Celebrate.

Human ingenuity, realized:

This is one of the first images taken by NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars the evening of Aug. 5 PDT (morning of Aug. 6 EDT). It was taken through a "fisheye" wide-angle lens on the left "eye" of a stereo pair of Hazard-Avoidance cameras on the left-rear side of the rover. The image is one-half of full resolution. The clear dust cover that protected the camera during landing has been sprung open. Part of the spring that released the dust cover can be seen at the bottom right, near the rover's wheel.

The things I've seen in my lifetime...
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Facebook Monetization Strategy

As of writing this, Facebook's share price is hovering around $20, about half of what it cost at the IPO. The problem many investors are having (explaining the subsequent drop in share price) is that Facebook's ability to generate revenue is questionable, and as their userbase plateaus in some areas...and is found to be fake in others...doubts arise about their value as a company.

This morning I got a text from a mystery number. Clearly the person knew me, and was aware of the goings-on of my Facebook profile because the text referenced something I had posted on a friend's page. But I did not know this person. Either they had a new number, or I'd lost the contact info when I flashed Jelly Bean onto my GNex, or both.

And after I found out which friend it was, I realized something: Facebook contacts never vanish. My sister gets married and changes her name...she still shows up in my friend list. My friend moves to Ohio and has a new address, he still shows up in my friend list. My buddy quits Verizon and moves to AT&T and gets a new cell phone number, he still shows up in my friend list. Despite changes in the data within it, our Facebook Friend List is immutable. And essential too; I was able to 'sync' my friends list with my phone and get cell phone numbers off of that sync.

Why aren't you charging for that, Facebook? Of course I appreciate things that are free. But having a list of all my contacts (that the contacts themselves helpfully update for me) and making that available to me, anywhere, is a pretty handy technology to have. One I'd pay a buck or two a month to keep. If Facebook could further refine it, say, by including a "Work People List" or something of that nature...I'd pay $10/month.

Facebook, are you listening?


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Mars!

By this time Monday, one of the most important events in space exploration will have occurred. Whether you are cognizant of it or not, the Mars Science Laboratory has been trekking through the empty blackness of space since this past November. What is the Mars Science Laboratory? Why, here's a fantastic video about it (just watch the first two minutes):

This is obviously a complicated procedure. Because Mars' atmosphere is thin, simple parachute landing won't work. Because the Curiosity Rover is so heavy, it can't do the balloon landing like the previous two rovers. So this convoluted parachute-retrorocket-drop from a cable plan was devised.

I won't say much more than that about the mission. But with NASA having spent $2.5 billion on this mission, pray with me, Saturday night, that the landing is a success. Successfully proving that heavy cargo can be deposited on Mars would open the door for future human missions there.


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In The Face Of An Old Dog

There's something in the face of an old dog, isn't there? An old wizened expression, as though the 10-20 years of its life were filled with experiences long to tell.

But when we look at an old dog's face, we see the imminence of mortality looking back at us. Our own death, premature or a long ways off yet, stares right back at us through the hazy, cataract-filled eyes of an old dog.

Our evolutionary process and that of dogs became intertwined tens of thousands of years ago. We evolved whites in our eyes to help us non-verbally communicate with them. They evolved barking to help prove invaluable and earn free food from us. So it's no surprise that their lives, though shorter, follow the same path as ours. Born helpless mammals, they age quicker than we'd like, and soon enter a 'rebellious teenager' phase. After a couple years, they mature and live relatively healthy, stable, productive lives until they grow old.

And then eventually death comes for them, just like us. As our domesticated partners, they don't have the luxury that wild animals do of slinking off to a private, hidden place to die. Just like us, they don't get predated before they are tired and arthritic and tumorous. Just like us, the old ones are usually mostly-blind, mostly-deaf, and mostly-sleeping.

This little charmer joined my family 2 months ago. When I brought her home, she was nine pounds, now she weighs nearly 20, and is only half grown. By this time next year, she'll look something like this:

And then, someday, she'll get old. That satisfied, grey, cloudy expression will take over her face, just as it takes over the face of every old dog. And she'll die. And I'll miss her.


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Being Randomly At A Movie Isn't "True Heroism'

Now I realize I am probably making no friends when I post this, but I did feel strongly about it. What exactly makes the victims of the Aurora shooting "true heroes"? My heart goes out to them, and especially to the families of the people who were killed in that depraved man's rampage.

But being at the wrong place at the wrong time is not heroism. Getting shot by a madman is not heroism.

I have nothing but respect for these people. Believe me. My beef is with the media that cheapens "true heroes" by overapplying the term. These people aren't true heroes. They are true victims.


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A Cosmic Thought

From wikipedia:

The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, constructed from a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area 2.5 arcminutes across, about one 24-millionth of the whole sky, which is equivalent in angular size to a 65 mm tennis ball at a distance of 100 meters. The image was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over ten consecutive days between December 18 and December 28, 1995.
The field is so small that only a few foreground stars in the Milky Way lie within it; thus, almost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies, some of which are among the youngest and most distant known.

3,000 galaxies in an image that only includes one 24-millionth of the night sky? Why, there must be billions of galaxies then!

It just makes me so very sad, that there's so much out there and we'll never see it. Hundreds of sextillions of stars, hundreds of quadrillions of rocky planets, millions of nebulae, black holes, supernovae, comets, distant worlds teeming with strange, alien life, and yet Americans spend more money in two weeks on war than we do in an entire year on space exploration.

Sometimes I seriously wonder if the Purpose of gravity is to keep weak species out of the space exploration business.


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Orbital Forcing, Global Warming, and Tree Rings

Here's a new study published in Nature. In it, they discuss the fact that tree ring data from fossilized trees in Northern Europe indicate that for the past 2,000 years, the temperature has been slowly decreasing.
Immediately upon its publication, the anti-global warming community pounced. "New Study Thoroughly Debunks Global Warming" reads the headline.

But wait. TAE is here, with two degrees in "science" to help the layman understand this highly scientific article. The summary of the article references a term called "orbital forcing" and suggests it is the cause of the temperature shift over the last couple millennia:

Over recent millennia, orbital forcing has continually reduced summer insolation in the Northern Hemisphere5. Peak insolation changes in Northern Hemisphere high latitudes, at ~65° N between June–August (JJA), have been identified as the prime forcing of climate variability over the past million years1. Together with long-term CO2 variability resulting from biogeochemical feedbacks of the marine and terrestrial ecosystems14, these insolation cycles have initiated the interplay between glacial and interglacial periods.

What is this orbital forcing? What is solar insolation?
Orbital forcing, basically, is the change in the tilt of the Earth over time. Most people know that the Earth is tilted on its axis. This tilt, combined with the year-long orbit around the sun, causes our seasons. When the Earth's tilt and orbit point the Northern Hemisphere towards the sun, we get summer in Kansas. 6 months later, we have winter as the tilt of the Earth and its orbit around the sun now direct more solar energy at the Southern Hemisphere.
Solar insolation is a measure of the total radiation, be it heat, light, UV, gamma rays, etc that the sun outputs that is hitting the Earth. So in a nutshell, orbital forcing is a change in the tilt of the Earth, which in turn amplifies or lessens the amount of solar insolation, i.e. heat, hitting the Earth.

These scientists have measured the size of tree rings dating back as far as 138 BC and found that solar insolation has been slowly decreasing over that period, as a result of orbital forcing. Therefore, the temperature of the Earth has been decreasing, though ever so slightly.

So is global warming debunked? Well yes, and no. Certainly the Earth is cooling off, if this study is true. But is it cooling off as fast as it would without the anthropogenic climate changes? If humans weren't raping and pillaging the Earth as fast as they possibly can, would the Earth have even more noticeable cooling effects?
Saying this "debunks" global warming is an over-simplification. This study alone does indicate that the global average temperature over the last 2,000 years has not increased - in fact it has gotten lower - but it makes no presumptions about the post-industrial revolution era, nor do the authors explicitly (or even implicitly) suggest that humans played a factor in their data.

The climate is a complex thing. Using a single tree ring study to "debunk" global warming is just as bad as the reactionists who point to the current hot/dry summer as "proof" of global warming.


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