The fiery history of blowing shit up mostly accident but then discovering something good. Generally, good for blowing stuff up, but with purpose.
Monthly Archives: September 2016
Science Denial Bad Guys and Good Guys
White Supremacy, Climate Science Denial, Trump, Alt-Right
Peter Sinclair suddenly realized it is all one big interconnected complex hole! (Well, whole, but more like a hole because of what we are throwing into it).
Look at this classic video he made a while back:
Then, check out his post, here.
A lot of stuff about the MadHouse Effect
I reviewed the Madhouse Effect HERE.
Get Energy Smart notes that only a day after the Madhouse Effect authors highlighted nine key deniers (including Bjorn Lomborg) in the Washington Post, that venerable newspaper publishes yet another bogus editorial (YABE) by Lomborg.
Jeesh.
See also:
EcoWatch: Michael Mann’s Hotlist of the 9 Most Prominent Climate Deniers
About an earlier editorial by Lomborg: Bjørn Lomborg WSJ Op Ed Is Stunningly Wrong
The National Academy of Sciences Writes One Of Those Big Letters
On September 20, 2016, 375 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 30 Nobel laureates, published an open letter to draw attention to the serious risks of climate change. The letter warns that the consequences of opting out of the Paris agreement would be severe and long-lasting for our planet’s climate and for the international credibility of the United States.
Very Smart Birds, Very Smart Bird Book
Crows are smart. Anyone who watches them for a while can figure this out.
But that is true of a lot of things. Your baby is smart (not really). Your dog is smart (not really). Ants are smart (sort of).
It takes a certain degree of objective research, as well as some serious philosophy of intelligence (to define what smart is) to really address this question. But when the research is done and the dust settles, crows are smart.
We were all amazed (or not, because we already knew that crows are smart) to find that New Caledonian crows made and used tools. Now, we know (see my most recent post at 10,000 Birds) that a nearly extinct Hawaiian crow is also a tool user. The interesting thing about this new finding is that it is highly unlikely that the Hawaiian crow and the New Caledonian crow descend from a tool using ancestor, according to the researchers who did this work. Rather, tool use arose independently in the two species. But, really, not so independently.
They are all crows, and crows are smart, and both of these species live in a particular habitat where this tool use makes sense, and competing species of bird that might otherwise be going after the resources the tool use allows access to are absent. So, the trait evolved twice, but not unexpectedly.
The Evolution and Development of Bird Intelligence
I want to point out two things about birds that you probably know. First, they share modalities with humans to a greater degree than most other species, even our fellow mammals. Second, many birds live under conditions where complex behavior would be selected for by long term Darwinian processes.
Most mammals are solitary, small and nocturnal, or if large, are diurnal herd animals or some sort of predator. They tend to be olfactory and have varying degrees of vision, etc. We, on the other hand, are highly visual, not very olfactory, diurnal, and have a complex social system, and so on. We share these traits, for the most part, with our fellow primates, but humans live in many non-primate habitats these days, so we tend to stand out as a bit odd. If you are reading this blog post, chances are that the nearest non-pet and non-human mammal that you could locate right now is a squirrel, and the actual nearest mammal is some sort of rodent that you would have a hard time finding.
But, the nearest animal with an interesting brain, and interesting behavior, is a bird. Go look out your window and report back. I’ll study this diagram on the evolution of intelligence while I await your return.
…
…
OK, I hope that was fun. Let us know what species it was in the comments, please.
The visual orientation, together with that second trait of smartness, combine to make birds and their smartness akin to human’s smartness to the degree that we subjectively see birds as “intelligent,” and that alone is interesting. But likely, we are both intelligent by objective criteria, about certain things.
Bird Brain: An Exploration of Avian Intelligence
He and his team “…have found striking similarities in the behaviour, ecology, neurobiology and cognitive mechanisms of corvids (crows, rooks, jackdaws and jays) and apes. [Suggesting that] these similarities are adaptations for solving similar social and ecological problems, such as finding, protecting and extracting food and living in a complex social world.”
The book is really great, the best book out there right now on animal intelligence, possibly the best book so far this year on birds. This is the kind of book you want laying around the house or classroom to learn stuff from. If you are writing or teaching about anything in evolution or behavior, this is a great way to key into the current work on bird intelligence.
Bird Brain
This is like a coffee table book in that it is slightly larger (not huge, just a little big) format, and full of great pictures, and the kind of book you can pick up and start reading anywhere. But it is also a book with a story, in a sense, or at least, an arc organizing the research being reported on. It is engagingly and well written and, very importantly, written by an expert.
I do respect journalists who become very interested in a topic and learn all about it and write it up, but there are limitations to such work. It is possible for various errors, minor or not, to sneak into such a work because the author is not deeply engaged in the way that a lifelong commitment to a work allows for. Bird Brain
I highly recommend Bird Brain
Here’s the TOC:
Subscribe to your eight favorite newspapers for $18.99 a month?
Wouldn’t that be great?
Many high end newspapers charge something like $10 a month to subscribe, just to the digital edition. But most people who use digital editions of newspapers scan several, pick and chose what to read, and end up reading them all for free because they don’t reach the limit of number of articles provided to a certain web browser per month.
But sometimes, one runs into that limit and suddenly can’t access articles for the last several days of the month. This hurts readers. (In some cases it hurts the papers. There are a half dozen items in the Washington Post right now that I’d like to blog about, sending thousands of readers to that paper, but I cant’ because I ran out of freebies early. Or they got stricter. Not sure.)
One can get around this by clearing cookies, switching web browsers, switching computers, etc. But this is unethical and defeatist in two ways. First, the writers and other staff actually do have valuable paid jobs, and ripping off the paper is ripping them off. Second, related but at a different scale, these are companies that may annoy us in various ways, but that we actually want to exist.
Due to new media and other considerations, newspapers, which may often be annoying but are still important, are facing an existential crisis. They have to make some money somehow. It simply is not true, though this philosophy arose during those heady days of the Time of Napster, that IF something can be downloaded from the internet, by any means, it IS therefore free, and any attempt to charge for it is IMMORAL.
One can also get around this by subscribing to the damn newspapers! And, if you have a fave, and that is the paper you generally read, do that!
But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the user scenario where several newspapers, not one, are roughly equally important to someone. For me, it is the Star Tribune, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and some subset of papers from Saint Paul, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco, and London. This is because I read and write about topics that are covered by all these papers. I do this to write a blog that does not make me enough money to subscribe to half dozen papers to the tune of $600. But, for personal pleasure and blogginess, I’d pay ten or even 18 bucks a month for a service that gave me all of this, or a choice of several.
So, I have a proposal, which is embodied in the headline of this post.
Netflix for Newspapers
Not necessarily run by Netflix, not necessarily restricted to newspapers. But mainly a paid monthly subscription to … to what? To all the newspapers? To your choice of six? To your choice of X for Y dollars, where the incremental increase per X of Y decreases until a point where you get them all for a hefty but not absurd cost, but allowing regular people to have easy access to, say, a half dozen or so of their favorites for the current cost of one or two subscriptions? Something?
Am I missing something? Is there already something like this out there? I doubt it, because if there was, someone would have tried to sell it to me by now. Why does this not exist? Can someone please arrange for this to exist?
Would you want this?
Ebola: Have more knowledge, need vaccine more
I just watched, at a the Twin Cities Science Film Festival, a film called Nzara ’76, which is about the first known Ebola outbreak, the one that gave it its name, in southern Sudan. That’s about 150 miles, as the Mvo-Mvo flies, north of my long term project area in the Ituri Forest, an impassable distance over an unforgiving terrain if you are a person, well within the migratory range of an Ebola carrying fruit bat.
Back in the day, when Ebola would strike here and there, killing dozens, then disappearing back into the wild as quickly as it came, there was not much movement to get a vaccine. Then, one day, a fruit bat, carrying ebola, dropped some bat spit covered fruit bits to the ground, which were later picked up and mouthed by a toddler, who became patient zero in a pandemic that would ultimately kill over 11,000 people and sicken nearly 30,000. That would be a good argument to get a damn vaccine.
But, one could argue that even though Ebola is known to have been around since the 1970s, and may have been around before that (entire villages falling to a deadly disease is known historically in the region, with no understanding of what the disease was), it only arose as an epidemic once, so really, what’s the big deal? Next epidemic we’ll attack much more efficiently and quickly, and only hundreds, if that, will die.
Aside from the fact that the morbidity and mortality tolls in the tens of thousands should not inure us to the death of dozens or hundreds, we should also consider that the conditions that allowed this pandemic to occur arose only recently, so a pandemic is actually more likely in the near future than it was in the near past. Also, and this is from new research, now that Ebola has infected tens of thousands, it has a temporary reservoir in the post-infection population.
Research that could not have been conducted before has now been conduced (and is ongoing) in the pandemic region. It is now understood that survivors can have ebola in their systems for long periods of time after infection, and that in some cases, they can pass this on. It can be passed on through both breast milk and semen. I assume it could be passed on through blood.
It is simply NOT the case that thousands of post pandemic West Africans are restarting ebola epidemics wherever they go. Post pandemic transmission has been rare, and quickly managed. It is probably true that ebola will eventually leave all the post pandemic people. Humans are not really a reservoir, long term, for ebola.
But, consider the fruit bats. The story I gave above about the start of the pandemic is almost certainly true, but at the same time, fruit bats in the region came up empty when tested for Ebola. There are a lot of reasons that would happen, beyond the scope of this post, but it serves as a model for a near future West Africa. Perhaps ebola will last a long time in some individuals. Perhaps previously infected individuals will become reinfected, but not get sick, and be carriers for a year, or six months.
An ebola pandemic is not going to resurface easily, or form this source, in this population, because of post pandemic harboring. But, here and there, some people may get the disease, and if there is another outbreak somewhere else, we now know that the public health problems are even more complicated than previously thought.
The obvious way to solve this problem is with a good vaccine that is widespread and regularly administered.
The research I’m referring to hear was reported at a conference in Antwerp, Belgium, on September 12, and is briefly written up here, in Nature.
A few highlights, and a caveat, from that work:
Researchers will soon publish the first confirmed report of a person without obvious Ebola symptoms infecting another person. A seemingly healthy mother in Guinea passed the virus to her nine-month-old daughter in breast milk, and the child died from Ebola-virus infection in August 2015…
…some people who became infected during the recent outbreak escaped detection. Miles Carroll… tracked 80 people who had contact with Ebola patients in Guinea but did not themselves become noticeably ill. Yet 15–20% of these contacts developed immune responses capable of neutralizing Ebola viruses, suggesting that they had contracted mild infections that went undetected.
[Researchers] traced a cluster of new Ebola cases to a man who transmitted the virus to a sexual partner 17 months after recovering from his infection…
Researchers must show sensitivity in communicating such findings, says virologist Stephan Günther of the Bernhard Nocht Institute, and take care not to make life more difficult than it already is for Ebola survivors, who face discrimination and lingering health problems. “We have to be careful to stress that these are very, very rare events.”
Dragging America Into the 20th Century
“?There are two types of nation” a recent Nature editorial begins; “…those that use the metric system and those that have put a man on the Moon.”
Such a pro-American jingoistic statement must be deep British irony. Anyway, the editorial continues …
The reliance of the United States on feet and pounds, along with its refusal to embrace metres and kilograms, baffles outsiders as much as it warms the hearts of some American patriots. But it is time for the country to give up on the curie, the roentgen, the rad and the rem.
This is about measuring radiation. There are several ways of measuring radiation. This has to do with the different ways radiation can exist, and the different kinds of effects it can have. For example, one might want a measure of biological damage, in order to measure, control, document, and discuss exposure in work places or disaster sites. The American tradition for this particular measure is the “rad” but by a 1970s convention that the US apparently ignores, it is the sievert.
The editorial points out the confusion, sometimes meaningful confusion, that arose in the wake of the Fukushima multiple meltdowns, when the Europeans and the Japanese were using sieverts and the Americans all had to pull out their slide rules to convert between sieverts and rads in order to keep track of what was going on. The Nature editorial notes,
Yes, it is possible to use both sets of measures, and to follow the rem numbers with the sievert numbers in brackets. In practice, this is what many US regulatory agencies do. But it is simply too awkward. The Australian government has publicly criticized the US system for creating confusion.
In the middle of an international nuclear-radiation incident, should emergency-response officials huddled in a situation room really need to whip out their calculators?
As I was reading this editorial, I recalled the space robot that essentially crashed into Mars instead of falling into a nice orbit, because the American part of the team was not using the SI (International System of Unites) method of calculating the movement of the robot’s mass. It seems that confusion over units could cause much worse disasters than losing a single (and expensive) robot.
The editors of Nature had the same thought.
Remember NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter, which was lost in 1999 when someone forgot to convert between imperial and metric units (even though they had plenty of time to check) — the spacecraft broke apart in the Martian atmosphere rather than smoothly entering orbit. Imagine if such an embarrassing error involved the life and safety of millions of people here on Earth.
Clearly, they have a point. The US nuclear industry resists this change because, they say, of cost. However, as Nature argues, it is already the case that the companies that manufacture equipment (and I’d guess software) for use in the nuclear industry already use both units, since they tend to be international.
The US should do this, and should go metric.
Grunt: The science of humans at war
Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
Roach is a well known and quite funny science writer who also wrote Stiff
This is a fun book, well researched, engagingly written, and informative. Also, off beat. Does human blood really draw sharks? What is the virtue of maggots, medicinally? How does the military test dangerous devices and the protections against them?
From the publisher:
Roach dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. She visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. At Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, we learn how diarrhea can be a threat to national security. Roach samples caffeinated meat, sniffs an archival sample of a World War II stink bomb, and stays up all night with the crew tending the missiles on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee. She answers questions not found in any other book on the military: Why is DARPA interested in ducks? How is a wedding gown like a bomb suit? Why are shrimp more dangerous to sailors than sharks?
I think you get the point!
Fun book, great bedtime reading.
Best Bird Book Of the Year So Far: What The Robin Knows by Jon Young
There was a dead rabbit in the middle of the road today. I suspected such a thing, nearby, just out of sight, and edible, because I noticed some crows taking off whenever a car went by. Then, when I went over, I could see the rabbit that they were feasting on between drive-bys.
I had been looking for rabbits lately, because of this: the cat had switched to hanging out by the upstairs window, the better to observe the just arriving Juncos (snow birds, it is fall). She had previously spent most of her time observing rabbits from the lower, ground level windows, until just the other day when, rather suddenly, all the rabbits disappeared. Until then, there was always a rabbit or two. In fact, the entire city had been recently invaded by rabbits, according to several reports, and now they seemed to be disappearing quickly. This, I assume, means that the coyotes finally got busy. Or, an epidemic of tularemia. Either way, something happened.
I once had a cat that was partly outdoors on Cape Cod. Well, the cat was indoors, but would escape. We’d go looking for it and always find it in a bush (a different bush every time) surrounded by no rabbits. All the other bushes would have rabbits nearby. But not the one with the cat in it. (Until, again, the coyotes showed up and ruined the rabbit-test method of finding the cat!)
Have you seen the film Dead Birds? See it if you can. This is a very important ethnographic film, of the old style, by Gardner, of a place in Highland New Guinea. Part of the story actually has to do with live birds, not dead ones, and how they are used by sentries at the outskirts if the village lands, during times of conflict, to detect the arrival of enemy combatants. You watch the birds, and you are watching the hidden predators.
Or you can listen to them. Or you can listen to the monkeys. Anything with an alarm call. I could engage you with story after story, if you and I both had the time, of finding very interesting and elusive critters out in the bush, mainly in Africa, by following up on the predator avoidance behavior of primates or birds.
And, this brings us to what I think is one of the best bird books ever.
What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World
And, of course, it isn’t just the robin, it is all the animals including birds, insects, and everything else. But Young is talking about birds, and it is certainly true that in most or possibly all habitats, it is the birds that, owing to their diurnal and highly visible and sound oriented nature, are telling you all this information about your mutual surroundings as well as about the bird itself.
To me, birding (and nature watching in general) is not so much about lengthening one’s list (though that is always fun) but, rather, about observing and understanding behavior. Young explores this, teaches a great deal about it, and places this mode of observation in the context of countless stories, or potential stories, about the world you are sharing with the birds you are watching.
This is a four or five dimensional look at a multidimensional world. Lucky for us humans, as primates, we share visual and audio modalities, and mostly ignore odor, and we have overlapping ranges in those modalities (to varying degrees). But birds fly (most of them, anyway) and are small and fast and there are many of them. In many places we live, we are the only diurnal visually-oriented non-bird. Indeed, while I’m sure my cat communes with the rabbits at a level I can’t possibly understand, I’m pretty sure I get the birds in ways she could not possibly get her paws around. (Which is why we don’t let her out of the house. She would prefer to eat them, rather than appreciate them!)
From the publisher, about the author:
Growing up near the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, Jon Young studied as a tracker and naturalist. For three decades, he has taught and mentored children and adults, combining Native skills practiced worldwide with the tools of modern field ecology, emphasizing the nearly lost art of understanding bird and animal language. The founder of OWLink Media, 8 Shields Institute, and the Shikari Tracking Guild, he consults with programs around the world. Jon has written or produced numerous books, audio, and multimedia projects. His website is www.birdlanguage.com. Married with six children, he lives in the woods above Santa Cruz, California.
Lots of science in this book, well documented and referenced. Simple black and white but very engaging graphics. So far my favorite bird book of the year.
Knife Attack in Saint Cloud: Terrorism, Racism, Guns
Update:
From WCCO:
An Islamic State-run news agency claims the man who stabbed and wounded eight people at a mall in Minnesota before being shot dead by an off-duty police officer was a “soldier of the Islamic State.”
Original Post:
We know nearly nothing about the Saint Cloud attack, but I’m going to offer some preliminary context-related thoughts anyway. Not conclusions or guesses, just context. (See below for some basic info on the attack.)
One thing you need to know is that Minnesota is a state with the least racist and most socially and culturally enlightened people in it. And, some of the most racist and anti-civilization people in it. Saint Cloud is, essentially, the capital of the latter subculture, a very racist place. This is Michele Bachmann territory.
This is one reason to be really careful about drawing conclusions about what happened there. When I hear “Saint Cloud,” “Stabbing Attack,” “Asked if Muslim,” and “Said Allah” all in the same report, my best guess is that a local Islamophobe tried to kill or injure recently immigrated Somalis (of which there are some) in Saint Cloud.
Gun nuts will point out that this is a case of a “good guy with a gun” doing some good. It is. But, the “good guy with a gun” was a cop. So, really, this is a cop stopping an attack. Meanwhile, apparently, the attacker did not do a lot of damage to others, because, it seems, he wasn’t using a gun. He was using a knife. So, no, “you could do the same thing (as some guy with a gun) with a knife or a piece of string therefore GUN FREEDOM!!!1!!” is not an argument.
If this does turn out to be an attack BY a Muslim on others in Saint Cloud, I suspect there will be white rage turned into violence soon in that community and nearby places such as Little Falls and Big Lake.
Report from the New York Times:
ST. CLOUD, Minn. — Eight people were injured during a stabbing attack at a Minnesota shopping mall that ended with the suspected attacker — who was dressed in a private security uniform and made references to Allah — shot dead by an off-duty police officer, authorities said.
…eight people were taken to St. Cloud Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries following the attack first reported about 8:15 p.m. Saturday at the Crossroads Center. One person was admitted. …
… an off-duty police officer… shot and killed the unidentified suspect, who was armed with a knife and wearing a private security firm uniform …
Local police had three previous encounters with the suspect, most for minor traffic violations…
Please Power Down Your White Privilege Now.
Back to school special:
I’d like to note that not every teacher who “moves to a school in the suburbs” does so for bad reasons. Some of them do so after being handed a $10,000 per annum pay cut and a contract with zero chance of a raise for the indefinite future or something else along those lines. In other words, while I strongly agree with Olivia Fantini, she may have some unexamined privilege of her own in blaming teachers for their own victimization.
Taxpayers, anti-tax organizations, and the elected officials bought and paid for by them are at the root of most of our problems in education. We used to fund education nearly well enough. Since the old days, it got more expensive and the basis for paying for it became, essentially, illegal in most states. THAT is where most of the blame should be placed.
Still a great video, though.
Pluto Has Tail, X-Rays
Did you ever notice that Pluto doesn’t have much of a tail? No, not that Pluto! This Pluto:
This has been known for a while. NASA noted this last year:
New Horizons has discovered a region of cold, dense ionized gas tens of thousands of miles beyond Pluto — the planet’s atmosphere being stripped away by the solar wind and lost to space. Beginning an hour and half after closest approach, the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument observed a cavity in the solar wind — the outflow of electrically charged particles from the Sun — between 48,000 miles (77,000 km) and 68,000 miles (109,000 km) downstream of Pluto. SWAP data revealed this cavity to be populated with nitrogen ions forming a “plasma tail” of undetermined structure and length extending behind the planet.
Not long ago it was not known that Pluto had an atmosphere. But it does, and it is probably made from solid ice that makes up a good portion of the planet. When Pluto is nearer the Sun, this atmosphere burns off and forms an unimpressive tail. (Existentially impressive, but not fireworks impressive.) If Pluto were to come really close to the sun, like a typical comet, it would … well, it would essentially be a a comet. A pretty big one, at first. But then after several passes…
Anyway, more recently, it has been discovered that Pluto also puts out X-rays, and if confirmed, this is interesting. The total number of X-rays that have been detected is very small. The existence of these X-rays is likely linked to the atmosphere. From NASA:
Scientists using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have made the first detections of X-rays from Pluto. These observations offer new insight into the space environment surrounding the largest and best-known object in the solar system’s outermost regions.
While NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft was speeding toward and beyond Pluto, Chandra was aimed several times on the dwarf planet and its moons, gathering data on Pluto that the missions could compare after the flyby. Each time Chandra pointed at Pluto – four times in all, from February 2014 through August 2015 – it detected low-energy X-rays from the small planet.
Pluto is the largest object in the Kuiper Belt, a ring or belt containing a vast population of small bodies orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune. The Kuiper belt extends from the orbit of Neptune, at 30 times the distance of Earth from the Sun, to about 50 times the Earth-Sun distance. Pluto’s orbit ranges over the same span as the overall Kupier Belt.
“We’ve just detected, for the first time, X-rays coming from an object in our Kuiper Belt, and learned that Pluto is interacting with the solar wind in an unexpected and energetic fashion,” said Carey Lisse, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, who led the Chandra observation team with APL colleague and New Horizons Co-Investigator Ralph McNutt. “We can expect other large Kuiper Belt objects to be doing the same.”
The team recently published its findings online in the journal Icarus. The report details what Lisse says was a somewhat surprising detection given that Pluto – being cold, rocky and without a magnetic field – has no natural mechanism for emitting X-rays. But Lisse, having also led the team that made the first X-ray detections from a comet two decades ago, knew the interaction between the gases surrounding such planetary bodies and the solar wind – the constant streams of charged particles from the sun that speed throughout the solar system – can create X-rays.
New Horizons scientists were particularly interested in learning more about the interaction between the gases in Pluto’s atmosphere and the solar wind. The spacecraft itself carries an instrument designed to measure that activity up-close – the aptly named Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) – and scientists are using that data to craft a picture of Pluto that contains a very mild, close-in bowshock, where the solar wind first “meets” Pluto (similar to a shock wave that forms ahead of a supersonic aircraft) and a small wake or tail behind the planet.
The immediate mystery is that Chandra’s readings on the brightness of the X-rays are much higher than expected from the solar wind interacting with Pluto’s atmosphere.
“Before our observations, scientists thought it was highly unlikely that we’d detect X-rays from Pluto, causing a strong debate as to whether Chandra should observe it at all,” said co-author Scott Wolk, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. “Prior to Pluto, the most distant solar system body with detected X-ray emission was Saturn’s rings and disk.”
The Chandra detection is especially surprising since New Horizons discovered Pluto’s atmosphere was much more stable than the rapidly escaping, “comet-like” atmosphere that many scientists expected before the spacecraft flew past in July 2015. In fact, New Horizons found that Pluto’s interaction with the solar wind is much more like the interaction of the solar wind with Mars, than with a comet. However, although Pluto is releasing enough gas from its atmosphere to make the observed X-rays, in simple models for the intensity of the solar wind at the distance of Pluto, there isn’t enough solar wind flowing directly at Pluto to make them.
Lisse and his colleagues – who also include SWAP co-investigators David McComas from Princeton University and Heather Elliott from Southwest Research Institute – suggest several possibilities for the enhanced X-ray emission from Pluto. These include a much wider and longer tail of gases trailing Pluto than New Horizons detected using its SWAP instrument. Other possibilities are that interplanetary magnetic fields are focusing more particles than expected from the solar wind into the region around Pluto, or the low density of the solar wind in the outer solar system at the distance of Pluto could allow for the formation of a doughnut, or torus, of neutral gas centered around Pluto’s orbit.
That the Chandra measurements don’t quite match up with New Horizons up-close observations is the benefit – and beauty – of an opportunity like the New Horizons flyby. “When you have a chance at a once in a lifetime flyby like New Horizons at Pluto, you want to point every piece of glass – every telescope on and around Earth – at the target,” McNutt says. “The measurements come together and give you a much more complete picture you couldn’t get at any other time, from anywhere else.”
New Horizons has an opportunity to test these findings and shed even more light on this distant region – billions of miles from Earth – as part of its recently approved extended mission to survey the Kuiper Belt and encounter another smaller Kuiper Belt object, 2014 MU69, on Jan. 1, 2019. It is unlikely to be feasible to detect X-rays from MU69, but Chandra might detect X-rays from other larger and closer objects that New Horizons will observe as it flies through the Kuiper Belt towards MU69.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra’s science and flight operations.
Reductionism in Art and Science
In the old days, the words “art” and “science” did not mean the same thing they mean today, at least in academia. Today, unfortunately, they have almost come to mean opposites. You can’t be doing both at once. Or, at least, that’s what people who haven’t thought about it much may think.
Art can be used to engage people in science, and science can provide a subject for art, and in various ways, the twain shall meet.
But in Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures
Reductionism is the distillation of something complex into something simpler while still maintaining central or key meaning. Grab the nearest art book and find two pictures of the same thing, one with nearly photographic detail and the other using just a few colors and shapes. Like this:
See the difference? Two bulls, not the same picture.
I won’t show you a picture of science being reductionist because science is reductionist most of the time.
You can reduce art, and you can reduce science. And, you can artfully reduce science and scientifically reduce art. And, the New York School of abstract art and other abstract traditions (people like Turner, Monet, Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Louis, Turrell, and Flavin, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and Mondrian) scientifically reduced art, which forms a good part of the focus of Kandel’s book. A major contribution of this work is a deep and unique understanding of the origin of what we generally call modern art.
The book
Here’s the TOC:
Part I: Two Cultures Meet in the New York School
Introduction
1. The Emergence of an Abstract School of Art in New York
Part II: A Reductionist Approach to Brain Science
2. The Beginning of a Scientific Approach to the Perception of Art
3. The Biology of the Beholder’s Share: Visual Perception and Bottom-Up Processing in Art
4. The Biology of Learning and Memory: Top-Down Processing in Art
Part III: A Reductionist Approach to Art
5. Reductionism in the Emergence of Abstract Art
6. Mondrian and the Radical Reduction of the Figurative Image
7. The New York School of Painters
8. How the Brain Processes and Perceives Abstract Images
9. From Figuration to Color Abstraction
10. Color and the Brain
11. A Focus on Light
12. A Reductionist Influence on Figuration
Part IV: The Emerging Dialogue Between Abstract Art and Science
13. Why Is Reductionism Successful in Art?
14. A Return to the Two Cultures
The 176 #Deplorable Things
Trump’s Latest Outrageous Claim: Obama Born In US
“After years of peddling a false conspiracy theory that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States, Donald Trump — just 53 days before Election Day — now says he believes the president was born in the U.S.
“President Obama was born in the United States. Period,” Trump said at a campaign event in a ballroom in his new hotel in Washington. “Now, we want to get back to … (bla bla bla).”
That’s from NPR.
This is clearly going to hurt Donald Trump with his base. The accusation to begin with wad deplorable, after all.
That was today, a few minutes ago.
But yesterday …
Start about midway:
More here:
Turn Off Your Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Now And Put It In A Secure Container!
As of October 11th: Samsung is now recalling ALL Galaxy Note 7 Phones. The previous recall and replacement program failed, the phone is basically dangerous, don’t use it, get rid of it, make them give you a new one.
In my view. Samsung should be providing cash back for the phones so people can buy whatever phone they want. That seems to be an option but I doubt they will actually do this for many customers. You can try, though!
Here is the latest information from Samsung.
WARNING As of October 10th or so, it is now known that Samsung phones other than those recalled are ALSO OVERHEATING and in at least some cases, bursting into flames. This may be the replacement phones that Samsung is providing its customers as part of the below described recall.
The FAA is asking people to not board aircraft with a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phone because it might bring the aircraft down, should it start a fire. Also, stow the phone in such a way that the on switch can not be accidentally actuated.
The US Consumer Product Safet Commission has issued a warning to stop using the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and to turn them off immediately.
I’m not sure of the frequency with which this happens. However, earlier “exploding phones” problems such as with an earlier version of Apple’s iPhone occurred with very few phones, and generally, only as a result of the phone being damaged. Apparently it is very rare that phones burst into flames entirely spontaneously, and apparently, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is doing this at too high a rate to allow the phones to exist.
According to the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission
Consumers should immediately stop using and power down the recalled Galaxy Note7 devices purchased before September 15, 2016. Contact the wireless carrier, retail outlet or Samsung.com where you purchased your device to receive free of charge a new Galaxy Note7 with a different battery, a refund or a new replacement device.
As noted, this applies to phones sold on or before yesterday, September 15th.
Samsung has more details here.
You can get the phone replaced or get a refund.
Here is what Samsung says you can do:
Exchange your current Galaxy Note7 device with a new Galaxy Note7 as approved by the CPSC available no later than September 21, 2016; or Exchange your current Galaxy Note7 for a Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 edge and replacement of any Note7 specific accessories with a refund of the price difference between devices; or Contact your point of purchase to obtain a refund.
In addition, “Customers who exchange a Note7 device will also receive a $25 gift card, in-store credit, in-store accessory credit or bill credit from select carrier retail outlets.”
Go to THIS SITE with the US CPSC to find the appropriate phone number and link for each of the major carriers (AT&T, Best Buy, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, and Verizon).
As long as we are on the subject of Cell Phone Safety, you may be interested in whether or not cell phones cause cancer. (Short answer: no.)