Justin's Shame...

Simon M. passes this along:

One day a fourth-grade teacher asked the children what their fathers did for a living. All the typical answers came up – fireman, mechanic, businessman, salesman, doctor, lawyer, and so forth. However, little Justin was being uncharacteristically quiet, so when the teacher prodded him about his father, he replied, 'My father's an exotic dancer in a gay cabaret and takes off all his clothes in front of other men and they put money in his underwear. Sometimes, if the offer is really good, he will go home with some guy and stay with him all night for money.'

The teacher, obviously shaken by this statement, hurriedly set the other children to work on some exercises and then took little Justin aside to ask him, 'Is that really true about your father?'

'No', the boy said, 'He works for the Democratic National Committee and is helping to get Hillary Clinton elected to be our next President, but I was too embarrassed to say that in front of the class.'

On my first reading of this, I was feeling some sympathy for little Justin. But then I realized – it's a joke!

Avalanches!

Just this morning I posted (below) about the remarkable imagery from the MRO's HiRISE instrument. Now this afternoon they've released these spectacular images that HiRISE made of avalanches in action! Either these avalanches are frequent occurences, or the science teams had a rare stroke of luck in catching these. From the MRO HiRISE web site:

All images are false color. Material, likely including fine-grained ice and dust and possibly including large blocks, has detached from a towering cliff and cascaded to the gentler slopes below. The occurrence of the avalanches is spectacularly revealed by the accompanying clouds of fine material that continue to settle out of the air. The largest cloud (upper images) traces the path of the debris as it fell down the slope, hit the lower slope, and continues downhill, forming a billowing cloud front. This cloud is about 180 meters (590 feet) across and extends about 190 meters (625 feet) from the base of the steep cliff. Shadows to the lower left of each cloud illustrate further that these are three dimensional features hanging in the air in front of the cliff face, and not markings on the ground. Sunlight is from the upper right.

Cameras orbiting Mars have taken thousands of images that have enabled scientists to put together pieces of Mars' geologic history. However, most of them reveal landscapes that haven't changed much in millions of years. Some images taken at different times of year do show seasonal changes from one image to the next, however, it is extremely rare to catch such a dramatic event in action. (Another, unrelated, active process that has been captured by Mars cameras are dust devils.) Observing currently active processes is often a useful tool in unlocking puzzles of the past for scientists studying the Earth. Working from primarily still images, it is harder for scientists studying Mars to rely on this tool. The HiRISE image of avalanching debris is a very rare opportunity to directly do so.

Amazing stuff!

Martian Matters...

As I write this there are several robotic explorers on and orbiting around Mars, and another is approaching quickly (the Phoenix lander). Rarely do these missions make the news, even though (from most perspectives, anyway) they are far more important to mankind than, say, Britney's latest calamity or over-exposure.

At right is a recent photo of an alluvial fan on Mars, taken by one of these explorers: the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and more specifically, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) imager it has onboard. You can click on this photo to enlarge it, or you can get the full resolution version (of this or any other of the tens of thousands of HiRISE images) from the HiRISE instrument site.

Quietly, every day, these robots (and the teams of scientists, engineers, and technicians who control and use them) are doing first-class science work. Our remarkable technology and their efforts are steadily advancing mankind's knowledge of the universe. I'm reasonably certain that the progress of these explorers will have more impact on our future than 90% (or more!) of the pap and crap that fills the front pages of our newspapers, or that leads on the news “shows” – and yet it is very seldom that the heroes of this work get any recognition at all...