Jack Vaughan: Science

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 01:45:48 GMT

Hey the radio thing is over and out. Have moved blog to http://www.moontravellerherald.blogspot.com.

Cant say will be there that long. It has flaws of the technical order too. But it does not have the same flaws that tire me here. Hard to upload and synch. A site where question marks have replaced apostrophes going back three years. I voiced my complaints [on synch arch] to Radio HQ. But interaction is not human. Its mechanical mouse machine missives.

Looking back on Radio Weblog: Some decent stuff. But scattered. Scattered notes in desk drawers was what I hoped to better. This is only slightly more neat. Got complaints from my readers about too much computer stuff. But what the hell else can I write about? So may fork into two sites in future. Good news is RSS and XML are here and the Web is ready to explode again. Short Google! Remember the words of Manny Ramierez: "I dont believe in no curses. You make your own destination."

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 02:58:02 GMT

Lets go back to GOD!

Ernst Mayr dies, aged 100
Sysematics, his specialty, I only came across yesterday. It was as historian that Mayr got my attention. Mayr got my attention and influenced my thought, that is for sure. I made point as a grad student in science communications get some history of science under my belt...all there was avaialble was one course, on Darwin, but lo and behold, Mayr's The Evolution of Biological Thought was just newly vailable and I shelled out the bucks and bought it, and got a decent grade in a course that was way over my head. Mayr's view was like James Burke' Connections, but significantly deeper. He showed how thoughts or thnkings intermingle and grow, bounce and resonate, pointing the way toward an explanation of the dialectics of science. Today blogs kind of form a dialectic; probably informed by Burke; but also probably informed by people who know people who read Mayr. The cat , he was long time harvard hadn, liived til a hundred and was scheduled to do a lecture in Bedford Jan 25 [it snowed big time that day]!
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4486887
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=66948

As Orwell Foresaw
Of interest: 'No Place to Hide' - By Robert O'Harrow Jr. - NYT's MICHIKO KAKUTANI writes: Brain waves with ''noninvasive neuro-electric sensors are just part of futuristic surveillance statethat is post-9/11 America, as described in Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s unnerving new book, ''No Place to Hide'' -- an America where citizens' The digital revolution of the 1990's exponentially amplified trends enabling retailers, marketers and financial institutions to gather and store vast amounts of information about current and potential customers. And as Mr. O'Harrow notes, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, ''reignited and reshaped a smoldering debate over the proper use of government power to peer into the lives of ordinary people.'' Orwell was right about this, Big Brother just arrived some two decades later than Orwell predicted. - NYT, Jan 25, 2005

UNRELATED
HP crossbar threatens transistor hegemony -Reuter, Feb 1, 2005
Morse code of cells -BBSRC.ac, Jan 10, 2005
Eisner departs -NYT, Jan 2, 2005
Space probe enters Titan's atmosphere CBC News, Dec 22, 2004

Kansas Town Is Launch Pad for Bid at Flight Record

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 03:01:32 GMT

Robot ships on other moons big news last year
Will we have such trips to view again? Maybe not in life time. Doors open and close as Apollo taught. Many years later the moon remains a mystery. Particularlly how it causes humans to misbehave. It is very hard to map.

Thrilling explorations of other worlds -USA Today, Dec 27, 2004
US share of the Human Genome Project complete - The Register, Dec 23, 2004
Burn start for Cassini-Huygens - SpaceRef.com
Meet Bose - PopSci, Dec. 2004
Water on Mars: THE Story - TechNewsWorld
Graham Glass weblog
Ray Ozzie looks back, looks ahead – December 6, 2004
The rise of the green building -The Economist Special
Sony to Disclose Details on Computer Chip - Forbes, Nov 29, 2004
Moon remains a mystery - Daily Times of Pakistan, Nov. 28, 2004

Web community flow machine history at IBM

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 16:30:49 GMT

Chemistry Nobel for protein death process
In the late '70 and dearly '80s, Rose, Hershko and Ciechanover worked to identify the marking process in which cells identify molecules to be destroyed. The process governs cell division, NA repair, and various immune functions. The Nobel comes due to the impotr the work holds for others attempting to prevent protein breakdown or to use it to breakdown cancer causing proteins.
Read: Protein death process earns Nobel - BBC, Oct 6, 2004

Sat, 07 Aug 2004 02:52:29 GMT

Sun spotted
Due to advances in computer modeling and new, high-tech instruments on the ground and in space we can monitor subtle aspects of solar behavior that make for real astrophysics. -Natgeo, July, 2004 [excrpt]

Related
Ming mans death ray -this site, Nov 5, 2003

Cassini Scientists Discover New Radiation Belt, Lightning --Planetary Society, Aug 6.2004
Alvin submarine to be replaced in 2008 - Reuters, Aug 6, 2004
Chicago's Von Freeman profiled on NPR - NPR.org, Aug 4, 2004

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 02:43:18 GMT

He was just interested in solving problems, Or, Be there when the picture is painted
My introduction to the discovery of DNA was, as with many people, through Watson’s 141-page ‘The Double Helix,’ [assigned in Biology in 1970, competed: 2001]. A great story of discovery. Of course, Crick actually fought to stop the book’s publication.

BiografieBiologinnen und Biologen | PaulingDNA Doc site

Watson’s brush strokes were broad but through various means the basic picture Watson painted has been filled in, and departed Crick appears as one of the greatest scientists. A Mendel or Darwin walking in my time. Is peer said of him: He was just interested in solving problems. But he had an eye for finding the absolutely crucial problem. He described his joy in the process as to be the guy who was "there when the picture is painted."

Crick studied physics After work on acoustic mines during World War II, he had been looking for problems on the cusp between the inorganic and organic. He and Watson too, had a sense for both biology and chemistry. Advances in biology had been somewhat stalled, too broad a statement that, until their sojurn in the 20th Century, as biochemistry had to develop from whole cloth.

The Watson-Crick approach was after Linus Pauling’s - building physical models compatible with information from the new science of X-ray crystallography. They had good [now controversial] access to Rosalind Franklin’s DNA crystallographs which she did not [or did] understand herself. They knew what they were looking for, they would tell you, and the truth is that in a relatively few inspired months they lurched on, spurred on by a stalking Pauling, and found the secret of life. The moved from the X-ray [shown at right] to the steel model [shown at far right].

Many basic elements of discovery were on display in the hunt for the Double Helix. In his memoir, Crick wrote: “It’s true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but .. we were looking for gold. Both of us had decided … that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene.”

Then he went about figuring what DNA done did. And then, onto The Brain and Consciousness, which we have noted on this site.

An odd bit about Crick: He looked at a tough problem in evolution - the narrow window for earth to cool and life to appear in fossil record and, bemusedly perhaps, in “Directed Panspermia” suggested an alien solution. He was maybe at times a bit gleeful about debunking the Bible story, but extraterrestrials? Hey no particular problem! Bunk on! Escapism in the defense of modern muckiness is okay. Just a footnote in the great parade.

See you in the gene pool the next time around Daddy Crick! Job well done!

Related
Francis Crick, Co-Discoverer of DNA, Dies at 88 - NYT, July 30, 2004
Crick in the neck - Jack Vaughan's Radio weblog, May 04
Francis Crick, DNA pioneer, dies - 30 July 04 NewScientist.com
Crick and his US collaborator James Watson - NewSci, July 30, 2004
DNAnniversary - USA Today, 2.23.2003

Unrelated
Simulation: ACC cars can keep traffic flowing
Human drivers have a tendency to brake harder than the car in front of them [mistakenly] did, erring on the side of safety. But Adaptive Cruise Control eliminates the tendency to overbrake. It smoothes out the overreactions, correcting for bad drivers, and cutting the propogation of those non-events that stall modern traffic. - WSJ [sub req], July 30, 20

Bill Gates view on what's next for Microsoft - July 30, 2004

Sat, 03 Jul 2004 03:04:55 GMT

Seven years in the making
Did Paul Simon say 'everything looks worse in black and white'? - If so, he either missed alot of film arts at NYU, or he is putting us on in his 1973 opus 'Kodachrome.' Black and white is what is real. People still finding that out. When the Nasa, Euro, Italio Cassini mission got to Saturn to orbit, with a billion billion pseudo colors at dispose, did they take pictures in color? No, brother droog. The fear of flaw was so great that they went with the least pixilated solution: B&W! The pictures were so good said Dr. Porco, that she thought they were simulations. Her mind was blown.

Of course, and yet, in true-color images taken in visible wavelengths, Moon Titan's photochemical smog, rich in organic material, gives the moon a smooth, featureless, orange glow.

Related
A very strange wonder - NYT, July 2, 2004
The first spacecraft to orbit Saturn arrived late Wednesday - NYT, July 2. 2004

poesy
Rings of Saturn
i.
We were approaching Saturn
In our craft of chrome

The encircling rings
Embellished and near

Said 'ramblers
You're gone but the decks are dormant,
You're gone and now you're here"

I'm Blinni
From the Italian Space Agency
On a mission from milan
5000 pounds of antennas and dream
and the soul of search
and all I do is push
that polaroid shutter
in the gap between
those rings
and gas
and fax
it back
to pasadena
alas
and
alack

cont..

What would you like to talk about?

Orbiter Cassini finds mystery in Saturn's rippling rings - NewSci, Jul 2, 2003

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
and the ultraviolet imaging spectrograph at http://lasp.colorado.edu/cassini.

Also see NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute image:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/61778main_pia06098-516.jpg
Full-Res TIFF: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/tiff/PIA06098.tif (311.1 kB)

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 01:43:15 GMT

Crick of Nobel
I’m sitting there once working the second shift on Digital Design and NPR is on I got a cold chill. The spine chill of the kind once evoked by The Shadow, but seldom from The NPR. Why you ask? It was Marvin Minsky talking, and it got me frightened. It was probably about the time [1986] of the publication of The of Society of Mind, and Marvin was being interviewed, and the topic was AI, and what is self, and what if the next step in evolution was machines. And, says, Marvin, drolly, why not?

This is the point where I get off the cybernetic boat and start swimming for land, with Tahitian beauties singing Christian chorals. I am interested in the intersection of art and science, as this weblog attests, but there is a time to bail.

Then it happens again. The chill factor. When? Last week. Whilst checking in on the Noble Dr. Crick in the N.Y.T., I read more about his long-arduous work on consciousness.

Now, the more I look at the literature of consciousness the more it seems to me the scientific and artistic neuronauts alike both seem to becoming to a like state – to a view of consciousness as flashing chains of images that mean something to those involved. And Crick’s work is somewhat on this path. But he seems a real certain and a little gleeful that consciousness will eventually be unveiled as an artifact.

No mysterious consciousness is supposed to=no soul=no persons. Let us let the Doc do the talking:

"The view of ourselves as `persons' is just as erroneous as the view that the Sun goes around the Earth," he said. He predicted that "this sort of language will disappear in a few hundred years."

Chill! Mooohaaaha!

Guess he didnt see Uma Thurman in Gattica.

Well there it is. The man did knock over some mysteries in his time – but the doors on the other side of DNA have proved pretty archly mysterious too. I think Crick uses the term mystery like Minsky did in Society of Mind. It is a weakness and conviieniienc [the heck with the spell checker!] of a form of human. Retro form. [Minksy expanded on this notion in famous SciAm article Will robots inherit the earth? Ray Kurzweill has had a go at this vein too.]

Crick uses mystery – like Marvin in book: as self-perpetuating and an end in itself, as long as it is outside of the scientific realm, apparently. Of course, the Zen folk are not an unspiritual lot, and they have been about doing away with this ‘self’ and ‘person’ stuff for some time. So I guess I will remain open minded as long as I have one.

Someday you may go to the mall and no one will be there. That day might be yesterday. But did it happen? [No animals were hurt during the production of this essay.]

RELATED
What underlies everything -This Weblog, Feb 22, 2004
On Crick and Watson upon reading Mayr; The Growth of Biological Thought - This Weblog, Oct 21, 2002
Conscious machines, by Marvin Minsky - uidaho.edu
Society of Mind on amazon.com
Will Robots inherit the Earth? from Sciam - on MediaLab site
Crick on path of being - NYT, Apr 13, 2004

TECHNOLOGY
Test Webcast - Requires Flash
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) will rip through retail and merchandising IT operations like an invading army. Or, RFID will simmer on the back burner - and flame out after some modest improvements in bar-code scanning appear.

I recently recast an ADTMAG colum[ http://download.101com.com/ADT/LBS/rfid.swf ] on the topic of RFID as a Flash presentation. I first did it on Feb 22 as a a 699K download but seems to work fairly well even under the least robust Internet connections. [That file was deleted to make way for an update linked-to above. I used PPT and RoboFlash to make it, so I havent' really learned Flash. But it seems to have a lot of potential as a communications mechanism. Hope to improve quality of presentation again later. Doing recordings within PPT is new to me, and the volume seems amiss. Also created a few plosives. This is only a test. Click to access Test Webcast

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 13:49:35 GMT

Bernard Ransil, 74

Dr. Bernard (Bernie) J. Ransil, mathematician and medical researcher, died on April 1 in Boston after a brief illness. He was 74.

Beginning in the mid-1960s in Boston, Ransil worked with members of the Harvard medical research community, where he was among the first to apply computers and advanced computational statistics to clinical studies. He retired from Harvard’s Department of Medicine as Associate Professor in 1996 but continued to provide his services to the research community at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Hospital. He was author/coauthor of over 125 publications on computational, medical and medical-ethical topics.

Early in his career, Ransil worked on molecular orbital computations at Catholic University of America, where he received a PhD. From 1956 to 1960, he worked in Robert S. Mulliken’s Laboratory of Molecular Structure at the University of Chicago, where he and others used computers to measure orbital paths for small molecules.

The lab’s work helped establish Mulliken’s Molecular Orbital theory, laid the groundwork for the then-new field of Computational Chemistry, and ultimately led to a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Mulliken in 1966. Ransil subsequently edited Mulliken’s papers, which appeared in 1989 as “Life of a Scientist: An Autobiographical Account of the Development of Molecular Orbital Theory.”

After receiving a medical degree at the University of Chicago in 1964, Ransilreceived a Guggenheim fellowship and traveled to Quantum Chemistry centers throughout Europe where he presented his Computational Chemistry research work.

He created the Vernon F. Gallagher endowed chair at Duquesne University in 1999 for the study and integration of science, philosophy and theology. His theater and musical reviews appeared in the Boston Globe and the Boston Pilot.

Ransil resided in Boston’s Mission Hill district. He is survived by Sr. Michele D.P. of Greensburg, PA, Janet Pack of Bethel Park, PA, Alise Ransil of Hawaii and Leonard Ransil of Eire, PA, Joseph of Walnutcreek, CA, Donald of McDonald, PA, and Sr. Dorothy Ransil of Etna, PA, and is also survived by many nieces and nephews.

---

Dr Ransil was my neighbor and landlord. Another neighbor and I pulled this obituary together. Bernie had a very scientific turn of mind, reflected in the meticulous care applied to his several Mission Hill properties, which he maintained in the face of the neighborhood's general decades' long deterioriation [that has since been reversed, at least in real estate terms]. He also was very devout, a Renaissance Man, and a keen student of Thomas Aquinus and other Church Fathers. He engoyed the company of great minds of the literary kind. Once my car got seriously sideswiped on the street, and I was ready to bail on the Hill. He hoped that C. and J. and I could stay, and he found a parking spot for me on his land overlooking the golden city. Was a great favor that I will always remember. -JV

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 04:17:24 GMT

Beach rover uncovers Mars's ancient oceans
The landing site of the Mars rover Opportunity was once the shore of a shallow, salty sea, NASA scientists have declared. The weight of evidence now gathered makes the conclusion unequivocal, they say. - New Scientist, March 24, 2004.

Wire-growth process leads to flexible nanosystems
An approach to creating single-crystal nanowires from just about any semiconducting material is being pioneered by Charles Lieber and his group at Harvard University in tandem with the nanotech startup he co-founded, Nanosys Inc. Together with methods for placing wires in arrays and multilayers, the technique promises to create complex systems at nanoscale. - EETimes March 24, 2004

5000-mph X-43A Vehicle Ready for Flight
NASA has set Saturday, March 27 for the flight of the experimental X-43A research vehicle. The flight is part of the Hyper-X program, a research effort to demonstrate alternate propulsion technologies for access to space and high-speed flight within the atmosphere. The flight will provide unique free flight data about hypersonic (faster than Mach 5) air-breathing engine technologies. The unpiloted 12-foot-long vehicle, part aircraft and part spacecraft, will be dropped from a B-52. It will be boosted to nearly 100,000 feet by a rocket and released over the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division Sea Range over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of southern Calif. It is expected to fly under its own power at about 5,000 mph. -MoontoMars.com, March 24, 2004

Mon, 22 Mar 2004 01:32:33 GMT

TECH/SCI
Moving to XML -- Does it mean throwing out your RDB queries?
Bringing relational data into XML formats is a major task for many developers these days. XML has clear benefits as a lingua franca for integration, but it must co-exist with a well-established body of relational DB know-how. - On ADTmag, Mar 16, 2004

Darpa desert race bests robots -New Scientist - Mar 15, 2004
The most formidable race for robot vehicles yet staged ended limply, with not one of the 15 entrants coming close to finishing the 142-mile (230-kilometre) Californian course.

Falling bubbles in the beer - EurkAlert.org, Mar. 15, 2004

TROPE FOR ZOE

The hunt for antihydrogen - cnw.ca, Mar 11, 2004
Nanograss -NYT, Mar 16, 2004
Sunnyland
refs in Deep Blues - on Amazon

Passings
Nobelist Pople, mathematician who modeled molecules, at 78
-NYT, Mar. 16, 2004
Cid Corman, 79, Poet of Roxbury and Kyoto
-NYT, Mar. 16, 2004

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 00:45:36 GMT

What underlies everything? What holds?
The noodling here all comes about upon a reading of In the River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks in The New York Review of Books. This is sort of a review of an absurd number [9] of books where Sacks, after many years work, states that it is not just perceptual moments but moments of an essentially personal kind that are the essential atom of being. Along the way Harvey Pekar and American Splendor, and this very Weblog come in for consideration.

Related
In the River of Consciousness - NYRB, Jan 4, 2004

American Splendor
on Amazon.com

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 17:18:21 GMT

Mandelbrot set
While at IBM Labs in the ‘70s, Benoit Mandelbrot found a mathematical way to describe phenomena in which the small parts are the same as the big parts. He described these patterns as fractals. Clouds and shorelines are the most-oft-cited example, and fractal images have become pretty familiar in the popular culture.

In the Economist article, Mandelbrot, now in his 80s, speaks about a capstone-type project underway, which is to produce a book and accompanying art exhibit demonstrating the historical precursors to fractals. What he admits to is extending geometry [past Plato] so that it could be applied to complex rough objects [shore lines, telephone line noise, past cotton futures markets]. “The science of roughness,” he agrees to call it. His discovery, if you will, and the special affinity of his scientific work for things seeming artistic, will continue to interest people watching the dance of science and art. Fractals have been noted in the prints of Katsushika Hokusi, Celtic Jewelry and so forth. To view this through Mandlebrot’s lens is something to look forward to.

"I overturned a horn of plenty in which all kinds of things humanity has always known were located," he said. He worries about the separations of individual science disciplines into narrow guilds, and the consequent obscurity that comes with that, as scientists talking to themselves – actually just to their subset of the science structure — and the public is alienated from science. Read Father of fractals Benoit Mandelbrot -Economist.com, Dec 6, 2003

Unrelated
Reasons to Be Cautious on Bush's Space Plan -NYT [reg req], Jan 15, 2004
More space news - globalsecurity.org

FRACTAL HOKUSI ON IMAGINATORIUM

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 14:11:11 GMT

Ming mans death ray
One thing we may never forget is the first episode of the Flash Gordon serial. Ming the Merciless aims a death ray of some sort at Earth.

It is this event that leads Flash to venture into space to counter Ming's death ray. And, pulling from a trove of newsreel footage, the serial directors showed the x-ray results: tidal waves in Samoa, earthquake in China, catastrophe in general.

When we feel bad, and feel the world seems in a tangle too, how often we feel it is Ming and his cosmic death ray disrupting our natural order. When president's totter and the car won't start, we wonder if Ming is at work. Clinton's and Wall Street's (not to mention the Mets') August 1998 troubles seemed to a part of a confluence. And we note that on August 27, 1998, according to Stanford and other researchers, witnessed a cosmic event in which the Earth's magnetic field was extravaganly disrupted by a distant 3-megaton "magnestar."

Last week the confluence came again.

So what do we know about these things (sometimes) called magnestars and (more widely known as) geomagnetic storms? Geomagnetic storms are major disturbances of the magnetosphere that occur when the interplanetary magnetic field turns southward and remains southward for an prolonged period of time. The drop in the surface magnetic field strength during the main phase of a geomagnetic storm is typically preceded by a brief rise in the field strength (see the entry for Dst index). Geomagnetic storms are classified as recurrent and non-recurrent. Non-recurrent geomagnetic storms, on the other hand, occur most frequently near solar maximum.

I asked Ham Radio Man Dan Romanchik about the storms. Should we track them carefully? He said he followed it in a roundabout way on a mailing list that broadcasts a propagation report every week. It's put out by the American Radio Relay League. http://www.arrl.org

Dan is a man of many blogs and sites. There is:
Dan of ARROW Comm. Assn. (www.w8pgw.org)
Ham radio Dan bookseller (www.QTB.Com/hamradio/)
Ham radio Dan blog at www.blurty.com/~kb6nu .

Dan writes: "On another amateur radio mailing list that I'm on (Elecraft: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft), one of the other listees claims to be a retired space scientist and he puts out his own little space weather forecast twice a week and tries to correlate that forecast to shortwave radio propagation.

"It's really amazing how this stuff affects shortwave radio conditions. The rule of thumb I use is 'solar flares = bad.'"

Fact is we spent Friday at the auto repair - the alternator fritzed out.

RELATED
Space Weather -NOAA.gov
Solar storm brewing - Oct 23, 2003 space.com

Tumbra at Nasa

Material here centers on hobbies, journal entries, and insterests of Jack Vaughan. Also includes links to my articles for Application Development Trends, where I work as Editor-at-Large.

Wed, 15 Oct 2003 17:28:18 GMT

NASA's Laser-Powered Aircraft -Sci Daily, Oct 10, 2003
Teams from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards, Calif., and the University of Alabama in Huntsville have demonstrated a small-scale aircraft that flies by means of propulsive power delivered by a ground-based laser. The laser directs beam at specially designed photovoltaic cells carried onboard to power the plane's propeller. The balsa-wood plane has a five-foot wingspan, and weighs only 11 ounces. We covered an early iteration, that used a search light to power the plane, on Moontraveller site.

Grid of Anthrax Cure-Sci Daily, Oct 10, 2003
Oxford University's Department of Chemistry has accumulated data on some 300,000 molecules which look like promising candidates [with 12,000 being marked as particularly promising] to form the basis for a cure for anthrax. The project was launched on 22 January and took less than four weeks to complete. It involved using screensaver time on 1.4 million personal computers in over 200 countries, screening some 3.5 billion molecules as possible inhibitors of the assembly of the anthrax toxin.

Sun, 05 Oct 2003 19:08:39 GMT

Universal Sigh: Close to a B Flat
Newly uncovered sound waves are thought to have been produced by explosive events occurring around a supermassive black hole in Perseus A, the huge galaxy at the center of a cluster. The pitch of the sound waves translates into the note of B flat, 57 octaves below middle-C.This frequency is over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, so the sound is much too deep to be heard, and we have a lot of evolving to do.
Read Harvard Smithsonian Release

How far B natural?
Solace in Tribute CDs -WSJ, Sept 16, 2003 [sub req]

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 17:39:28 GMT

New and noted
Eureka A review of invention and accident - Sept 03, Smithsonian Mag
Dick Waterman, blues photog - Sept 03, Smithsonian Mag
Balloon Record Team Is Confident - New Scientist, Sept 3, 2003
Gambles, Gaffes Behind Shuttle Disasters -NYT, Aug 31, 2003
Petrowski on NASA: Failure is Always an Option -NYT, Aug 30, 2003
Mars got close - Mars Today, Aug 28, 2003
Report on Loss of Shuttle Focuses on NASA Blunders - NYT, Aug. 26, 2003
The CAIB Report

-Mars, we hardly knew ye

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 04:59:48 GMT

Astronomers Report Evidence of 'Dark Energy' Splitting the Universe
Dave Letterman nailed this one. He too reads Times. In Lettermanland, a somber announcer intones:: “Astronomers now believe that the universe contains a massive amount of ‘dark energy’ which is pushing the universe apart. Furthermore, they believe this ‘repulsive, antigravitational force will eventually turn the universe into a cold, dark, empty space.”
(Then, suddenly happy) “So rush right into Applebee’s and try our new riblets and popcorn shrimp combo before it’s too late! Applebee’s. Eating good in the neighborhood!” CBS Late Night Astro-ph -July, 2003

-Makes you wanta holler, way they do my space.
Peter Guralnick on Sam Cooke on NPR -July 30, 2003
Pentagon Abandons Plan for Futures Market on Terror -NYT, July 29, 2003
Nerve Cell Structure May Figure Into Defects In The First Stages Of Life Sciene Daily, July 29, 2003
Bob Hope, 100, star of big broadcast of 1938, gone NYT, July 28, 2003

Sun, 29 Jun 2003 15:18:04 GMT

Nano workers achieve consistent 3D structures
Before ultrasmall biological computing devices can be consistently created, scientists must master the difficult task of regularly assembling elements at the molecular level. A step in that direction occurred this week. IBM and university researchers have described precision methods developed to chemically size magnetic and semiconducting nanoparticles envisioned for use in future molecular computing systems.

This type of work could lead to 3D crystal structures, as opposed to the random mixtures of nanoparticles that have so far marked molecular computing. This is essential for consistent, predictable computing.

In a statement, IBM said lab workers had succeeded in manipulating particles' sizes in increments of less than one nanometer and had managed to tailor the experimental conditions so the particles would assemble themselves into repeating 3-D patterns.

"What excites us the most is that this is a modular assembly method that will let us bring almost any materials together," said Christopher Murray, manager of nanoscale materials and devices at IBM Research. "We've demonstrated the ability to bring together complementary materials with an eye to creating materials with interesting custom properties."

Materials for the experiments included lead selenide and magnetic iron oxide. Lead selenide is a semiconductor that has applications in infrared detectors and thermal imaging. Magnetic iron oxide is commonly used in the coatings for magnetic recording media.

For related images and animations: http://domino.research.ibm.com/Comm/bios.nsf/pages/selfassembly.html
For more information about IBM's nanotechnology research projects: http://www.research.ibm.com/pics/nanotech/

For Colin Johnson's take at EETimes
http://www.eet.com/story/OEG20030625S0025

Schematic of a binary superlattice

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 02:03:09 GMT

Bioinformatic book review: It came from the lab!
Programmers who have an interest in this new field are at something of a disadvantage when it comes to surveying the territory. The Web is a font of information, but it is often disconnected information without much context. Once again, books may be the best way to get up to speed, but finding the right one is not easy. They range from very wide, very expensive and very dense text books that are an amalgam of learned papers and require more than a journeyman's mastery of biochemistry, to narrower, highly focused computer software books that hardly touch on biology at all. Read on adtmag.com

Related/Unrelated
Book Review: Managing risk on software projects- ADTmag.com
Harff Prediction Genocide accelerators decelerators -PDF
Frank Rich meets the media frenzy -NYT Jun 15, 2003

Sun, 15 Jun 2003 03:40:16 GMT

The Education of Henry Dynamo
Henry Adams can catch you unaware. He seems as if to be the first modern man. He runs through scenarios of meaning that might work in a turbulent world, and the view is a world view, all the time quite big on bemusement. He was ready to directly critique the modern world. To Adams the dynamo became a “symbol of infinity”.
Read the rest of the story.

Unrelated
Wind power - NYT, June 13, 2003
Goodnight, David Brinkley - NYT, June 13, 2003
Pipeline sabotage - NYT, June 13, 2003

Oh dynamo!
Europe mission statement stumbles - NYT, June 13, 2003

Sun, 18 May 2003 03:41:10 GMT

Gould threads - The state of the essayist art is hard to gauge. If you grant that there is a revival of the form today, you may want to posit paleontologist Stephen J. Gould as one of those who had a hand in the transform. Read Moon Traveller comment.

Related
Gould's final essay in NatHistory -Natural History.com
The first column-Natural History.com
Professor in the Bleachers With a Lifelong Scorecard -NYT, May 19, 2003 {REG REQ}
Gould Amazonia list mania
Stanford Gould stuff

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 02:28:54 GMT

DNA as Software
For many, the best analogy for the way DNA works is that it's like a computer program at the heart of every cell. Some of its programming tricks bear an uncanny resemblance to ones the human brain has dreamed up. But DNA also works in ways human programmers find entirely alien. David Kestenbaum takes the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the first scientific description of DNA to speak with researchers trying to understand this odd and extraordinary piece of "software," which is the product of billions of years of evolution. Hear the clip - ATC, NPR.org, Apr 26, 2003 [Real Audio]

Related
Defending Franklin's Reserach Legacy -Nova PBS.org, Apr 22, 2003
Franklin DNA discussion -Wash. Post, Apr 23, 2003
Stunning creativity of DNA pioneers -BBC, April 23, 2003

NASA builds mosaic of Columbia's Demise -NYT [Reg Req],Apr 22, 2003
Windows server out -ADTmag.com, April 25, 2003
Sir Katz, Nobelist for Nerve Chemistry Work, Dies -NYT [Reg Req], Apr 25, 2003
NASA builds mosaic of Columbia's Demise -NYT,Apr 22, 2003
Inquiry focuses on Shuttle's aluminum undergrid -NYT, Apr 22, 2003
White Stripes play the Hammerstein -NYT, Apr 21, 2003

Sun, 16 Mar 2003 03:09:12 GMT

Waiting for a traffic light - History has many points of view, but some come to dominate. The distortion can become profound. A Rutherford can become a bumbler. And Leo Szilard, a determined dreamer, can get a walk-on in the Atomic Bomb Saga. These are thought on reading Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Read complete Moon Traveller 03-15-03 Commentary

Forlorn Dunes

Sun, 02 Mar 2003 02:30:47 GMT

Failure modes
In a kick-off keynote address at the 2001 OOPSLA in Tampa, Henry Petroski discussed success and failure in design throughout history, concluding that there is a unique interrelationship between the two.Failure could be generational, said Petroski; when engineers start to work with new design paradigms they take great care. Then as things get familiar, they forget about the fundamentals and they push, sometimes beyond the real design limits. From ADT's January 2002 issue.

Regal condor killed in the wild - San Francisco Chronicle, CA - 21 Feb 2003
The last female California condor to be born in the wild and to remain living in
the wild has been shot to death by a poacher.

NASA chief: E-mails were handled properly - Chicago Sun Times - 28 Feb 2003
NASA's top official said that engineers' dire email speculations while Columbia was still in orbit were properly evaluated.

Bush climate change study flawed, scientists say - Environmental News Network - 26 Feb 2003
The Bush administration's plan for research into global climate change lacks a focus to guide officials science panel said.

Art, and DNA - THEDNAGE.COM