Saturday, February 27, 2010
Create Your Own Kaleidoscopoe, online
A very nice free site from zefrank.com. And please check out http://www.lumosity.com/: scientifically-designed games and activities, to improve your brain. :)
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Poetry Bits - Matthew Arnold
'Dover Beach"
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Hubble Space Telescope Photographs Result of Asteroid Collision?
Asteroid collisions are energetic, with an average impact speed of more than 11,000 miles per hour, or five times faster than a rifle bullet. The comet-like object imaged by Hubble, called P/2010 A2, was first discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research, or LINEAR, program sky survey on Jan. 6. New Hubble images taken on Jan. 25 and 29 show a complex X-pattern of filamentary structures near the nucleus.
"This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets," said principal investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. "The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies."
Hubble shows the main nucleus of P/2010 A2 lies outside its own halo of dust. This has never been seen before in a comet-like object. The nucleus is estimated to be 460 feet in diameter.
Normal comets fall into the inner regions of the solar system from icy reservoirs in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. As comets near the sun and warm up, ice near the surface vaporizes and ejects material from the solid comet nucleus via jets. But P/2010 A2 may have a different origin. It orbits in the warm, inner regions of the asteroid belt where its nearest neighbors are dry rocky bodies lacking volatile materials.
This leaves open the possibility that the complex debris tail is the result of an impact between two bodies, rather than ice simply melting from a parent body.
"If this interpretation is correct, two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight," Jewitt said.
The main nucleus of P/2010 A2 would be the surviving remnant of this so-called hypervelocity collision.
The filamentary appearance of P/2010 A2 is different from anything seen in Hubble images of normal comets, consistent with the action of a different process," Jewitt said. An impact origin also would be consistent with the absence of gas in spectra recorded using ground-based telescopes.
The asteroid belt contains abundant evidence of ancient collisions that have shattered precursor bodies into fragments. The orbit of P/2010 A2 is consistent with membership in the Flora asteroid family, produced by collisional shattering more than 100 million years ago. One fragment of that ancient smashup may have struck Earth 65 million years ago, triggering a mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. But, until now, no such asteroid-asteroid collision has been caught "in the act."
At the time of the Hubble observations, the object was approximately 180 million miles from the sun and 90 million miles from Earth. The Hubble images were recorded with the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).
Paul Krugman's Blog in the NYT
Check the link and read it. We may really be doomed, if Obama & Company are as clueless as they appear/
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Iran and nuclear enrichment politics
This is complicated, politically and technically, but nevertheless it pains me to see the Obama Administration through the State Dept. spokesman Hillary Clinton be so simplistic and likely intentionally untruthful about many of these issues, and basically ignore their duties to bring out the verifiable facts to the public. Of couse, if we had a popular press which would do this duty, this would be unnecessary, but as we do not we seem to have one, we are left in a factual vacuum, where people need to depend on themselves and their own (largely technological) resources to enforce any sort of sanity-based view on the world. Here are a few verifiable items -- not personal opinions, and you can find the freely-available sources online and elsewhere to verify the statements:
Sunday, Feb. 7 President Mahmoud Ahmadinjed announced that Iran would proceed on its plans toward enriching uranium to the 19.75% needed to produce medical isotopes.Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, represented the announcement as a way for Iran to put pressure on the West to provide the low enriched uranium for its medical reactor on Iran's terms. Note: the particular isotope Iran is interested in is Molybdenum 99, which is essential for multiple medical diagnostic uses -- but unfortunately has a relatively short half-life, meaning that obtaining, shipping, receiving and putting it into use is difficult since by the time all this happens most of what you'd paid for has decayed -- , making local production of the isotope much more desirable, as is commonly known throughout the scientific community in the West.
Meanwhile, the intransigence of Robert Gates -- the US Secretary of Defense -- and with Hillary Clinton, the State Department's spokesman, seems to want to present this entire issue as "IRAN WANTS TO MAKE A BOMB".
The US Intelligence Agencies themselves have gone on record on the Voice Of America to say they do not believe this is the case.
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/middle-east/US-Defense-Spy-Chief-Iran-Undecided-on-Nuclear-Bomb-81256887.html
"...there is no evidence that Iran has made a final decision to build nuclear weapons."
Iran does have a nuclear enrichment program -- to which it is entitled- like all other signatories to the Non-Proliferation Agreement. Although it's not as transparent as the UN would like, Iran is completely in compliance with the international treaties, and allows 24-hour surveillance of all its nuclear facilities and allows visits by by UN inspectors.
Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, has specifically said that Iran is open to the 'fuel swap' concerpt (the West would supply Iran with its fuel needs and accept the nuclear waste/fuel rods in return) but the West are finding reason after unreasonable reason why not to accept a deal. This appears to be a political decision. (It should be reiterated that under Iran's system of government, President Mahmoud Ahmadinjed has limited powers, and is not in the chain-of-command for Iran's military forces.)
Also, previously Iran used to buy the Mb99 isotope from Argentina -- a lovely country known for its military dictatorship, the disappearance of thousands of opponents, etc -- but the USA found this perfectly OK and never objected. Of course, now that Argentina is no longer producing this and Iran actually want to produce this medically-necessary material for itself, this is a big fscking problem. The ghosts of Paul Wolfowtiz, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes and all the rest of the neocons come out of the woodwork like cockroaches. I had thought that we as a country had dropped the huge telephone book upon them and then stomped on it, multiple times; certainly not hoping that the Obama Administration would even think about going down that path, even for political expediency.
Other things of note:
1) Iran is a signitory of the International NonProliferation Agreements
2) Iran allows all listed surveillance and inspection items listed in that Agreement, including 24-hour electoniuc and personal inspections by UN inspectors.
3) The previous IAEA inspector and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Dr. Mohamned ElBaradei has personally visited and inspected the supposed 'nuclear weapons construction site' at Qom, and has stated publicly that there was nothing there. "It's a hole in a mountain." he stated, saying the site was indeed as Iran said, a backup enrichment site in case the Natanz facility was attacked by Israel or the US.
A quote from Juan Cole's site:
The list of other countries capable of producing LEU of 19.75% includes Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Holland, North Korea, South Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There would be nothing extraordinary about Iran joining this list, and none of the others on it except N. Korea is being sanctioned-- and that is for constructing a bomb, which Iran is not doing. Argentina was sanctioned neither for enriching to 19.75% nor for selling that stock of LEU to Iran! And South Korea was never sanctioned for secretly enriching to 77%, near bomb grade, something Iran has never been accused of.
3) In addition, no one in the US government is willing to talk on record and in public to the Israelis -- who are not a signatory to any international treaties and refuse all international access to any of their nuclear facilities -- and who possess approximately 200 actual nuclear weapons, according to defectors from their own country with professional knowledge of these matters. As if they and their possession of these weapons make no difference, and do not constitute a major political and strategic element in all negotiations concerning Middle-Eastern affairs.
Complicating all this is the anniversary of the February revolution, so the US would really best be served by the old motto, STFU and at least not parrot and repeat the appalling mistakes of previous administrations.
PS: Barack and Hillary -- I expected better of you. You're smarter than this -- get with it.
Sunday, Feb. 7 President Mahmoud Ahmadinjed announced that Iran would proceed on its plans toward enriching uranium to the 19.75% needed to produce medical isotopes.Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, represented the announcement as a way for Iran to put pressure on the West to provide the low enriched uranium for its medical reactor on Iran's terms. Note: the particular isotope Iran is interested in is Molybdenum 99, which is essential for multiple medical diagnostic uses -- but unfortunately has a relatively short half-life, meaning that obtaining, shipping, receiving and putting it into use is difficult since by the time all this happens most of what you'd paid for has decayed -- , making local production of the isotope much more desirable, as is commonly known throughout the scientific community in the West.
Meanwhile, the intransigence of Robert Gates -- the US Secretary of Defense -- and with Hillary Clinton, the State Department's spokesman, seems to want to present this entire issue as "IRAN WANTS TO MAKE A BOMB".
The US Intelligence Agencies themselves have gone on record on the Voice Of America to say they do not believe this is the case.
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/middle-east/US-Defense-Spy-Chief-Iran-Undecided-on-Nuclear-Bomb-81256887.html
"...there is no evidence that Iran has made a final decision to build nuclear weapons."
Iran does have a nuclear enrichment program -- to which it is entitled- like all other signatories to the Non-Proliferation Agreement. Although it's not as transparent as the UN would like, Iran is completely in compliance with the international treaties, and allows 24-hour surveillance of all its nuclear facilities and allows visits by by UN inspectors.
Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, has specifically said that Iran is open to the 'fuel swap' concerpt (the West would supply Iran with its fuel needs and accept the nuclear waste/fuel rods in return) but the West are finding reason after unreasonable reason why not to accept a deal. This appears to be a political decision. (It should be reiterated that under Iran's system of government, President Mahmoud Ahmadinjed has limited powers, and is not in the chain-of-command for Iran's military forces.)
Also, previously Iran used to buy the Mb99 isotope from Argentina -- a lovely country known for its military dictatorship, the disappearance of thousands of opponents, etc -- but the USA found this perfectly OK and never objected. Of course, now that Argentina is no longer producing this and Iran actually want to produce this medically-necessary material for itself, this is a big fscking problem. The ghosts of Paul Wolfowtiz, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes and all the rest of the neocons come out of the woodwork like cockroaches. I had thought that we as a country had dropped the huge telephone book upon them and then stomped on it, multiple times; certainly not hoping that the Obama Administration would even think about going down that path, even for political expediency.
Other things of note:
1) Iran is a signitory of the International NonProliferation Agreements
2) Iran allows all listed surveillance and inspection items listed in that Agreement, including 24-hour electoniuc and personal inspections by UN inspectors.
3) The previous IAEA inspector and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Dr. Mohamned ElBaradei has personally visited and inspected the supposed 'nuclear weapons construction site' at Qom, and has stated publicly that there was nothing there. "It's a hole in a mountain." he stated, saying the site was indeed as Iran said, a backup enrichment site in case the Natanz facility was attacked by Israel or the US.
A quote from Juan Cole's site:
The list of other countries capable of producing LEU of 19.75% includes Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Holland, North Korea, South Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There would be nothing extraordinary about Iran joining this list, and none of the others on it except N. Korea is being sanctioned-- and that is for constructing a bomb, which Iran is not doing. Argentina was sanctioned neither for enriching to 19.75% nor for selling that stock of LEU to Iran! And South Korea was never sanctioned for secretly enriching to 77%, near bomb grade, something Iran has never been accused of.
3) In addition, no one in the US government is willing to talk on record and in public to the Israelis -- who are not a signatory to any international treaties and refuse all international access to any of their nuclear facilities -- and who possess approximately 200 actual nuclear weapons, according to defectors from their own country with professional knowledge of these matters. As if they and their possession of these weapons make no difference, and do not constitute a major political and strategic element in all negotiations concerning Middle-Eastern affairs.
Complicating all this is the anniversary of the February revolution, so the US would really best be served by the old motto, STFU and at least not parrot and repeat the appalling mistakes of previous administrations.
PS: Barack and Hillary -- I expected better of you. You're smarter than this -- get with it.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Poetry Bits - W. H Auden
The Shield of Achilles
by W. H. Auden
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
by W. H. Auden
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
Poetry Bits - Yeats
The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;
Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;
Empedocles has thrown all things about;
Hector is dead and there's a light in Troy;
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.
What matter though numb nightmare ride on top,
And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?
What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop,
A-greater, a more gracious time has gone;
For painted forms or boxes of make-up
In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;
What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,
And all it knows is that one word "Rejoice!'
Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul,
What matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear,
Lovers of horses and of women, shall,
From marble of a broken sepulchre,
Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,
Or any rich, dark nothing disinter
The workman, noble and saint, and all things run
On that unfashionable gyre again.
Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;
Empedocles has thrown all things about;
Hector is dead and there's a light in Troy;
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.
What matter though numb nightmare ride on top,
And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?
What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop,
A-greater, a more gracious time has gone;
For painted forms or boxes of make-up
In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;
What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,
And all it knows is that one word "Rejoice!'
Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul,
What matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear,
Lovers of horses and of women, shall,
From marble of a broken sepulchre,
Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,
Or any rich, dark nothing disinter
The workman, noble and saint, and all things run
On that unfashionable gyre again.
Monday, February 1, 2010
The first and last Americans on the moon
This appears to be 'it.' There is no money in Obama's just-announced budget for the Ares I program, the heavy-lifter Ares V system, or the entire Constellation program. There will be no moon bases, no lunar landers, nothing.
Well, not quite true, and a fight is certainly expected. Funding is included to extend the International Space Station Mission to 2020 as was hoped, but: the Space Shuttle program has ended, and 7,000 jobs have already been cut at Kennedy Space Center. Shortly, only the Russians will have any means of getting there. The US intends to offer 'incentives' to private companies to develop the capability of shuttling humans and cargo to the ISS. Yeah, well...
It's quite possible that we have seen both the first -- and the last --Americans to set foot on the moon, all in one generation.
Well, not quite true, and a fight is certainly expected. Funding is included to extend the International Space Station Mission to 2020 as was hoped, but: the Space Shuttle program has ended, and 7,000 jobs have already been cut at Kennedy Space Center. Shortly, only the Russians will have any means of getting there. The US intends to offer 'incentives' to private companies to develop the capability of shuttling humans and cargo to the ISS. Yeah, well...
It's quite possible that we have seen both the first -- and the last --Americans to set foot on the moon, all in one generation.
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