What have you done for me lately? Okay, I’m indirectly saving you. The Planetary Society is helping fund research into “mirror bees.” These are spacecraft that hover around incoming asteroids and use mirrors to focus light on the rock.
The light vaporizes surface material, creating a plume of debris that gently pushes the asteroid onto a safer trajectory.
Don’t grovel on your knees thanking me for rescuing the biosphere. You too can join the Planetary Society and be a giant among men and women.
No kidding! Watch this film of a recent NASA rocket launch. An Atlas V rocket passes near a sundog and the dog winks out as visible shock waves ripple through the air. This seemed weird to me at first because I would think sundogs don’t really have a “location” as such–it would just depend on where you’re standing. On the other hand, it’s ice crystals causing the sundog, and if the rocket passes near the ice crystals, I suppose that could destroy it. Everyone in the area saw it happen…you can hear them gasp in amazement. Here’s another view of the shock waves.
One of those time-wasting items fluttering around Facebook recently: what was the #1 song in the USA on the day you were born? Mine was something I’d never heard of, “Wanted” by Perry Como. However, jump one year back to my -1 birthday and the big hit was, “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” by Patty Page. Now there’s a song I remember. It’s a little hard to picture everyone across the country buying this record. Arf! Arf! On my first birthday, the #1 song was “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” King of Wild Frontier! I remember that one, too. The lyrics tell of killing bears and Native Americans, which doesn’t sound so good today. I had my own coonskin cap just like Davy’s.
If you keep going, delving into hit songs on your birthday, before and after your actual birth, there’s no end to the amazing tunes:
1915 “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier” by Morton Harvey
1921 “O-H-I-O (O-My! O!)” Al Jolson
1933 “Stormy Weather” Leo Reisman featuring Harold Arlen
1940 “In the Mood” Glenn Miller
1957 “All Shook Up” Elvis Presely
1969 “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In” The Fifth Dimension
1970s – mostly crap in the #1 spot
1983 “Come on Eileen” Dexy’s Midnight Runners
Let’s quit there before Celine Dion appears and our tears fall like rain. How many songs have compared tears to rain? How many roads must a man walk down? I gotta go.
This Week in Science is an excellent podcast which ably does exactly what its name implies. It was recommended to me a month or so back and I’ve gotten hooked.
Here’s an item I learned from a recent episode: Fruit bats can drink you under the table. Even with a high blood alcohol concentration, fruit bats can adroitly fly through an obstacle course.
And I have other science news to report:
Toad Landing. According to Science Daily, toads “are capable of anticipating when and how hard they’re going to land after a jump” and they prepare themselves to absorb the impact accordingly. I wonder if frogs, on the other hand, just hit the ground at random and roll to a stop, hoping that no one is watching.
Proposed NASA budget. I listened to Phil Plait expound at length on this subject on the Skepticality podcast. Like some others I’ve heard on this subject, he thinks it’s overall a pretty good new direction and budget for NASA. The proposed new plan includes scrapping the Ares rocket program, which was not going so well anyway, and trying again on a new and better heavy-lift rocket. Meanwhile, NASA will channel funds into private space industry to develop the means to ferry people into orbit and do the routine stuff the Shuttle has been doing. NASA gets a bigger budget, and much of it goes to science, science, science, and new technology. On the down side, Phil also believes that Congress may very well mess with this budget and ruin it.
My big, fat geek wedding. Never marry a science writer. She just might have your blood sampled before and after the wedding. Check out the change in oxytocin levels occurring in bride, groom and participants at the ceremony! Oxytocin is a hormone that’s closely associated with social bonding.
Finally, there’s this video guide about destroying the world with nanobots. Thank, Scot.
I’ve been making pancakes for Maggie on a regular basis for months. The packaged gluten-free mix in the store makes ‘cakes that are good. Almost as good as the ones made from buckwheat that you personally grind into flour in the back yard, mix with freshly squeezed milk from an organic virgin goat, and eggs from free-range, naturally-cloned chickens; chickens who were raised on fire-roasted corn, high altitude glacier water from the Alps, and earthworms fresh from the compost bin. Yes, the packaged mix is that good.
But tonight Maggie said the pancakes were a little crunchy. They are usually a little crunchy, she said, but tonight they were too crunchy. I took them back and tried ’em. Dang if there wasn’t a tiny piece of eggshell in almost every bite. For months I’ve been busting those chicken ovoids over the mixing bowl and dumping shell pieces in there. She never told me. How embarrassing.
I never claimed to be much of a cook, but now I must get down to basics and learn how to break an egg. I went to Wikihow and looked this up:
“NEVER crack eggs directly into the bowl that you are building your recipe in. Always crack eggs into a separate bowl first just in case you need to remove any bits of shell before transferring the eggs to the bowl you are working in.” Whoops.
Wikihow also says that when you start, “Grasp the egg in your dominant hand.” That’s a problem already. Neither of my hands dominate. Both are pacifists. My left one likes to write, my right one likes to do sports. It’s a good trade off. They both take turns with computer mousing, though my left likes it better. If one hand gets a little uppity, I slap it with the other one. We call that peace through ambidexterity.
Actually, I don’t have time for much reading. I bought a few books anyway and hope to squeeze them in. Yeah, I buy books instead of going to the library. That’s especially important when it might take me months to read one. It’s good for the book industry, bad for the trees. Someday I’ll get an e-reader. Right now the Kindle seems kind of pricey. I’m waiting for a cheap, high-quality e-book reader. A $100 Kindle. I think prices will come down in a few years. Then I won’t look back. For now, in paper:
59 Seconds, by Richard Wiseman. I already wrote about this one. Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The memoir of a fearless woman who grew up in strict Muslim family in Somalia. She came to Europe to escape an arranged marriage, earned a college degree, and became a member of the Dutch parliament. Incredibly, she openly denounces Islam and its treatment of women, ignoring the danger of doing so for the sake of speaking out and hopefully alleviating some of the horror perpetrated on women in the name of god. Into the Cool, by Eric Schneider and Dorian Sagan. It’s about the second law of thermodynamics. How does the flow of energy from a concentrated state to an equilibrium underlie evolution, ecology, economics, and just about everything else? If I can understand this book, I’ll get their hypothesis on this subject. I’m dubious about theories that try to explain everything, but I think if nothing else, I’ll see the world from a different perspective after reading this. House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds. A science fiction book that attempts to take the reader 6 1/2 million years into the future. It’s a world in which humans and post-humans have slowly spread throughout the galaxy (at sub-light speeds–I like an SF novel with no warp drives and wormholes). It’s a strange time in which, among other things, the Andromeda galaxy seems to have “disappeared” and no one knows why.
It may be 6 1/2 million years before I get all these read, at my 20 minutes per day allotment.
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