Boo-hoo. Hollywood strikes out again. Its 2004 climate-change doom-and-gloom flicker, “The Day After Tomorrow,” predicting an ice age for Britain and Europe thanks to global warming slowing the Gulf Stream ocean current, isn’t surviving scientific scrutiny. What small changes there’ve been in the Atlantic current since sat inspections began in 1993 apparently are only part of a natural cycle.
Via Snoopy The Goon.
Comments Off on The Day After Tomorrow? Nope
Posted in Blogosphere, Science/Engineering, South of the Border, Space
Tagged AGW, Al Gore, climate change, global warming, Gulf Stream, NASA, ocean currents, The Day After Tomorrow
It may, sooner than we’d like, be allowed to crash into the atmosphere and burn up, its fragments falling into the oceans. But, in the meantime, watch this flash timeline of how it was built and think about what yet may be done there.
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Posted in Obamalot, Science/Engineering, Space
Tagged International Space Station, ISS, Space Shuttle
New discoveries of significant amounts of water (at least six-feet of water ice in each of forty craters) on what was long considered a bone-dry Luna show why today’s AGW to-do hardly can be considered “settled”:
“If you converted those craters’ water into rocket fuel, you’d have enough fuel to launch the equivalent of one space shuttle per day for more than 2000 years. But our observations are just a part of an even more tantalizing story about what’s going on up on the Moon.”
Via Science@NASA.
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Posted in Science/Engineering, Space, Weather/Climate
Tagged "settled science", AGW, Luna, NASA, water on the moon
Hal Clement’s classic hard SF novellas here about alien contact, Mission of Gravity and Star Light, with a couple of connected short stories thrown in, make for wonderful reading, and some free education in elementary physics and chemistry.
MG hardly suffers from being so old that the humans employ slide rules and photographic film, and the author wisely continues it in the more recent SL. It’s also almost unnoticeable that there is, as other reviewers of his other books have pointed out, no sex and no violence—not even a sharp argument between the humans and the aliens.
Instead, the stories move along on resolving the inevitable hazards as the hydrogen-breathing Mesklinites (variously described as grotesque worms, caterpillars or centipedes about three feet long) explore their own high-gravity planet and, later, a similar one three parsecs away, as contract employees (and, simultaneously, students and respected friends) of the humans.
What makes it work is the interplay between the species and the way Clements’ aliens mimic human emotions and behavior, including occasional paranoia and deception, despite their significant physiological differences. I was sad to finish. It’s a pity the author is no longer alive to continue this rich story of human scientists, linguists and administrators hesitantly helping the Mesklinites gradually move from being sailors on methane seas in ammonia storms to pilots of interstellar spacecraft.
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Posted in Library, Science/Engineering, Space
Tagged Heavy Planet, Mesklinites, Mission of Gravity, space alien contact, species interplay, Star Light
Delighted to see a new confirmation of the postulated dinosaur-killing effect of the meteor (or comet) that splashed into Chicxulub on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula millions of years ago. University of Texas geophysicists, who have helped map the ocean floors, did quite a bit of work on the remains of the crater—all hidden today by water and rock but still discernible with radar.
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Posted in Science/Engineering, South of the Border, Space, Texana
Tagged Chicxulub, dinosaur-killer, Texas geophysics
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Posted in Science/Engineering, Scribbles, Space, Weather/Climate
Tagged Mt. Jelm, Sun Pillar, Wyoming, Wyoming Infrared Observatory
Birth control pills? The automobile? Antibiotics? Arguably. But in this case it’s radar, and Robert Buderi does a grand job of explaining why in the 500-plus pages of his sometimes technical, occasionally confusing, but always compelling 1996 classic, which I recently reread for the third time.
Perhaps it’s most compelling if you use your microwave (whose magnetron heart is a principal radar component) for more than defrosting bread or reheating coffee. Not to mention having more than a passing interest in astronomy, the battlewagon Texas (one of the first warships to, in 1939, get a working radar) and know some meteorologists who rely on their Dopplers for play-by-play forecasting of severe thunderstorms.
Must be other reasons, too, which would account for why the thirteen-year-old book still has respectable sales, even if only sixteen people have taken the time to review it at Amazon. Could be because this is one of the few accessible books to explore this world-changing technology and the people behind it. Which could be because much of it still is a military secret. The aluminum “chaff,” for instance, first used in 1945 to confuse enemy radar still is very much in use and hardly changed in sixty-five years.
Buderi, a former Business Week technology editor, does drop the ball now and then, and not just because of his understandable inability to penetrate all of the technology’s secrecy before, during and since World War II. Nazi Germany, as he points out, failed to match the radars of the Allies. But not because the Germans didn’t have the earliest lead of all. In 1904, in fact, long before any other country was taking RAdio Detection And Ranging seriously. (Unfortunately Germany’s military and commerce didn’t either).
Buderi dismisses Christian Huelsmeyer’s Telemobiloscope as merely preliminary. But the Duesseldorf engineer’s invention to prevent ships from colliding had all the ingredients except the cathode ray tube, which hadn’t been developed yet, and the radar name which awaiting coining. Nevertheless, Buderi’s book is a winner. There’s simply nothing else like it. But, good as it is, it suffers from its own focus on the Rad Lab at MIT, ignoring or slighting developments elsewhere. Still, it’s a murky subject and Buderi’s book is illuminating, if incomplete.
Comments Off on The Invention That Changed The World
Posted in Library, Science/Engineering, Space, Texana, The War, Troops, Weather/Climate
Tagged Christian Huelsmeyer, radar, Robert Buderi, Telemobiloscope, The Invention That Changed The World
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 