Blogs / Cosmic Variance

The astronauts have wrapped up repairs on Hubble, and released it back into orbit (as of 8:58 EDT this morning)! This mission was just astounding from beginning to end. I didn’t get a chance to blog about it (because hey, it was sunny for once in Seattle), but Sunday’s repair of STIS was another day of drama, with one of the astronauts literally having to rip a handle off the instrument to get access to the panel they needed to unscrew. (Oh, and get this — they then had to peel off a g*ddm sticker to get at some of the screws! Oy.) Monday featured installation of new “outer blanket layers”, which help insulate the telescope. Installation was smooth, except for an accidental head doink on an antenna by John Grunsfeld (which is the first sign that any of the people up there right now may in fact share genetic material with the likes of me). Phil has been doing a great job keeping up on the spacewalks on Twitter, if you want a more detailed blow-by-blow.

The next phase is “Servicing Mission Observatory Verification” (SMOV), during which all the new instruments are put through their paces. This process is expected to take about 3 months, with early release images coming out in early September, with science programs expected to start running not long after. I’m getting myself prepared to be blown away!

PS. Oh, one random bit from my trip to the launch. I got to meet Dennis Overbye. I felt a bit like an 11 year old girl meeting a Jonas Brother.

A decision came down this week from the U.S. District Court in Central California in the case of Farnan v. Capistrano Unified School District. There are a few emerging news reports on what happened; the best article I found so far is in the Orange County Register. Apparently a student (Farnan) recorded a number of statements made in a AP course on European history taught by James Corbett, and the student felt that the statements made by the teacher violated his First Amendment rights under the establishment clause. Among the twenty or so statements made by Corbett about which the complaint was made, the court found that only one, where Corbett referred to creationism as “religious, superstitious nonsense” violated the student’s constitutional right not to have a “government official” in effect establish a secularist religion.

The statement arose, apparently, because another teacher, Peloza, was, in Corbett’s view, teaching religious, superstitious nonsense. From the Court’s ruling:

Peloza apparently brought suit against Corbett because Corbett was the advisor to a student newspaper which ran an article suggesting that Peloza was teaching religion rather than science in his classroom. Corbett explained to his class that Peloza, a teacher, “was not telling the kids [Peloza’s students] the scientific truth about evolution.” Corbett also told his students that, in response to a request to give Peloza space in the newspaper to present his point of view, Corbett stated, “I will not leave John Peloza alone to propagandize kids with this religious, superstitious nonsense.” One could argue that Corbett meant that Peloza should not be resenting his religious ideas to students or that Peloza was presenting faulty science to the students. But there is more to the statement: Corbett states an unequivocal belief that creationism is “superstitious nonsense.” The Court cannot discern a legitimate secular purpose in this statement, even when considered in context. The statement therefore constitutes improper disapproval of religion in violation of the Establishment Clause.

The decision is worth taking a look at, and may become a cause celebre for the creationists. It’s worth wading through the legalese, and getting to the other statements that the court did not think violated Farnan’s rights, and which statements it felt did. In the case of the Peloza comment, the Court suggested that Corbett might have “criticized Peloza for teaching religious views in class without disparaging those views” and thereby would not have violated their rights. Yikes! Quite subtle nuances now separate what you can and can’t say in class.

If you are a teacher, particularly one who intends to tell your students that creation “science” isn’t really science but is religiously inspired non-science, are you violating your students’ rights? I can imagine many, many more things which, said slightly different ways, could be taken to violate students’ rights. Can a court really take a single sentence and say “this constitutes the establishment of a state (non)religion”? I am aghast at the thought.

Personally I hope that Corbett and the Capistrano school district appeal this one…and the ACLU should take a major interest here. The chilling and anti-rational effect of this ruling on classrooms all over the country is all too real.

Inspired by Earth Day (and eerily in sync with Julianne!) I have been looking for good views of the planet from space. In fact, two nights ago my TV satellite provider Dish Network launched the Earth Channel, with a 24/7 view of the earth from the EchoStar 11 satellite. There is also a video with a compressed 24 hour series of stills taken from the camera. At one point you see the moon passing behind the earth. Of course since it’s a TV satellite, it’s geosynchronous and you’ll only ever see the western hemisphere. As far as I can tell, though, you cannot get it online anywhere.

And this one is pretty cool. Even though the image is not very sharp, you can actually control a little web cam on a the Tate satellite, in polar orbit 400 km above the earth… Add a focus button!

I cannot seem to get NASA’s ISS webcam stream to work. Darn. Too popular? Not Mac compatible?

Sadly, Al Gore’s 1990’s vision of an Earth-viewing satellite, originally called Triana, and later renamed DSCOVR, sits in storage at Goddard, having been built but cancelled in 2006.

Speaking of which, it appeared for some time that a similar fate awaited Nobel Prize winner Sam Ting’s Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, designed to search for antimatter (antihelium nuclei, in fact) and other things in space. Construction of the $1.5 billion satellite was completed, and it awaits launch at CERN. An additional, final Space Shuttle mission, STS-134, was added to the 2010 NASA schedule. It was authorized by Congress in the fall but I am not sure if funding has been appropriated yet. (My money is on Sam Ting, though.)

Anyway, where are the cool views of our planet from space?

As you may have heard, Stephen Hawking has been rushed to the hospital after falling very ill. He has been struggling with a chest infection for several weeks, and has had to cancel some public appearances. A press officer from Cambridge University later added that he has improved, and is now in comfortable condition.

Not much to add, except that we all hope for a speedy recovery, and that is back writing papers and giving lectures before too long.

Update: Associated Press, reporting from another statement released by Cambridge, says Hawking is expected to make a complete recovery.

If you watch the Daily Show, you know the inane humor of John Oliver, one of the regular “corespondents” on the show. My colleagues at CERN tell me that he’s visiting CERN now, filming one of his inimitable segments on the LHC and the experiments, to be aired “some time after April 21″. Personally, I can’t wait to see it – he is always funny and usually pretty sharply barbed. He apparently rode an LHC dipole magnet like Slim Pickens rode the bomb in Dr. Strangelove, and asked one of our guys “is there anything you do here that’s not boring?” His video spots are always edited tightly to get the maximum laugh quotient. Anyway, here he is in the CMS cavern, earlier today (thanks to my student Matt Searle for the photo!)

I’ve been on a little bit of a Wall Street rant as of late (here and here). But I can’t help throwing out a couple more things, in case you somehow missed them. In recent weeks Jon Stewart, in his inimitable way, has been asking a truly important question: why did the business media completely and totally miss the Wall Street meltdown? Aren’t they supposed to be doing investigative reporting? Aren’t they supposed to be asking the hard questions, uncovering wrong-doing, and thereby informing and protecting the public? With all the resources at their disposal, how could they completely and totally miss the most profound economic event since the great depression? The truth, of course, is that the mainstream media coverage of Wall Street is a farce. It consists of interviews with CEOs and stock pickers, and advice and analysis that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on (or the photons your TV/computer monitor emits). There are very few true business reporters out there (Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times being my favorite).

The first must-see show consists of Jon Stewart doing a take-down of CNBC (a cable channel devoted solely to business). The show includes plenty of clips from CNBC “experts” (including Jim Cramer) making statements and stock-picking suggestions which turn out to be spectacularly wrong. It is truly brilliant and instructive:

A couple of weeks later Jim Cramer was a guest on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, presumably to defend his (and CNBC’s) honor. It is simultaneously one of the most entertaining and disturbing interviews I’ve ever seen (though nothing compares to the Sarah Palin interviews). Jim Cramer is the host of a show on CNBC called Mad Money. The basic premise of the show is that Cramer, a former hedge fund manager, will “make you money” by telling you which stocks to buy or sell. The problem, of course, is that he has no idea what he’s doing (see here and here). This is not a stab at him particularly, since I believe that aside from a truly tiny set of individuals, none of these fund managers or traders has any clue, and for the most part they all do roughly average (within expected deviations depending on their assumed risk). But I digress. In the interview Jon Stewart completely dismantles Jim Cramer, showing him to be essentially a fraud. Or, more to the point, he is providing entertainment, not actual financial advice. It is an astounding admission, from one of the most watched financial advisors in the world. What we need is more investigative journalism, and less snake-oil salesmanship. Here is the interview:

Here it is almost the end of March, and none of us has blogged about the International Year of Astronomy 2009.

There are a whole bunch of cool events of various sorts around the world. Ray Jayawardhana at Toronto started the year off with a great ad campaign on Toronto busses and elsewhere called Cool Cosmos. Here are a couple of examples:


Pretty cool to see that while you’re standing on a bus.

Later this week starts 100 hours of Astronomy, running April 2–5. The focus is a worldwide marathon of amateur astronomers watching the sky, culminating in a star party during the final 24 hours, which coincides with the 3rd annual International Sidewalk Astronomy night. If you have a telescope and know how to use it, get out there! And if you don’t, now’s your chance to find one! Astronomical observatories will be participating via Around the World in 80 Telescopes, which will be a live webcast starting on Mauna Kea (with Gemini, Subaru, UKIRT, Keck, CFHT, SMA, CSO all participating) and then heading west until it gets back around to Lick and Palomar 24 hours later. In addition to the webcast, you can also follow 100 Hours on twitter Impressively, in New York City, they managed to get the park lights turned off at 8pm this friday for their star party — great opportunity to see a dark(er) night in NYC!

In case 100 days isn’t enough, there is also a podcast called 365 days of astronomy, which has a daily podcast from a variety of sources and on a wide range of astronomy related topics.

Of course, there is also a blog, Cosmic Diary which includes bloggers from ESA, ESO, JAXA, and NASA, so you can hear about the life of professional astronomers all over. Check em out!

I’m sure I’ve missed some of the most interesting events, so feel free to leave them in the comments.

Not to be a harbinger of doom, but this one sounds bad. There are some 6-15 million computers out there running Windows which are infected with a computer virus, dubbed Conficker C. The recent report by SRI makes for some chilling reading. On April 1 (that is, next Wednesday!) the virus is set to…well…do something. It’s not clear what, but with so many millions of computers will do it. The report concludes:

We present an analysis of Conficker Variant C, which emerged on the Internet at roughly 6 p.m. (PST) on 4 March 2009. This variant incorporates significant new functionality, including a new domain generation algorithm and a new peer-to-peer file sharing service. Absent from our discussion has been any reference to the well-known attack propagation vectors (RCP buffer overflow, USB, and NetBios Scans) that have allowed C’s predecessors to saturate so much of the Internet. Although not present in C, these attack propagation services are but one peer upload away from any C infected host, and may appear at any time. C is, in fact, a robust and secure distribution utility for distributing malicious content and binaries to millions of computers across the Internet. This utility incorporates a potent arsenal of methods to defend itself from security products, updates, and diagnosis tools. It further demonstrates the rapid development pace at which Conficker’s authors are maintaining their current foothold on a large number of Internet-connected hosts. Further, if organized into a coordinated offensive weapon, this multimillion-node botnet poses a serious and dire threat to the Internet.

Yikes! Whoever wrote this thing is not a very nice person…or persons. The C variant apparently managed to upgrade itself over the network, and disables security anti-virus software. If I were you (and I am apparently not because I use only OS X and Unix) I would update my antivirus software every day and scan my machine. And leave it off next Wednesday if possible.

Pass the word…

I went and watched Jill Tarter’s acceptance speech for her TED Prize earlier this month. I’ve been aware of Jill’s work for a long while now, and have been a (somewhat silent fan). But I was unaware of the TED prize until it came up in xkcd.com. (Kudos to xkcd for that!)

I really liked the grand view she takes of the universe and our place in it. She eloquently points out the fact that swirls of gas and dust have collapsed and developed into a form which is aware of itself and wonders where it comes from, and whether it’s alone. When you think about it like that, it’s a little unnerving.

It really is hard to imagine a more profound discovery than to definitively prove that there is sentient life elsewhere in the universe, perhaps relatively close to our little spot in the suburbs of the Milky Way. Science fiction has for decades explored the many possibilities of the forms that such life might take. Movies and TV have focused mostly on the humanoid forms since the costumes are easy. One might make arguments about the typical strength of materials relative to the gravity of habitable planets, etc., and about convergent evolution. But to me it seems exceedingly unlikely that intelligent life elsewhere has two legs, two arms, or even a head like ours. It would seem to me to be a long shot that they are RNA/DNA based, or even based on amino acids and proteins. It could be they they are tiny, and have a hive-like culture. Or they could be vast stadium-sized creatures who live for millennia and float in their densely gaseous outer planetary layers. The possibilities are endless. The chance that they are anything like us, though, seems truly remote.

But here are a few things we can say relatively confidently about intelligent/sentient/technical beings elsewhere that we may some day detect:

1. They are made out of the same kinds of atoms and molecules that we find here, possibly including
iron/cobalt/nickel, other metals, and lighter atoms like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, silicon, and on and on. These atoms came from the explosions of the first stars in their final death throes, and that’s what’s out there to make life from.

2. They need energy to survive, and may have learned how (as we have) to access alternative sources of energy to drive their technology. Some of these sources may be entirely unknown to us (yet – that’s one reason why we need to keep pushing the high energy frontier) but available all around us if we just knew what to do.

3. They almost certainly use ordinary electromagnetism and the nuclear forces in their technology, which is based on the ordinary matter from #1. Clearly light, and all the other forms of electromagnetic radiation are so ubiquitous it is hard to imagine they’ve overlooked it. Similarly for the nuclear forces. This is our doorway into ordinary matter at reasonable temperatures. (This having been said, humans on earth only recently started to learn how to control these forces. And, given #2, maybe the aliens have moved on to better things.) Their electromagnetic emanations, anyway, are just about our only hope of detecting them.

4. They are almost certainly either far older, and more developed than we are, or far younger and more primitive. Humanity has only been truly self aware, and headed toward advanced technology, in the very recent past, perhaps the last few hundred thousand years. Compared with billions of years, this is a tiny slice of time.

5. They are very, very far away and it would take an excessively long time for them to cross the vast distances between stars. (I view faster-than-light travel or communication as a non-possibility, practically speaking, for even the most advanced life forms. I know this is not going to make me popular with the alien fans out there, but outer space is really, really big.) It takes light many thousands of years to cross the vast stretches of space. You have to really want to go interstellar if that’s what you’re about, and you have to abandon the rest of your society and all the support you get from it once you leave.

For me the bottom line is that even if we found aliens by peering out into space with our detectors, we may realize they are out there, but they are probably not coming here. Somehow that makes me feel more lonely, not less. And if they did come here their technology is so advanced that they would hardly regard us as worth of any sort of interest or notice. Our planet might have some interest for them in terms of resources to exploit, but that is probably about it. We’d just be in the way, at best. We can forget about communicating with them…let’s just hope they don’t want our protein.

Anyway, give Jill a listen she is very eloquent on the subject.

Yesterday President Obama signed the stimulus bill. With the stroke of a pen, $789,500,000,000 has been “spent”. The bill includes roughly $18B for science research, and over $50B for education. The National Science Foundation receives $3B, of which $2B goes directly to peer-reviewed science. Given that the total budget for NSF is $6B a year, this is a significant increase. The Department of Energy Office of Science receives $1.6B, while energy programs at the DOE receive over $30B. NASA receives $1B, of which almost half goes to Earth science climate research.

If you sent email or made phone calls, please take a moment now to thank your Senators and Representatives. Many people worked very, very hard to ensure that science was adequately funded.

This is a lot of money, all of which needs to be spent on a very short timescale. But it sends a clear message that science is important to the future of this Nation, and this Planet.