When [It] Strikes Me

I was a bit busy last week and wasn’t able to do one of the things I really wanted to: write about space and a few extraordinary developments that have been announced or released lately.  Namely, there’s been more fun with exo-planetary systems, Europa and asteroids.

F-Yeah Exo-Planetary Systems

A few months ago I wrote about the discovery of a hot “near-Earth” named GJ 1214b.  The rocky planet measuring about six times the mass of the Earth was discovered at about 40 light years distance using the Radial Velocity method of exo-planetary detection (measuring red-shift of a star to determine slight wobbles caused by a star — in this case, GJ 1214 — orbiting along with exo-planet(s) around their common center of gravity).

Scientists at a conference in France announced this week the discovery of two new exciting sets of exo-planetary systems, each distinguishing in its own way.  The first, which has been observed primarily using Radial Velocity is the discovery of the stellar system with the most known planets outside of our own solar system.  HD 10180, a Sun-like M-Class star sitting about 128 light years away hosts a whopping seven planets.

NASA released the above animation of the planetary system around HD 10180.

Click through for more discussion and discovery. Read more…

I’ve been meaning to write a bit more and clarify my thoughts and feelings on the Cordoba Initiative’s plans for a community center and mosque in lower Manhattan. Last week, I strung together a bit of a rambling post discussing how disappointed I am in the sweeping tide of anti-American behavior taken up in the name of “American values” throughout this nation.

The proposed Cordoba House is an uncomfortable issue for most and brings up conflicting feelings and desires to both defend American freedoms and empathize with the families of September 11, 2001 victims.

Part of my desire to discuss the topic more was the realization that I hadn’t articulated well exactly what it was that I found offensive and anti-American. So let me be clear, opposing the Cordoba House is not anti-American. It is merely the attempts to use the government or government means that is anti-American and, quite simply, unconstitutional.

While technically, the movement to have the former Burlington Coat Factory building landmarked was not specifically tied to the building of a mosque (and it would not have completely blocked the construction, but simply made the plans more difficult as the exterior of the building would have had to be preserved) and was, therefore, not relating to the establishment, promotion or obstruction of religious freedoms. Despite this, few would argue that the facts really hid the between-the-lines anti-Islam motivations thereunder. This would be no different than the post-Edwards v Aguillard move of creationists to remove overt religious references to religion or god in the newly revamped intelligence design movement. Everyone knows the motivation has no basis in science, but in religious ideology.

In the case of the Cordoba House, pushing to landmark and make more difficult the conversion of the building at the proposed site was a measure to use the government to obstruct the construction of a privately funded, otherwise legal religious building and institution. In other words, this move represented an effort to violate the Establishment Clause.

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I’ve settled into a nice niche with respect to Twitter news.  Yes, you can get some breaking stories truly from the masses via Trending Topics, but I also rely on two specific sources for news updates.  One is for headlines and the other is for commentary.

Click on through to check em out. Read more…

Mike Bloomberg marked the Cordoba House victory from Governor's Island (nee Nutten Island), where the Dutch first settled New Amsterdam.

This past week has seen two important victories for liberty in America.  Yet somehow, the news accounts are all over the place.  If you look at a Red station/website/paper (e.g., anything owned by Rupert Murdoch), the sky is falling.  If you’re on Twitter or Tumblr, you’d think everyone had decided to sing Kumbaya and that all the world’s ills are over.  Obviously, the reality is somewhere in between.  And, at least in my eyes, these victories for liberty were but speed bumps that have not halted a harsh and brutal wave of oppression that ironically brandishes the name of freedom.

The victories of which I speak were both very important.  The first came on Tuesday when the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously against a measure to grant landmark status to the building that once housed The Burlington Coat Factory and now is planned to be torn down and replaced with a 13-story community center called the Cordoba House.  The second was Wednesday, when a California jurist enjoined enforcement of a ballot initiative that effectively banned same-sex marriage in the state.  While these two levees pushed back the waters of hatred and bigotry (of late, quite commonly in the name of fundamentalist Christianity), this country is leaking like a sieve elsewhere and that the victories were necessary at all is reflective thereof.

READ MORE, AFTER THE JUMP Read more…

OK, I admit I’m like a nerd without the credentials (American Studies BA instead of a Physics or Chem BS), but I must say I was especially pleased with a certain clever re-Tweet I earned myself today.  As many of you may know, Russian scientists (in concert with some Americans) have collided particles together in a successful effort to recreate a new, super heavy element numbered 117 and temporarily called Ununseptium.

Well, as the team prepares to give it a final name, Wired Science’s Twitter has been helping out by polling followers on what they think the name should be.  I contributed my thought, which got a solid re-Tweet from my all-time favorite magazine.

Click through for images and Epic Victory! Read more…

I honestly couldn’t really care much about the death of Corey Haim.  Yeah, anyone throwing their life away on drugs is tragic, but Corey Haim’s death is really no more so than your local neighborhood crackhead.  That said, he was in some kickass movies.  Silver Bullet, Lucas, Lost Boys and, of course, that movie where Nicole Eggert got nekkid.  [Pause... reflect... getting creepy so get back to typing]

Anyway, Lost Boys was freaking awesome, so in honor of Haim’s passing we will remember his best movie career scene… starring the most powerful stereo in the world:

That would be NASA and not Pixar.

There has been science in the news this week.  It hasn’t been great, but even the worst news sometimes has a silver lining.  And I think that’s the case here with both stories.

President Obama’s budget proposals in his first year have been science heavy.  His 2009 budget gave bumps to several science-focused departments and additional programs, granted NASA stimulus money and tried to find room for a return to the moon by 2020.

Not withstanding my belief that Obama cares more about science than the recently departed government CEO, he’s pretty much been forced to end his support of it this year.  Particularly with NASA, the spending freeze he’s instituting is gutting science.  On Monday, he’s expected to announce that he’s killed the Moon 2020 plan and it looks to move to commercialize and privatize space flight [There's a joke to be made here that he's finally found one industry sector he doesn't want to socialize].

This is not, however, to say that the President has killed NASA.  Quite to the contrary, I think he’s merely made an amputation of the fully government-controlled space flight program in an effort to save the corpus as a whole.  He’s proposing to grant the ISS several more years of life and I’m confident he might try to find a way to extend the Hub and other observational satellites, which are the stuff of scientific magic.  Nevertheless, it’s a bit of a dark day when you realize that manned flight (that which contributes the most to a child’s imagination) is taking the brunt of the hit.

All this comes just two days after the true-life Wall-E story of the robot that just wouldn’t quit.  The Mars rover Spirit is almost 1900 days past its scheduled run of 90 days of operation.  Unfortunately, much as with me golf courses, you don’t want to get stuck in a sand trap on Mars.  That’s exactly what Spirit did this past week.  Spirit is now permanently in said trap but remains scientifically operational.  There’s a long winter ahead for it, but it’s done its service to America and humanity at large, and it appears it will continue to do so, at least for the time being.

XKCD put together a great tribute cartoon for Spirit which I’ve linked after the jump. Read more…

As I wait for my newly ordered Kindle to arrive (I finally caved and promised the stack of paper books I’ve got on my bedside that they will still get read), I was excited to see news break today that Jeff Bezos is soliciting Apps for the Kindle.  Starting next month, a KDK (Kindle Developer Kit) will be made available.  Granted, the E-Ink format likely won’t be able to compete with whatever flash comes out with the iTablet, but it’s good to see Amazon strike now, before Apple gets into the game.

Source: Macworld

NPR is reporting on a new Congressional Quarterly study which says that President Obama is the most successful president in the last 50 years, with respect to getting legislative measures through.  The study states that the President has succeeded in getting passage of 96.7 percent of all legislation in the House and Senate for which “the president had a clear position.”  This means that where the President has publicly urged a vote one way or another on a bill, almost 97% of the time his will was adhered to.

That’s lovely.  It’s also a ridiculously incomplete picture of reality.  They talk of him having a better record than Lyndon Johnson.  Uhh… no.  Johnson’s percentage may not have been higher, but he got the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act through (admittedly, on the back of the Kennedy assassination).

Conversely, President Obama has, as the article states, “picked his battles” by cherry picking which legislation to publicly support and push through his Democratically controlled congress.  More misleading is the amount of compromise that goes into those legislative measures.  For example, the Health Care Reform bill looks nothing like what the President campaigned on and most of the financial stimulus measures were truly corrupted… though necessary.  The NPR article does do a pretty good job of pointing out those facts.

Source: Congressional Quarterly and NPR -- Click to see the article.

Netflix gave The Grey Lady access to the rental patterns for their top movie titles in 2009 and the Times went to town converting zip code based data into graphical renderings of rental patterns for said movies.  The generator is fun to play with and features some interesting patters like the limited, Manhattan and hipster Brooklyn appeal of Mad Men and the exclusively suburban draw of Last Chance Harvey.

I’ve got some of the more interesting maps, including a stark comparisons that perhaps reflects the persistent residential segregation of New York and the appeal of homosexually themed films in minority communities.  On a more comfortable level, a movie about robots was most most popular among non-humans.

Wondering?  CLICK THROUGH TO READ ON Read more…