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/

From Pharyngula.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

From BoingBoing.

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.

It’s tough to express how disappointing this institution is to visit. It’s basically a ramshackle gift shop fronting a petting zoo and a campground area. There are also three large animal statues outside, one of a Florida Panther, the other two of a gorilla and of a lion that were probably appropriated from a put-put course or the like.

The large words above the entrance beckon the travelers inside. What comprises the exhibit? Another gorilla statue, a few shelves split between Skunk Ape merchandise and a some lean Skunk Ape documentary evidence.

And that’s it. It’s hardly worth the stop. The rest of the gift shop is devoted to more standard Florida tchotchkes, and the whole store is festooned with cobwebs and other unmistakable signs of decay. At the back of the store is the entrance to a petting zoo.

The driving force behind the belief in a Skunk Ape living near the everglades was a Mr. David Shealy, who owns the research headquarters. It’s my understanding, at least from anecdotal accounts, that Mr. Shealy has become bored and disillusioned with the whole Skunk Ape thing because it hasn’t made as much money as he hoped. I’m sure there are still hardcore Bigfoot researchers who will hold on to their belief in a Skunk Ape in south Florida, but the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters is a monument to a weird idea whose time looks past.