APOD

APOD brings us...

Why caused this great white spot on the surface of Saturn's moon Rhea? The spot was first noticed last year by the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. Cassini's flyby of Rhea in April imaged in the spot in great detail. Astronomers hypothesize that the light-colored spot is the result of a relatively recent impact on the surface of the icy moon. The impact that likely created the crater also splashed light-colored material from the interior onto the darker surface. Rhea spans 1,500 kilometers across and is the second largest moon of Saturn after Titan. Rhea sports several other light colored surface features that are, as yet, not well understood.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Quote for the day

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.

   William F. Buckley

Quote for the day

No person was ever honoured for what he received. Honour has been the reward for what he gave.

   Calvin Coolidge

Arlington Ladies

This is an organization I'd never heard of before, but after reading their story in the American Spectator, I am in awe of their volunteer service. This group makes certain that someone attends every funeral at Arlington, and they stand ready to help the families of the fallen in any way that they can. They seek no "pat on the back", as one of them put it. A tiny part of this article, quoting one of the Arlington Ladies:

"What we do is always important and meaningful, but when you are alone at a funeral there is an added relevance," Willey said. "You feel an even greater need to be there, like you're helping to close the circle. For those grieving far away, a personal letter letting them know that someone was there can help soothe their sorrow. It shows them that their loved one's service was not forgotten and also that their loss has not been ignored."

The connection between the bereaved and an Arlington Lady does not end when the funeral is over, either.

"One of the first things I tell all my families is, 'I am your Arlington lady, not just now but forever, and you can always contact me,'" said Paula McKinley, the chair of the Navy Arlington Ladies. "It's a bond that is built to last."

This may sound like hyperbole, but consider the following: McKinley has placed roses on a grave for years at the request of a Navy widow and last summer on what would have been the couple's 50th anniversary she sent along 50 roses because it's what she imagined the husband would have done.

Read the whole article. I recommend having a box of Kleenex at hand...

Remembering...

Photo courtesy of Yahoo. Click to enlarge the picture.

Eleven year old Thomas McGahan, a Boy Scout, and his Cub Scout brother Nicholas, of Northport, N.Y., place flags on graves at the Long Island National Cemetery.

I weep for the fallen and their families...

Sunrise in Iraq

From the Guard Experience.

Photo by SSG Russell Lee Klika
Courtesy of SSG Russell Lee Klika

4/5/05, IRAQ – SGT Chad Crisp, LTC Mark Hart, and SGT Robert Bonnett of 1st Squadron, 278th RCT clear a drainage ditch in the early morning hours of April 5,2005,that insurgents had used as a defensive position to stage an ambush the night before. LTC Hart is not wearing his blouse-top because he used it to help stop the bleeding of an insurgent so he could be evacuated for medical treatment and questioned.

Very nice photo.

APOD

APOD brings us...

This stunning aerial view shows the rugged snow covered peaks of a Himalayan mountain range in Nepal. The seventh-highest peak on the planet, Dhaulagiri, is the high point on the horizon at the left while in the foreground lies the southern Tibetan Plateau of China. But, contrary to appearances, this picture wasn't taken from an airliner cruising at 30,000 feet. Instead it was taken with a 35mm camera and telephoto lens by the Expedition 1 crew aboard the International Space Station -- orbiting 200 nautical miles above the Earth. The Himalayan mountains were created by crustal plate tectonics on planet Earth some 70 million years ago, as the Indian plate began a collision with the Eurasian plate. Himalayan uplift still continues today at a rate of a few millimeters per year.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Quote for the day

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

   Edumnd Burke

APOD

APOD brings us...

Titan's odd spot could be a cloud, but if so, it's a persistent one. Peering into the thick, hazy atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon, cameras on board the Cassini spacecraft found a bright spot at the same location during Titan encounters in 2005 and 2004. Seen near Titan's upper edge in this false-color image from the VIMS instrument, the spot is almost 500 kilometers wide, and is brightest at infrared wavelengths. In addition to suggesting the uniquely colored spot is a persistent cloud possibly controlled by surface features, researchers also entertain the idea that the spot is caused by unusual surface material or extremely tall mountains. They also note the bright infrared spot could be hot. Further clues to the odd spot's nature will come during a planned encounter in July 2006 when Cassini's cameras will look at the spot during Titan's night. If it glows at night, it's hot.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Best line of the day

Peggy Noonan has a new column on OpinionJournal, and it's a great one. The best line:

I don't know if politicians have ever been modest, but I know they have never seemed so boastful, so full of themselves, and so dizzy with self-love.

The lady has a talent with words. I savor her columns as I do few others, as much for the power and the beauty of her prose as for the insight offered up...

Quote for the day

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

   Rebecca West

Time

I work for a company in a regulated industry (securities trading). Some of the regulations require certain of the company's computers to keep verifiably accurate time, to within plus or minus three seconds of the official national time reference, kept at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Laboratories, in Boulder, Colorado. This is the F1 Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock, shown in the photo at right.

When I first ran into this requirement a few years ago, I thought this would be a simple matter of implementing the Network Time Protocol (NTP). This is a very well-known and widely deployed protocol for the specific purpose of allowing a computer's clock to be precisely synchronized to time standard on the Internet. These "Stratum 1" Internet time servers are themselves synchronized directly to the NIST time standard.

I ran into a showstopper hitch with this approach: the "verifiable" part of the regulatory requirement. The trouble is that NTP works by communicating with the time servers over the Internet, and the time it takes messages to travel back-and-forth over the Internet is far from certain. Here's a mind experiment that illustrates the problem:

Imagine that you want to set your kitchen clock accurately, but the only time reference available is your neighbor's clock, which you know is accurate. Then imagine that the only way you can communicate with your neighbor is by talking. So to set your clock, you organize 12 of your friends to form a line between your kitchen and your neighbor's house, where each person is within shouting distance of the person next to him in line. Now you're ready: your neighbor shouts to the first person in the line when it's exactly twelve noon, and that person relays it to the next one, and so on, until finally you hear the shout from the last of your twelve friends in line — and at exactly that moment you set your kitchen clock to twelve noon.

Now how accurate do you suppose your clock is? It's going to be off by whatever the delay was; perhaps 20 or 30 seconds in this case. But you have an idea: you'll practice this relaying ahead of time, and time the delay, so you know what offset to subtract to set your kitchen clock correctly! Well, that's basically what NTP does. But it doesn't always work correctly. For instance, suppose one of your friends sneezed exactly when the adjacent friend shouted, so that the shout had to be repeated? Oops — guess that one will take a little longer than usual! Also, how consistent do you suppose that shouting is? Not very — you'll find that the time varies considerably from attempt to attempt. No matter how you slice it, if you set your kitchen clock by the method just described, there's no way you can be positively, absolutely certain that your clock is correctly set. In other words, it's not verifiable.

It turns out there's a perfectly conventional way to solve this problem: you buy your own stratum 1 time server, and put it on your own network. This eliminates the uncertainties of the Internet, and leaves you vulnerable only to the vagaries of your own network. In most corporate IT environments (and even in many homes), these "local area" networks (LANs) are implemented in a way (called "fully switched") that essentially eliminates any uncertainties in the message delivery time. In this situation, the computers that need to have their clocks accurately set can synchronize to this local stratum 1 time server, and this will satisfy (easily) the regulatory requirements such as those my company faces.

One problem with this approach: it's very expensive. The cheapest stratum 1 time servers work by listening to cell phone signals (which are synchronized to NIST's national time reference) or by listening to GPS satellites (which have atomic clocks on board that are in turn synchronized to NIST's national time reference). These servers cost about $5,000 to $10,000 each — and a company like mine really needs to have two of them, just in case one happens to break.

At the time my company was facing this problem, we really didn't want to spend that kind of money on this problem. So we looked for alternative solutions, and found that it's possible to purchase "time receivers" that listen to the aforementioned cell phone signals, GPS satellites, or the WWVB radio station maintained by NIST for the specific purpose of transmitting time information. For a number of reasons, including price, we chose a WWVB receiver. We bought two of these, and connected them to two computers running the Linux operating system. Then we modified the source code for NTP (this is reasonably well documented, and it's open source) to match the WWVB receiver, and installed the modified and recompiled NTP. Voila! We had our own stratum one time servers, for a lot less money than the commercial equipment.

Now, being the geek that I am, I just had to have something even better (and cheaper!) at home. It took me a couple of years for technology to catch up with what I wanted, but it finally has. Garmin recently came out with a new device called the GPS 18 LVC. This little darlin' is about the size and shape of a couple of drink coasters piled on top of each other; a little disk with a wire attached to it. It's a complete GPS sensor, but the part I care about (for these purposes) is that it has (a) an NMEA-compatible interface, and (b) a pulse-per-second (PPS) output. "NMEA" is the National Marine Electronics Association, and those folks long ago created a standard protocol ("language") for GPS units. The standard NTP source code distribution contains an NMEA driver, so this compatibility makes it easy to interface the GPS 18 with NTP. The bottom line: the GPS 18 LVC has everything you need to create a spectacularly good stratum 1 NTP server. And it costs about $80!

So I bought a couple of these (to make a redundant time standard). I've designed some simple circuitry (RS-232 line drivers) to allow me to put the GPS receivers up on my roof, and yet still have a stable signal travel down 100 feet or so of wire. I will be implementing NTP with the standard NMEA driver (modified if needed for the GPS 18's needs), and I'll be using the PPS output to implement the PPS driver in NTP. In the end, I'll have a stratum 1 NTP server synchronized to one millisecond or better with the NIST national time reference. The total cost of this project, including the dual GPS 18 LVCs, is less than $250 (using existing Linux-based computers as the NTP servers).

If you're interested in the design, I'd be happy to send you a Visio of the schematic. Just drop me a line! And once I've built it and got it running with NTP, I'd also be happy to share the NTP driver sources and configurations...

Arabs for common sense

From Rantings of a Sandmonkey:

Look, we as arabs/muslims/whatever can't just play the victim, decry that we are opressed and persecuted, and yet be OK with venemous hate like this be spewed and spread throughout our society. We can't chant "Death to America" on one hand and wonder why they won't be more on our side. While the jews were holding out vigils, and stating that " we are all americans today", The Palestinians danced on the streets and handed out sweets and baklawas when 9/11 happend, and then they openly wonderd why the US was on the side of Israel. LOL. If you, dear reader, are one of those people, let me tell you the story of my friend Irina.

My friend Irina - russian jewish US immigrant and current US customs agent - was all about the peace process and giving the palestinians equal rights with the rest of her family when a suicide bomber blew himself up in 2002 and killed her cousin, who was a peace activist. Since that Day her and her whole Labour-voting family turned against the palestinian peace process and became overnight Likud supporters, because- as she told me- they realized that day "that the palestinians don't differentiate between pro- and anti-peace jews; they are all jews to them and therefore they should all die." She used to get really upset and cry whenever she would hear about palestinian houses getting demolished or palestinian bystanders dying or getting injured in crossfire, and now, when she hears about stuff like that, she says that the one thing that crosses her mind is "better them then one of my family".

Read the whole thing.

Good news from Iraq

Mr. Chrenkoff does it again, in part 28 of his excellent "Good News from Iraq series. A teaser:

American airmen are also currently training the reactivated Iraqi air force:

Pilots and enlisted Airmen from the 777th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron at Little Rock Air Force Base, Ark., are here working hand-in-hand with pilots and crewmembers who served in Saddam Hussein’s air force before Operation Iraqi Freedom.

By the time the program is over, which we estimate to be May 2006, they will be a fully functional squadron,” said Maj. Roger Redwood, operations flight commander for the 23rd Advisory Support Team that is part of the 777th EAS. They are training airmen at Iraq’s 23rd Squadron.

While many of the new recruits have ample flight experience, their exposure to English has been more limited, officials said.

Most of the officers can communicate pretty well, but they have a hard time understanding the radio calls from air traffic control,” Major Redwood said.

They know the airplanes. They know the systems. They can do it all in Arabic, but we require them to do it in English, because if they are going to fly worldwide, they will need to be able to do it in English,” Major Redwood said. The Iraqi airmen are certainly not lacking in determination and dedication, the major said.

“These guys are all true patriots. They want to help their country,” Major Redwood said. “All of them were higher ranking in the Saddam era, so they took a pay cut. A lot of these guys were colonels and now they are majors. The guys coming in now are all captains, and they used to be majors and lieutenant colonels.”

APOD

APOD brings us...

What causes small waves in Saturn's rings? Observations of rings bordering the Keeler gap in Saturn's rings showed unusual waves. Such waves were first noticed last July and are shown above in clear detail. The picture is a digitally foreshortened image mosaic taken earlier this month by the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. The rings, made of many small particles, were somehow not orbiting Saturn in their usual manner. Close inspection of the image shows the reason - a small moon is orbiting in the Keeler gap. The previously unknown moon is estimated to span about seven kilometers and appears to have the same brightness as nearby ring particles. The gravity of the small moon likely perturbs the orbits of ring particles that come near it, causing them to shimmer back and forth after the moon passes. Since inner particles orbit more quickly than outer particles, only the leading particles of the inner rings and the trailing particles of the outer rings show the wave effect.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Quote for the day

This is the epitaph I want on my tomb: 'Here lies one of the most intelligent animals who ever appeared on the face of the earth.'

   Benito Mussolini

APOD

APOD brings us...

In 1997, Comet Hale-Bopp's intrinsic brightness exceeded any comet since 1811. Since it peaked on the other side of the Earth's orbit, however, the comet appeared only brighter than any comet in two decades. Visible above are the two tails shed by Comet Hale-Bopp. The blue ion tail is composed of ionized gas molecules, of which carbon monoxide particularly glows blue when reacquiring electrons. This tail is created by the particles from the fast solar wind interacting with gas from the comet's head. The blue ion tail points directly away from the Sun. The light colored dust tail is created by bits of grit that have come off the comet's nucleus and are being pushed away by the pressure of light from the Sun. This tail points nearly away from the Sun. The above photograph was taken in March 1997.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Why watch birds?

From GrrlScientist at "Living the Scientific Life (or Scientist, Interrupted)", eight reasons why birdwatchers watch birds. Read the whole thing, but here's her final reason:

8. Finally, it can save your life. One day you will be walking home from work, depressed. Your kid has the flu; the car's clutch needs to be fixed; and you are thinking tomorrow is your birthday. Another year has passed, and once again you have not triumphed at anything, really. Then you glance at the sky in despair, and right there, right over your head, blessing that particular air space on your street forever, is the world's most beautiful bird! With pearly white head, black and white wings, long forked tail, it circles slowly, a hundred feet up, eating dragonflies, tearing off the wings and letting them flutter down -- while you toss your briefcase in a bush, grab the first person to come along, and shout, "A swallow-tailed kite! A swallow-tailed kite!" until he, too, looks up and blinks at the sight and knows suddenly that he must buy some binoculars and become a bird watcher himself.

Reason number five particularly resonated with me. Birds conjure up beauty and mystery and strangeness for me. They also are one of the most challenging photographic subjects, and that also appeals to me.

Another reason that birdwatching appeals to me is one that GrrlScientist doesn't mention: it's something that almost anybody can do from their home. We live in the foothills of the mountains just east of San Diego, California, and we have a little property out in the chapparal environment. With a few bird feeders and some reliable water, we get hundreds upon hundreds of bird visitors, prominently visible from every window in our home. The most common species are California quail, four different hummingbird species, California towhees, spotted towhees, California thrashers, house finches, lesser goldfinches, western bluebirds, and white-crowned sparrows. We have many other bird species as well: orioles, blackbirds, grosbeaks, sparrows, kingbirds, hawks, kites, osprey, tanagers, and many more. All observable, even if only on occasion, right from our home.

Iraqi art

From Lance in Iraq (more at this link):

NOTE: This one may need to be explained to liberals. In this picture, the US is being portrayed as a champion of human rights. That is the way we are seen by most Iraqis because they are perceptive.

I pointed this art out to a liberal friend, who immediately retorted that surely this was simply an enterprising Iraqi taking advantage of American military sentiments to make a few bucks. Could be, I suppose. But wouldn't the simpler and more likely explanation be that it is exactly what it appears to be? Especially coming from an artist, with, one suspects, sentiments of his own...

Click the photo for a larger view. Better yet, go to Lance's blog!

Quote for the day

One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

   Albert Einstein

Quote for the day

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.

   G. K. Chesterton

California dreamin'

You know you're from California if...

1. Your coworker has 8 body piercing's and none are visible.

2. You make over $300,000 and still can't afford a house.

3. You take a bus and are shocked at two people carrying on a conversation in English.

4. Your child's 3rd-grade teacher has purple hair, a nose ring, and is named Flower.

5. You can't remember . . . . is pot illegal?

6. You've been to a baby shower that has two mothers and a sperm donor.

7. You have a very strong opinion about where your coffee beans are grown, and you can taste the difference between Sumatran and Ethiopian.

8. You can't remember . . is pot illegal?

9. A really great parking space can totally move you to tears.

10. Gas costs $1.00 per gallon more than anywhere else in the U.S.

11. Unlike back home, the guy at 8:30 am at Starbucks wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses who looks like George Clooney really IS George Clooney.

12. Your car insurance costs as much as your house payment.

13. You can't remember . . .is pot illegal?

14. It's barely sprinkling rain and there's a report on every news station: "STORM WATCH."

15. You pass an elementary school playground and the children are all busy with their cells or pagers.

16. It's barely sprinkling rain outside, so you leave for work an hour early to avoid all the weather-related accidents.

17. HEY!!!! Is pot illegal????

18. Both you AND your dog have therapists.

19. The Terminator is your governor.

20. If you drive illegally, they take your driver's license. If you're here illegally, they want to give you one.

Dogs

The reason a dog has so many friends is that he wags his tail instead of his tongue.
— unknown

Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.
— Ann Landers

If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.
— Will Rogers

A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.
— Josh Billings

A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.
— Robert Benchley

We give dogs time we can spare, space we can spare, and love we can spare. And in return, dogs give us their all. It's the best deal man has ever made.
— M. Acklam

Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.
— Sigmund Freud

Their is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.
— Ben Williams

The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.
— Andy Rooney

I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
— Rita Rudner

Dogs need to sniff the ground; it's how they keep abreast of current events. The ground is a giant dog newspaper, containing all kinds of late-breaking dog news items, which, if they are especially urgent, are often continued in the next yard.
— Dave Barry

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
— James Thurber

Anybody who doesn't know what soap tastes like never washed a dog.
— Franklin P. Jones

If your dog is fat, you aren't getting enough exercise.
— unknown

My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to $3 a can. That's almost $21 in dog money.
— Joe Weinstein

Ever consider what our dogs must think of us? I mean, here we come back from the grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!
— Anne Tyler

Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.
— Roger Caras

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
— Mark Twain

If you think dogs can't count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them.
— Phil Pastoret

You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that says, 'Wow, you're right! I never would've thought of that!'
— Dave Barry

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
— Robert A. Heinlein

My goal in life is to be a person as good as my dog already thinks I am.
— unknown

Without comment

As it appears that none is needed!

Click on the picture for a larger, clearer view...

Mars Odyssey - photo!

Currently there are several active robotic satellites in orbit around Mars. One of these is the Mars Odyssey, another is Mars Orbiter Camera. Recently the Mars Orbiter Camera took photos of Mars Odyssey — an amazing technical achievement. In the words of Malin Space Science Systems:

The Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) images shown here are the first pictures of a spacecraft orbiting Mars taken by another spacecraft orbiting Mars. In April 2005, the MOC aboard Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) was used to take pictures of the other two spacecraft currently operating in orbit around Mars: NASA's Mars Odyssey and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express.

The MGS MOC is able to resolve features on the surface of Mars as small as a few meters across from its nominal 350 to 405 kilometers (217 to 252 miles) altitude. From a distance of 100 kilometers (62 miles), MOC would be able to resolve features substantially smaller than 1 meter across. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL; Pasadena, California), Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company (LMSSC, Denver, Colorado), and Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS; San Diego, California) worked very closely together to acquire images of Mars Express and Mars Odyssey.


Mars Odyssey

Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey are both in nearly circular, near-polar orbits. Odyssey is in an orbit slightly higher than that of MGS, in order to preclude the possibility that the two orbiters would collide. However, the two spacecraft occasionally come as close to one another as 15 kilometers (9 miles).

The figure at right shows an extreme enlargement of the best MOC view of Odyssey; the fourth figure is a computer-generated drawing scaled to the same size. The MOC image clearly shows the Gamma Ray Spectrometer (GRS) and its 6 meters-long boom, the high gain antenna used to transmit not only the science data from Odyssey's own instruments, but also to relay data from the two Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity), and its solar array panel.

Mars Odyssey was launched on 7 April 2001, and reached Mars on 24 October 2001. Mars Global Surveyor left Earth on 7 November 1996, and arrived in Mars orbit on 12 September 1997. Both spacecraft are in an extended mission phase, both have relayed data from the Mars Exploration Rovers, and both are continuing to return exciting new results from Mars.

You can read more about this photo, and see more photos, at the Malin site. Click on the photo at right for a larger view.

Aurora Borealis

From Antartica, via "75 Degrees South". There's a nice collection of aurora borealis photos posted there...

Click for a larger view.

Ann nails Newsweek

Ann Coulter has a new column ("Newsweek dissembled, Muslims dismembered") that brilliantly exploses Newsweek's hypocrisy on the "flushed Qu'ran" story. Read the whole thing (linked above). Here's her conclusion:

No matter how I look at it, I can't grasp the editorial judgment that kills Isikoff's stories about a sitting president molesting the help and obstructing justice, while running Isikoff's not particularly newsworthy (or well-sourced) story about Americans desecrating a Quran at Guantanamo.

Even if it were true, why not sit on it? There are a lot of reasons the media withhold even true facts from readers. These include:

# A drama queen nitwit exclaimed she'd kill herself. (Evan Thomas' reason for holding the Lewinsky story.)

# The need for "more independent reporting." (Newsweek President Richard Smith explaining why Newsweek sat on the Lewinsky story even though the magazine had Lewinsky on tape describing the affair.)

# "We were in Havana." (ABC president David Westin explaining why "Nightline" held the Lewinsky story.)

# Unavailable for comment. (Michael Oreskes, New York Times Washington bureau chief, in response to why, the day The Washington Post ran the Lewinsky story, the Times ran a staged photo of Clinton meeting with the Israeli president on its front page.)

# Protecting the privacy of an alleged rape victim even when the accusation turns out to be false.

# Protecting an accused rapist even when the accusation turns out to be true if the perp is a Democratic president most journalists voted for.

# Protecting a reporter's source.

How about the media adding to the list of reasons not to run a news item: "Protecting the national interest"? If journalists don't like the ring of that, how about this one: "Protecting ourselves before the American people rise up and lynch us for our relentless anti-American stories."

It's classic Ann Coulter: witty, provocative, and dead on target.

Tech quote for the day

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build better and bigger idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

   Rick Cook

Quote for the day

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

   Abraham Lincoln

Developer humor

Top 12 things a Klingon programmer would say:

12. Specifications are for the weak and timid!

11. This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual processors if I am to do battle with this code!

10. You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon.

9. Indentation?! -- I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!

8. What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.

7. Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' -- they have 'arguments' -- and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.

6. Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.

5. I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a Bat-Leth contest. They will not concern us again.

4. A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!

3. By filing this SCR you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!

2. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!

1. Our users will know fear and cower before our software. Ship it! Ship it, and let them flee like the dogs they are!

S.S. Estonia

Scott at BalticBlog has a new post about a Swedish exhibition on the tragic sinking of the ferry S.S. Estonia eleven years ago. He also posts an excellent historical article that I have reproduced in its entirety here. He comments:

Pain, definately. Controversy, no. Not among people that don't fall easily to conspiracy stories. Even if the ferries from Estonia were carrying Soviet military gear from time to time, there's no evidence, so far, that this particular vessel was carrying such equipment. Even if, so what? The Soviet Union had the ship blown up? The Americans, who were to receive the supposed equipment? Heh.

Read both his post and the article...

The picture at right is of the bell on a monument to the people lost on the S.S. Estonia. This monument is located on a spit of land on the Estonian island of Hiiumaa — the closest piece of Estonian land to the site of the sinking. I've visited this monument a half dozen or so times, each time I've visited Hiiumaa; I find it very moving in its lonely, windswept location...

Journalistic responsibility

Claudia Rosett has a new column on Opinion Journal that urges the U.S. press to use its freedom and strength to report not only from a U.S. focus. Her conclusion:

The tragedy in all this is that while the entire world is by now acquainted with tales — true and false — about Abu Ghraib and Guantanomo Bay, the information pretty much ends there. When it comes to the Islamic world's most despotic states, almost no one outside their borders can reel off the names of the prisons they run, let alone tales of what happens within. Afghanistan is still recovering from the Taliban blackout of the human soul — which at the time received almost no coverage. Saudi Arabia--whence the Arab News, in its disquisition on Newsweek's story, denounces the U.S. as "ignorant and insensitive" — provides no accounting to the world of its dungeons. Can anyone name a prison in Yemen?

The point is not to engage in a tit-for-tat recitation of prison management, or invite a reprise of those absurd old Soviet debates, in which Moscow's reply to charges of millions dead in the gulag was that America had street crime.

But to whatever extent the press is engaged in the business of trying to report the truth, or contribute to the making of a better world, it would be a service not only to U.S. journalism, but to the wider world — including Muslims — to spend less effort dredging Guantanomo Bay, and more time wielding the huge resources at our disposal to report on the prisons of the Islamic world. It is in such places that the recent riots had their true origins.

If you're willing to believe that the U.S. press in general is motivated primarily by a desire to report the truth, then it is plausible that Ms. Rosett's call could be heeded. But if you're as cynical as I am, and you believe that the U.S. press is motivated primarily by ideology, then it seems likely that Ms. Rosett's plea will fall on deaf ears. More specifically, if Newsweek's motivation is ideological, then reporting on the prisons of the Islamic world will not help them achieve their goals. Implying that the current administration allowed (or even encouraged) desecration of the Qu'ran would.

Let's see if their behavior changes.

I'm not holding my breath, though.

Quote for the day

To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girlfriends.

   Benjamin Franklin

Baby Towhees

Six weeks ago we had a pair of California Towhees raise a brood in a nest built in a safety helmet hanging on our patio. Now there's another brood full of babies in the same nest! We don't know if it's the same pair of adults or not, as there's no way without tags to tell the adults apart. One thing did notice: there were three adults harassing me as I took this photo, not the two I expected. One possibility is that the third adult was actually a juvenile from the first brood; another is that it really was an adult, helping for some reason I don't understand.

We expect these little guys to fledge within a week...

Why we need Bolton

There's been a short Mark Steyn drought of late, but it's over. He's got a wicked new column out; with his usual wit and humor he evicerates the opponents of John Bolton's nomination to be the U.S.'s ambassador to the U.N. Right in the middle of this piece he makes a point about perceptions:

Thus, Bolton would have no problem getting nominated as U.N. ambassador if he were more like Paul Martin.

Who? Well, he's prime minister of Canada. And in January, after the tsunami hit, he flew into Sri Lanka to pledge millions and millions and millions in aid. Not like that heartless George W. Bush back at the ranch in Texas. Why, Prime Minister Martin walked along the ravaged coast of Kalumnai and was, reported Canada's CTV network, "visibly shaken." President Bush might well have been shaken, but he wasn't visible, and in the international compassion league, that's what counts. So Martin boldly committed Canada to giving $425 million to tsunami relief. "Mr. Paul Martin Has Set A Great Example For The Rest Of The World Leaders!" raved the LankaWeb news service.

You know how much of that $425 million has been spent so far? Fifty thousand dollars -- Canadian. That's about 40 grand in U.S. dollars. The rest isn't tied up in Indonesian bureaucracy, it's back in Ottawa. But, unlike horrible "unilateralist" America, Canada enjoys a reputation as the perfect global citizen, renowned for its commitment to the U.N. and multilateralism. And on the beaches of Sri Lanka, that and a buck'll get you a strawberry daiquiri. Canada's contribution to tsunami relief is objectively useless and rhetorically fraudulent.

I whole-heartedly support sending a clear-thinking, reform-minded representative like John Bolton (especially if he's also a foul-mouthed bully!) to the U.N., which deperately needs a thorough spanking. However, unlike many of Mr. Bolton's supporters, I'm not particularly optimistic about his chances of real success, in the sense of achieving real reform. Call me a pessimist if you like, but I don't see how a single member of the U.N. can force substantive changes in the way the U.N. does business, whatever their alleged leverage and whoever their representative is. The other members have too much of a vested interest in discomfiting the U.S. (at minimum) and in actively opposing the U.S. (at worst). The balance of power in the oddly constructed world of the U.N. is a complex thing, but even at the hub — the Security Council — these anti-U.S. forces hold sway (think China, France, Russia). On the whole, countries act in their own perceived self-interest, and all too often that means anti-U.S. actions, whether overtly counter to our interests or in the form of mere "friction" (making it harder to get what we want done). I expect Mr. Bolton to be nominated, and I expect him to make lots of noise and to provoke a few kerfuffles, and I look forward to the resulting entertaining press and blogospherics. But I am pessimistic about the chances of him provoking substantive change...

Guns vs. doctors

Are doctors more dangerous than guns? Consider:

1.The number of physicians in the US is 700,000.

2. Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year is 120,000.

3. Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171. (US Dept. of Health & Human Services)

A. The number of gun owners in the US is 80,000,000.

B. The number of accidental gun deaths per year (all age groups) is 1,500.

C. The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is .0000188.

Statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners. In both relative and absolute terms, doctors kill more people than guns do.

Doctors also save a lot of lives. Guns, used for protection, do the same thing — though, to my knowledge, nobody tries to track that number. Reporting it would probably be deemed inappropriate by the MSM...

Quote for the day

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

   Harry S. Truman

Dog Humor

How Many Dogs Does It Take to Change A Light Bulb?"

Golden Retriever: The sun is shining, the day is young, we've got our whole lives ahead of us, and you're inside worrying about a stupid burned out bulb?

Border Collie: Just one. And then I'll replace any wiring that's not up to code.

Dachshund: You know I can't reach that stupid lamp!

Rottweiler: Make me.

Boxer: Who cares? I can still play with my squeaky toys in the dark.

Lab: Oh, me, me!!!!! Pleeeeeeeeeze let me change the light bulb! Can I? Can I? Huh? Huh? Huh? Can I? Pleeeeeeeeeze, please, please, please!

German Shepherd: I'll change it as soon as I've led these people from the dark, checked to make sure I haven't missed any, and make just one more perimeter patrol to see that no one has tried to take advantage of the situation.

Jack Russell Terrier: I'll just pop it in while I'm bouncing off the walls and furniture.

Old English Sheep Dog: Light bulb? I'm sorry, but I don't see a light bulb!

Cocker Spaniel: Why change it? I can still pee on the carpet in the dark.

Pointer: I see it, there it is, there it is, right there.....

Greyhound: It isn't moving. Who cares?

Australian Shepherd: First, I'll put all the light bulbs in a little circle...

Poodle: I'll just blow in the Border Collie's ear, and he'll do it. By the time he finishes rewiring the house, my nails will be dry.

The Cat: "Dogs do not change light bulbs. People change light bulbs. So, the real question is: How long will it be before I can expect some light, some dinner and a massage?"

Operation Iraqi Children

It's hard to imagine a more useful charity (from several perspectives) than this one. From their web site:

Many American troops have taken it upon themselves to reconstruct schools and gather learning tools for the children of Iraq.

Their efforts have been met with immense gratitude from the local Iraqis and their children.

Operation Iraqi Children is a grassroots program that aims to provide concerned Americans with the means to reach out to the Iraqi people and help support our troops' attempts to assist them.

Michael Yon's latest

Michael Yon reports from Iraq on the death of an American Marine: First Sergeant Michael J. Bordelon. The picture at right is of Sgt. Bordelon at a peaceful moment. The conclusion of Michael Yon's post:

And finally the word came that Michael J. Bordelon had run the course. The men here at 1-24 Infantry began to prepare a memorial service from scratch. Though they had known the odds two weeks earlier, nobody seemed to want to bet against their friend by preparing a memorial, so in the nights leading to the ceremony, men worked late to prepare a farewell while conducting ongoing operations.

The auditorium was nearly packed, but the empty seats in the back were the most prominent, empty seats that would have been filled by men who were gone, men who were wounded or killed in action on the same streets where Michael Bordelon ran his last mission, and finished the race.

NGC 3370

APOD brings us...

Similar in size and grand design to our own Milky Way, spiral galaxy NGC 3370 lies about 100 million light-years away toward the constellation Leo. Recorded here in exquisite detail by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys, the big, beautiful face-on spiral does steal the show, but the sharp image also reveals an impressive array of background galaxies in the field, strewn across the more distant Universe. Looking within NGC 3370, the image data has proved sharp enough to study individual pulsating stars known as Cepheids which can be used to accurately determine this galaxy's distance. NGC 3370 was chosen for this study because in 1994 the spiral galaxy was also home to a well studied stellar explosion -- a type Ia supernova. Combining the known distance to this standard candle supernova, based on the Cepheid measurements, with observations of supernovae at even greater distances, can reveal the size and expansion rate of the Universe itself.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Quote for the day

The tyrant dies and his rule ends, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

   Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

Boots on the ground

Michael Yon's latest post, from the troops with their boots on the ground in Mosul. An excerpt:

Deuce Four headed downtown this morning with several items on their to-do list. One task was to recon a gasoline station that was attacked and destroyed a couple of weeks ago. While we walked around the rubble of the abandoned station, the commander noticed two artillery rounds on the ground. A minute or so later, someone spotted a radio command switch for a very large booby trap.

We were surrounded by nine bombs (large artillery shells) all rigged to explode by radio control.

While I ran away as fast as I could, the soldiers "pulled back quickly" and called EOD, who arrived and removed the bombs without incident.

New moon

APOD brings us the moon, with a jet and contrail in the light of a sunset...

Remember when the Moon was young? It was just last Monday. On May 9th, this slender crescent Moon was recorded at a tender age of 34 hours and 18 minutes. Well, OK ... when calculating the lunar age during a lunation or complete cycle of phases - from New Moon to Full Moon and back to New Moon again - the Moon never gets more than 29.5 days old. Still, a young Moon can be a rewarding sight, even for casual skygazers, though the slim crescent is relatively faint and only easy to see low in the west as the sky grows dark after sunset. Sighting this young Moon last Monday, lucky astronomer Stefan Seip was also treated to a very dramatic telescopic view of an airliner flying in front of the distant sunlit crescent. At a high altitude, the jet's stunning contrails reflect the strongly reddened light of the Sun setting below the western horizon.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Quote for the day

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny....'

   Isaac Asimov

Hugs in Iraq

From Lance In Iraq (with more pictures), the pictures say it all. But here's what Lance said:

Some of the soldiers here have adopted a nearby family that needs some help with things and these images were captured at the moment they arrived for a brief visit. The soldier getting the hugs is the guy doing most of the heavy lifting (no pun intended) to help out.

In the decades to come, Iraq will be a major power in the Middle East and they will be our ally. The foundation of that critical relationship is being solidified here everyday by soldiers and Iraqis.

American soldiers are one of the world's wonders...

Quote for the day

The man who does not read good books is at no advantage over the man that can't read them.

   Mark Twain

Oil for news

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Eric Stakelbeck at the Weekly Standard have an interesting article that tells about Uday Hussein (Saddam's son) using the oil-for-food program to manipulate the press. If you want to dignify Al Jazeera with that label (or vice versa, I suppose). The piece begins:

On January 6, 2005, the U.S.-funded Arabic satellite network Al Hurra broadcast an explosive exposé detailing the financial links between Saddam Hussein's regime and the Arab press. Al Hurra's documentary--so far overlooked in the West--aired previously unseen video footage, recorded by Saddam Hussein's regime during its murderous heyday, of Saddam's son Uday meeting with several Arab media figures and referring to the bribes they had received.

Recipients of this Baathist largesse appeared to include a former managing director of the influential Qatar-based government-subsidized satellite network Al Jazeera, Mohammed Jassem al-Ali. The videotaped meeting between Uday and al-Ali occurred on March 13, 2000, when al-Ali still worked as Al Jazeera's managing director. Their conversation makes clear that this was not their first meeting, but that they had met on prior occasions--and that Al Jazeera had put into effect the directives that Uday had proffered in those previous meetings.

Referring to how his advice had affected changes in Al Jazeera's personnel, Uday states, "During your last visit here along with your colleagues we talked about a number of issues, and it does appear that you indeed were listening to what I was saying since changes took place and new faces came on board such as that lad, Mansour."

This "lad" is Ahmed Mansour, an Al Jazeera journalist who has been criticized for his pro-insurgency reporting. In particular, Mansour came under fire in early 2004 for his coverage of the U.S. attack on Falluja, which pointedly emphasized civilian casualties.

Read the whole thing.

Fun with words

Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot his whole life, which created an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him frail, and with his odd diet, he suffered from very bad breath. This made him a super-callused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

Tip o' the hat to Jim M.

Boots on the ground

His latest photo blog is at right, and below is an excerpt (the conclusion) to his latest post:

While the medic tried to stop the bleeding, SFC Robert Bowman began questioning the man through a translator. "You are going to die," Bowman said, "I want you to answer some questions."

The man brought his hand to his head, and touched his forehead with his index finger, pointing right between his eyes. "Shoot me, shoot me," he said, "I want to die."

LTC Kurilla ordered the medic to try to save him. So they took him to same hospital where Sgt Davis died last week; the same one that little Farah never made it to, and there he is, still alive, his bombing days are over.

The entire blog is excellent (though short!), and worth visiting regularly...

More mass graves

But the American liberal left somehow has managed to keep their blinders on with respect to the ongoing discoveries and investigations of Saddam's seemingly innumerable mass graves. The MSM pays far more attention, of course, to the current events — especially any that make Americans look bad.

The last credible reckoning of Saddam's mass graves that I saw gave the running total of his victims as over 800,000 — while estimating that only one quarter of the grave sites had yet been discovered. Iraqi authorities believe that very large undiscovered mass grave sites remain in (especially) the southern marshlands and in the Kurdish areas. Undisputedly there are many hundreds of thousands of people who simply disappeared during Saddam's reign and whose remains have never been discovered.

Where is the American left's outrage about these deaths? How can they miss the fact that the human cost of Saddam's reign was enormously higher than the human cost of taking Saddam out? What philosophical or moral calculus are they using that enables them to weigh these facts and condemn America?

Meanwhile, Free Iraqi has his own comments on the mass graves. Read the whole thing, but here's his conclusion:

Still, the mass graves are now the most striking evidence of Saddam's regime brutality and they show in a way the size of death and destruction this regime was bringing to Iraq on a daily basis. I say they show, and I mean to the rest of the world, as we don't need any evidence to tell us we were living in Hell.

Niebuhrian?

Chrenkoff cites this familiar poem by theologian Dr. Rheinhold Niebuhr as a way to understand President Bush's foreign policy:

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

I can't help but agree with Mr. Chrenkoff on this one, though at first blush it seemed ludicrous to me to reduce an apparently complex foreign policy to something so simple. If I were making such an attempt (which never occured to me!), I'd probably have started with the premise of fostering liberty. But this little poem does a much better job of summarizing the strategy (even to a non-believer), as opposed to the objective of spreading freedom.

Georgians for Bush

According to press reports, President Bush's short visit could hardly have been more friendly (if you'll discount the alleged "attack" with a dud grenade). Huge crowds (especially considering Georgia's small size) of 100,000+ people waited hours in the rain to see and hear him (and Laura, of course). A group of traditional Georgian dancers got Mr. Bush so enthused that he jumped onto the stage and did a little gyrating of his own. Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili said, “You stood with us during our revolution and you stand with us today. On behalf of my nation I would like to say, `Thank you,’”. And we're told that he also persuaded President Bush to make an unplanned stop in a local Georgian restaurant — after which President Bush, obviously pleased, highly recommended a stop there by any visitor.

Publius Pundit has a nice writeup, with some photos. An excerpt:

Arms are raised in the air, everyone cheers and chants, and Freedom Square turns into a sea of Georgian and American flags.

At first glance you may think you’re witnessing the Republican National Convention all over again. But if you saw President Bush speak just now, you would know that he was winning the hearts and ears of a crowd of jubilant Georgians. When recalling all of the October pre-election polls reflecting how much the world hates the United States and especially President Bush, it would seem odd to the outside observer that over 100,000 people would wait in the heat, for hours on end, before impatiently breaking through police barriers just to hear Bush speak. In reality, however, it isn’t so far-fetched. Due to American support for freedom and democracy in the region during and after the fall of the Soviet Union, countries from the Baltics to the South Caucasus hold the United States in the highest of regards.

Quote for the day

Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

   George Orwell

Quote for the day

The idea of countries helping others become free, I would hope that would be viewed as not revolutionary, but rational foreign policy, as decent foreign policy, as humane foreign policy.

   George W. Bush (May 7, 2005, while visiting with the leaders of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania before visiting Russia and Georgia)

Something to remember

Publius Pundit has a nice piece today, with lots of links, about an ugly incident from World War II: the Yalta conference in which Churchill, Stalin, and Rooosevelt basically agreed to divide up Eastern Europe. There's some legitimate room for debate about whether the Western Allies could have done anything effective about it, but...they didn't even take a principled stand, or object in any way, to Stalin's enormous grab of land for a "buffer zone" around the core of the Soviet Union. And in the process millions of people who had independent before Hitler overran them were "transferred" from one tyrant's dominion to another's.

To some of my Estonian friends, especially those who are both ethnically Estonian and interested in history, this behavior of the Western Allies rankles to this day, and is the direct cause of a reluctance to trust. And who can blame them?

An excerpt:

Amid this, I discovered some ugly history. There was a book out, by Nikolai Tolstoy, a distant descendent of Leo Tolstoy, called ‘Victims of Yalta.’ It disturbed me, because of its description of how the victorious Allies handed their Eastern European allies in the Great War to Jozef Stalin. Prisoners of the Germans were to be forced back to Stalin brutal communist regime, the evilest tyranny on earth. Many of them jumped onto barbed wire rather than endure that fate worse than death. All begged to be spared. None were. Many were shot the minute they reached their now-Stalinist oppressed homelands.

One of my professors had been a Polish freedom fighter who fought with Sikorsky from London during the war. He was decorated for bravery. From him, I learned the term ’sold down the river.’ The allies instead chose to preserve ‘peace’ with Jozef Stalin, at the price of their freedom. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were willing to do it, because they were ‘only’ Eastern Europeans, the third world of Europe, surely ‘used’ to oppression. So in the disgraceful last chapter of the war, they traded Eastern Europe’s freedom for their own.

Check out the whole thing, and don't forget to follow some of those links...

Stars, nebulae, and stuff

From the APOD:

When stars form, pandemonium reigns. A textbook case is the star forming region NGC 6559. Visible above are red glowing emission nebulas of hydrogen, blue reflection nebulas of dust, dark absorption nebulas of dust, and the stars that formed from them. The first massive stars formed from the dense gas will emit energetic light and winds that erode, fragment, and sculpt their birthplace. And then they explode. The resulting morass can be as beautiful as it is complex. After tens of millions of years, the dust boils away, the gas gets swept away, and all that is left is a naked open cluster of stars.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Quote for the day

Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown.

   H. Ross Perot

Sunni days

Strategy Page has an interesting report today:

The Sunni Arab media in the Middle East has gotten tired of blaming the United States for everything that doesn't work in Iraq. More and more stories blame Iraq's Sunni Arabs for the terrorism, corruption and tyranny in Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East. This is part of a trend, the growing popularity of Arabs taking responsibility for their actions. This is a radical concept in Middle Eastern politics. For several generations, all problems could be blamed on other forces. The list of the blameworthy was long; the United States, the West, Colonialism, Infidels (non Moslems, especially Jews), Capitalism, the CIA, Israel, Democracy and many others too absurd to mention. Giving up this crutch is not popular in the Middle East. Oil wealth has made it possible to sustain, for decades, the belief of all these conspiracies to keep the Arab people down and powerless. But the invasion of Iraq, and the overthrow of Saddam, forced Arabs to confront their long support for a tyrannical butcher like Saddam. Here was a dictator who knew how to play the blame game, and position himself as an Arab "hero." Saddam's supporters turned to terrorism to restore themselves to power. Two years of killing Iraqis has shamed an increasing number of Arabs into admitting that this is an Arab problem, not the fault of the United States (who, in the most popular delusion, should have waved a magic wand and made all problems in Iraq disappear.) Even the Sunni Arab media are in awe of the Iraqi Shia and Kurds, for not slaughtering large numbers of Sunni Arabs in response to the terrorism, or simply as revenge for centuries of torment at the hands of Sunni Arabs.

If these observations are accurate, then this is a hopeful portent of positive change. Now all we need is for some of this new attitude to diffuse into the "blame America first" crowd of liberals over here!

Zoom!

In the words of the Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Our Earth is not at rest. The Earth moves around the Sun. The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way Galaxy orbits in the Local Group of Galaxies. The Local Group falls toward the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. But these speeds are less than the speed that all of these objects together move relative to the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). In the above all-sky map, radiation in the Earth's direction of motion appears blueshifted and hence hotter, while radiation on the opposite side of the sky is redshifted and colder. The map indicates that the Local Group moves at about 600 kilometers per second relative to this primordial radiation. This high speed was initially unexpected and its magnitude is still unexplained. Why are we moving so fast? What is out there?

Well...it appears that there is an enormous gravitational pull from the direction of the constellation Centaurus. Astronomers have dubbed this the Great Attractor.

You can read more about the cosmic microwave background radiation and the doppler dipole in this Wikipedia article.

Arab proverbs

Courtesy of Subzero Blue:

Wishing does not make a poor man rich.

Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things on marble.

When what you want doesn't happen, learn to want what does.

The wound of words is worse than the wound of swords.

The wound that bleeds inwardly is the most dangerous.

Only the tent pitched by your own hands will stand.

Only three things in life are certain birth, death and change.

Seek counsel of him who makes you weep, and not of him who makes you laugh.

He who has health has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.

Quote for the day

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.

   Henri Poincaré

Cosmos

Someday very soon, the privately-financed Cosmos mission will be launched by a submerged Russian submarine. The objective is to test an honest-to-goodness solar sail. If you've never heard of this sort of propulsion system, they're quite interesting. The basic idea is to leverage the power in the photons (light) streaming out from the sun, by capturing them or reflecting them from a large "sail" constructed of ultra-lightweight materials.

Here's the Cosmos site, and here's a good Wikipedia article on the whole idea...

More wildflowers!

Debbie and I took a very nice hike on the East Side Trail along Cold Stream in Cuyamaca State Park today. The wildflowers are within a week or so of prime at the altitude of Green Valley Campground.

Go read all about it (and see all the pictures!) at the link above. You can also click on the picture at right for a larger view.

Overlapping galaxies

Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) brings us this photo (click on the photo at right for a larger view) of two galaxies that just happen to line up from our perspective on Earth. This has some scientific benefits (see below), but what strikes me as I look at this is simply the sheer beauty of it. And also what seems like a vanishingly small chance that something like this could "just happen", and how fortunate we are to live in an age where such things can be discovered and shared. The explanation from APOD:

NGC 3314 consists of two large spiral galaxies which just happen to almost exactly line-up. The foreground spiral is viewed nearly face-on, its pinwheel shape defined by young bright star clusters. But against the glow of the background galaxy, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust are also seen to echo the face-on spiral's structure. The dust lanes are surprisingly pervasive, and this remarkable pair of overlapping galaxies is one of a small number of systems in which absorption of visible light can be used to directly explore the distribution of dust in distant spirals. NGC 3314 is about 140 million light-years away in the multi-headed constellation Hydra. This color composite was constructed from Hubble Space Telescope images made in 1999 and 2000.

Quote for the day

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.

   Richard Bach

Five days in hell

It's a riveting and shocking story. One tiny excerpt:

As soon as the metal door clanged shut behind us, the English – speaking leader said, “You are spies… and now you are prisoners”. All of our cameras, equipment and identification were taken from us and we were told to sit on a mat with our backs to the wall. “The Americans will attack soon and I have to see to my men,” said our captor. “I will deal with you when I return”.

Shortly after nightfall, they brought a platter of food into the compound, and in what would soon become a routine pattern, they served us first before eating dinner themselves. Admittedly I did not have much of an appetite.The plates had just been cleared away when another car pulled up outside and four more gunmen came quickly through the door. Before I could even react, I was pulled to my feet and pressed against the wall with my hands on top of my head. Almost immediately I heard the distinct sound of a Kalashnikov being cocked about a metre behind me. In fear and shock at the realization that they were about to execute me, Zeynep screamed at them in Turkish: “Don’t shoot him… he has a son!”

Phoebe

JPL's caption for this picture (click for a larger view):

Phoebe's true nature is revealed in startling clarity in this mosaic of two images taken during Cassini's flyby on June 11, 2004. The image shows evidence for the emerging view that Phoebe may be an ice-rich body coated with a thin layer of dark material. Small bright craters in the image are probably fairly young features. This phenomenon has been observed on other icy satellites, such as Ganymede at Jupiter. When impactors slammed into the surface of Phoebe, the collisions excavated fresh, bright material — probably ice — underlying the surface layer. Further evidence for this can be seen on some crater walls where the darker material appears to have slid downwards, exposing more light-colored material. Some areas of the image that are particularly bright — especially near lower right — are over-exposed.

An accurate determination of Phoebe's density — a forthcoming result from the flyby — will help Cassini mission scientists understand how much of the little moon is comprised of ices.

This spectacular view was obtained at a phase, or Sun-Phoebe-spacecraft, angle of 84 degrees, and from a distance of approximately 32,500 kilometers (20,200 miles). The image scale is approximately 190 meters (624 feet) per pixel. No enhancement was performed on this image.

Hindenberg

On May 6, 1937 the zeppelin Hindenberg caught fire and crashed while attempting to dock at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Lakehurst happens to be near where I grew up, so tales of the Hindenberg were very familiar to me even as a child. Thirty six people died in the accident, including one ground crew member.

The exact cause of the accident is an enduring controversy, with some investigators (I use that term very broadly) believing that it wasn't an accident at all. Wikipedia has a good article on the entire affair.

Click on the picture for a larger view. A tip o' the hat to TigerHawk for reminding me of this bit of history.

Ann Coulter kerfuffle

Daniel Bonevac at Right Reason has a nice post on the most recent Ann Coulter kerfuffle, at the University of Texas at Austin.

The crowd greeted Coulter with a standing ovation. Her speech lasted for about 30 minutes. Protesters began shouting almost as soon as she began, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. They numbered a few dozen and were clustered in the back. Coulter’s supporters constituted most of the crowd, and interrupted her frequently (and more effectively) with laughter and applause.

Coulter’s real strengths emerged in the question period, which lasted for roughly an hour. Many questions were friendly; some were even thought-provoking. Others, however, were hostile—including the obscene one that led to a student’s arrest, which I will not dignify by repeating here. (Why, by the way, has sexually explicit profanity become so common among some leftists recently? And why do they delight in directing it toward women? Wouldn’t they term this behavior ‘sexual harassment’ if it were being done by anyone else?) The first “question” was a diatribe followed by flatulent noises. Sadly missing were informed and articulate questions challenging Coulter’s views.

The level of controversy surrounding Coulter’s appearances here and elsewhere surprises me. I recall similar outbursts against speakers during the Nixon and Reagan administrations, but those speakers tended to be administration officials whose actions constituted the supposed grounds of the protest. Coulter doesn’t hold a government position; she has no direct political power. She gives talks. She writes columns and books. The same holds of David Horowitz, William Kristol, and Pat Buchanan, all of whom, like Coulter, have been physically assaulted as well as disrupted while speaking on campus. That, it seems to me, adds new dimensions to the free speech debate. Protesters who try to disrupt speeches by administration officials can argue that they are protesting actions, not speech per se. The new protesters can’t make that claim. They are protesting speech qua speech, which is why they need to allege that the speech they condemn is “hate speech,” so threatening to the social order that it ought to be silenced. Hence the pies and threats of violence; threats, in their view, deserve to be met with threats.

I'm increasingly disturbed by the recent spate of mindless, content-less, sometimes obscene, and sometimes violent confrontations of conservative speakers by liberals in the audience. The first few occurences, toward the end of last year, I was inclined to write off as basically harmless antics by the more unbalanced fringe elements. As these incidents keep piling up I'm starting to wonder if we're witnessing something else entirely: the intellectual disintegration of the left. Lest you jump to a conclusion, I don't think that's good news at all — an alternative perspective, if based on some defensible intellectual foundation (as opposed to making vile and obscene remarks about Ann), and the resulting public debate, is an important part of a representative democracy.

Don't you just love that picture of Ann?

Protest babes

...and he's brought us a nice collection of protest babe photos. Along with some words of "protest babe wisdom":

A few words, though, before we begin. If any of you think only the Christian women of Lebanon walk around without their own portable tents, forget that. It’s isn’t even close to true. My hotel was on the Muslim side of Beirut and I saw almost as many modern-looking women on that side of the city as I saw in the Christian areas. Even Hezbollah doesn’t mandate the veil or the hijab.

Two Hezbollah groupies invited me to have coffee with them downtown. We argued rather passionately about politics, as you can imagine, but they were good sports about it. They gave me a Cuban cigar as I went on my way, but first one of them asked me: “So, whaddaya think of our women, eh?” and elbowed me good-naturedly in the ribs. Lebanon ain’t Saudi.

Hat tip to Publius Pundit for the pointer...

P.S. There's a semi-serious side to looking for (if not at the protest babes) when the protest babes show up for the revolution, recent experience suggests that the revolution is going to succeed. And if they don't show up, not.

Quote for the day

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.

   Victor Borge

Mars Polar Lander found?

The folks at Malin Systems (a San Diego company that does imaging work for NASA and JPL) believe they may have found the lost Mars Polar Lander that disappeared in December 1999. In their own words:

The loss of Mars Polar Lander in December 1999 was a traumatic experience not only for those of us intimately involved in the mission, but also for the U. S. Mars Exploration Program. Following the failure, exhaustive reviews of what happened and why led to major shifts in the way planetary exploration was implemented. Without telemetry, the cause of the failure could only be surmised. It would be extremely important if, through some observation, it were possible to confirm the failure mode.

Shortly after the loss of Mars Polar Lander (MPL), the Mars Global Surveyor MOC was employed to acquire dozens of 1.5 m/pixel images of the landing uncertainty ellipses, looking for any evidence of the lander and its fate. The criteria we used in searching for MPL required a bright feature of irregular or elongated shape (the parachute) within about 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) of a location that included a dark area (rocket-disturbed martian dirt) and a small, bright spot near its center (the lander). In 2000, we found one example (see figure) that met these criteria, but in the absence of any substantive, corroborating evidence, the interpretation that this was MPL and its parachute were considered to be extremely speculative.

Observations by MGS MOC in 2004 of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) landing sites provided guidance for a re-examination of the previously identified MPL candidate. For example, the material from which the MPL and MER parachutes are made is similar, and its brightness in MOC images can be calculated, at least in a relative sense, as a function of sun angle. The brightness of the candidate "parachute" in the MPL candidate location image turns out to be consistent with it being the same material. The brightness difference of the ground disturbed by rocket blast at the MER sites is similar to the brightness difference seen in the MPL candidate image, again adjusted for the difference in illumination and viewing angles. These consistencies lend credibility to this tentative identification.

If these features really are related to the MPL landing, what can we surmise about that landing from the image? First, we can tell that MPL's descent proceeded more-or-less successfully through parachute jettison and terminal rocket firing. The relative location of the candidate parachute and lander is consistent with the slight west-to-east wind seen in dust cloud motion in the area around the date of landing. The blast-disturbed area is consistent with the engines continuing to fire until the vehicle was close to the ground. How close is not known. The larger MER retrorockets fired at about 100 m altitude and continued firing until the engines were about 20-25 m above the surface; the candidate MPL disturbance is roughly the same size, but whether this means the engines were firing as close to the ground as the MER rockets cannot be determined. These interpretations are consistent with the proposed MPL mode of failure: the engines fired at the correct time and altitude and continued firing until the flight software checked to see if an electronic message indicated that the landing leg contact switch had been set. Since the initial leg deployment several kilometers above the surface apparently induced sufficient motion to trigger this message, the software stopped the engines as soon as the check was made, about 28-30 seconds into the 36-40 second burn. MPL was probably at an altitude of about 40 m, from which it freely fell. This is equivalent to a fall on Earth from a height of about 40 feet. The observation of a single, small "dot" at the center of the disturbed location would indicate that the vehicle remained more-or-less intact after its fall.

What is important about having a candidate for the Mars Polar Lander site? It gives the MOC team a place to target for a closer look, using the compensated pitch and roll technique known as "cPROTO." Examples of cPROTO images and a description of this capability, developed by the MGS team in 2003 and 2004, were discussed in a MOC release on 27 September 2004. Without a candidate for targeting a cPROTO image, it would take more than 60 Earth years to cover the entire Mars Polar Lander landing ellipse with cPROTO images, because the region spends the better part of each Mars year covered with carbon dioxide frost, part of each winter is spent in darkness, and, because of several uncertainties involved with the technique, it often takes two, three, or more tries before a cPROTO image hits a specific target. Now that a candidate site for Mars Polar Lander has been identified, we have a cPROTO target, which may permit us to obtain an image of about 0.5 meters per pixel (allowing objects approximately 1.5-2.5 meters in size to be resolved) during southern summer this year. At the present time (May 2005), the landing site is just beginning to lose its cover of seasonal carbon dioxide frost.

Click on the photo at right for a stupendously huge, high-resolution version (it will download quickly from Malin's site, not slowly like it would from mine).

A Marine acts quickly

A fast-thinking Marine takes quick and decisive action upon seeing another McDonald's customer in danger. The short story from 7/39 News:

Staff Sgt. Jamie Nicholson is being hailed a hero for what he did at the McDonald's in Clairemont at Balboa and Genesee avenues. Nicholson was in the drive-thru line placing his order over the McDonald's intercom when Sabio Barretto, 24, who was being waited on at the drive-thru window, dropped some change out his window. Barretto leaned out his window to retrieve the money and either stepped on the gas pedal or the idling vehicle pulled forward, trapping his head between the car and the exterior wall of the restaurant.

Nicholson told police what happened as he pulled into the drive thru.

"I was placing my order over the intercom, and then I heard the lady inside say, 'Oh, my God,' and kind of scream," said Nicholson.

It appeared that Barretto was in serious danger, said Nicholson.

"The door was hitting the building, so he was pinned between the door and the car, and it looked like it cut off his oxygen," said San Diego police officer Tim Peterson.

Nicholson acted quickly to save Barretto.

"I jumped out," said Nicholson. "He was turning blue, [so I] smashed the back window in, reached from the back seat, put the car in reverse car, backed up, just reassured him, told him everything would be all right, help was on the way."

Nicholson, who is a drill instructor at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, said that unlike when he served four months in Iraq, he didn’t expect any trouble at the McDonald's Wednesday morning.

"Life-threatening situation at a McDonald's drive through is not something you'd expect everyday, that's for sure," said Nicholson.

San Diego Sgt. Andra Brown said Nicholson did everything right.

"He definitely is a hero," said Brown. "He took immediate action. He did not hesitate to get involved, saw that somebody's life was at risk, and it's not what you'd expect to find at McDonald's drive-thru, but he's a hero, he saved a guy's life today."

Barretto was taken to Sharp Memorial Hospital, where he was treated for minor injuries.

Desmond T. Doss

Desmond Doss was a very unusual sort of military hero. He refused to kill enemy soldiers, because of his religious beliefs. But he still wanted to serve his country, and serve it he did...with great distinction. Chaotic Synaptic Activity (is that a great name or what?) has a wonderful post describing Doss' heroism. Here's a small taste:

The monument was then, the day of the picture of my sisters and I, located near a sugar cane field on the island of Okinawa. It was there my father told us a story of an Army Medic by the name of Corporal Desmond T. Doss, who distinguished himself (that day) by climbing an escarpment, repeatedly, venturing out onto a machine gun fire swept battle field of open, relatively flat ground, to recover his fellow soldiers, and lower them down the escarpment to safety. A brave man indeed, but he was braver still, in the context of then, and even today than those key points describe.

Desmond T. Doss is (he is still living) a 7th Day Adventist. This Christian denomination does not believe in the taking of life. Desmond Doss could have easily avoided service in WWII. Because of his upbrining and personal faithfulness, a request for CO status would have, most likely, been granted without question. Yet, Desmond T. Doss joined the Army, not to kill, but to save lives.

You'll be really sorry if you don't read the whole post. Plus all your hair will fall out, and a camel with leprosy will move into your car's back seat. Worse things, perhaps, as well. Read it!

Here's the citation from Doss' Medal of Honor:

The President of the United States in the name of The Congress takes pleasure in presenting the Medal of Honor to

DOSS, DESMOND T.

Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, Medical Detachment, 307th Infantry, 77th Infantry Division.
Place and date: Near Urasoe Mura, Okinawa, Ryukyu Islands, 29 April-21 May 1945.
Entered service at: Lynchburg, Va.
Birth: Lynchburg, Va. G.O.
No.: 97, 1 November 1945.

Citation: He was a company aid man when the 1st Battalion assaulted a jagged escarpment 400 feet high As our troops gained the summit, a heavy concentration of artillery, mortar and machinegun fire crashed into them, inflicting approximately 75 casualties and driving the others back. Pfc. Doss refused to seek cover and remained in the fire-swept area with the many stricken, carrying them 1 by 1 to the edge of the escarpment and there lowering them on a rope-supported litter down the face of a cliff to friendly hands. On 2 May, he exposed himself to heavy rifle and mortar fire in rescuing a wounded man 200 yards forward of the lines on the same escarpment; and 2 days later he treated 4 men who had been cut down while assaulting a strongly defended cave, advancing through a shower of grenades to within 8 yards of enemy forces in a cave's mouth, where he dressed his comrades' wounds before making 4 separate trips under fire to evacuate them to safety. On 5 May, he unhesitatingly braved enemy shelling and small arms fire to assist an artillery officer. He applied bandages, moved his patient to a spot that offered protection from small arms fire and, while artillery and mortar shells fell close by, painstakingly administered plasma. Later that day, when an American was severely wounded by fire from a cave, Pfc. Doss crawled to him where he had fallen 25 feet from the enemy position, rendered aid, and carried him 100 yards to safety while continually exposed to enemy fire. On 21 May, in a night attack on high ground near Shuri, he remained in exposed territory while the rest of his company took cover, fearlessly risking the chance that he would be mistaken for an infiltrating Japanese and giving aid to the injured until he was himself seriously wounded in the legs by the explosion of a grenade. Rather than call another aid man from cover, he cared for his own injuries and waited 5 hours before litter bearers reached him and started carrying him to cover. The trio was caught in an enemy tank attack and Pfc. Doss, seeing a more critically wounded man nearby, crawled off the litter; and directed the bearers to give their first attention to the other man. Awaiting the litter bearers' return, he was again struck, this time suffering a compound fracture of 1 arm. With magnificent fortitude he bound a rifle stock to his shattered arm as a splint and then crawled 300 yards over rough terrain to the aid station. Through his outstanding bravery and unflinching determination in the face of desperately dangerous conditions Pfc. Doss saved the lives of many soldiers. His name became a symbol throughout the 77th Infantry Division for outstanding gallantry far above and beyond the call of duty.

If you'd like to read more about this hero who was nearly thrown out of the service, look here and here.