, ocean floor of Enceladus.
Or at least, with the current evidence and knowledge, this is a very plausible scenario.
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So, there’s life on Earth without sunlight, deep on the ocean floors, near hydro-thermal vents where this process produces energy enough to sustain weird life forms we didn’t know existed before very recently.
There’s water geysering out of Europa’s icy crust from its ocean floor below.
There’s potentially time + interesting life-sustaining geochemistry + energy + a protected environment on both of these ocean worlds…so…hey….
There may be something really worth finding down there.
Next up: Sending better instruments to cruise through Europa’s geysers:
Perhaps Hawking is guilty of a little hubris in weighing in with such certitude on the God question?
Here’s a quote of his Hawking’s posted previously:
“His [Kant’s}argument for the thesis was that if the universe did not have a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before any event, which he considered absurd. The argument for the antithesis was that if the universe had a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before it, so why should the universe begin at any one particular time? In fact, his cases for both the thesis and the antithesis are really the same argument. They are both based on his unspoken assumption that time continues back forever, whether or not the universe had existed forever.”
Not so much that time continues back forever, but that it’s impossible to conceive of a point outside of time. Kant wished to argue that both time and space are not necessarily inherent characteristics of the universe (or any object at all…especially those objects with which we have no direct experience, like a black hole, though according to Kant we can have knowledge of objects) but rather time and space are part of our onboard apparatus, and preconditions for us have intelligible experience in the first place (unlike as is assumed in calculus, for example). He constructed a vast metaphysics to make his point in the hopes of putting metaphysics on the same ground as the sciences (the Enlightenment was going strong around him, and he latched onto Newton’s laws especially). It’s questionable as to whether or not he succeeded, but fascinating to think about nonetheless.
There was a good Kathryn Schulz piece at the New Yorker entitled: ‘The Really Big One,’published in July 2015, which Nick Zentner at Central Washington University uses as his jumping-off point for discussion.
The above hour-long talk is designed for lay-people and starts with the basics, catalogues the current evidence, and leads to current understanding:
On average, every 250-500 years or so, the Cascadia Subduction Zone can rip {partially or} at once, and can generate an earthquake (with tsunami) of potentially 9.0 or greater {if all at once}. The last big one is known to have occurred 316 years ago, on January 29th, 1700.
Because Seattle was under a glacier not that long ago, it’s a long way down to bedrock, and this means bad news for transferring energy during earthquakes: A big bowl of mud and looser glacial deposits, drumlins and hills prone to landslide, ending abrubtly in water, does not a good recipe make.
‘The original Shackel paper is intended as a critique of post-modernism. Post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”, and there’s an uncontroversially correct meaning there. We don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society; for example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay.’
“The following, however, appears to me to be correct in Kant’s statement of the problem: in thinking we use, with a certain “right,” concepts to which there is no access from the materials of sensory experience, if the situation is viewed from the logical point of view.
As a matter of fact, I am convinced that even much more is to be asserted: the concepts which arise in our thought and in our linguistic expressions are all — when viewed logically — the free creations of thought which cannot inductively be gained from sense experiences.”
In reviewing seismic data with two distinct events, it’s not clear if a top portion slipped first, causing the bottom to give, or vice versa:
Our author:
‘To my untrained eye the initial seismic event shows a slow increase in energy release rather than an abrupt peak. Note also that the second event appears to be much smaller than the first. Thus, in this interpretation, the initial failure was, I think, a small, slow failure in the lower slope that destabilised the upper block of the Oso landslide, which slid onto the mass below.’
From King5 news, names, photos and a brief remembrance of those who lost their lives. R.I.P.
The Galeras volcano is in Colombia, and on a fateful day in 1993, it caught many scientists and tourists milling around its crater-rim by surprise with a little mini-eruption. I, too, remember reading the horrific accounts:
“I heard this huge boom, and then rocks the size of televisions started falling around us,” recalled Dr. Andrew McFarlane, a geologist at Florida International University who had got beyond the crater. Dr. McFarlane suffered a broken foot, bruises on his legs and badly burned hands from climbing over burning rocks.
Dr. Williams, fleeing the crater’s rim, pounded by flying rocks, ran as far as he could down the volcanic slope before his broken legs gave way. He took shelter from the weakening eruption behind large rocks. After an hour, a second volcanic blast hurled aloft new boulders that he successfully dodged.’
Dr. Stanley Williams led the party that day, and wrote a book entitled ‘Surviving Galeras‘ in its wake about continuing to press-on despite the tragedy. Excerpt from his book here. Fascinating reading.
Our emailer points out that a Victoria Bruce charged Williams with a high degree of hubris in her book ‘No Apparent Danger.’ More here. There’s some drama involved.
Remarkably, like the predictability of extreme weather events, understanding of what helps cause volcanic eruptions is getting much better due to the work of vulcanologists everywhere.
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*As a side note…I remember standing across from the Mt. St Helens crater at the Johnston Ridge Observatory, witnessing the scope of destruction some 30 years on, feeling a sense of awe, fascination, a desire for more knowledge, mixed with fear and continuing thoughts at my own sudden smallness and cosmic insignificance when measured against such forces. It can be humbling.
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***My uncle tells a story about passing north on I-5 over the Toutle River bridge some days afterwards, and seeing a horse carcass, upright and stuck in the volcanic mud and ash-flow that flowed down from the mountain.
Do you click through to videos found on a blog? Probably not, so I’m putting this up for my own benefit as much as anyone else’s. I was fortunate enough to attend a Curiosity Rover landing party at Boeing in south Seattle, which included some speakers from JPL (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) discussing the mission.
There’s so much science going on, and so many new discoveries, it’s hard to keep up. Yet, it’s also easy to overlook some of the data and evidence piling up which allow for an ever-expanding picture of what Mars is like.
Ashwin Vasavada, a JPR Research Scientist gave a presentation open to the public at the one-year mark, which included some very basic and very interesting questions from the audience. Easy to follow:
‘Research suggests habitable conditions in the Yellowknife Bay area may have persisted for millions to tens of millions of years. During that time rivers and lakes probably appeared and disappeared. Even when the surface was dry, the subsurface likely was wet, as indicated by mineral veins deposited by underground water into fractures in the rock. The thickness of observed and inferred tiers of rock layers provides the basis for estimating long duration, and the discovery of a mineral energy source for underground microbes favors habitability throughout.’
Just as optics revolutionized the sciences and the boundaries of human knowledge, from Galileo to Newton and onwards, Tim Jenison wonders if optics may have revolutionized the arts as well.
‘But still, exactly how did Vermeer do it? One day, in the bathtub, Jenison had a eureka moment: a mirror. If the lens focused its image onto a small, angled mirror, and the mirror was placed just between the painter’s eye and the canvas, by glancing back and forth he could copy that bit of image until the color and tone precisely matched the reflected bit of reality.’
Good Vermeer page here for a refresher on the Dutch master.
Penn & Teller helped make a documentary which has gotten good reviews, entitled ‘Tim’s Vermeer.‘
They discuss the project and Tim’s theory below (perhaps only the Girl With The Pearl Earring knows for sure if the painter used such a technique):
-Curiosity isn’t necessarily looking for life, but it’s looking for the conditions that make life possible here on Earth with its 10 instruments, such as trying to determine the origins of the methane on Mars’s surface by being better able to analyze the kind of carbon (12 or 14) in the atmosphere to find its source. It’s also much better able to look for amino acids (the building blocks of life on Earth) and better able to analyze the rock and crystal samples it picks up. It’s got a cool laser. It’s about the size of a Mini-Cooper.
-Unlike Earth with its dynamic interior and tectonic plates, relatively strong magnetic field, thick and dynamic atmosphere etc., Mars is a bit like a time capsule. With just over 50% the diameter of Earth, about 38% the gravity, and less than 1% the atmosphere we’ll be able to get a much better picture of what happened during the formation of our solar system about 4 1/2 billion years ago as it’s much less disturbed. The trip up the rock face in Gale Crater over the next few years is like a trip back through time. What happened to Mars? Did the Earth and Mars have common experiences?
No methane on Mars, so that rules out the certain kinds of microbial life hoped for. There is water on the surface, in the soil. at about 2%, which is good for colonial prospects. It probably had liquid water in the past, but that is thought to have been billions of years ago. A lot of evidence points to ancient Mars and current Mars being very different.
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So, what about a more human problem that interests the libertarian-minded?
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The problem is that over time, human organizations succumb to decay, bad incentives, and get weighed down by their own internal politics, increasing layers of bureaucracy, and regulations. They can end-up no longer boldly and creatively solving the problems they were designed to solve, becoming risk-averse and losing their spirit of innovation and flexibility to free-up the top talent. You can put more and more money in, but get less and less in return. In fact, I’d argue along with many others that we’re in a period of American life where many other bureaucracies and government agencies may have also reached that point. Such is my road-map.
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After the terrible Challenger explosion in 1986, Richard Feynman was included on an independent panel to find out what went wrong. He discovered a profound difference between engineers’ and managements’ probability estimates for number of flights without failure. One potential (and very important) reason that a system-ending failure can go unnoticed is the tendency of managers to believe top-down explanations.
It’s vintage Feynman, inconoclastic, penetrating and brilliant:
“for whatever purpose, be it for internal or external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product, to the point of fantasy.”
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.“
Watch Robert Zubrin and other Mars Undergrounders pursue their quest despite NASA at times, but ultimately benefitting from collaboration with NASA engineers’ experience and insight, giving a boost to this deepest of human dreams: the next frontier. A colony on Mars.
We can do this, and it will be both like and unlike anything we’ve ever done before.
Video taken by a local resident and Bad Astronomy blogger familiar with the area. Remember, floods kill more people than any other natural disaster. The energy the water carries is deceptively powerful. Safe places can become very unsafe, very quickly. Once you’re swept away, that’s usually the end of you.
This is probably a 50 or 100 year flood, with some areas in the foothills receiving as much as 8 inches of rain in a few hours. The area’s also had fires recently, causing less soil absorption so all that water flows down and picks up an especially nasty mix at the front end. Thoughts and prayers to the families of those lost and/or missing.
In the mountains, it doesn’t always have to rain where you are for flash flooding to occur. Avoid low places and arroyos. Know your terrain and stay aware of the weather. Fascinating video of rainwater and debris flow making its way into washes in southern Utah. Don’t try this at home:
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If you’re into this stuff, check out The Landslide Blog. Great and current videos from around the world of erosion, earth movement, flash flooding, debris flows in different materials, geology, etc. You can get sucked in and carried away (ha-ha)
Here’s a video from JPL discussing features on Mars that indicate drainage, liquid flow and similar features here on Earth. Evidence of an ancient liquid past and a current dry environment is one mystery the Curiosity Rover is trying to solve by going to Mt. Sharp. Go Rover!
Addition: The El Reno tornado was a record 2 1/2 miles wide. Video here. It’s easy to see when a few miles wide tornado spins off multiple vortices, hits in the evening, and is rain-wrapped, that even veteran chasers can underestimate it. It’s like the supercell is dragging its belly on the ground.
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As a blogger and writer and weather-interested layman:
I suspect everyone’s been moved by the beauty of nature, and felt wonder, fear, and awe at its power and mystery. Some people keep going back and try to figure out how it works as well. There’s an element of thrill-seeking to the hunt, and adrenalin, no doubt. It’s extremely risky chasing down tornadoes time and again, putting yourself so dangerously close, but the goal is to know more, and to stay as safe as possible under the circumstances.
There’s been a lot of data gathered and science done that has drastically improved forecasting, preparation and warning time, and our understanding of tornadoes. That’s no doubt saved many lives. Storm-chasers also bear witness to the death and destruction in the wake of tornadoes, so to everyone who’s suffered, my condolences.
It might be helpful to the Samaras family to visit his site as he has a DVD for sale.
Here’s Tim Samaras discussing his work in 2004. R.I.P.
The Prospect has a good article here on Parmenides (no longer free). Stanford’s page here.
“By these arguments, Parmenides arrives at his picture of the world as a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Needless to say, scholars have disagreed over exactly what he meant. They have questioned whether he meant that the universe was one thing, or only that it was undifferentiated.”
“According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting “fictions”. Each rests upon a “mistake”, the commingling of “qualities of the imagination” or “impressions of reflection” with “external” impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither.“
and also:
“Unlike Hume, however, he (Kant) undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes.“
If you have an hour, the drilling team gives a presentation and a Q and A. They explain the significance of the first non-Earth drilling.
They’ve driven the Rover over to a flat area of rocks they call ‘John Klein,’ in a depressed region called ‘Yellowknife Bay,’ beyond Glenelg which was originally a target point from the landing site. There’s a group of likely fine-grained (siltstone or mudstone?) rocks on the Martian ground. They’ve photographed white veins in the rocks amongst other features, and used the ChemCam to determine the veins are probably a calcium sulfate, which forms on Earth usually due to water percolating through rocks, but they’re still doing analysis.
You can download these photos or view them a slideshow, and the Rover team keeps updating them with each new tool they use and each new location they move the Rover. You can track the whole mission that way in photos with captions explaining what’s going on.
Here’s animation of how the drill works (follow that link for all video updates).
‘NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity during a two-year prime mission to assess whether areas inside Gale Crater ever offered a habitable environment for microbes. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.’
-Unlike Earth with its dynamic interior and tectonic plates, relatively strong magnetic field, thick and dynamic atmosphere etc., Mars is a bit like a time capsule. With just over 50% the diameter of Earth, about 38% the gravity, and less than 1% the atmosphere we’ll be able to get a much better picture of what happened during the formation of our solar system about 4 1/2 billion years ago as it’s much less disturbed. The trip up the rock face in Gale Crater over the next few years is like a trip back through time. What happened to Mars? Did the Earth and Mars have common experiences?
A December 4th, 2012 livestream overview of the mission. Ashwin Vasavada’s talk starts about min 15:25, and is pretty easy to follow for non-scientists and lay people like myself:
My belated condolences to the family, friends, and colleagues of Roger Sandall, who passed away on August 11th, 2012. He was an Australian thinker and critic of cultural relativism, romantic-primitivism and the Noble Savage. He was a keen observer of the ways in which certain strains of Western thought interact with the non-Western, and often, tribal worlds.
While not as strong as in Australia, we’ve seen the rise of multicultural apologetics in the U.S. regarding the native population: “Well, we robbed this land from the Indians, anyways.” Sandall highlights the problems and hubris of such sentiment, and what can become the “Disneyfication” of the natives and the historical record.
They’ve made a wind map of Gale Crater based on the data received, and there are possibly dustless dust-devils, or convective vortices that occur around noon of a Mars day passing over the Rover. The Rover has stopped at a place called Rocknest, and from this article:
‘Scientists theorize that in Mars’ distant past its environment may have been quite different, with persistent water and a thicker atmosphere. NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission will investigate possible losses from the upper atmosphere when it arrives at Mars in 2014.
With these initial sniffs of Martian atmosphere, SAM also made the most sensitive measurements ever to search for methane gas on Mars. Preliminary results reveal little to no methane. Methane is of interest as a simple precursor chemical for life. On Earth, it can be produced by either biological or non-biological processes.
Methane has been difficult to detect from Earth or the current generation of Mars orbiters because the gas exists on Mars only in traces, if at all.’
Still driving towards Mt. Sharp. Some cool pics in slideshow format. Link to NASA videos.
Addition: Have they already found some data suggesting proof of sub-surface microbial life at Rocknest? Stay tuned.
Brief update on the potential evidence for liquid water.
Here’s a video from JPL comparing similar features here on Earth:
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New photo of the Rover’s first scoop of Martian soil.
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Felix Baumgartner’s jump from 23 miles up, livestream here.
Addition: Baumgartner made it! Highest manned balloon flight. Highest free fall to Earth from about 127,600 feet or so, or just over 24 miles (perhaps not the longest in duration as he was at 4 min 22 sec and Kittinger was 4 min 36 sec). He may have been the first to achieve the speed of sound without being in a craft.
Another Addition: That’s 128,100 feet, 4 min 20 sec freefall, and he did break the sound barrier. He did not have the longest free fall: This record still belongs to Kittinger.
“From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep,” said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. “Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them. This is the first time we’re actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it.”
Apparently, it’s sedimentary conglomerate. Rounded rocks smoothed by water and deposited in a cement like structure, which is now jutting above the surface as it lays in a large alluvial fan bed. Comparison photo from Chile, back on Earth, of what appears to be a similar phenomenon. The Rover is still headed towards Glenelg.
Video comparison on alluvial fans between Las Vegas and L.A. and on Mars, where the Rover sits:
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Thanks to everyone in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory living on Mars time!
They’re still heading to Mt. Sharp, driving the rover 400 meters toward Glenelg:
‘Sol 38 (Sept. 13, 2012) was destined to be a driving day for NASA’s latest edition to the Martian landscape. Curiosity perambulated over 105 feet (32 meters) of unpaved Gale Crater during yesterday’s drive. The rover’s odometer now clocks in at 466 feet (142 meters) covered since the landing on Aug. 5.’
Scheduled landing is at 10:31 pm PDT, today, Sunday, August 5th, 2012 (1:31 am EDT). Videos, a countdown clock, and links to live NASA feed.
Here in Seattle, there’s a free event at the Museum Of Flight with activities for the kids and speakers from NASA, Aerojet, and the UW leading up to the landing..
Let’s hope all goes well! Here’s the dramatic 7 minutes of terror video:
It sent back some thumbnail photos from either side of the Rover before the feed was lost and Mars set. Thanks to everyone at the Museum Of Flight, NASA, and the thousands of people who worked on Curiosity for so long. Yes!
Some ideas I picked up at the event (for other interested non-scientists/astronomers):
-Curiosity isn’t necessarily looking for life, but it’s looking for the conditions that make life possible here on Earth with its 10 instruments, such as trying to determine the origins of the methane on Mars’s surface by being better able to analyze the kind of carbon (12 or 14) in the atmosphere to find its source. It’s also much better able to look for amino acids (the building blocks of life on Earth) and better able to analyze the rock and crystal samples it picks up. It’s got a cool laser. It’s about the size of a Mini-Cooper.
-Unlike Earth with its dynamic interior and tectonic plates, relatively strong magnetic field, thick and dynamic atmosphere etc., Mars is a bit like a time capsule. With just over 50% the diameter of Earth, about 38% the gravity, and less than 1% the atmosphere we’ll be able to get a much better picture of what happened during the formation of our solar system about 4 1/2 billion years ago as it’s much less disturbed. The trip up the rock face in Gale Crater over the next few years is like a trip back through time. What happened to Mars? Did the Earth and Mars have common experiences?
“The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks.”
They’re still going over the 2012 data, but an apparent triumph for the Standard Model and the structure being built atop 20th century physics.
‘Curiosity is scheduled to land at approximately 10:31 p.m. PDT Aug. 5 (1:31 a.m. EDT, Aug. 6).’
and
‘The landing target ellipse had been approximately 12 miles wide and 16 miles long (20 kilometers by 25 kilometers). Continuing analysis of the new landing system’s capabilities has allowed mission planners to shrink the area to approximately 4 miles wide and 12 miles long (7 kilometers by 20 kilometers), assuming winds and other atmospheric conditions are as predicted.’
University of California TV interviews Vivek Sharma in Spetember 2011, who is in charge of finding the Higgs if it’s there. Thanks to a friend for the link, for interested laypeople like myself.
Mt. Sharp sits in Gale Crater, where Curiosity is headed.
“Mount Sharp is the only place we can currently access on Mars where we can investigate this transition in one stratigraphic sequence,” said Caltech’s John Grotzinger, chief scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory. “The hope of this mission is to find evidence of a habitable environment; the promise is to get the story of an important environmental breakpoint in the deep history of the planet. This transition likely occurred billions of years ago — maybe even predating the oldest well-preserved rocks on Earth.’
The water find is less probable. Expected landing date is August 6th, 2012. Let’s hope it goes well.
A little more detail about the February 11th, 2012 5.9 earthquake off the coast of Oregon.
Related On This Site: The last big Cascadia subduction zone earthquake likely occurred on Jan 27th, 1700, at magnitude 9.0. The article suggests an occurence anywhere from 300-350 year intervals up to 400-600 year average intervals (new research suggests the former). It’s just over 311 years and counting.
A view of the tornado from the south. More with Greg Forbes, at the Weather Channel. More from Jeff Masters at Weather Underground on the outbreak. Via the IndyStar, some more video and eyewitness reports. Via the Tucson Citizen:
‘In Henryville, an EF-4 tornado — the second-highest on the Fujita scale that measures tornadic force — brought 175-mph winds and stayed on the ground for more than 50 miles’
As always, thoughts and prayers with those lost, their families and loved ones, and the communities affected.
Addition: Link sent in by a reader. Surveillance camera footage from the Henryville Junior/Senior High School.
‘The longest record for a subduction zone is from Cascadia, where scientists have linked buried marshes and submarine landslides with a series of about 22 megaquake quakes going back 10,000 years. The time between quakes ranges from 200 to 1,000 years, with an average of about 500 years’
Related On This Site: The last big Cascadia subduction zone earthquake likely occurred on Jan 27th, 1700, at magnitude 9.0. The article suggests an occurence anywhere from 300-350 year intervals up to 400-600 year average intervals (new research suggests the former). It’s just over 311 years and counting.
Opportunity is still going! NASA’s rover page with photos. Wikipedia’s page on the Martian climate. From an interested observer, thank you to everyone who has put so much into these missions.
Some links for non-scientists like myself: A commenter links here. CERN article here and background article here. One page explanation by different physicists about what it is and why they’re looking for it.
‘There is a deeper level that tells us that physical reality is all about causations. Causations that propagate at only one speed. The speed we refer to as the speed of light, denoted by the magical symbol “c”. Nothing goes faster, and nothing goes any slower.’
“The amount of devastation is going to be unbelievable,” says Rob Witter, coastal geologist with the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries. “People aren’t going to be ready for this. Even if they are prepared, they are going to be surprised by the level of devastation.”
The last big Cascadia subduction zone earthquake likely occurred on Jan 27th, 1700, at magnitude 9.0. The article suggests an occurence anywhere from 300-350 year intervals up to 400-600 year average intervals (new research suggests the former). It’s just over 311 years and counting.
“The good news about the region’s shallow faults is they don’t pop very often, Sherrod said. Repeat times seem to range between 700 and several thousand years. The bad news is Sherrod and his colleagues keep finding more.”
And also from the Times, click here for more of the Seattle area’s earthquake history.
It occurred at approximately 10:35 a.m. PST. A list of responders of those who felt it and their distance from the epicenter. They don’t think that it was related to volcanic activity.
“The following is a neat little experiment whose result may be counterintuitive to some of those who embrace the “all bodies fall the same way inside earth’s gravity” ‘doctrine’ without quite understanding it.”
Towards the end of the video, it’s suggested that the physical sciences have now separated themselves from the binds of metaphysics (or as I presume, the binds of certain kinds of metaphysics: Aristotelian, in the case of Galileo and cosmology in the 16th century and onwards).
We have perhaps returned to open questions of infinity as posed by the pre-Socratics, and freed such high-end mathematical thinking from many a metaphysician, or natural philosopher, or theologian; thus establishing natural science as a confluence and continuance of Enlightenment development. Onward we go. Of course this view, while possibly accurate, relies on its own assumptions.
As sent in by a reader: Kelly Ross makes the Kantian metaphysical argument here:
“Kant does not think we can know, or even imagine, the universe as either finite or infinite, in space or in time, because space and time are only forms of perception and cannot be imagined or visualized as absolute wholes. The universe, as the place of things in themselves, is not in space or in time and so is neither finite nor infinite in space or in time. Thus there cannot be an a priori, rational or metaphysical, cosmology.”
And while this may have freed Kant from the metaphysical disputes of his day, especially both Rationalist and Empiricist as he synthesized both, what do the current thinkers about such matters stand to gain by being tied into Kantian metaphysics (his Copernican revolution)?
Addition: As I’ve discussed with many people, I don’t have a specific answer as of now. Kant was deeply tied in to Newton’s laws, and stayed abreast of the developments of his day (Any metaphysician of similar weight would probably have to deal with Einstein, QED etc) . He wanted to put metaphysics on the same footing as the sciences, and it’s doubtful he succeeded. The rest of us are picking through what he did achieve, which has been highly influential.
“Some people, professors, thinkers, philosophers and whatnot, like to talk about bringing the humanities and sciences together in a comfortable marriage, “just like it used to be.” I say this is a terrible idea “
Indeed. In fact, I say it’s a failure on the part of many a humanities department not to maintain a curriculum without devolving into balkanization and politicization…thus pathetically trying to copy science in search of a new curriculum. Nice try.
I’m a non-scientist, so this is probably partially understood, somewhat accurate, and certainly dated:
Here is a well-done video from the Sprites Project at the University of Alaska:
During what is normally a cloud to ground lightning strike during a thunderstorm, there is occasionally a discharge of energy above the cloud, high up in the atmosphere. These phenomenae are called blue jets, red sprites, and elves. They are faint, require a dark background against which to view them, and also require that you be far enough away to see the storm from a distance (preferably from aircraft or a mountain overlooking a plain).
“Sprites are highly structured discharges lasting 5 to 100 ms and extending from 40 to 85 km altitude which result from intense electric fields following a major redistribution of electric charge in the troposphere — usually a positive cloud-to-ground return stroke.”
The Runaway Breakdown thesis here’s a quote from wikipedia by Nikolai Lehtinen:
“In the upper atmosphere, cosmic rays striking air molecules within thunderstorms can supply the relativistic electrons which trigger a breakdown in “runaway” mode. The breakdown region is a conductive plasma many tens of meters long, and it can supply the “seed” which triggers a lightning flash.”
The previous record was 7 in in diameter, and fell to the ground in Aurora, Nebraska in 2003. This is not quite official yet, but is measuring 8 in in diameter and weighing in at 1 lb 15 oz, and was perhaps as large as 11 in before it melted to measured size.
Here’s a graphic on hail formation, and some more information here. It takes a tremendous amount of lift to keep stones that big aloft.
‘Sometimes my sympathy for science magazines (in print and online), which try to keep intelligent readers informed on the progress in basic science, gets dampened by observing how they end up providing a narrow-sighted look at things’
and
‘Muon radiography is indeed a promising technique for several applications, not only against smuggling of nuclear material or -God forbid- nuclear weapons. The Italian researchers are involved in a European Union funded project to detect screened radioactive sources illegally introduced into trucks bringing scrap iron to foundries’
