Mantis Shrimp are TOTALLY BADASS!

Mantis shrimp see in much more vivid colors than us humans, and are just generally totally bad-ass (most awesome shrimp ever) but recent studies of the mechanism that mantis shrimp use to change linearly polarized light into circularly polarized light may give inspiration to the next generation of DVD drives.

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/mantis-shrimps-could-show-us-way-better-dvd-26561.html

LCROSS impact early tomorrow morning.

At 4:31 AM(PST) tomorrow(10/9/09) morning, NASA's LCROSS satellite will smash into the moon to study possible sources of water. Now, there's a lot of important and interesting science to be done on this mission, and the resulting data will be invaluable in understanding our moon and eventually creating moon bases and cities, but when I think about this mission, I can only focus on the WOW COOL aspect of it. because WE ARE GOING TO HIT THE MOON WITH A SPACESHIP JUST TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS. I hate to yell, but that is just amazingly cool. So cool in fact, that me and a few friends are headed to the Chabot Space and Science Center to watch it with our own eyes. If you are in the bay area, Join us, its only 3$. If not, you can get live images and info from NASA

New Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE images up.

NASA has just released a whole new set of images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiters HiRISE camera and they are just stunning. There are a bunch of great images of the Gullies but the one that really stood out to me in terms of vivid beauty was  a dune

USGS Dune Database Entry Number 0419-449 (ESP_014348_1345)
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona 

The latest batch of Images.

NASA's Press Release

Trash Can Nuclear Reactors

In yet another win for the belated retrofuture, and yet another reason why its a great idea to fund NASA, researchers have announced that they have made many critical strides into developing a trash can sized nuclear reactor. getting a nuclear reactor down to convenient size may be key into solving many of our energy problems, at the least, it helps in our energy problems with setting up colonies on the Moon and Mars.

Now don't get me wrong, they haven't built one yet, we just have encouraging signs that it is possible and it will work.

Water Water Everywhere

My desire for extra-planetary emigration is well documented, so, when I saw two interesting articles about water on both Luna and Mars, I had to talk about them and their effect on bringing about the belated retrofuture.

Before I talk about the moon, I want to mention a finding that has been overshadowed by the moon finding (which, admittedly, is very very exciting.) However, Here on Between Worlds I'm going to give Mars the first billing. a few meteorites that smashed into mars last year have uncovered martian ice at latitudes much closer to the equator than we have expected to find ice. This means that ice is much more plentiful on mars than we previously thought.

What I find most fascinating about this is a coincidence that only proves that nature has a twisted sense of humor. One of the meteorites revealed ice no more than 4 inches from where the 1970's Viking 2 lander dug a trench into mars. If the viking lander had dug its trench only 3.5 inches deeper, it would have likely revealed the ice, and certainly would have changed how we view mars and martian exploration in the past 4 decades.

But onto the big story of the day, The Indian Chandrayaan-1 mission, using NASA's Moon Meteorology Mapper, has discovered that the moon is damp. Water, while not abundant, is definitively present on the moon. One of the major problems that has been facing a Lunar Colony has been the assumed dryness of the lunar surface. If we were unable to find water on the moon, we would have to ship it all up from earth, and that puts a major major crimp in any plans. the energy cost of shipping it all up is extensive to say the least (if you don't believe me, ask anyone who has gone to burning man)
 Furthermore, we gain more than just drinking water when we find water on the planetary bodies and moons we wish to colonize, Rocket-fuel and Breathable Oxygen all can be made once we have that good ol' Hydrogen Hydroxide (don't listen to the fools who call it 'dihydrogen monoxide' they don't know what they are talking about).

These findings force us to radically change our previous conceptions about the rarity of water in the solar system. The increased water we find throughout the system can and will be used to sustain human colonies on other planets.  Overpopulation has become a major problem for humanity, we can fix this in two ways, decreasing population, and increasing resources/area. However, our home planet is fast becoming tapped out of resources, so, where do we go? To the stars, where else? This is one of the major callings of our generation. We must break free from the gravity well that keeps us on this planet. The water findings just give us the confidence that allows us to take bold action in taking the next step to become the first species (so far as we know) to spread itself out to the stars.

Fuck You Evangelicals, You Cant Take My Country.

Bruce Wilson at the Huffington Post  Reports on one of Former Alsaka Governor and Vice Presidental Candidate and total fucking lunatic Sarah Palin's Religous adviser, Rick Joyner is actively trying to undermine the principles that the uninted states was founded on and setting up a goddamn religous totalitarian state.

Im not even fucking kidding. this is the movement of the so called "third wave" christians who  believe the end times are apporaching and that they need to take back the world for "their Dread Champion, Jesus Christ"  This is just fucking proof of what i have been saying all along. the idea of subordinating reason to faith, to deny science, and reality, and the crazy hatred spread among these people has caused  the Evangelical movement to threaten the very fibers of our modern way of life. We cannot sit idely by whiole these lunatics prepare to recalim the world,

They are preparing to send us to displacement camps. And thats it, the battle lines are drawn. I do not understand how people can see this and not immideatly turn to athiesm, This is the endpoint of blind faith. this is why i am an radical athiest, because the true threat to my way of life comes from the people who are convinced that god has sent them on a misson to destroy the Uninted States of America.

Hienlien wrote a short story, Revolt in 2100, that is about a counter revolution to a religous fundamentalist state that had cropped up in the USA, much later, when collecting his short stoies in his timeline (the day after tomorrow) he mentioned two stories that he never wrote, one of them, was about the rise of the religous fundamentalism and he said he was never able to write it as it was too depressing, but that in the rise of TV preachers he saw it coming. and it seems, he may have been right all along,

But now, we are aware, and we see it coming, it is our mission as americans to stop these religious nutjobs from seizing the country that came up with the declaration of independence and the bill of rights.

Im tired of the right wing always taking the mantle of patriotism, it is clear now that they have been pandering to treasonous liars who are out to destroy the secular way of life. I wont have it. This is the country of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Washington,  would they have sat idly by while a group of religious fanatics attempt to tear down all they had worked so hard to make free? I think not.

Cosmic Friday: HST Edition

This week, the Hubble Space Telescope unveiled its new imaging camera to give us even better access to the beautiful vistas that the universe has in store. I was about to post about it on Wednesday when I first heard about it, but I figured, this would make a perfect edition of Cosmic Friday. NASA press release



In the upper left shows a butterfly emerging from stellar demise in a nebula, the upper right displays a clash of galaxies known as "Stephens Quintet", The bottom left is an image taken of the center of the great globular cluster Omega Centauri, and finally, our old friend from last weeks Cosmic Friday, the last image is a pillar of star birth in the Carina Nebula.

Images like these are why I can never understand when people are against space flight and space exploration. how can you see images as beautiful as these and of such cosmic significance and not want to be there to see it with your own eyes? I understand all the problems, the Light Speed barrier, but still, we cannot help but yearn to break free of this gravity well.

Britain apologizes for its treatment of Alan Turing after the war.

In what must be a gratifying feeling for the LGBT community but should definitely be celebrated the world over the British Government formally apologized for their treatment of Alan Turing after the war. For those of you who don't know, Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, the solver of the decision problem. and the man who cracked Enigma and very likely won WWII for the allies, was homosexual. and after the war, turing was convicted of Gross Indecency for his sexual preference. he was given the choice of chemical castration and hormone therapy or jail-time, lost all of his access to his classified work, and, after a year committed suicide. One of the greatest mathematicians of this century and the man who did more than any other man to defeat the Axis powers died after being persecuted for something so silly as his sexual orientation. It is I think, one of the more shameful occurrences in modern history and it is quite refreshing to have the government that caused it to formally apologize, even if it is years later.

2009 has been a year of deep reflection - a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ - in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence - and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate - by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices - that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Gordon Brown

Early computer to be brought back online.

The Harwell computer, the UK's third oldest computer is about to head down to bletchley park to be rebooted after 36 years idle.

Mr Barnes said the prospect of seeing the Harwell computer up and running after more than 36 years was "very exciting

indeed it is, computers have become so ubiquitous to modern life, tha it is easy for us to forget how modern they are, and we often forget those early pioneers into computing technology that has created the modern era. its nice to see these great early computers starting up again to remind us how far we have come, now that we seem to be sitting on the cusp of the quantum computing revolution.

read more here

Stand Aside, its time for SCIENCE

Its a great time to love science. We now have the first evidence of a binary star system where one is a massive white dwarf star. Such stars are the precursor to type 1a supernovae. A white dwarf star is usually about half as massive as the earth and about as large, however, the star the ESA has found is half the size of the earth and half again as massive, hence much much denser than the average white dwarf. The theory is that when the star hits 1.60 earth masses, it will cause a supernova, one that is close enough to us that will light up the sky day and night. The inhabitants of this planet are going to be so damn lucky in a few million years....

ScienceDaily (2009-09-04) -- The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope has uncovered a celestial Rosetta stone: the first close-up of a white dwarf star, circling a companion star, that could explode into a particular kind of supernova in a few million years. These supernovae are used as beacons to measure cosmic distances and ultimately understand the expansion of our Universe.

White dwarfs

Crypto-Human Interest.

So I wanted to share a fun story with Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code

However, I think this article really misses a opportunity to explain the importance and nature of cryptography and misses some very important points of how cryptography matters to our daily life as opposed to being just the playthings of presidents and friends as a exercise for the mind.

the very nature of our modern lives is build on a foundation of cryptography. all modern financial systems rely on the strength of modern cryptography. and modern cryptography is very goddamn strong. and quantum cryptography is unbreakable.

The code-breaking effort the allies unleashed in WWII is one of the greatest stories of ingenuity, hard work and very possibly more than any other factor, defeated the axis powers.


All online purchases rely on the modern public-key system for encryption, one that cannot be attacked like we would attack enigma, we know how the system works, without the key to find what you needed to decrypt the message would take all of the computers on earth working non-stop for thousands of years. I think to sell cryptography short is to fail in your responsibility to educate the public, and the fact that they spent time talking about simple substitution cyphers but don't mention the massive impact crypto plays in our day to day life is intellectually disingenuous.

None-the-less, by the current standard of media and what sort of job we can expect the 4th estate to do on our behalf(a terrible one) it is a fun article, that you should read.