Mars Curiosity Tweetup

After hearing such wonderful things from fellow skeptic, Trent Faust, about his Tweetup experience with NASA, I was super-excited to hear that I’d been chosen to attend the Mars Curiosity Tweetup and launch event in November. I debated whether to attend since the tweetup was scheduled for the day before Thanksgiving and the launch the day after. My wife, Sharon, encouraged and supported my attendance and I could not ignore this opportunity. I didn’t debate it for too long – only a few hours after receiving the invitation, I decided to attend.

Once I joined the closed FaceBook group dedicated to the event, information started pouring in like crazy. They wanted us all to vote on designs for patches, pins, teeshirts, etc. Suddenly, I felt like a pawn in a merchandising scheme. Many people in the group seemed to take a sense of pride in being part in what seemed to me a guerrilla marketing project.

I committed to buying three of the pins; but I expressed no interest in hats, teeshirts, patches, etc. I suppose NASA needs the money they get from all of the merchandise, but I felt no urge to participate much in this part of the festivities.  A good number of people attending are from out of state and some from overseas. So I get that they want to get all the souvenirs and memorabilia as they can get their hands on.

Some of us used the group page to arrange car pooling. There is also a special luncheon with an astronaut on Thanksgiving for those guests dining sans family due to participation. Some locals have also opened up their homes for people to sleep and/or dine on Thanksgiving evening. How’s that for Southern hospitality? So there are certainly some good uses for the Facebook group page.

What really interested me, though, is the opportunity to get a VIP tour of the Kennedy Space Center and front row seats to the launch. Yes – sign me up for that! After all, exploration is from where all of the excitement begins. What better way to celebrate Carl Sagan Day (Nov. 12) than with the thought of seeing a Mars Mission launch in the same month.

The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover is slated to land on Mars in August 2012. Its two-year mission is focused on finding any possible remnant of microbial life starting with the most likely locations near its landing site. This little guy is going to be a hard worker collecting rock and soil samples, pulverizing them, collecting and transmitting the resulting data back home to the JPL. It will also be sporting a number of cameras to help researchers navigate and explore, not to mention snapping more great photos of the red planet for all to see.

You can follow twitter accounts @MarsRovers and @MarsCuriosity or navigate to http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/overview/ to find up to date information.

Future and past NASA Tweetup info can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/connect/tweetup/index.html.

Carl Sagan Day info can be found at http://carlsaganday.com/

PZ Myers delivers a very entertaining talk at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne in 2010:

From Pharyngula.

Ray Comfort being interviewed on Atheist Experience on local public access television in Austin, TX:

Un-fucking-believable. (How do you manage to sound like a blithering idiot within a minute-and-a-half of being introduced? Especially when 45 seconds of that time is eaten up by host introductions.) I watched about 25 minutes before my head exploded.

There’s a lot of nutcases out there.

OK, now I’ve officially heard everything. I’ve changed my mind–this guy is f-ing hilarious! I think he’s pulling a Steven Colbert-style satirical swindle on all of us.

From Pharyngula.

The Pioneer Anomaly is a long-standing mystery where the solar-system-escaping Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft have been experiencing a tiny, unexplained sunward acceleration over the course of their journey. That is, the spacecraft have been coasting for 40 years, and should only be experiencing gravitational slowdown from the sun (plus other known small accelerations, like radiation pressure).

However, they have been showing a slight, unaccountable deceleration. And by slight, I mean slight: 10^-9 m/s², or one hundred millionth of a g. Perhaps the most impressive thing in the entire business is that such a small acceleration can be accurately measured! (Although it does add up to a shortage in distance travelled of about 500 km per year, but that is for spacecraft 15 billion km away!)

A bevy of theories have been offered to try to explain the existence of this anomaly, the most creative of which is probably Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND, which adds a fudge factor to Newton’s law of gravity that would account for this (and also get rid of the need for Dark Matter).

However, several Portuguese researchers now claim to have explained the anomaly in a much simpler way: By doing a better job of accounting for all of the heat radiating off of the spacecraft. We’ll have to wait for JPL to confirm the analysis, but it sure seems more likely than needing to modify the laws of physics – go Occam’s razor!

Here’s the original research article. From Slashdot.

A beautiful (if disturbing) set of videos illustrating the Milgram experiments. Particularly interesting was the complete lack of empathy visible in the 19-year-old’s face (though many others followed just as far in the experiments) as she continues to deliver increasingly large shocks to the victim.

Enlightening quote: “I realized when you went silent that you were either dead or you weren’t actually plugged into it any more.”

An insight into how much more machinelike we are than our sense of freewill would have us believe. From here.

From the BBC Four program The Joy of Stats*, an excellent, Tuftesque demonstration of the power of visual design combined with the presentation of statistics.

I as much as anybody (more than most, probably) am often distressed and cynical about a world that feels like it’s spinning out of control. It’s nice to see a clear statistical demonstration that things are, in fact, getting vastly better for many millions of people.

*Unfortunately, apparently not (easily) available in the US.

Were you the bored kid in math class who doodled rather than paying attention? (I was — I remember discovering the “crazy checkerboards” and star patterns myself, and still draw Sierpinski gaskets when I need to think-doodle.) Vi Hart’s Mathematical Doodling series is an impressive display of clear and simple explanations of topology, graph theory, etc. that arise from sketching and simple rule-following.

Her website is full of tons of other cool mathematical distractions.

From BoingBoing.

A nice summary of the research into whether there are any health risks posed by cell phone usage.

tl;dr: There is no conceivable physical mechanism by which cell phones could cause harmful effects. Nor is the amount of energy emitted by them anywhere near enough to be dangerous. Finally, if they were at all dangerous, it would be obvious from the fact that three billion people are now constantly using them, and brain cancer levels somewhere in the world would be increasing.

Also touches on the new airport security scanners in Part 5. Part 1 below:

Found from Bad Astronomy.

Is this modern-day Tennessee, or 1925? Hard to tell. From Panda’s Thumb:

Unable to deny the word of god to his students or himself, Joe Wilkey walks a thin line between science and religion…

No he doesn’t; he spews unadulterated horseshit. Perhaps he should watch some Eugenie Scott to bring himself up to speed.

Not to get too overtly- or overly-religious, but in this debate Deepak Chopra demonstrates very clearly the use of a great number of logical fallacies in argument — in fact, about the only real talent that he displays is that of shouting over his fellow panelists. (Whoever this Jean Houston lady is — Chopra’s co-proponent in the debate — she seems to have memorized a few dozen pithy zingers and anecdotes, but that’s about all she had to contribute. She would speak for minutes at a time, and I could literally not parse any meaningful content out of the gibberish of her New Age word salad of touchy-feely babble.)

Michael Shermer does his usual competent job of putting DC in his place, although Chopra was being particularly vitriolic against him, and kept shouting him down (he and Shermer have a bit of a history, and Chopra was particularly riled by Shermer’s use of the term “woo” in reference to his…work.)

But I could watch Sam Harris talk for hours. (His recent TED talk was pretty damn good, as well.) In this debate he was his usual brilliant, cogent self — he has the type of delivery style where he clearly states exactly what you’ve always felt, and wish you could express, but in a way you could never manage to arrange and deliver lucidly, and certainly not on-the-fly in a debate format. (For some reason the break-points kept occurring during his statements, which was both annoying and suspiciously suggestive that they were being edited — I’d like to see his parts uncut).

Here’s PZ Myers’ take on the debate. And be sure to stick around for the Q&A at the end where the quantum physicist in the audience pipes up to tell Chopra precisely how amply supplied with fecal matter he is, in regards to his appropriation of physics jargon into the realms of the meaningless.

As Julia Sweeney so eloquently put it, “Deepak Chopra is full of shit.“