"It could be radioactive or poisonous"

From www.airspacemag.com, on the immediate aftermath of the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003:

Hemphill City Manager Don Iles arrived at the fire station as a radio report came in from a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officer on US 96 near Bronson. “There’s a big metal object in the middle of the highway. It gouged the road. I’m looking at it, but I don’t know what to make of it.”

The dispatcher asked if it had any identifying marks or numbers. The DPS trooper said, “Yeah, but it’s only partial.” He read back the numbers to the dispatcher, who then told him to wait. The trooper said he would stay at the scene by the object and keep vehicles from running over it.

A few minutes later, the dispatcher came back on and said, “I’ve just been in touch with NASA. Please do not pick up or touch any of the material, because it could be radioactive or poisonous.”

NASA later admitted that it was highly unlikely that any of the debris was radioactive or poisonous, it's just that they didn't want people keeping chunks of it as souvenirs or sticking them on eBay. NASA wanted to be able to collect the debris themselves in 'pristine' condition to help them reconstruct what went wrong. Fair enough, you might think.
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From the BBC:

Police have warned students in the UK against using a website that they say lets users "illegally access" millions of scientific research papers. The City of London police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit says using the Sci-Hub website could "pose a threat" to students' personal data. The police are concerned that users of the "Russia-based website" could have information taken and misused online.

The Sci-Hub website says it "removes all barriers" to science. It offers open access to more than 85 million scientific papers and claims that copyright laws should be abolished and that such material should be "knowledge to all".

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this are, it seems to me that the police are trying NASA's tactic. They could have reminded people that downloading from such sites is a breach of copyright, which is a civil offence that can be treated as a criminal offence in extreme cases. But nobody takes this seriously nowadays as they know the chances of somebody being take to court for downloading something from the internet is to all and intents and purposes zero, so the police went for the "don't touch! This is radioactive and poisonous!" strategy.

Forewarned is forearmed. It's quite possible that the site *is* a phishing operation, in which case the sensible thing to do is to download from it using a public computer or via a VPN or something, which has the added bonus of making the copyright breach even harder to trace. Which neatly solves both problems from the students' point of view.

Asimov in action

From Second Foundation (1948 to 1953):

Bail Channis sat at the control panel of the Lens and felt again the involuntary surge of near-worship at the contemplation of it. He was not a Foundation man and the interplay of forces at the twist of a knob or the breaking of a contact was not second nature to him.

Not that the Lens ought quite to bore even a Foundation man. Within its unbelievably compact body were enough electronic circuits to pinpoint accurately a hundred million* stars in exact relationship to each other. And if that were not a feat in itself, it was further capable of translating any portion of the Galactic Field along any of the three spatial axes or to rotate any portion of the Field about a centre...

The answer was of course spectographic analysis. For many centuries the main object of interstellar engineering was the analysis of the "light signature" of more and more stars in greater and greater detail. With this, and the growing precision of the "hop" itself, standard routes of travel through the Galaxy were adopted and interstellar travel became less of an art and more of a science

* The current best guess is that there are 150 - 250 billion stars in the Galaxy, maybe they didn't assume that seventy years ago? Elsewhere in the books is an explanation of a heads-up display, you just keep adjusting the virtual galaxy until it lines up against what you can actually see and hey presto, the computer tells you where you are.

From Sky News:

Prof Jorgensen had designed the four instruments that Juno used to track stars as part of its magnetometer investigation.

NASA explained that these onboard cameras took photographs of the sky every quarter of a second to determine Juno's orientation in space by recognising the patterns of the stars - an engineering task which was "essential" to the magnetometer's accuracy.

Which is the same general principle. I'm surprised that triangulation works on such a small scale (well within the solar system) because the parallax differences must be minuscule, but they seem to be able to make it work.

Tim Peake

537th man in space. Also happens to come from Britain. Big whoop.

Friday Night Gearchange

This featured in the closing sequence of some Brian Cox ego-fest repeated on telly last Sunday.

The Carpenters "Calling occupants of interplanetary craft", up a shameless semitone after 1 min 6 seconds, a mere one-quarter of the way through the song:

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (318)

Those who pretend that only the real economy (and all its advances in technology) exists and who have a massive blind spot where the Land Monopoly Black Hole is concerned argue thusly:

We are no longer an agrarian economy. Agriculture is but a small part of our economy and with improvements in communications and transport, land/location and land/location values are no longer so important.

Exhibit A:

With growing numbers of people going online to perform tasks ranging from work to grocery shopping and streaming entertainment, good broadband has become critical. Homes without can lose 20 % of their value.

Or by implication, having good broadband (and presumably mobile phone reception) adds 25% to the 'unimproved' value of a home.

Exhibit B:

According to the real estate boffins at Knight Frank, suborbital space travel “presents the opportunity to radically shift global property markets”.

It seems an odd subject for the consultancy to tackle, but travelling outside Earth’s atmosphere will make getting around an altogether speedier affair (think London to Sydney in two hours) encouraging the world’s wealthiest to take second homes further afield.

Note that they are referring to "second homes", and by implication third and fourth homes, thus pushing up demand and hence prices/values. They are not suggesting that people will move their first home, which would free up their old home for more efficient use and/or tend to dissipate any upward pressure on prices/rents.

"India launches British taxpayers' money to Mars"

From the BBC:

India has successfully launched £1 billion of British taxpayer's money towards the Red Planet - with the aim of becoming the fourth space agency to use UK funding to reach Mars.

The Mars Orbiter Mission took off at 09:08 GMT from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the country's east coast.

The head of India's space agency told the BBC the mission would demonstrate the technological capability to spend aid payments from Great Britain on reaching Mars orbit and to carry out experiments to test the limits of the former colonial master's patience.

The spacecraft is set to burn UK taxpayers' money for 300 days, reaching Mars orbit in 2014.

They probably aren't even aware they are doing it.

This month's edition of British Airway's Business Life magazine ("Total reading time 57 minutes", it says on the cover) includes half a dozen main articles (one page or longer) all of which are about rents and rent-seeking:

1. Interview with the CEO of Canada Goose, the premium cold weather clothes manufacturer:

When [my grandfather] first arrived, he worked in a clothing factory as a cutter and then decided at some point that he wanted to open up his own place, which he did. It was very small and in downtown Toronto, which was the home of the garment industry back then. Now it's the night-club district…

Most brands these days are not real brands, they're some product mass-produced in some factory somewhere else that has a fancy store woven in front of it by marketing departments…

I went to Europe, where I learned how valuable the term 'Made In Canada' is for us. I realised that for a lot of people a Canada Goose jacket is like a Swiss watch. The place where it is made is really important. We're a quintessentially Canadian product. All of our jackets are made in Canada. It's impossible to imagine us not making them in Canada.

2. Article about football players' salaries:

Manchester City, the 2011-12 Premier League champions, spend more than £200 m each year on player wages along, a figure that equates to 87 per cent of the club's total turnover… it's not as if it's the players or even their agents who are ultimately deriving up wages, it's the broadcasters - and one in particular.

In the summer of 2012, BSkyB signed a new three-year deal to cover 166 games a season, worth a record £2.3 bn to the Premier League… It's interesting to contrast that with Sky's first deal to cover Premier League in 1991. Back then it paid just £340 m.

3. Article about a private business which wants to build reusable rockets for space travel:

"I think there's nothing positive or constructive I could say about Kenneth Clark" [Managing Director Alan Bon] told an interviewer earlier this year.

It was Clark, in his role as Minister for Trade and Industry during Margaret Thatcher's final term, who 25 years ago pulled the plug on government funding of HOTOL - Horizontal Take-Off and Landing - the admittedly flawed spaceplane being developed by Bond and his colleagues…

Earlier this year, however, the government did a volte-face and over next two years it is to plough £60 m into the development of Sabre, a revolutionary engine tipped to transform the economics of putting satellites - and indeed people - into space…

… The technology behind Reaction's pre-cooler is so commercially valuable that rather than take out a patent - which would perforce lead to publication of its workings - the company is avoiding the risk of feeding copycat competitors by treeing it as a trade secret, like the recipe for Coca Cola.

… a new backer emerged in the shape of Nigel McNair Scott, a Conservatie Party donor and chairman of property investment company Helical Bar.

4. Article about commercial property syndicates:

Commercial proeprty is bounding back. Figures from industry monitor IPD who that UK commercial real estate returned1.9 per cent in the three months to June, the highest return in two years…

Many hope that this heralds a definitive upturn in the property cycle, and a signal to invest in shops, offices and factories on the back of a recovering economy.

5. Article about local loyalty card schemes:

My Sant'Ambrogio card, issued by the eponymous market of central Florence, is about two tubs of fresh pest away from marking me as a most loyal customer indeed.

Supported by the local council, this card is designed to encourage me to shop not in the international chain supermarkets and stores on the edge of town, but instead with the market stall holders and local businesses who risk being left behind if everyone moves to the suburbs.

6. Article about hotel renovation:

You could argue that a quality new build might be cheaper but that misses the point. The Prince de Galles has an established location on Venue George V and a proven trading history, and offers considerably less market risk.

Finding suitable land in an established European city is all but impossible, and what's more, a speedy renovation can improve a hotel's fortunes in months, while building from scratch takes years.

Things which came from space

1. Life

2. Gold nuggets

3. Everything else

FFS.

The whole of Planet Earth came from space, it's just a load of rocks and iron and stuff which was whizzing around in space and which clumped together over a period of millions or billions of years.

One of those rocks will have had "life" on it, and I'm not sure it's relevant which one. We can decide an arbitrary date for when the clump was big enough to count as Planet Earth, so whether life originated on Planet Earth or not depends entirely on whether that that date is after or before the time that the rock bearing life arrived here.

And I suppose the order in which things arrived is quite interesting, but they all came from space.

China prans unmanned moon randel raunch

Flom the BBC:

China prans to send an unmanned space plobe to the moon this yeal fol the countly's filst runal randing.

State media said plepalations wele now undel way fol the raunch of Chang'e-3, the ratest stage in its effolts to put a pelson on the moon.

The claft wirr use a ladio-contlorred lovel to tlansmit images and dig into the moon's sulface to test sampres.

"In a film studio you don't get too much noise"

From The Daily Mail:

On a sound stage, you don't hear anybody scream. And that's the main problem Moon-stage-exploring 'astronaut' Buzz Aldrin has with Will Smith's latest sci-fi vehicle After Earth. A day after attending the New York première of the post-apocalyptic thriller, he said the film was a great family drama but complained the space scenes were not true to the original 1969 hoax.

"There was a lot of noise. In the hangar out in the Cailfornia desert which we used, we didn't get that much noise," he said.

Aldrin, who followed Neil Armstrong onto the moon backdrop during the historic Apollo 11 filming in 1969, explained that "noise didn't propagate through the sound insulated walls. Once the director shouted 'Action!' you could pretty much have heard a pin drop. We talked over headsets. Being far away from towns and cities, we were free of static. We could communicate with each other pretty clearly, and the director adn crew, though they were several yards away," he said.

The 83-year old former stunt man was the guest of honour at an event for a new luxury camera from Hasselblad. The Swedish company has supplied cameras used for filming mock-ups of space missions for more than 50 years.

And who does he think perfected the realistic telling of space stories?

"Arthur C. Clarke added a bit of reality to the genre with the (function) of the ship and people flying out in space on a mission," Aldrin said. Clarke wrote the screenplay for the Apollo 'landings' and the foreword for Aldrin's 1996 sci-fi novel, 'Encounter With Tiber.' Like Clarke's original screenplay, that book is being turned into a TV series.

Fun Online Polls: Your favourite Armstrong & paper cups

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Who is your favourite celebrity Armstrong?

Neil - 46%
Louis - 28%
Alexander - 11%
Lance - 8%
Other, please specify - 7%

That looks pretty clear cut, and well done to the late Neil. Suggestions for "other" included: William  (Geordie industrialist) 3 votes; Stretch (1970s toy) 2 votes; and Lil Hardin (pianist) 1 vote.
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There's a great series they repeat on Quest every now and then called "How It's Made". They did paper cups last week and the voice over said that the quality control was so good that only one in a million paper cups leaks.

Which seemed a bit of a bold claim, but then it occurred to me that of all the thousands of paper cups I have used in my lift (one or two a day at work for ten years, it soon adds up), not one of them had leaked on me.

That's this week's Fun Online Poll, how many times in your life have you had a paper cup which leaked?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Subsidies for windmills and solar panels & your favourite Armstrong

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll on an excellent turnout of 190 votes (thanks to everybody who took part) were as follows:

How much extra are you prepared to pay on your electricity bill to subsidise windmills and solar panels?

Nothing - 91%
£10 a year - 4%
£100 a year - 3%
£1,000 a year - 2%

I don't think that requires much further comment, does it?
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Not much else is going on at the moment, so let's find out who your favourite Armstrong is: the moon landing faker-cum-intrepid space pioneer; the cancer-surviving mono-bollocked drugs cheat ex-fiancé of planet-saver Sheryl Crow; the half of the comedy duo Armstrong and Miller who features in the Direct Line adverts and doesn't look like Rob Brydon; or the gravelly-voiced trumpet player?

Or indeed one of the dozens of other similarly named people listed on this Wiki page.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Usain Bolt successfully lands on Mars

From the BBC and the BBC:

Usain Bolt has landed a huge new robot rover on Mars in stunning style at London 2012, managing to bring the rover down safely in an Olympic record time of 9.63 seconds.

He landed the one-tonne vehicle, known as Curiosity, in a deep crater near the planet's equator 06:32 BST (05:32 GMT). He will now embark on a mission of at least two years to look for evidence that Mars may once have supported life.

A signal confirming the rover was on the ground safely was relayed to two billion TV viewers on Earth, using Nasa's Odyssey satellite, which is in orbit around the Red Planet.

The success was greeted with a roar of approval from the 80,000-capacity crowd. Engineers and scientists who have worked on this project for the best part of 10 years punched the air and hugged each other.

The descent through the atmosphere after a 570-million-km journey from Earth had been billed as the "ten seconds of terror" - the time it would take to complete a series of high-risk, automated manoeuvres that would slow the rover from an entry speed of 20,000km/h to allow its wheels to set down softly.

Bolt had come into London 2012 with doubts about his fitness and his form, having injured himself when he crashed the Viking 2 Mars module a few months ago in Jamaica.

"I was slightly worried about my start," he told BBC Sport. "It was not the best reaction in the world, but I stopped worrying about it and executed it and it worked.

Asked to respond to the doubters, Bolt said: "I'm not concerned. I've said it from the start. People have got to realise this mission will be different. When we landed we only thought we'd get 30 sols (Martian days) on the surface, so we had to hit the ground running. Curiosity has plenty of time."

China takes one small step towards solving over-population crisis

From The Telegraph:

China has declared its intent to send a man to the moon, aiming to become the first nation to reach the lunar surface since the last American mission in 1972...

"Bus the size of a satellite due to hit Earth tonight"

... says The Mirror.

But according to The Metro, it already happened a couple of days ago:
"The satellite is the biggest Nasa craft to fall to Earth since Skylab in 1979." continues The Mirror breathlessly (same link as above).

According to the BBC, a similar incident happened two years ago:According to The Evening Standard, there was another three years ago:And according to The Daily Mail, there was another one six months before that: Buses... the new cows?

You learn something new every day.

I always had the impression that when these space rockets take off, first a load of fire comes out of the rockets; then there's a great woosh of white steam (they have a swimming pool sized tank of water directly beneath the rockets to prevent them setting fire to everything); and a second or two later, the whole thing begins to accelerate vertically.

Not so.

The BBC showed a clip of the shuttle Discovery taking off yesterday (viewable here), and you can see that the thing lurches a few feet upwards right after the countdown gets to "One", hangs in the air for a split second, and then resumes its assent before the impressive jets of fire have even started coming out of the engines.

Is NASA using anti-gravity machines to power these things, with the 'fire coming out' bit just to cover their tracks?

Headline of this and the next centuries

From The New Scientist:

Asteroid bound for Earth! Warn your grandchildren!

Asteroid 1999 RQ36 was discovered a decade ago, but it was not considered particularly worrisome since it has no chance of striking Earth in the next 100 years - the time frame astronomers routinely use to assess potential threats.

Now, new calculations show a 1 in 1400 chance that it will strike Earth between 2169 and 2199, according to Andrea Milani of the University of Pisa in Italy and colleagues (www.arxiv.org/abs/0901.3631).

"India Moon probe ready for launch"

£825 million of UK taxpayers' finest is enough to pay for 18.333 of these: