Tales Of Brave Ulysses

Can’t get enough space news.

• SpaceX Falcon 1 Lost Due To Fuel Leak – The private launch vehicle Falcon1 blew up after 1 minute of flight last weekend due to a fuel leak. Don’t give up yet guys, it took NASA years to build a reliable space launch vehicle.
  
• Messenger Science Page Goes Live – Years before the Messenger probe finally arrives in orbit around Mercury, the web page describing the mission’s scientific data is up and running. The highlight so far; a flyby of earth from last August.
  
• Plot Of The Inner Solar System – Man, that is a lot of stuff to keep track of.
  
• Cassini Finds Football Field-Sized Moonlets In Ring – These chunks are the first discovered that bridge the gap in size between the particle sized ice crystals that make up most of the ring and the tiny moonlets that skirt the rings like Pan, which are called shepherd moons. And a warm welcome to Geek from Guam, I know this Saturnian stuff is close to your heart.
  
• Voyage To The Mystery Moon – Speaking of Saturn, Nova has a companion web page to their television program on Cassini and the Huygens Probe. It is full of interesting stuff, recapping the latest discoveries about Titan’s atmosphere and even the geysers on Enceladus.

I was going to let this slide, but it is just too much.

What’s up with this Britney Spears statue being peddled around the web as a pro-life testament? What’s with the bear head? This thing is just freaky, and…

Man, it just leaves me speechless. Sheesh.

The recently cancelled Dawn mission to the asteroids of Ceres and Vesta has been revivified! How cool is that? NASA brought it back from the dead and gave the probe another chance to explore the asteroid belt. Apparently NASA’s one sided decision to scrap the mission ticked off European agencies that had invested a great deal of time and money, to say nothing of the ire of the scientific community. Well it’s good to hear that NASA will continue to fund science missions instead of funneling all the agency’s budget into keeping three people spinning around in low earth orbit in a stinky box.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is successfully in orbit around the red planet and just sent back the first pictures. Nothing too spectacular, the engineers are just testing out the equipment. The photos were taken from an altitude of 2500 kilometers, well above the satellites final orbital height of 300 kilometers, and show some highlands from Mars’ southern hemisphere. Current resolution is about 7 meters per pixel, which is damn good, but the image resolution will be better than 1 meter per pixel in the final orbit.

Polish author Stanislaw Lem passed away yesterday at the age of 84 after a long bout with heart disease. I’ve only read his novel Solaris, but it was an extremely poignant reflection on loss and humanity. Guess I better hit the library and see if they have any of his other books I can check out.

Humpback whales can talk! Or at least ramble on for hours and hours singing distinct phrases in their plaintive subsurface crooning. That’s pretty cool.

Just a set of links on atheism and religion, the merry-go-round:

• Religious Belief Itself Is An Adaptation – An interview with Edward O. Wilson on biology and religion.
• Defenders Of The Faith – A reprinted NY Times editorial about how the ones most likely to defend religious freedom are atheists.
• Atheists Are America’s Most Distrusted Minority – Along the same lines, people distrust atheists more than any other minority in this country. Somehow I feel this and the editorial are related, probably through the ideas mentioned in the first link (how we are wired for belief in tribal religions to form cohesive groups – us vs. them)
• The Good Old Days – What was America like in the late 19^th century, the high water mark of Christianity in the States?
• Anatomy Of A Lynching – A crowd in Thailand beat a Buddhist monk to death when he took a hammer to a sacred statue of a Hindu god, proving it’s not just a Christian or Muslim thing, even Buddhists get caught up in religious frenzy.

It’s been a wet and rainy couple days, much needed rain. It looks like it has cleared out now, but there was a light drizzle yesterday this morning. Hopefully that was enough to give the ground a good dousing, and curb some of these brushfires that have been scorching the island.

Speaking of the weather, forecasters are predicting an average typhoon season for 2006. Let’s hope that means no typhoons for Guam.

Title says it all.

The tomb is interesting because of the bright illustrations of Homer’s epics on the sarcophagus, which is over 2,500 years old. Based on the paintings archaeologists suspect a warrior was interred in the grave.

The top skylines in the world. I agree that Hong Kong is the best, but I was surprised to find Chicago #2 on the list.

Here’s a story for the sophomat, the only color blind freak I know: Damn Interesting � A Life More Colorful

No surprises here. But the timing is interesting. I guess the case was unsealed because of her sentencing next month? Or was it done to sabotage the political campaign of “Patient A”?

Heard an interesting story on NPR this morning; there is a plan afoot to introduce the rare Florida panther into the Ozark forests of Arkansas. Only about a hundred panthers still exist, the victims of hunting and loss of habitat. The remaining panthers are currently kept in a protected refuge in southern Florida, but development pressures are encroaching on the preserve. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is looking for large areas of undeveloped land to place the big cats, and Arkansas’ Ozark National Forest offers 1.2 million acres, just the right size for a few dozen panthers to wander around, pouncing on deer.

The idea of releasing large predators into the woods is obviously not too popular with some folks. Farmers are concerned about livestock, and others are concerned about mountain lion attacks on people. Arkansas officials vowed to fight any introduction of the panthers. Public comment on the decision is being accepted until April.

I know this is a growing problem; all these electronic gizmos littering our modern domestic landscape suck tremendous amounts of energy – even when they are not on. Televisions, stereos, VCR’s, DVD players, microwaves, all this stuff is never really off. They all just sit there, quietly sucking electricity during the 99% of the time they are not actually in use. Sure it’s just a trickle compared to when they are actually working, but magnify that trickle across the entire nation and it is an immense amount electricity – equivalent to the output of 18 typical power plants. The Economist has a good article about this problem: Pulling the plug on standby power. I’m as guilty as the next guy. When I turn off the light and night, my living room is aglow from all the LED’s signaling the electronic vigilance of my appliances.

I am intrigued by the idea of freighter travel; not because of concerns about the environment or carbon emissions, but because visions of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark and his adventures on a tramp steamer dance through my head.

Anyway, here’s a couple links to freighter lines that offer berths for paying customers. Regrettably Guam does not appear to be on any of the destinations. I guess the only way I’m cruising off this island is on somebody’s sailboat.

Wes?

I saw on the news yesterday that northern Queensland got hammered by a humongous tropical cyclone, Cyclone Larry. Winds over 180 mph lashed the coast south of Cairns, completely obliterating the town of Innisfail. The AP is reporting thousands left homeless, though thankfully no fatalities were reported. I know how much it sucks to be in the path of a Cat 5 storm, and the long weeks afterwards of clean up and hardship.

This is a shocker for the island’s telecommunications industry: Guamcell and HafaTel, the island’s largest cellular provider and the island’s GSM cellular provider, were both bought by Japanese behemoth NTT DoCoMo in a $72 million deal.

Wow. DoCoMo is just huge, a leviathan in the mobile phone business. This radically changes the landscape for cellular phones on Guam.

Three interesting pieces from Salon that I read last week:

• Decline and fall – America is just as doomed as Rome, Spain and Britain were in their imperial ambitions. A trifecta of ominous portents; peak oil, religious zealotry and mounting debt all point towards collapse of the Republican kakistocracy.
  
• Planet of Slums – First it was a planet of weeds, now comes a planet of slums. It looks to me like it will probably be a world of both weeds and slums. Guam’s starting to look more and more like both.
  
• I, Nanobot – But never mind the desolation of the planet, we’re about to push our species into extinction through the creation of artificial life forms. And we’ll go joyfully into that good night, dazzled by our brilliance and the beauty of our limitless future.

Oops. My final ukiyo-e and I forgot to post it on Sunday. Well here it is now and I might as well go out with a bang:

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, Katsushika Hokusai, 1830-1832. From the series Thirty-six Views of Fuji.

I’m sorry to end this little experiment, but I am out of reproductions to scan. Perhaps I will get my hands on more nice reproductions I can scan sometime in the future.

Why do people shout ‘Geronimo’ when they jump out of airplanes?

Because they can.