One hundred years ago, in 1910...

Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published the first volume of Principia Mathematica, (commonly abbreviated as PM) one of the most important works on the foundations of mathematics; the second and third volumes were published in 1912 and 1913. This monumental (both in size, scope and complexity) was attempt to derive all mathematical truths from a fixed set of rules and axioms in symbolic logic. Cited by The Modern Library as #23 of the hundred most important non-fiction works of the century, it's also referred to as 'the most important scientific or mathematical work, which no one has read." (Largely due to it's scope and the need to master a symbolic logic syntactical language invented by Russell and Whitehead.)
As an example, it takes until page 379 of volume I, for Prop. 54.43 to be proven. This is a proof that  -- given the limited number of axioms and relational rules posited in PM:
"1 + 1 = 2".
Here it is:

This proof is actually completed in the section on cardinal arithmetic in volume II page 86, accompanied by the comment, "The above proposition is occasionally useful."  :)

IceCube: Badgers and Neutrinos at the South Pole

"Construction of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory was completed at the the South Pole in Antarctica on December 18, 2010 New Zealand time. This scientific milestone marks completion of the world's largest neutrino detector and a powerful tool for exploring the Universe" (from the link in the Title).
IceCube is the world's largest neutrino 'observatory' and is located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, at the earth's South Pole in Antarctica.
Badgers? The University of Wisconsin at Madison is the lead instituion of the project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.
  The function of of IceCub is to detect and collect information on neutrinos (uncharged, extremely light particles created by the decay of radioactive materials, particles that lack an electric charge.) Trillions of neutrinos pass through each of our bodies every day, but there is little chance that even one of them would interact with an antom in our bodies in a lifetime.
  The IceCube devices located at the South Pole actually 'looks' North, using the entire Earth as a filter to block out surface radiation, etc.
  The telescope/detector consists of over 4000 Complex sensors, deployed on 'strings' like Christmas lights, at depths in the ice starting between 4750ft. and 8000 feet beneath the surface. (!). It turns our the one of the best materials to embed and enclose such sensors is pure ice, and the miles-thick Antactic ice bed is exactly such a material. The sensors on the strings lowered in holes drilled in the ice by hot-water drilling apparatus don't start until about a mile below the surface, to filter out excess particles coming from the surface.

  What is this all supposed to tells us: more information about the growth and death of stellar processes in the early universe, information about 'dark matter' and 'dark energy', the existense of WIMPS ('weakly interacting massive particles') and much more.

   The amazing part of the device/telescople is its size: more then one cubic kilometer.
Here are some illustrative diagrams:

(That's the Eiffel Tower on the right,

for size comparison)

Monday-Tuesday, Dec. 20-21: TOTAL LUNAR ECLIPSE IN ALL NORTH AMERICA

Well, it's been about three years since we in North America got to see a total lunar eclipse, but there will be one late Monday night-Tuesday morning:
 Earth's shadow will totally engulf the Moon from 2:41 to 3:53 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, or 11:41 p.m. to 12:53 a.m. Pacific Standard Time; the earlier parts of the eclipse start and end about an hour beforehand and afterward.
Alas, it looks like here in MN, it will be cloudy and not visible, but do check. The next total lunar eclipse visible in all North America will not happen until
April 14-15, 2014  :(

For more info, check: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/home/111597159.html

"The Pale Blue Dot" - the greatest photograph ever taken

This is my nomination for the greatest photograph ever taken by mankind.
Taken by the spacecraft Voyager I in 1990,at a distance of 3,781,782,502 (almost 4 billion miles) from where it was launched. it shows our planet Earth -- "The Pale Blue Dot" as never seen before. The photo almost never happened -- it was not in NASA's approved activities, and it took a long series of ever-increasingly-public requests from the USA's most 'notable' writer on Astronomy -- Carl Sagan -- to finally convince NASA to try. NASA was worried that pointing Voyager I's narrow-field camera back toward the Earth (and the Sun) might damage it's sensors; but in the end, the photo was made.
Details:
The picture was taken using a narrow-angle camera at 32° above the ecliptic and it was created using blue, green, and violet filters. Narrow-angle cameras, as opposed to wide-angle cameras, are equipped to photograph specific details in an area of interest. The light band over Earth is an artifact of sunlight scattering in the camera's optics, resulting from the small angle between the Earth and the Sun. Earth takes up less than a single pixel—NASA says "only 0.12 pixel in size."
That's it -- that's us.
Voyager  I and its companion Voyager II continue on into interstellar space, and after 33 years, are still sending back data.
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

Here is a comment from Sagan's book "Pale Blue Dot", Random House, 1994.
https://planetary.org/bluedot_poster.html

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. 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."

Double click the image to enlarge, and see our entire planet , as the 'pale blue dot' in the upper band. The colored bands are artifacts of the multi-color-filtered imaging process.

A reproduction of this photo appears in NASA's public-viewing and movie gallery. The photo needs to be replaced several times a year, because it "wears out". So many people want to go up to it, and touch the "Pale Blue Dot" for themselves...

ALERT! The Geminid Meteor Shower

The largest and most impressive meteor shower -- called the 'Geminid' shower -- will occur this year on Dec. 13-14th. So bundle up if it's cold and go out and take a look.
Best viewing is after midnight until dawn on the Dec. 14th.
Of course, if in your area the night is cloudy, you're out of luck. :(
Otherwise, you can expect about 120 meteor streaks per hour, and possibly some large fireballs.
The other meteor showers during the year (like the Perseids) are believed to be caused by debris shed by comets during their orbits around our sun. The interesting part about the Geminid shower (named because it appears to be centered around the constellation Gemini) is that it's known to come from a particular weird object named 3200 Phaethon, which doesn't appear to shed nearly enough material to account for the year's largest meteor shower.

Information at: http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-geminid-meteor-shower-defies-explanation.html

Particle Physics, the Standard Model, Dark Matter and everything...

A great site from the particle data group at the Lawrence BerkeleyNational Laboratory: supported by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation:
 http://particleadventure.org/

"The Shield of Achilles', by W. H. Auden

One of the greatest commentaries on modern war, constrastion with the visions of the 'Heroic Era;...

The Shield of Achilles
W. H. Auden

---

She looked over his shoulder
       For vines and olive trees,
     Marble well-governed cities
       And ships upon untamed seas,
     But there on the shining metal
       His hands had put instead
     An artificial wilderness
       And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
   No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, 
   Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
   An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line, 
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
   Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
   No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
   Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For ritual pieties,
     White flower-garlanded heifers,
       Libation and sacrifice,
     But there on the shining metal
       Where the altar should have been,
     She saw by his flickering forge-light
       Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
   Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
   A crowd of ordinary decent folk
   Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
   That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
   And could not hope for help and no help came:
   What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For athletes at their games,
     Men and women in a dance
       Moving their sweet limbs
     Quick, quick, to music,
       But there on the shining shield
     His hands had set no dancing-floor
       But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, 
   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

     The thin-lipped armorer,
       Hephaestos, hobbled away,
     Thetis of the shining breasts
       Cried out in dismay
     At what the god had wrought
       To please her son, the strong
     Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
       Who would not live long.

The Fine Structure Constant

Well, it's very late, so let's talk about one of the most interesting and obscure "things/values/contstants/whatever" in the universe: the 'fine structure constant', universally represented by the Greek letter alpha 'α'.
It's a coupling constant, in that it characterizes the strengh of the electromagetic interactions of everything.
In other words, it's fundamentally involved in one of the four fundamental interactions in the universe:
Electromagnetism
the strong nuclear force
the weak nuclear force, and
gravitation.
(PS: That's all there is, as we know it)
Alpha has always been mysterious, since it's a dimensionless number -- not 'meters per second' or 'pounds per square foot' or anything -- it's just a number. Where the hell did it come from, and why is it what it is, and not something else?

Here's a prophetic comment from the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, more than 40 years ago:
There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant e the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to -0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!

Feynman anticipated by a great leap of intuition and genius, that  'alpha' IS actually related to pi and and e (the base of natural logarithms), as has been subsequently shown - maybe.

But it's still a fundamental issue in the 'anthropic' question about physical theories: are the theories we use to explain the universe -- right down to its fundamental constants -- a necessary result that observations of the physical universe have to be compatible with the intelligent life which observes it? (Take an aspirin here).
It's relatively-easily calculated that alpha (the fine-structure constant) could not be greatly different from what it is, in our universe: a small variation on either side would make it impossible for stars to form, and eventually for carbon and oxygen atoms to be created through nuclear synthesis: no carbon atoms = no carbon-based lifeforms like us. Thus also, no one to measure these constants....

So, physicists still ask -- why 'this' rather than 'that'? ...

PS: this is still an open and controversial question. Some recent experimental evidence suggests that this constant: isn't.
It may now or have in the past varied in different parts of our universe. If this is the case, it is still unclear what this means...
Ref:
http://www.physorg.com/news202921592.html

The 'Big Bang' and cosmic background radiation

In about the middle of the 20th Century, cosmologists had come up with two basic competing theories about the beginning of our universe: the 'Steady State' theory and what popularly became known as the 'Big Bang' theory. The 'Steady State' theory maintained that the universe had always been around, and would continue to be so, without noticeable change. Fred Hoyle was probably the most popularly-known proponent of this theory.
Sputnik and the Russian space program actually made a big contribution to research leading to discoveries in this area.
Working at Bell Labs in 1964, Arno Penzia and Robert Wilson were trying to perfect means of communicating with satellites in orbit. To measure these faint signals, they had to eliminate ALL the interfering noise, from radios, television transmissions, nearby radar and radio transmissions, etc. They suppressed interference from the heat in the receiver itself by cooling it with liquid helium to −269 °C, only 4 °C above absolute zero. But still, there was this residual signal -- they even thought this might be from 'irregularities' in their large horn antenna (picture), caused from the accumulation of pigeon droppings. But even when the large horn antenna was thoroughly scrubbed, the residual signal remained.
Penzias and Wilson were not cosmologists or theoretical physicsts, but got in contact with Robert H. Dicke, Jim Peebles, and David Wilkinson, astrophysicists at Princeton University just 60 km (40 miles) away, who were preparing to search for microwave radiation in this region of the spectrum. Dicke and his colleagues reasoned that the Big Bang must have scattered not only the matter that condensed into galaxies but also must have released a tremendous blast of radiation. With the proper instrumentation, this radiation should be detectable. (wikipedia).
After talking to Robert Dicke at length, Penzias and Wilson invited them all down to the Bell Labs facility in New Jersey, to actually listen to -- and see on monitors -- the residual 'noise' they were recording. To avoid controversy, their results and interpretations were published in separate papers.

In 1978, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint discovery.

To put it succintly, there is no longer any argument about the 'beginning' of the universe, when it happened, and a good part of its history since then. Aside from all the other evidence, there is no other explanation for the pervasive 3 degree K blackbody radiation which pervades the universe: it's the predicted and calculated remnant of the 'Big Bang' event which created this universe. End of story.

How confident are we? Check the attached photo, with the predicted vs. measured radiation, together with the 1% error bars.

PS: It must seem rather demeaning now, for Penzias and Wilson having to spend days on their hands and knees inside the big horn antenna, scrubbing all the surfaces with bleach, to remove all the pigeon shit.
Worth it, perhaps, for a Nobel Prize.

PPS: Bell Labs - whose scientists invented the transistor, the intergrated circuit, the photovoltaic cell, the C programming language, the UNIX operating system, the first wireless local area network, etc. was effectively disbanded. As of now, there is reportedly no one doing basic research.
Hope your cell phone makes you happy.

The Bell Labs Horn Antenna In Crawford Hill, NJ (now a National Historic Site)

The data from the original scans from Bell Labs, correlated with the specific numerical predictions from the models of the 'Big Bang' theory. End of subject, as they say.

A 'Science Joke' and the meaning of 'limiting conditions'

A geneticist, a physiologist and a physicist were summoned to meet a wealthy racehorse magnate. He told them he would give a million pounds to the one who could accurately identify race-winning horses. After six months of hard work, they returned to present their results to the expectant millionaire.


The geneticist said, "I've looked into all the current genetic research, checked blood-lines going back decades, but there are just too many behavioural and environmental factors. I can't help."

The physiologist said, "I've looked at muscle mass, bone volume and density, and all the other factors I can think of, but the problem's too complex. There's just no guarantee of predicting a winner."

Finally, the physicist calmly walks up to the millionaire and gives him an index card. "Here you go," he says "I've found an equation that solves the problem for you."

"Wow," said the millionaire, "That's impressive...I'll get my cheque book."

"Great. But there's one thing you should know," said the physicist. "It only works for a spherically symmetric horse travelling in a vacuum."

An old explanation, for an old saying...

There's an old saying 'close enough for all practical purposes...' which has a very good physical model/explanation.
If you are in a classroom with an equal number of males and females, separate the two sets and have all the males stand on one side of the room, and all the females on the other.
At a given command, have each set of people move toward each other, so that each line of people exactly halves the distance between them.
In theory, no matter how many times you repeat this command, the two groups will never reach each other...
In practice, you will find that after a relatively few number of instances, the two groups will be close enough together 'for all practical purposes.'   :)

Got a particle accelerator in your desk drawer?

Not a facetious question: yes, you do, if you have a roll of Scotch tape (the old kind, not the newer 'Magic Transparent' stuff).

It's been known since the precursor to the current tape was invented in the 1930's that if you quickly peeled off the tape from its roll, it emits a very faint blue light. You can actually see this if you want to take the time a trouble: take a roll of this tape (the package-sealing size works well) into a completely dark room, like a closed closet with no lights. Wait about 30 minutes, so that your eyes become adjusted to the lack of light (see 'rhodopsin' or 'visual purple' on the web for the reasons). Then, very quickly peel back a length of tape from the roll -- you should clearly see a faint blue light coming from the region where the tape is being pulled from the roll. The reason: the all-important conservation of mass/energy: the breaking of molecular bonds at this boundary causes electrons to change their energy state, and the excess energy is emitted as photons: particles of light in a particular blue part of the spectrum.

(PS: a similar phenomenon can be observed -- in the same 'dark closet scenario' -- with two people: one observer and one person crunching/chewing peppermint hard candies. The same blue light phenomenon can be observed, although in this case, there are concommittent dangers - deflection of proper attention if the members are sexually attracted, and the danger of tooth or filling damage from crunching hard candies.

So, back to the 'particle accelerator' thing:
it has recently been discovered and reported that this same 'peeling Scotch tape off the roll' function -- if done at high and continuous speed in a vacuum -- actually generates a relatively coherent beam of X-rays, strong enough for example to image human finger bones on photographic plates.
Reference: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/64111/title/Tale_of_the_tape_
So, your roll of Scotch packing tape is really, a particle accelerator (X-ray machine) in disguise (well, given a good vacuum and the right equipment to peel it off.)
The physical explanation for this phenomenon is still unknown.

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut (Little Red Riding Hood)

For those who have forgotten, or those too young ever to have seen this classic piece, I reprint it here. For reasons which may be called 'meaning dissonance' the piece is actually rather hard to read, since the well-known words of the story are replaced by similar-sounding words of totally different meaning. The best way I think to enjoy the piece is to present it to someone and have them try to read it aloud -- just read the words as written and not try to gather any meaning from them. The results are pretty hilarious.

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut: Annulled Furry Starry


Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle
cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock florist. Disc ladle gull often worry ladle
cluck wetter putty ladle rat hut, end fur disc raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat
Rotten Hut.

Wan moaning Rat Rotten Hut's murder colder inset: "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy
ladle basking winsome burden barter end shirker cockles. Tick disc ladle basking
tudor cordage offer groin murder hoe lifts honor udder site offer florist.
Shaker lake, dun stopper laundry wrote! Dun stopper peck floors! Dun daily-doily
inner florist, end yonder nor sorghum stenches dun stopper torque wet strainers."

"Hoe-cake, murder," resplendent Ladle Rat Rotten Hot, end tickle ladle basking
end stuttered oft. Honor wrote tudor cordage offer groin murder, Ladle Rat
Rotten Hut mitten anomalous woof.

"Wail, wail, wail," set disc wicket woof, "evanescent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut!
Wares or putty ladle gull goring wizard ladle basking?"

"Armor goring tumor groin murder's," reprisal ladle gull. "Grammars seeking bet.
Armor ticking arson burden barter end shirker cockles."
"O hoe! Heifer blessing woke," setter wicket woof, butter taught tomb shelf, "Oil
tickle shirt court tudor cordage offer groin murder. Oil ketchup wetter letter,
end den -- O bore!"

Soda wicket woof tucker shirt court, end whinney retched a cordage offer groin
murder, picket inner widow end sore debtor oil worming worse lion inner bet.
Inner flesh disc abdominal woof lipped honor betting adder rope. Zany pool dawn
a groin murder's nut cup end gnat gun, any curdle dope inner bet.

Inner ladle wile Ladle Rat Rotten Hut a raft attar cordage end ranker dough ball.

"Comb ink, sweat hard," setter wicket woof, disgracing is verse. Ladle Rat
Rotten Hut entity bet rum end stud buyer groin murder's bet.

"O grammar," crater ladle gull, "wart bag icer gut! A nervous sausage bag ice!"
"Buttered lucky chew whiff, doling," whiskered disc ratchet woof, wetter wicket
small.

"O grammar, water bag noise! A nervous sore suture anomalous prognosis!"

"Buttered small your whiff," inserter woof, ants mouse worse waddling.

"O grammar, water bag mousey gut! A nervous sore suture bag mouse!"

Daze worry on forger nut gull's lest warts. Oil offer sodden throne offer
carvers an sprinkling otter bet, disc curl end bloat Thursday woof ceased pore
Ladle Rat Rotten Hut end garbled erupt.

Mural: Yonder nor sorghum stenches shut ladle gulls stopper torque wet strainers.

Chernobyl and Nuclear Power - part II

OK, I orginally planned to write a long article about the Chernobyl disaster, but soon realized that there is little I can add to the detailed analysis and account found on Wikipedia at the link accessible on the header line of this post.
Interesting points I would highlight:
the disaster was caused by a culture of neglect, incompetency, disregarding legal and written procedures for both the constuction and operation of the facility, and indeed in all aspects of design, manufacture, construction, operation and regulation of these plants.
The specific RBMK design of the Chernobyl reactors only exists in the (previous) Soviet Union, and would not be allowed to be built in the West.
The 'final score' on the incident is somewhat controversial, since data from the incident has been slanted or outright fabricated for politcal purposes.
As far as actual, verified scientific data goes:
An international assessment of the health effects of the Chernobyl accident is contained in a series of reports by the United Nations Scientific Committee of the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR). These are available online for those who wish to read or download them.
In the aftermath of the accident, 237 people suffered from acute radiation sickness, of whom 31 died within the first three months. Many of these were the 'first responders.'
The UNSCEAR and IAEA reports state specifically that "there has been no increase in the rate of birth defects or abnormalities, or solid cancers (such as lung cancer) "
There is a statistically estimated figure that approximately 4,000 additional cases of thyroid cancer may occur througout the lifetimes of all individuals exposed. These cancers are among the most easily treated and have the highest survival rates of any cancer types, typically  the five-year survival rate of thyroid cancer is 96%, and 92% after 30 years.
There is no evidence of long term genetic effects in human or animal populations in the region (which would be expected, since any genetic anomalies would only last one generation, and then die off).
The Prypiat Exclusion Zone is open for tourism with proper permits, and many web photo logs show the current state of this abandoned contryside.
There are still life-long residents of the area which refused to be evacuated  -- some hiding in the woods, to later return to their homes.
I highly recommend the book Medvedev, Grigori (1989). The Truth About Chernobyl. VAAP. First American edition published by Basic Books in 1991. ISBN 2-226-04031-5 (Hardcover). At the time of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, Medvedev was deputy director of the main industrial department in the Soviet Ministry of Energy dealing with the construction of nuclear power stations. Since Medvedev knew the Chernobyl plant well, he was sent back as a special investigator immediately after the 1986 catastrophe.

PS: This cannot happen in the West

PPS: One of the descriptions of a plant worker  -- who (like all of them) knew nothing of what was occurring, went up a stairway leading to Reactor Room #4 of the plant, while the disaster/meltdown was occurring-- he looked out into the huge reactor containment room, where the gigantic steam explosion had just occurred, the graphite containment of the reactor core was burning and on fire, and the core was melting down...
The air in the huge room was filled with the bright blue light of Cerenkov radiation, and all the brightly burning graphite blocks...
He said it was 'very beautiful'.
He died a few days later from the direct radiation exposure he received. A coworker of his -- right behind him on the stairway, but who did not go into the reactor room -- survived.

Super-K !

The Super-Kamiokande (full name as Super-Kamioka Nucleon Decay Experiments) is a neutrino observatory near the city of Hidu, Japan. It's located more than 3,200 feet underground. Contained in a stainless steel tank more than 135 feet tall and 128 fee in diameter, are almost 14,000 photomultiplier tubes, to record the very occasional interaction of a neutrino, with an atom in a molecule of the more than 50,000 gallons of ultra-pure water with which the tank is filled.

Here is an very cool photograph of the tank being filled, complete with a boat with two technicians in it... click on the photo for full image.
PS: the light shining on the underwater photomultipliers, reminds me greatly of Monet's 'Water Lily' series of paintings...

Remembrance

I saw an old friend the other day

In San Francisco by the Bay
It took me back to only yesterday
The years somehow let slip away
We laughed and talked about the days gone by
And brushed a tear away with a sigh
We promised not to let it be this long
Like the old refrain from an old, old song.

Remember old friends we’ve made along the way
The gifts they’ve given stay with us every day

Looking back it makes me wonder
Where we’re going and how long we’ll stay
I know the road brings rain and thunder
But for the journey what will we pay?
I often think the times get crazier

As this old world goes round and round
But just the memory makes it easier
As the highway goes up and down

Lately word’s been coming back to me
There’s a few I will no longer see
Their faces will be seen no more along the road
There’ll be a few less hands to hold
But for the ones whose journey’s ended
Though they started so much the same
In the hearts of those befriended
Burns a candle with a silver flame
-- Mary McCaslin, "Old Friends"

Chernobyl and Nuclear Power - part I

I'm saying 'Part I' because this is a big topic, and likely best broken down into multiple posts.

There's a technical and a personal part to this, here's most of the personal.
In April of 1986, my late wife and I went (again, for about the eighth time) to Europe on a three-or-four week vacation. we landed in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, on Friday, April 25, 1986. We had a sort-of-interary, but having 3-month Eurail passes and having been through a lot of European territory on other trips, really planned things day-by-day. Well, we had visas/entry permits for USSR/Russia.Ukraine and intended go to first to Kiev, but the news reports when we landed said it was quite gray and cold; so we decided to go the Paris-Madrid way instead, and hook back up into Russia later in the trip. So took the train to Paris, stayed overnight, and then took the next train to Spain.
(Don't let anyone tell you any crap about 'April in Paris'. April in Paris is almost always bloody cold, damp, rainy and rotten. So we kept on going to Spain... (Alicante, on the Med. coast -- really nice). )
Reactor number four at the Chernobyl complex, outside of the town of Pripyat in the Ukraine, about 60 miles NW of Kiev, suffered a catastrophic accident on that Saturday, April 26, 1986, resulting in the worst nuclear accident in history: the only 'Level 7' event on the International Nuclear Event Scale which has ever happened.
As a matter of course, the then Soviet Union denied the event, hid  and denied details of it, and censored and forbade all press coverage or even mention of the event.
We first heard of it when still in Spain, about a week after the event, when the radioactive plume from the Chernobyl plant drifted into Western Europe, was delected, analyzed and its origin determined. This made big headlines in all papers.
Upon travelling back to southern France, we noted then:
the huge fields of flowers, lavender, etc. outside of St.Paul-de-Vance were gone: cut down -- only things growning in greenhouses were left.
When dining in (some really terrific) inns and restaurants there, we were often laughingly encouraged to have 'The Russian Salad' with our meal: canned peas and carrots, since all 'grown-outside' fruits, vegetables, etc. had been ordered destroyed by the French government. A few days later, that fear spread to even hydroponically-grown produce, because of fear of water comtamination. (Likely, all of these concerns were overreactions, but more real data on that later.)
In any case, aside from just being warmer, spending some time on the Spanish seacoast, etc. it likely was an accidentally good decision, not to go directly to Kiev upon arrival...

Ok, So Where Them Neanderthals Go, Anyway?

A recent research study printed in the October issue of "Current Anthropology" strongly suggests that the rather sudden (in geologic time scale) disappearance of the Neanderthals was due to volcanism.
Specifically, the article identifies "the Campanian Ignimbrite super-eruption which occurred around 40,000 years ago in modern day Italy, and a smaller eruption thought to have occurred around the same time in the Caucasus Mountains. The researchers argue that these eruptions caused a “volcanic winter” as ash clouds obscured the sun’s rays, possibly for years. The climatic shift devastated the region’s ecosystems, “possibly resulting in the mass death of hominids and prey animals and the severe alteration of foraging zones.” (end)

A New but Difficult Tourist Destination: "Kryptos"

"Kryptos" is a sculpture by Jim Sanborn, done in 1991. It is emplaced on the grounds of the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia.
The sculpture contains four sections, each of encrypted text. In addition, Sanborn placed around the grounds of CIA headquarters several other pieces, including slabs bearing morse code, the pictures of a compass rose, and a duck pond. Misdirection? Kryptos itself was designed and executed such that it's not possible to photograph or view the entire piece at one time. The decryption of the messages contained in Kryptos have occupied a great deal of 'spare time' and a similar slice of 'computing power' of the greatest information-related organizations in the world, since Kryptos' installation in 1991.
Sanborn worked with a CIA employee named Ed Scheidt, Chairman of the CIA Cryptographic Center, to come up with the cryptographic systems used on the sculpture. Sanborn has revealed that the sculpture contains a riddle within a riddle, which will be solvable only after the four encrypted passages have been decrypted. He said that he gave the complete solution at the time of the sculpture's dedication to then-CIA director William H. Webster. Sanborn said, however, that he had not given Webster the entire solution. He did, however, confirm that where in part 2 it says "Who knows the exact location? Only WW," that "WW" was intended to refer to William Webster. Sanborn also confirmed that should he die before the entire sculpture becomes deciphered that there will be someone able to confirm the solution. How this will take place is unknown.

The ciphertext is in 4 parts/pages. The first three have at considerable effort been decoded. This was made more difficult because Sanborn disclosed that there had been an omission of a character which made the solution more difficult, and he subsequently provided that character.

The first three parts (including intentional misspellings) of the sculpture, when decrypted say:
Part I:
BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION

Part II:
IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE HOWS THAT POSSIBLE ? THEY USED THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGRUUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO


On April 19, 2006, Sanborn contacted the Kryptos Group (an online community dedicated to the Kryptos puzzle) to inform them that the accepted solution to part 2 was wrong. He said that he made an error in the sculpture by omitting an "X" used to indicate a break for aesthetic reasons, and that the decrypted text which ended "...FOUR SECONDS WEST ID BY ROWS" should actually be "...FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO".
The actual location listed in GPS coordinates is about 200 feet SouthEast of the sculpture itself

Part III:
SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q (?)

This is a paraphrased retelling of Howard Carter's comments on the orginal opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt. The question was posed by Lord Carnavon, to whom Carter replied, "Yes! Wonderful things!"

Part IV:
part IV - which Sanborn explicitly has said depends on the decipherments of parts I-III, has never been deciphered, despite the best efforts of the CIA, the NSA and all their computer resources. There is also a Yahoo Group of more than 2000 members (like the SETI project) who dedicate parralel time on their own computers toward the decipherment of this text.

This likely rates as the most interesting and important unsolved cipher in history.

Incidentally, the public cannot visit or view the sculpture, since it is in the Federally-resticted CIA headquarters in Langley, VA. Not even US Senators are permitted on the site: only those specifically granted clearance by the related agencies are allowed any access to the site at all.

Those not interested in, or offended by firearms, please ignore

Bob Cogan
STI Trojan with new ivory grips

Received today my custom STI Trojan .45 back from Bob Cogan at Accurate Plating and Weaponry,Inc.
http://www.apwcogan.com/
I cannot recommend Bob and his company enough.
The firearm:
Modifications from the original standard STI Trojan 5":

hard-chrome plating
trigger work
complete work-over, disassemly, polishing,beburring, lubrication and reassembly
new wood grips
new magazine guide
replace 5 inch with 6 inch STI barrel and add supporting ramp
custom build single chamber 4-port compensator head (!)
add Burris red-dot optical sight - quick acquistion and the supreme solution for those of us with eyesight difficulties.

Lockheed SR-71 "Blackbird"

The Lockheed SR-71 "Blackbird" aircraft -- likely the greatest aircraft every designed and made by man. Designed at the Lockheed 'Skunk Works' by a team headied by Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, likely the greatest aircraft designer ever.

Capable of flying at over 85,000 ft (more than 16 miles high), at mach 3+ (over 2,200 mph).

How about:

Los Angeles, CA to Washington, DC in 64 min 20 sec, avg speed 2,144.8 mph (1990 - its retirement flight on the way to a museum in DC)

or

New York to London: 1 hr, 54 min. 56.4 sec (1974) -- your average Boeing 747 flight time is about 6 1/2 hours.

Enough numbers: check the Wikipedia page and any number of other SR-71 pages for photos and info.

This aircraft -- and others like the U-2 -- were tested out of the ultra-secret area just northwest of the Nevada Test Site (nuclear test site), usually named 'Area 51'.

This site is still the most secret and hidden area in the USA if not the world. You can check that out on Google too, but beware of UFO weirdos.

Check the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_51

and the independent 'Dreamland Resort' page at http://www.dreamlandresort.com/ for real info.

Since more than 50 years have passed since the start of many of these projects, much has been declassified, and the people sworn to secrecy under penalty of treason are now free to tell stories, and many of those still alive are delighted to finally be able to do so.

It's hard to even understand today the level of secrecy and paranoia surrounding all of this, nuch of which continues.

During the development and testing of the SR-71 (the successor to the U2 which proved vulnerable to anti-aircraft missiles, when pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Russia), no one without a 'TOP SECRET' government clearance was allowed to work on, consult on or even view this aircraft. Even the Groom Lake (Area 51) base personnel without such a clearance were locked in windowless rooms such as their living quarters, when the aircraft was even being momentarily outside. Testing and flights occurred at night, so that Russian (and American) satellites could not photograph the aircraft. And on and on...

Now, one former test pilot for the program has told a great story of one of his flights:

On a test flight of an early, prototype version of the SR-71 flying from Groom Lake toward California, the aircraft suddenly became uncontrollable, flipped upside down and was not recoverable. The pilot ejected safely, and the aircraft crashed.

Uninjured, the pilot (back in his regular USAF uniform the next day) was in a cafe just across the border in California, when a couple of 'good 'ol boys' in a long bed pickup truck pulled up, parked and approached him. They said something like, "Hey, we got your aircraft here." What they had recovered and had in the back of their pickup was the cockpit canopy from the crashed aircraft. At this time, NO ONE without a top secret security clearance had EVER seen even a part of this aircraft. The pilot told them they could not say anything about this to anyone, ever, and told them that the aircraft had a nuclear weapon on board (everyone knew about and was paranoid about this in the 1960's). They agreed, and hung around the cafe while the pilot called his command and the California Highway Patrol, who arrived to confiscate their pickup and hold it until the USAF could arrive to take custody of the aircraft part. Then the FBI arrived on site and took the guys away to their main office in Sacramento, interrogated them, polygraphed them, and had them swear to and sign National Security agreements not to mention any element of any part of this incident, under penalty of treason.

(A treason conviction carries the death penalty and the FBI made sure they understood that this would be the case.)

After that, the FBI took the pilot into custody, interrogated and polygraphed him, and then asked if he would agree to being questioned under 'truth serum' (sodium pentothal). He agreed, of course, since if he refused he'd lose his security clearance and thus his job.

He says in his memoir, that he doesn't remember anything the FBI asked him or what he answered, although it must have satisfied them, but it got him into real trouble with his wife.

The FBI just brought him home, carried him into his house and dropped him on the sofa in the living room. He was still so drugged and 'out of it',  his wife assumed that he had just gone out and gotten drunk. :)

PS: as of the time of writing, he and his wife have been happily married for more than 60 years.

For tecnically-oriented movie fans...

If you've been to a large IMAX Theatre lately, the film being projected on the screen is illuminated by an extremely-high-power xenon short-arc lamp, usually of 15,000 Watts.

The lamp itself is made of fused pure quartz -- the only material that can withstand the high pressures, temperature and high-level light outlet. The electrodes at each end are made of thorium-doped tungsten, and the assembly needs to be circulating water-cooled. The quartz lamp itself is filled with xenon (Xe, a heavy, colorless, odorless noble gas, atomic weight 54), at a pressure of almost 400 psi.

The color spectrum of these lamps is very similar to normal sunlight (very desirable) but with some specific high peaks in the infrared region. In operation, they are similar to high-powered welder's arcs and even momentary unfiltered viewing of the lamp in operation can be enough to cause irreparable eye damage. In practice the entire lamp assembly in enclosed in an explosion and fireproof refrigerator sized housing, with "welder's goggle-strength" viewing ports built in. During the full-power operation of the lamp, significant heat, IR and IV output  and ozone production occurs, so other needed cooling and venting, shutdown mechanisms, etc., are also included in the lamp cabinet.

Lamps are shipped to the customer in multiple-walled, heavily damped and cushioned containers, with the lamp itself inclosed in an explosion-shielding sub-container. (Think of a 400 PSI pressurized glass bomb, and what would happed if it was  banged hard again something.)
Once delivered, technicians upack the lamp from its packing and container, and install the lamp in the cabinet: all while wearing a head-to-toe 'bomb-protective' type suit, in case of lamp failure or accident. The quartz lamp cannot be touched directly by hand in any place, since any skin oils on the quartz will cause a process called 'devitrification', which can lead to spot darkening on the lamp and in the worst cases, catastropic lamp failure. (This is not a good thing: a nice-sized explosion of glass shards of over 1500 degrees F).

When the lamp ages and nears the end of its useful life (1000-2000 hours depending on usage) the operator technicans can tell by tracking the number of hours in service, the percentage of rated output, and the amount of current needed to produce the needed level of illumination. When this happens, the technicians need -- of course -- to power down the lamp/power supply, wait until all cools to room temperature and no ozone build-up is recorded; then the cabinet is opened, the 'bomb-suited' technicians remove the lamp and replace it. The used lamp could technically just be thrown-away: all its component part are innocuous and inert and pose no environmental hazard. Except that they're pressurized bombs made of glass, waiting to go off. As a result, the used lamps are repacked in their original shipping containers and returned to the manufacturer, who (remotely) destroys them. (Incidently, no recycling: none of the sigificant parts such as the tungsten electrodes or the fused quartz globe are reusable).

So, that's one of the behind-the-scenes things at your IMAX (assuming you've got one of the big ones). There are multiple kinds of IMAX theatres, processes etc. -- but that is as they say, another story. :)

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons, attribution: Atlant

The "Demon Core"

Time for some more early-nuclear age stories.

A 14-lb sphere of relatively-pure plutonium (just slightly below the 'critical mass' to cause a runaway reaction or explosion) actually went critical on two occasions at the Los Alamos Labory in 1945 and 1946. Both instances resulted in the death by radiation poisoning of a noted scientist involved.
The experiments involved were (or have come to be) known as "tickling the dragon's tail" since they both involved in some manner, slowly, slowly building up the reflections of neutrons (which cause fission in plutonium atoms) into this nicely-machined spherical piece of metal. Incidentally, the core itself was relative safe to handle, and any number of people did, holding it in their hands (it's rather heavy) and remarking how warm it was: the refined plutonium sphere gave off a fair amount of heat as a byproduct of its continuing nuclear decay.Surprisingly, it's not particularly dangerous to hold: plutonium decays by emitting alpha particles (a helium nucleus: two protons and two neutrons bound together) which which won't penetrate a few centimeters of air, a piece of paper, clothing or the human skin. When inhaled or ingested, that's another matter...
Following adapted from the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_K._Daghlian,_Jr.

Anyway,in the experiment, Daghlian was attempting to build a neutron reflector by manually stacking a series of 4.4 kg tungsten carbide bricks in an incremental fashion around the plutonium core. The purpose of the neutron reflector was to reduce the mass required for the plutonium core to attain criticality.

As he was moving the final brick over the assembly, neutron counters alerted Daghlian to the fact that the addition of this brick would render the system supercritical. As he withdrew his hand, he accidentally dropped the brick onto the center of the assembly. Since the assembly was nearly in the critical state, the accidental addition of the last brick caused the reaction to go immediately into the prompt critical region of supercritical behavior. This resulted in a power excursion.

Daghlian panicked immediately after dropping the brick and attempted to knock off the brick without success; he was forced to partially disassemble the tungsten-carbide pile to halt the reaction. Daghlian was estimated to have received a dose of 510 rem (5.1 Sv) of neutron radiation, from a yield of 10^16 fissions. He died 25 days later from acute radiation poisoning.

In the second (as perhaps more famous) incident using this same plutonium core, the noted Physicist Louis Slotin was also killed.
On May 21, 1946, Slotin and seven other colleagues performed an experiment that involved the creation of one of the first steps of a fission reaction by placing two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around a plutonium core. The experiment used the same plutonium core that had irradiated Daghlian, later called the "Demon core" for its role in the two accidents. Slotin grasped the upper beryllium hemisphere with his left hand through a thumb hole at the top while he maintained the separation of the half-spheres using the blade of a screwdriver with his right hand, having removed the shims normally used.Using a screwdriver was not a normal part of the experimental protocol.

At 3:20 p.m., the screwdriver slipped and the upper beryllium hemisphere fell, causing a "prompt critical" reaction and a burst of hard radiation. At the time, the scientists in the room observed the "blue glow" of air ionization and felt a "heat wave". In addition, Slotin experienced a sour taste in his mouth and an intense burning sensation in his left hand. Slotin instinctively jerked his left hand upward, lifting the upper beryllium hemisphere and dropping it to the floor, ending the reaction. However, he had already been exposed to a lethal dose (around 2100 rems, or 21 Sv) of neutron and gamma radiation. Slotin's radiation dose was equivalent to the amount that he would have been exposed to by being 1500 m (4800 ft) away from the detonation of an atomic bomb.

As soon as Slotin left the building, he vomited, a common reaction from exposure to extremely intense ionizing radiation. Slotin's colleagues rushed him to the hospital, but irreversible damage had already been done. His parents were informed of their son's inevitable death and a number of volunteers donated blood for transfusions, but the efforts proved futile. Louis Slotin died nine days later on May 30, in the presence of his parents. He was buried in Winnipeg on June 2, 1946.

At first, the incident was classified and not made known even within the laboratory; Robert Oppenheimer and other colleagues later reported severe emotional distress at having to carry on with normal work and social activities while they secretly knew that their colleague lay dying.

This particular plutonium core ("The Demon Core") was later used in the Crossroads Able nuclear test.

The largest and perhaps oldest organism on earth?

What is the oldest organism on earth? What is the largest? Both of these turn out to to be difficult questions and may really depend on how you define the terms. In terms of area, a 'fungal mat' in Oregon discovered in 1992 is said to cover approximately 1500 acres, but both the area and whether this should be considered one organism is still a matter of debate. A single Giant Sequoia tree may weigh 4.5 million pounds. The bristlecone pine is a long-lived single organism with one specimen (named "Methuselah") having been ring-dated at almost 4,800 year old -- making it the oldest 'non-clonal' organism. The most intriguing candidate for both crowns is a 'group' of aspens in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, which actually has a name: "Pando" -- Latin for "I spread."
Pando is more than 106 acres in size, and consists of more than 47,000 tree trunks (you'd assume that these are separate organisms, but they're not) collectively weighing more than 13 million pounds.
Although aspens do come in male and female varieties, the species seldom flowers and instead an individual propagates itself by vegetative reproduction: it sends out roots, which travel some distance before they sprout up and appear as separate plants. In fact, they are all genetically-identical clones of the orginal individual -- all just upshoots of a common root system, and can truly be considered one organism. That would make Pando the largest (by weight) of any organism on the planet. The oldest? The bristlecone pine is no longer considered the oldest or longest-living organism by most biologists, due to the existence of 'clonal colonies' such as Pando. Other species than aspens spread similarly, and one of the oldest (calculated) clone is a creosote bush estimated to be 11,700 years old.
Earlier biologists and botanists have postulated that some clones (the whole collective of visible, above-ground manifestations is actually called a 'clone') may have lifespans in the millions of years, or even be effectively immortal, barring a cataclysmic event; and even cataclysmic events such as fires and conflagrations are actually beneficial to these clones. These events do not destroy the deep-below-ground clonal root structure, and actually clear the area of competing species -- such as conifers -- with which they compete largely for needed sunlight.
Earlier this year, the 'immortality' idea was effectively discredited, however. Like any organism, even a clone's system was found to accumulate -- albeit very slowly -- natural mutations which affect and reduce the vegetative reproduction rates of these clonal colonies. Estimate show that after perhaps 20,000 years, the 'spreading capability' (reproductive viability) of the clonal structure (not the individual trees -- they die after 200 years at the most) may decline by as much as 50%, threatening the continued expansion of the clone.
Neverthess, both the Pando and other aspen clones in Europe have been estimated to be between at least 10,000 to 20,000 years old.

Scientists call for a global nuclear renaissance in new study

Scientists outline a 20-year master plan for the global renaissance of nuclear energy that could see nuclear reactors with replaceable parts, portable mini-reactors, and ship-borne reactors supplying countries with clean energy, in research published today in the journal Science.

The scientists, from Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge, suggest a two-stage plan in their review paper that could see countries with existing nuclear infrastructure replacing or extending the life of nuclear power stations, followed by a second phase of global expansion in the industry by the year 2030. The team say their roadmap could fill an energy gap as old nuclear, gas and coal fired plants around the world are decommissioned, while helping to reduce the planet's dependency on fossil fuels.


Professor Robin Grimes, from the Department of Materials at Imperial College London, says: "Our study explores the exciting opportunities that a renaissance in nuclear energy could bring to the world. Imagine portable nuclear power plants at the end of their working lives that can be safely shipped back by to the manufacturer for recycling, eliminating the need for countries to deal with radioactive waste. With the right investment, these new technologies could be feasible. Concerns about climate change, energy security and depleting fossil fuel reserves have spurred a revival of interest in nuclear power generation and our research sets out a strategy for growing the industry long-term, while processing and transporting nuclear waste in a safe and responsible way."

The researchers suggest in their study that based on how technologies are developing, new types of reactors could come online that are much more efficient than current reactors by 2030. At the moment, most countries have light water reactors, which only use a small percentage of the uranium for energy, which means that the uranium is used inefficiently. The team suggest that new 'fast reactors' could be developed that could use uranium approximately 15 times more efficiently, which would mean that uranium supplies could last longer, ensuring energy security for countries.

Another idea is to develop reactors with replaceable parts so that they can last in excess of 70 years, compared to 40 or 50 years that plants can currently operate at. Reactors are subjected to harsh conditions including extreme radiation and temperatures, meaning that parts degrade over time, affecting the life of the reactor. Making replaceable parts for reactors would make them more cost effective and safe to run over longer periods of time
==============================================
Note from Bill Krog:
it's already happening: check out info about Hyperion Power Generation at http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/
They are in the production stage now -- and have hundreds of overseas orders -- for the "Hyperion Power Module", which basically is likened to a nuclear battery.
Which technology licensed to them by Los Alamos National Laboratories, the company is in production of a Nuclear Power Module, which is basically a 1.5 meter by 2 meter, self contained and sealed cube. It needs no complicated outside control station or system, is self-regulating and incapable of 'melt-down' type accidents, and is deliverable to the emplacement site worldwide by flatbed truck, ship or railcar. Once its delivered, all that's needed is (for security purposes) to dig a hole, bury it and surround it by a fence. The modular units will deliver 25MW of electicity energy (enough for about 20-25,000 American-style homes ) for 8-10 years. ("Stackable" for greater output). They are emplaced by the Company, and when they near the end of their useful life, the Company simply replaces them, like a battery.
They have NO carbon output/footprint, release NO gases, warmed water, particulates, etc, into the atmosphere, produce NO measureable radioacivity outside their own structure, cannot 'melt-down' or 'runaway' and neither use nor produce any nuclear materials which are usable in weapons-making applications, and fully meet all IAEA non-proliferation standards. You won't find a wind- or solar-based solution which will give you years of 25MW of base-load electricity 24/7/365, reagardless of whether the wind is blowing or not, or if the sun is shining or not, and which doesn't require hundreds or thousands of acres of land.

"We Gotta Get Outa This Place...

As the old song says.
Stephen Hawking (a bright person) said recently that mankind's only chance of long-term survival lies in colonising space, as humans drain Earth of resources and face a terrifying array of new threats.

"The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet," the renowned astrophysicist told the website Big Think, a forum which airs ideas on many subjects from experts.

"Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space," he added.
He warned that the human race was likely to face an increased number of events that threaten its very existence, as the Cuban missile crisis did in 1962.
The Cold War showdown saw the United States and Soviet Union in a confrontation over Soviet missiles deployed in Cuba, near US shores, and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
"We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history," said Hawking.
"Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill."If we want to survive beyond the next century, "our future is in space," added the scientist.
"That is why I'm in favour of manned, or should I say 'personed', space flight."
His comments came after he warned in a recent television series that mankind should avoid contact with aliens at all costs, as the consequences could be devastating.

NuDets

Or 'Nuclear Detonations' as you may know them.
Here a link to a computer-animated 'art work', showing all the known nuclear detonations worlwide by date, by country, etc. Very nicely done.
http://gizmodo.com/5600704/the-explosions-of-every-nuclear-bomb-to-date

The US total of 1030 corresponds to the official number acknowledged and published in the 'official record' of such things, the US Government publication "United States Nuclear Tests - July 1945 through September 1942"
DOE/NV -- 209 REV 15 Pub. December 2000.

If you'd like to see exactly where these 1030 detonations occurred, you can check my Google Map at:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=116945134295436436626.00044ff490bf518b65562&ll=44.150681,-148.447266&spn=36.757543,107.050781&t=h&z=4

This lists/shows the sites of all nuclear tests done in the USA, including Alaska, Nevada, Colorado, and Mississippi.
The map indicates the shot name, type, purpose, published yield and the the location of the surface-ground-zero of the drillhole or emplacement location. The location is accurate -- according to the US Government publication -- to to +- 100 meters or so; so the subsidence craters do not necessarily line up with the map markers, due both to the the location error, and to that fact that the map marker is the drill hole or emplacement location, not necessarily the spot directly underneath the center of the existant subsidence crater (if any).
NOTE: the Google map has five pages and is slow to load due to the number of data points and markers. In addition, if you are on Page 1 for example, only the markers/data for those points on Page 1 are shown. Navigate to the other pages to redisplay the map, and show the appropriate points/markers, which are listed in alphabetical order by shot name.

PS: if you look up and zoom in on 'Sedan' on Page 4, when you zoom close enough you will see the labelled roads in a circle, surrounding this large cratering shot. If you follow 'Groom Lake Road" to the east from the top of the circular road, as it winds through the mountains and desert, in about 18 miles you will come to an airbase with runways, on a dry lake bed. This is the renowned "Area 51" where the USA to this day tests and flies experimental and ultra-secret aircraft.

'Extreme Skier Dies on K2'

It was reported today that skier and mountaineer Fredrik Ericcson died Friday, while trying to summit K2 in Pakistan -- the second-highest mountain in the world. Ericcson was attempting to be the first man to ski from summit to base camp on K2. According to his friends, Ericcson and his climbing partners had begun the 'summit push' between 1:00am and 1:30am in low-visibility weather. Somewhere along the summit route at about 8,300 meters (27,231 feet) Ericcson "lost his purchase and was unable to arrest his fall." (This would be a fall of almost 4,300 feet).

His body, resting at about 7,000 meters will remain where it lies and likely no attempt will be made to recover it, due to the extreme danger. K2 is considered much more difficult than Everest to ascend, and in terms of number of ascent attempts vs. number of climber deaths, is the most dangerous of all of the "eight-thousanders" (peaks over 8,000 meters) in the world.

BYU Scientists Convert Matter Into Mormonism

PROVO, UT—A team of physicists from Brigham Young University announced yesterday that they have succeeded in converting a tiny particle of matter into the truth and sanctity of the Book of Mormon.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/byu-scientists-convert-matter-into-mormonism,1681/

Poems from "A Space Child's Mother Goose"

published 1958: Verses by Frederick Winsor
===============================
1.
Probable-Possible, my black hen
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn't lay eggs is the Positive Now
Because she's unable to Postulate How.

8.
Three jolly sailors from Blaydon-on-Tyne
They went to sea in a bottle by Klein.
Since the sea was entirely inside the hull
The scenery seen was exceedingly dull.

20.
Russell and Whitehead and Hegel and Kant!
Maybe I shall and maybe I shan't.
Maybe I shan't and maybe I shall.
Kant Russell Whitehead, Hegel et. al.

Threes

by John Atherton (to be sung by Niels Bohr)


I think that I shall never c
A # lovelier than 3;
For 3 < 6 or 4,
And than 1 it's slightly more.
All things in nature come in 3s,
Like ... , trio's, Q.E.D.s;
While $s gain more dignity
if augmented 3 x 3 --
A 3 whose slender curves are pressed
By banks, for compound interest;
Oh, would that, paying loans or rent,
My rates were only 3%!
3² expands with rapture free,
And reaches toward infinity;
3 complements each x and y,
And intimately lives with pi.
A circle's # of °
Are best ÷ up by 3s,
But wrapped in dim obscurity
Is the square root of -3.
Atoms are split by men like me,
But only God is 1 in 3.

Untouched Meteorite Impact Crater Discovered By Google Earth

A pristine meteorite impact crater has been found in a remote area of the Sahara desert in southwest Egypt. The crater was originally noticed on Google Earth images, and is believed to be only a few thousand years old.
The 45-meter wide, 16-meter deep 'Kamil' crater -- in the Sahara desert -- was discovered by scientists examining Google Earth satellite photos.

"There are only 176 confirmed impact craters on the Earth’s surface, but most wear away quickly, and only 15 of them are smaller than 300 meters in diameter."

A New Possible Linear Accelerator at Cern

A new possible linear accelerator for electrons and positrons -- like the linear (straight line accelerator at Stanford University, now officially called 'SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory') is in the planning stage at CERN.  This straight line -- as opposed to a ring-shaped accelerator like the LHC) would accelerate electrons and their 'opposing' positron particles to almost the speed of light in opposite directions, and then whack them together, potentially yielding much amusement, doctoral theses and maybe even yet another glimpse into what all this universe thing is all about...

There is no gravity...

In what may indeed be only of the most important Physics papers of several decades, Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected mathematician and string theorist at the Unversity of Amsterdam, has pretty much supplied an entirely new phyisical view of that most mysterious of subjects: gravity. In Verlinde's view, gravity is not one of the four fundamental forces in the universe, and in fact, "doesn't really exist." The statement might have been made to be rather a provocation, but in Verlinde's view, as he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.

There is a public explication of this, in the New York Times article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravity.html?ref=science

Dr. Verlinde's paper is downloadable at:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0785

Note: according to the Times article, very few scientists claim to fully understand Verlinde's paper. He himself says to pay attention more to the words and the concepts, rather than the maths.

In the coming decades, much of real importance or interest may come from this...

NASA: not that it was ever perfect..

But at least it wasn't utterly, unbelievably, appallingly and increasingly irrelevant, downright stupid and knowingly being used as nothing more than a political tool, by someone who pledged to do better, and not to continue the crap which preceedeth.

Here's the money-shot quote from the current NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, testifying in public before Congress:

"When I became the NASA administrator, [Obama] charged me with three things, One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering."

So much for Kennedy's speech, for NASA's original space mission, and for everything else it once stood for, and for which we paid our tax monies for:  and for the most part gladly, since it lead to some of the greatest achievements of mankind as a species.

Now,  our former astronauts and real heros like John Glenn, Neal Armstrong and Eugene Cernan all publicly denounce and express dismay at the current Administration's supposed policies (That would be 'President Obama').

So, from a grand vision of mankind's future in space and the ultimate journey to the stars, ensuring homo sapiens' survival and continued evolution, we are now left with trying to encourage our own children to study more math and science in our failed educational system, and to help Muslim cultures and communities feel
good about themselves. And at the same time admitting that the USA is no longer able to do anything other than reach LEO  (low-earth-orbit) without the help of other countries.

So, since no one reads this anyway, I'll close this rant with a long quote from William James (1842-1910)
"If this be the whole fruit of the victory, we say; if the generations of mankind suffered and laid down their lives;

if prophets confessed and martyrs sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, and protract ... their contented and inoffensive lives,
-- why, at such a rate, better lose than win the battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be saved from so singularly flat a winding-up."

And few seem to notice, but this is a species-wide, depressing setback.
We used to be better, and braver.
Sic transit gloria mundi.

Check out the entire universe, from Planck's view...

Basically, the first view of the entire universe scan from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite - the successor to the COBE and WMAP projects. Amazing. The main disk of our galaxy The Milky Way and surrounding gas and dust clouds are the bright horizontal swath and swirl in the center. Even more interesting is the mottled and patterned parts of the image outside the glare of our galaxy. These show the approx 3 Deg. K Cosmic Background Radiation which permeates our view of the universe from all directions. This is the remnant of the 'Big Bang' and subsequent expansion of our universe, from about 13.7 billion years ago.
The Planck satellite will be making multiple scans of the universe over the next few years, and then with the help of computer programs, will mask out the obscuration of our galaxy and nearby stars, to show a more complete view of the structure of this universal remnant of the beginning of our universe. The study of the patterning and clustering in these images will provide crucial evidence about the nature of the universe in its very early 'expansionist' phase, before the formation of stars and galaxies.

PS: In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson at the Crawford Hill location of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel Township, New Jersey, had built a large radio receiver to basically test communications with satellites in space. They discovered the pervasive Cosmic Background Radiation, which they once thought was due to pigeon shit in the receiver. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery in 1978

PPS: the interchannel noise you see on television between or on unused channels -- and the static in the radio spectrum -- is also party due to this Cosmic Background Radiation, so you can actually watch something due to the 'early universe' on your TV.

Lines from T. S. Eliot

From "Burnt Norton" - #1 of the "Four Quartets"

Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

OK, I admit it and I'M SORRY OK????

So, here's the deal, since no one reads this anyway, sends me email, whatever, this seems pretty safe.
A long, long time ago when I was a lot younger, I went about the world, seeding the ground in a number of places, with a supply or iridium I just happened to have around (a different story altogether).
This of course, lead Luis Alvarez and others when they finally found evidence of this, to logically conclude that this was all a result of an asteroid collision, leading to the Chicxulub crater and the subsequent extinction of a large percentage of the 'dinosaurs.' In actuality, it was really IMHO a pretty funny joke.
But now that I'm almost 70 million years old, I felt it was time to share this with the precisely zero (0) people who read this.
Regards.

.45ACP

The new one.
Single-stack .45ACP 1911-type, from STI: Trojan 5.0
(http://www.stiguns.com/guns/Trojan5.0/Trojan50.php)
Custom work (hard chrome plating, fiber optic sights, etc. by the best gunsmith
I know: Bob Cogan at Accurate Plating And Weaponry
(http://www.apwcogan.com/)
Call Jason Selva -- the office manager, or Bob himself.

If you own a handgun, everyone has to have a 1911. It's a rule.

New Zen-like laser produces pico-second bursts of ... nothing.

In an advance that sounds almost Zen, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado at Boulder, have demonstrated a new type of pulsed laser that excels at not producing light. The new device generates sustained streams of "dark pulses" -- repeated dips in light intensity -- which is the opposite of the bright bursts in a typical pulsed laser.
("stand back, or I shall fire 60 trillionths of second of darkness at you...")

The Trouble With Boys (statistically speaking) WARNING! Contains mathematics

Probability and statistics are mind-confusing at times, even for those who work with them all the time.
Gary Foshee, a collector and designer of puzzles from Issaquah near Seattle walked to the lectern to present his talk. It consisted of the following three sentences:
"I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys?"
"The first thing you think is 'What has Tuesday got to do with it?'" said Foshee, deadpan. "Well, it has everything to do with it." And then he stepped down from the stage.
This is actually a very difficult question, made fascinating by the 'what the heck does Tuesday have to do with the result???"
Foshee's "boy born on a Tuesday" problem is a gem of the genre: easy to state, understandable to the layperson, yet with a completely counter-intuitive answer that can leave you with a smile on your face for days. If you have two children, and one is a boy, then the probability of having two boys is significantly different if you supply the extra information that the boy was born on a Tuesday. I'm not kidding.

Preliminary question: "I have two children. One of them is a boy. What is the probability I have two boys?"
This is a much easier question, though a controversial one. After the gathering ended, Foshee's Tuesday boy problem became a hotly discussed topic on blogs around the world. The main bone of contention was how to properly interpret the question. The way Foshee meant it is, of all the families with one boy and exactly one other child, what proportion of those families have two boys? :)
To answer the question you need to first look at all the equally likely combinations of two children it is possible to have: BG, GB, BB or GG. The question states that one child is a boy. So we can eliminate the GG, leaving us with just three options: BG, GB and BB. One out of these three scenarios is BB, so the probability of the two boys is 1/3 (not 1/2 as seems intuitive).  No big problem here, but then the fun begins:
Now we can repeat this technique for the original question. Let's list the equally likely possibilities of children, together with the days of the week they are born in. Let's call a boy born on a Tuesday a BTu. Our possible situations are:

■When the first child is a BTu and the second is a girl born on any day of the week: there are seven different possibilities.

■When the first child is a girl born on any day of the week and the second is a BTu: again, there are seven different possibilities.

■When the first child is a BTu and the second is a boy born on any day of the week: again there are seven different possibilities.

■Finally, there is the situation in which the first child is a boy born on any day of the week and the second child is a BTu – and this is where it gets interesting. There are seven different possibilities here too, but one of them – when both boys are born on a Tuesday – has already been counted when we considered the first to be a BTu and the second on any day of the week. So, since we are counting equally likely possibilities, we can only find an extra six possibilities here. To calculate probababilities, you can't double up on this stuff. :)
Summing up the totals, there are 7 + 7 + 7 + 6 = 27 different equally likely combinations of children with specified gender and birth day, and 13 of these combinations are two boys. So the answer is 13/27, which is very different from 1/3.

It seems remarkable that the probability of having two boys changes from 1/3 to 13/27 when the birth day of one boy is stated – yet it does, and it's quite a generous difference at that. In fact, if you repeat the question but specify a trait rarer than 1/7 the closer the probability will approach 1/2.

Life is strange...