Look. It’s really just this simple. If you live in a place where it snows, and your car/truck/SUV/van/whatever is covered, then I don’t care how late you are, or how tired you are, or how hard it is to reach. You have to get a broom or a brush and GET THE SNOW OFF YOUR WHOLE VEHICLE, AND NOT JUST A LITTLE PORTHOLE IN YOUR WINDSHIELD YOU CAN SEE OUT OF.
Here, let me make it easy:
Oddly enough, I get unhappy when the snow — or, joy of joys, a big ol’ slab of ice — flies off your car and hits my windshield or just sits like a mine in the middle of the road.
Seriously. People who do this are a menace to others. Brush off your whole vehicle.
Pictures courtesy Per Ola Wiberg (Powi) and MSVG on Flickr.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all that, if Jenny McCarthy were impaled on a unicorn’s horn, she’d blame vaccines. After all, her organization Generation Rescue has shamefully blamed them on totally unrelated things before, and no doubt will again.
This is a serious topic, since the antivaxxers are a public health menace, and the rise of preventable diseases can in many cases be traced back to their propaganda. But sometimes, just sometimes, mocking them is the way to go.
NASA has found a significant amount of water ice on the Moon!
Holy Haleakala!
On October 9, the LCROSS spacecraft watched as a Centaur rocket booster slammed into the south pole of the Moon, hoping to determine if any water ice exists under the lunar surface. The idea is that over millions of years, comet impacts and other events have brought water to the Moon. Most of it goes away over time, but if any water happens to accumulate at the bottoms of craters at the poles, where the Sun never shines, it can stay put, frozen forever in shadow. By impacting a spacecraft into the Moon, it can eject the ice where it gets hit by raw sunlight. The water breaks down into hydrogen and hydroxyl molecules (OH-), which can be directly detected.
The target crater, Cabeus, has a temperature on its floor of -230 Celsius, cold enough to store ice. The Centaur slammed into it at high speed, making a new crater about 20 meters across and splashing debris over an even bigger area. A plume went up and out of the crater, and it was that tower of ejected material that had the telltale signs of water. The infrared spectrometer on LCROSS definitely detected absorption lines from water, and the ultraviolet spectrometer saw it in emission. Not only that, the emission got stronger with time, which clinches the deal! That’s exactly what you expect by a plume containing water.
Wow.
The amount of water they found in the plume was a couple of hundred kilograms in total, but that indicates there is a lot more still lying on the surface. They don’t know how much exactly just yet; NASA wanted to release this news as soon as they were sure they had definite results, but there is still much to do. Where did this water come from? How long has it been there? How accessible is it to future astronauts? These questions and more will, hopefully, be answered in the coming weeks and months as the data are analyzed more thoroughly. So stay tuned. There’s lots more good news to come!
Jim Kakalios was the science advisor for the Watchmen movie, and wrote a book called The Physics of Superheroes. I met him briefly when we both spoke at the National Academy of Sciences about new ways to engage the public about science. He’s a nice guy.
He’s also a funny one, and a canny one. He was asked to give the 2009 convocation address at the University of Minnesota (sorry, the video is not embeddable, so go there and watch it), and he talked about geeks and nerds. I think he hit the right note. We do run this planet. "Revenge of the Nerds" was more than just a movie, it was a primer for the future of nerddom.
You might as well face it. If you’re reading my blog, you’re a nerd. Be proud. I am.
The ESA spacecraft Rosetta swings past the Earth in a few hours, but look at what it did when it was still 630,000 km (400,000 miles) from home:
Sigh. So lovely.
Rosetta took an image every hour for 24 hours; they’re making a movie which will be online soon. That should be spectacular!
Via Digg I found a lovely website called Light Stalking, with tips and fantastic photos for amateur photographers. The site is featuring wide-angle (that is, not through a telescope) pictures of the sky taken by amateurs, and they’re lovely. The pix were culled from Flickr (though not freely licensed, so I cannot post any here), but it’s easier to get them all from one place. Take a look! Maybe they’ll inspire you to try to get some of your own.
