Early in the day I came across a nice rundown of the top ten most beautiful science experiments. An impressive list, albeit the beauty is perhaps of an esoteric nature (nifty animated graphics aside!).
It got better a little later, as over at the AAS meeting was revealed a new Hubble image of sidewalk-astronomy favorite M42 sure to impress the intelligentsia and masses alike:
Wow, stunning! Who needs absolute answers to everything when there’s stuff like that to enjoy…and explore!
I thought about ending the year by going through the various clippings I’ve collected and tossing out some rants, but there will be plenty of time (and material) for that in 2006. Better to finish up with something a bit happier. Astronomy Picture of the Day pointed out that 2005 was a wonderful year of imagery and science from Saturn, so what a fitting way to end with yet another stunning colorful picture:
So the small-government right and the big-government left are equally exhausted. The only appealing political platform is good government.A great idea to rally behind. Unfortunately, between the legions of what’s-in-it-for-me voters and those who aren’t savvy enough to differentiate good public officials from bad (whether by analysis of rhetoric or performance), I fear that there won’t be enough collective gumption to vote proper people into office and accept the necessary sacrifices to move us from current state to ‘good government’.
An idea doesn’t have to be right to be important, so long as it gets people thinking in a new way.– Michael S. Turner on Alan Guth’s original inflation theory, S&T, November 2005
Sending astronauts on the shuttle isn’t worth the risk, and not simply because of its design flaws. For all its problems, the shuttles have safely returned from 98 percent of their missions, which may well be the highest success rate of any exploration program in history.The real problem with this exploration program is that it doesn’t explore anything. Three decades after going to the Moon, NASA is sending astronauts a few hundred miles above Earth to conduct high school science experiments. Can you name anything - besides repairing the Hubble Telescope - they’ve accomplished?
I think acts of flag desecration are offensive conduct we ought to ban in the interest of protecting the greatest symbol of our country.Funny, I always felt that the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights were the greatest symbols of our country. I certainly hope all the people who valiantly fought and died in American service did so for those things–and what they represent–rather than a particular arrangement of colors and shapes.
Nevertheless, I am enjoying it, as an encouraging sign of the revival of the left. Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes a certain amount of ideological self-confidence. It takes a critical mass of citizens with extreme views and the time and energy to obsess about them. It takes a promotional infrastructure and the widely shared self-discipline to settle on a story line, disseminate it and stick to it.Hey, the Downing Street Memo indicates that the tactic worked for the neocons, so there’s no reason to think that other sociopolitical stripes can’t successfully use similar tactics…
More neato stuff from Cassini at Saturn. Another nice writeup of this image is over at APOD.
(Okay, I guess the composition is more of a dot-slash, but it could still be the basis for the next icon…)
This morning there was some hullabaloo under the Kennedy, as some claimed a holy sight:
From ink blots to constellations to salt-water stains under expressways, the ability of the human mind to construct patterns from random data is quite amazing.
(Gotta love what’s written to the, uh, image’s immediate left…)
My preference for objects extragalactical rather than planetary is well known, but I couldn’t pass up this shot. I dunno why I like Saturn so much. Perhaps the fascinating gravitational dance of the rings and moons? Perhaps the systemic complexities that are every bit as rich and detailed as mighty Jupiter but more subtle and understated? Whatever…good to know we should continue getting shots like this from Cassini for a couple more years.
After the political/bureaucratic side of NASA generated some bad news earlier this week, today the science side released more hopeful stuff. First, the operator who inadverently killed the wind-speed measurements on Huygens was reprieved today when some clever folks at the Deep Space Network were able to reconstruct much of the data simply from analyzing the Doppler shifts in the carrier signal. Nifty work! Then, of course, what can be more pleasant than calm azure skies–unless perhaps those skies with a nice moonshot and pretty ring shadows:
A couple weeks back the news/weather types were making much ado about nothing, but today we’ve got a real snowfall to deal with. While an inch in North Carolina leads to chaos and day-long traffic jams, Chicagoans just shrug off the snowdrifts and keep going:
Given the conditions shown here, I certainly don’t want to drive my Honda right now let alone a big, clunky mail truck. But I just had to laugh when I looked out the window to see this…I get this mental image of the mail carrier barrelling down the street, sliding and screeching to a halt, and casually stepping out with an air of ‘Hey, perfect parking job!’
Here’s what my aforementioned vehicle looked like when the snowfall had (mostly) stopped
Surprisingly, we decided that there was no pressing need for a vist to IKEA today after all.
I’ve found myself eagerly seeking the latest and greatest releases from the Huygens probe on Titan. This contrasts with my more lackadaisical interest in the last major planetary surface probes, Spirit and Opportunity. Some of that is certainly due to my stronger interest in extragalactic astronomy rather than planetary science, and perhaps also that I simply find Saturn a prettier and more fascinating planet to watch.
However, I think it’s more than that: whereas the Mars Rovers–while doing wonderful science and sending cool pictures–are merely refining what we knew about Mars, the Huygens probe is bringing us something entirely new. Until yesterday, not a single human had ever seen what the surface of Titan looks like! Now, it seems to be a place with pebbles and fog and shorelines…
Since yesterday morning the mission control room must have been an fun, exciting, and energetic place to be.
