Not Quite a Blog

The Universe is 13.73 (±0.12) billion years old.

Seems like if we know so well how old the Universe is, we should probably start celebrating it's birthday, right?

I'm getting increasingly disgusted with the commentary surrounding the new IAU definition of "planet". It's not that I would normally get disgusted... but it must just be a slow news day and everyone seems to have a silly opinion. NPR started off with a statement like "If you have a model of the Solar System, you might want to snap off the ninth planet, Pluto." WTF?!?!

It's not like it's gone. Further, it's still a freakin' planet. It's just a dwarf planet... one of four other dwarf planets. So shut the hell up! Pluto doesn't care. The New Horizons spacecraft doesn't care. Further, no one else would care if there wasn't such a big deal being made about it. Sheesh. (end rant)

We now have 12 planets. Get used to it. 8 are "classical planets" and 4 are "dwarf planets". Expect that last category to get much bigger as time increases.

UPDATE []: Oops. Doug's right. Seems like Resolution 5B that would have added the term "classical" in front of "planet" in the definition didn't pass. A further illustration of how silly this is.

Astronomers have discovered a tenth planet, Lila (see note on name below)... modulo the debate about what is considered a planet; for which I point you to Gibor Basri's great essay: Defining "Planet".

UPDATE [2005-07-30 07:54:47]: This NYT story, "Planet or Not, Pluto Now Has Far-Out Rival", says that the astronomers are informally calling this planet, Xena! (Although Lila is the name they formally submitted to the IAU)

UPDATE [2005-07-31 09:40:31]: The Caltech website has been updated to include a note that the name Lila is not necessarily the name that they submitted to the IAU.

I'm not necessarily the praying type... but I pray for the seven astronauts that just successfully launched into LEO.

Of course, launching isn't the easiest part, but it is not the hardest and it is where much can go wrong. With the previous two shuttle disasters (as I explain in this paper), a draft near the jet-stream layer of our atmosphere caused problems: with Challenger, this draft caused a solid rocket booster to flex, breach and send white hot propellant into the red liquid fuel tank; with Columbia, this draft caused a loose piece of foam to hit the leading wing edge and punch a whole into it.

So, I'll be very interested in two things in the coming days:

• Did the shuttle encounter any peculiar drafts during launch? Some of this can be ascertained from how the exhaust trail breaks up. If it did, the inspection could be very important.

• How useful will the digital imaging inspection tools be? The astronauts will deploy a few different means of inspecting the integrity of the shuttle's outer skin. We'd like to see what they find and how well the tools they use work.

Check this out...:

Astrologist sues NASA over crash

MOSCOW, Russia (Reuters) -- A Russian astrologist who says NASA has altered her horoscope by crashing a spacecraft into a comet is suing the U.S. space agency for damages of $300 million, local media has reported.[...]

"It is obvious that elements of the comet's orbit, and correspondingly the ephemeris, will change after the explosion, which interferes with my astrology work and distorts my horoscope," Izvestia daily quoted astrologist Marina Bai as saying in legal documents submitted before Monday's collision.

There is a lot going on at NASA. Firings, layoffs, contract cancellations and hints of center reorganizations and maybe even a closure.

Read more »

If this "discovery" survives scrutiny, it will be the biggest scientific discovery of all time. Hands down.

Finding the Ultimate Theory of Everything

Could two lookalike galaxies, barely a whisker apart in the night sky, herald a revolution in our understanding of fundamental physics? Some physicists believe that the two galaxies are the same - its image has been split into two, they maintain, by a "cosmic string"; a San Andreas Fault in the very fabric of space and time.

If this interpretation is correct, then CSL-1 - the name of the curious double galaxy - is the first concrete evidence for "superstring theory": the best candidate for a "theory of everything", which attempts to encapsulate all the phenomena of nature in one neat set of equations.

(cross-posted to "Challenges of P2P" here)

In the P2P debate, it's often easy to forget that there are important uses of P2P technology other than file-sharing -- uses that do not implicate copyright. While file-sharing focuses on the consumption of the network, other technologies focus on production utilizing the vast computing and innovative resources available at the network's edges. Our own Space Science Lab here at UC Berkeley has made a valuable contribution in this area through the development of distributed computing.

Harnessing the power of tens of thousands of CPUs, the SETI@home project pioneered this technique to analyze vast quantities of radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life. In an effort to allow other researchers to harness the power of distributed computing, those behind SETI@home developed a general-purpose version of their distributed computing software, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). BOINC projects now include climate modeling, protein-folding calculations, gravitational wave detection and improving particle accelerator design in addition to searching for ET.

One such project, climateprediction.net, reported their first results in last week's Nature. As reported by Science's wonderful ScienceNow service in a story called, "Climate Models Heat Up":

Now modeler David Stainforth of the University of Oxford, U.K., and 15 colleagues have pumped-up this approach by utilizing the processing capacity of 26,000 personal computers. Volunteers from the general public contributed the power of their machines to climateprediction.net, allowing the researchers to vary six parameters, several at one time for a whopping 2578 simulations. Most of the simulations predicted a global temperature rise of around 3.4°C, but some ran as hot as 11°C, 2°C warmer than any kind of study before it. Stainforth, whose group publishes its work in the 27 January issue of Nature ("Uncertainty in predictions of the climate response to rising levels of greenhouse gases"), says he can't say how likely the 11°C heat-up is because "we can't yet give a probability for our results."

One can imagine a consumption-based P2P filesharing service that is similarly unhindered by issues of copyright. For example, a filesharing service for only public domain or Creative Commons-licensed works. Of course, there are the open questions of whether or not such a service could be built and whether or not it would sustain. If we suspend reality for a second and imagine that all (or a significant number of) public domain works were available on such a system, I think we can all agree that such a service would be culturally influential and and have a broad impact on our growing information society.

Too cool. We have weather, houston (from "Titan's Streams Like Earth's"):

Many of the same processes that helped shape the Earth are in effect today on Saturn's smoggy moon Titan, a team of international scientists revealed on Friday. [See: "Seeing, touching and smelling the extraordinarily Earth-like world of Titan" and "Islands, rivers and methane springs - latest images of Titan".]

Relying on data gathered directly from the atmosphere and surface of Titan last week by the European Space Agency's Huygens space probe, the scientists said they were able to conclude that a regular pattern of precipitation and erosion is carving out streambeds and leaving behind a layer of "dirt" on the giant moon.

"There is liquid that is flowing on the surface of Titan," said planetary scientist Toby Owen,of the Institute for Astronomy, during an ESA-sponsored press conference. "It's not water -- it's too cold -- but liquid methane. And it flows in the same way it does on Earth."

So, I've been really really disappointed in the NASA/ESA coverage of the descent of the Huygens probe. We got a few badly processed images and very little text or non-imaging data.

This is likely a sciency version of propriety... that is, they don't want you to have a stream of raw data so that they can publish a packed issue of Science or Nature. However, there is no competition with the data (that is, no one else has the same data and is rushing to analyze it). So what gives? Is there no funding for outreach and education? Why is there no Huygens data blog where researchers give you bits of insight into what they're doing to analyze the mounds of data they have?

Well, good thing that the data is, by default public domain. Amateurs have been processing the data, "Enthusiast compositions of the Huygens images", and stitching together the raw images into their own panoramas that are far, far better than anything released by NASA or ESA yet. Check these puppies out:

UPDATE: Mr. Liekens is upset that some people are inline linking to his images so he's begun to move his images around. I'll disable the links to the larger images since they no longer point anywhere.