Hello, editor....

I know not every article will be perfect, but can't one hope to avoid errors in the first sentence?

With the advent of a series of satellites intended for a variety of communication and navigation purposes and with transmitters from 136 MHz to 1600 MHz, the importance of the phenomenon known as scintillation [...] becomes of importance.

Particle physics in the oilfield

This at a time that US investment in particle physics research is plummeting:

Geneva, 9 May 2008. A Protocol to the 2006 Cooperation Agreement between Saudi Arabia and CERN was today signed at CERN by H.E. Dr. Mohammed I. Al-Suwaiyel, President of the King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology, on behalf of the Government of Saudi Arabia, and Robert Aymar, Director General of CERN , in the presence of H.E. Ali I. Al-Naimi, Minister of Petroleum and Mineral resources and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Saudi Aramco, H.E. Dr. Ibrahim A. Al-Assaf, Minister of Finance and a delegation of representatives of Saudi universities and Saudi Aramco.

The objective of the Protocol is to provide the operational framework as required for the execution of a range of specific tasks under the Cooperation Agreement in order to build a growing high-energy particle physics community in Saudi Arabia that eventually will participate as a visible member in the global scientific community collaborating at CERN.

Saudis know they must work on having a life after oil. When the US gives up leading the way in any and all research, what will we have left?

source: Interactions News Wire #32-08 (9 May 2008)

Whoopsie

This sinkhole opened up a few days ago in Daisetta, TX. It's an old salt dome that probably had the oil pumped out from underneath it and has now decided to collapse. According to the Houston Chronicle, some local teenage girls have taken to calling it the "Sinkhole de Mayo." Clever!

picture credit: James Nielsen/Houston Chronicle

Don't listen to anything this man says

Robert Zubrin, author of Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil, starts out a recent interview on DailyKos with this whopper:

This year, the USA will import 5 billion barrels of oil. At $100/bbl that is $500 billion dollars taxed out of the US economy by the collection of foreign governments known as OPEC, some of whom are using it to promote terrorism directed against the United states and numerous other countries. When George Bush took office in 2001, we were paying $90 billion per year for foreign oil. So the Bush administration has effectively responded to 9-11 by increasing our financing of the enemy fivefold -- and now we are actually paying OPEC more than we are paying our own defense department (the US DOD budget this year is about $435 billion).

A few "minor" details to point out, courtesy of the US DOE's Energy Information Agency:

1) We import 5 billion barrels of "total crude oil and products," but less than 4 billion barrels of actual crude oil. "Products" includes things that are already refined, such as gasoline, kerosene, and even liquified petroleum gas.

2) Only about 1.9 billion barrels of crude oil come from OPEC countries.

So 1.9 billion barrels times $100/barrel is $190 billion dollars to OPEC - not, in fact, more than we pay the defense department. This does not leave me inclined to believe any other figures or comparisons Zubrin quotes.

Oh, and one other thing. Only about 800 million barrels come from the Persian Gulf, with roughly 200 million from Iraq, so say $60 billion dollars. I know terrorists can come from any part of the world, but to the American public it means the Persian Gulf. Hyperbole, anyone?

This I can agree with, though: "the Bush administration has effectively responded to 9-11 by increasing our financing of the enemy fivefold."

A 30-minute round trip to space!

XCOR Press release

That explains a lot

From The Onion:

March 19, 2008 | Issue 44•12

HOUSTON—According to an official NASA report released Saturday, nearly 32 percent of all prayers exiting Earth are deflected off satellites orbiting the planet—ultimately preventing the discharged requests for divine intervention from ever making it to the Gates of Heaven. "After impact with the satellite, these diverted prayers typically plummet back into the atmosphere, where they either burn up or eventually land, unanswered, in a body of water," the report read in part. "Of the remaining prayers, research confirms 64 percent fail to make it past the stratosphere because they aren't prayed hard enough, 94 percent of those with enough momentum are swallowed by a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and 43 percent are eaten by birds." The report concluded that, of the 170 billion prayers issued last month, one made it to God, whose reply was intercepted by a hurricane and incorrectly delivered to a Nigerian man who reportedly did not know what to do with his brand-new Bowflex machine.

Road trip!

If only Geneva were within driving distance of Atlanta:

On 6 April 2008, CERN will open its doors to the public, offering a unique chance to visit its newest and largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), before it goes into operation later this year. This scientific instrument, the largest and most complex in the world, is installed in a 27km tunnel, 100 metres underground in the Swiss canton of Geneva and neighbouring France. CERN will open all access points around the ring for visits underground, to the tunnel and the experiment caverns. On the surface, a wide-ranging programme will be on offer, allowing people to learn about the physics for which this huge instrument is being installed, the technology underlying it, and applications in other fields.

Source: Interactions News Wire #21-08 (18 March 2008)

How does your mindwandering compare to others?

I just took this fun little survey about daydreaming that was put together by some people at Harvard. The results will not surprise anyone who's known me for longer than, say, 5 years:

You spend more time than the average individual ‘lost in thought’ or mind-wandering.

Your daydreams are more creative than most.

My glasses give me superpowers

I'm...Spectrum Analyzer Woman! My glasses, being both high-index and ridiculously thick at the edges, tend to separate out colors. I've noticed this before - usually it shows up as a blue shadow on one side of the object and a yellow shadow on the other side. Flat-panel computer screens do it bad. When I look at neon lights I can sometimes separate out the emission lines. The other day, though, I noticed for the first time that it works on the fluorescent lights in my bathroom. I happened to be standing in just the right place such that a narrow reflection from the shower door separated out and showed the dominant emission lines, even though the bulb produces white light. There's a line in blue quite far from the actual reflection, a green line closer to it, and a red line just on the other side of the reflection. Needless to say, this is way cooler than yellow and blue shadows. Next I'm going to see if I can get a picture of this with my camera.

Snow!

My Texas Rain Gauge was doing double duty as a Texas Snow Gauge Wednesday evening. Unfortunately the snow turned to rain after a few hours, so not much was left by morning.

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

From
Interactions News Wire #78-07
03 January 2008
(http://www.interactions.org):

Proposed for "first light" in 2014, the 8.4-meter LSST will survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its three-billion pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move.
...
The LSST will be constructed on Cerro Pachón, a mountain in northern Chile. Its design of three large mirrors and three refractive lenses in a camera leads to a 10 square degree field-of-view with excellent image quality. The telescope's 3200 Megapixel camera will be the largest digital camera ever constructed. Over ten years of operations, about 2000 deep exposures will be acquired for every part of the sky over 20,000 square degrees. This color "movie" of the Universe will open an entirely new window: the time domain. LSST will produce 30 Terabytes of data per night, yielding a total database of 150 Petabytes. Dedicated data facilities will process the data in real time.

This is extra cool:

LSST is designed to be a public facility - the database and resulting catalogs will be made available to the community at large with no proprietary restrictions. A sophisticated data management system will provide easy access, enabling simple queries from individual users (both professionals and amateurs), as well as computationally intensive scientific investigations that utilize the entire database.

By the way, "synoptic" is related to "synopsis" in that this telescope is meant to survey the state of the sky at regular intervals. It is also a meteorological term.