045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 7: And Another Thing

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 7: And Another Thing

We close on a happier note, which is that we have an occasion of And Another Thing, where we step aside from politics to look at some cool science stuff.

And we have two, both from astronomy.

First, on Christmas Day, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space.

It is the largest, most powerful telescope ever sent up and once in place and deployed, will be able to do everything from giving close-ups of neighboring planets to seeing the first galaxies formed to aiding the search for extra-terrestrial life.

Twenty years in the design and development, the telescope, which "sees" in infrared, should be producing its first images in about six months.

Second, a couple of weeks ago, NASA announced that it has been confirmed that in April the Parker Solar Probe, which has been orbiting the Sun, passed through the corona, the upper atmosphere of the Sun - in effect, you could say the probe touched the Sun, surviving a three year journey and a roughly 2 million degree Fahrenheit environment to do what was previously thought impossible, a journey which already had provided more information about our source of heat and life while revealing new mysteries still to be explained.

Science is cool.

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12

 

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12

- Good News on the minimum wage

- Thoughts prompted by the Kim Potter verdict 

- Clowns of the Year: Louis Gohmert and Dave Chappelle

- Outrage of the Year: vaccine selfishness 

- Special Clown/Outrage Award: "President" Joe Manchin 

- RIP: Desmond Tutu 

- And Another Thing: James Webb Space Telescope takes off; Parker Solar Probe "touches the Sun"

043 The Erickson Report for December 2 to 15, Page Three: Noted in Passing

Now, a few things Noted in Passing, just a minute or two on a couple of things I wanted to mention.

First up, at last, it appears the government is taking corporate crime seriously.

Too bad it's the government of Sweden.

On November 11, prosecutors in Sweden indicted two executives of the Lundin Oil corporation for complicity in war crimes perpetrated in Sudan between 1999 and 2003.

In essence, the charge is that Chairman Ian Lundin and former CEO Alex Schneiter turned security for an oil field where the company had a claim over to the Sudanese military either knowing or criminally indifferent to the fact that the change would (and did) result in war crimes including massacres.

The case marks the first time since Nuremberg that prosecutors have brought “grave war crime” charges and indictments against individuals.

As a footnote, the company released a statement saying "There is no evidence linking any representatives of Lundin to the alleged primary crimes in this case." In other words, "We didn't actually pull the trigger, so nothin' to do with us."

Sorry to tell you, gang, that ain't how it works.

=

Here's something interesting. On November 23, the DOD announced it is establishing a new group to investigate reports on the presence of UFOs in restricted airspace.

The formation of the group comes after the government released a report in June, encompassing 144 observations, which concluded there was a lack of sufficient data to determine the nature of mysterious flying objects.

This comes after decades of officialdoms deflecting, debunking, and discrediting observations of UFO's.

What I personally find interesting is that he new group, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, refers not to "unidentified flying objects" but to "unidentified aerial phenomena" or UAPs, which I find interesting because I have been calling them that for a number of years, speculating that they are actually some sort of natural phenomena that are rare enough that we haven't learned yet to recognize them, much like the UFOs that commercial pilots learned not to report for fear of being grounded but which are now known by the names red sprites and blue jets and are types of lightning that strike upwards from the tops of thunderstorms.

Wonder if I'll get any credit for the name.

=

Finally, in April 2015, Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, a credit card payment processing company, raised the minimum wage at his company to 70,000, which he paid for by cutting his own pay to the same level.

He was mocked as a "socialist," "lunatic of all lunatics," whose employees would soon be on bread lines.

Six years later, company revenue has tripled, the customer base has doubled, 70% of his employees have paid down debt, many bought homes for the first time, 401(k) contributions grew by 155%, and turnover dropped in half.

What's more, when the pandemic broke out, the company lost 55% of its business in one month. Price said the company was four months from bankruptcy. Instead, his employees voluntarily took pay cuts of an amount they each chose, seeing the company through until things improved.

And they have - to the point where those employees have all been given back the amounts they passed up.

Apparently being a socialist lunatic is not such a bad thing.

One final note: When Price made the announcement, Rush Limbaugh declared that he hoped this would become a Harvard Business School cast study of how socialism fails. It is a Harvard Business School case study - just for the opposite reason.

036 The Erickson Report for April 22 to May 5, Page Four: And Another Thing

036 The Erickson Report for April 22 to May 5, Page Four: And Another Thing

We're going to take a break now for something I keep meaning to make more common but never seem too. We call it And Another Thing, where we step aside from politics and social commentary to look at some science thing that I think is cool.

This time we start with the first picture to the right. It's a recently enhanced photo made from an original plate taken in May 1919 in Sobral, Brazil. It is, as I expect you guessed, of a solar eclipse.

It has some added color so that nice solar prominence can be easily seen. The original, of course was in black and white. But that's not the interesting part.

The second photo zooms into the lower right corner of the picture. Notice the two bright spots circled in red.

What's so special about these spots? Well, as I'm sure you knew, they are stars. What's important is that they shouldn't be there. Or more exactly, they shouldn't be where they are.

Which brings us to Albert Einstein and his Theory of Relativity. Relativity has the reputation of being extremely difficult to understand and indeed the mathematics involved in having a deep understanding of the theory are quite advanced and well beyond certainly my comprehension. But the concepts of the theory can be understood by any reasonably intelligent person. You may have to focus a bit, but you can understand it.

The basic concept to understand is that Einstein realized that we do not exist in a universe of three dimensions of space and a separate one of time, but a universe of four-dimensional spacetime. That space and time are interwoven, that each affects the other, and neither is absolute but can be distorted or warped - specifically, warped by the presence of mass.

His original Theory of Relativity, which later became the Special Theory of Relativity, described the effects of that insight in what are called non-accelerated frames of reference. That is, with objects moving in a straight line at a constant speed; more technically, objects moving at a constant velocity, so their acceleration is zero. Thus, a non-accelerated frame of reference

It became the Special Theory of Relativity because Einstein later expanded it to include accelerated frames of reference, where objects are changing their speed or direction of motion or both. That was the General Theory of Relativity - which served as Einstein's theory of gravity.

Newton described gravity as an attractive force between two objects, with the strength dependent on their masses and how far apart they are. Einstein, however, described gravity as the result of the warping of spacetime by mass. So anything traveling close enough to a massive enough object would have its path bent by the warping of spacetime. That means anything - even light.

Okay. The eclipse of 1919 was an excellent opportunity to test Einstein's idea. During an eclipse, astronomers can observe stars appearing close to the Sun, which otherwise would be lost in the glare. By comparing their positions with observations of those same stars at times when they are visible in the night sky, the amount by which their light has been deflected by the Sun can be measured.

Two expeditions went out, one to Sobral and one to the island of Principe off the west coast of Africa. There are great dramatic stories of the scientific struggles and frustrations involved, including the Principe expedition waking up to thunderstorms and getting only occasional glimpses of the Sun in breaks in the clouds and multiple plates in Sobral being ruined because it was hot enough to warp the lenses in the camera. But they managed to get enough plates to get results.

Now, Newton also predicted that light would have its path be deflected by gravity - but Einstein predicted more than twice the effect. Newton's theory predicted a deflection of 0.8 arc-seconds. Einstein predicted 1.8. An arc-second is 1/60 of an arc-minute, which is 1/60 of a degree, which is 1/360 of a complete circle. So yeah, an arc-second is small, but the size is unimportant, it's how closely prediction matches actual measurements.

The stars in this photo are deflected by just under 2 arc-seconds. The ones from Principe were measured at 1.6 arc-seconds. One a little above Einstein's predictions, one a little below, but both in line with it and far removed from Newton's.

These results, that is, were the first observational proofs of the General Theory of Relativity.

They made Einstein a figure known worldwide and other predictions of his theory, such as black holes, have been subjects of both scientific study and sci-fi ever since.

Which brings me to the third image. Almost exactly 100 years later, in April 2019, a worldwide collaboration of scientists produced this, the first ever image of, the first direct observational evidence of, a black hole.

With a mass roughly equal to 6.5 million of our Suns, this supermassive black hole is located in the galaxy M87, some 55 million light years away from Earth. By the way, M87 just means Messier 87, or number 87 in the Messier catalog of deep-sky objects.

Recall you can't see the black hole itself; the gravitational strength of a black hole is so great that anything passing the event horizon, even light, can't escape. Which is why it's called a black hole. As matter is drawn into the black hole, it swirls around, spiraling in, becoming extremely hot and becoming what scientists call luminous, giving off electromagnetic energy such as radio waves and X-rays. That's what you're seeing here.

The image was obtained using something called the Event Horizon Telescope, which linked together eight ground-based radio telescopes, effectively turning the Earth into one giant virtual radio telescope and creating a resolution sharp enough to focus on an orange on the surface of the Moon.

It also provided an extraordinary test of Einstein's theory of gravity and its underlying notions of space and time. One hundred years later and we are still getting observation evidence related to the General Theory of Relativity - and Einstein is still right.

As a footnote to this, what gave me a hook to raise this now, is that at he end of March of this year, 2021, the team that did the black hole picture followed it up with the final one here. Those visible swirls are in effect an image of the structure of the magnetic field in the event horizon of that black hole.

The image is enabling astrophysicists to analyze the nature and strength of that magnetic field and through that provide important insights into the still-mysterious nature of black holes. Because yes, they are still in a number of ways mysterious and even as more and more is learned there is a considerable amount still unknown about them.

 

And I think that is really cool.

Two bits of science news I didn't have time for on the show

First, I now have a second reason beyond the next eclipse in 2024 to make sure I live another six to eight years.

A team of astronomers is predicting that in 2022, give or take a year, two stars in the constellation Cygnus will collide, creating an explosion in the night sky so bright that it will be visible to the naked eye.

It would mark the first time such an event was predicted by scientists.

I gather that it won't be some incredibly dramatic event, it won't be like a supernova visible even in the daytime, but it will be, again, visible to the naked eye in the night sky and it would just be so cool to be able to stand and look at the night sky and think that I was watching the explosion of a star some 1800 light-years away.

Our second bit of cool news is that in spring of 2017 nine telescopes around the world will aim towards the center of the Milky Way, around 25,000 light years away, in an attempt to capture the first-ever image of a black hole.

Black holes, by definition, do not emit visible light and we can't even "see" the blackness of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way because it is obscured by the clouds of gas that surround it.

But radio waves are not blocked by those clouds and by using a technique called interferometry that can synthesize data from multiple sources, these nine radio telescopes essentially can function as one big telescope as big as the entire Earth, with a resolution sufficient to show an orange on the Moon.

Which means these telescopes, working together, can create a radio image of the matter surrounding the black hole, enabling astronomers to "see" the black hole in its shadow.

Exactly what that will look like, no one knows. There are ideas, but no one actually knows. And that, as I think is always true in science, is part of the attraction.

10.7 - And Another Thing: total solar eclipse, August 2017

And Another Thing: total solar eclipse, August 2017

Let's try to at least end the week without any more gloom and doom. So we'll turn to And Another Thing, our occasional foray into something cool, usually cool science and at least not intentionally political.

This time we have a bit of truly cool astronomy stuff. It's something I just learned about a few weeks ago in reading a book about the Sun.

There is going to be a total eclipse of the Sun on August 21 visible in a wide swatch across the US. The path of totality will hit the coast just south of Portland, Oregon and pass over parts of 10 states before leaving shore just north of Charleston, South Carolina.

It will be the last total eclipse visible in the continental US and I believe anywhere in the US until 2024.

I am already making plans.

What's Left #10

What's Left
for the week of January 19-25, 2017

This week:

Good News: sentence of Chelsea Manning commuted
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-justice-manning-idUSKBN15130B
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning

Footnote: on the legalities
http://lifehacker.com/how-presidential-commutations-and-pardons-work-1791306461

Clown Award: Reince Priebus
http://fair.org/home/wapo-organ-of-extreme-center-calls-mlk-true-conservative/
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/riot-language-unheard-9-mlk-quotes-mainstream-media-wont-cite
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/1/15/1620765/-Republicans-in-lather-over-question-of-Trump-s-legitimacy-want-wait-for-it-Obama-to-step-up
http://www.wbrc.com/story/34264012/the-latest-obama-wants-to-stop-future-election-interference?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=AP_Politics
http://swampland.time.com/2012/08/23/the-party-of-no-new-details-on-the-gop-plot-to-obstruct-obama/
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/donald-trump-birther-obama-119945

Outrage of the Week: Dems choose Big Pharma over consumers
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/01/12/big-pharma-backed-dems-join-gop-block-sanders-effort-end-drug-price-gouging
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/-booker-and-the-other-big_b_14150632.html
http://www.drugguide.com/ddo/view/Davis-Drug-Guide/109517/all/Canadian_and_U_S__Pharmaceutical_Practices
http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/tell-congress-stop-21st-century-cures-act/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/12/13/obama-paying-tribute-to-biden-and-bipartisanship-signs-21st-century-cures-act-tuesday/?utm_term=.57db35b48c3c
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-21st-century-20161205-story.html
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/grab-bag-goodies-21st-century-cures-act

Protests continue and grow
https://pen.org/
http://www.pen-international.org/our-history/
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/our-democracy-risk-writers-resist-martin-luther-king-jr-day-n707316
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2017/0116/Days-before-Trump-inauguration-writers-gather-to-celebrate-the-power-of-language
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/01/15/nationwide-rallies-are-ourfirststand-against-gop-assault-healthcare
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/democrats-protest-defense-obamacare_us_587bd3e9e4b09281d0eb741d
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-bernie-sanders-michigan-healthcare-rally-20170115-story.html
https://www.bustle.com/p/these-our-first-stand-protest-photos-show-thousands-of-americans-fighting-for-their-lives-30602
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/01/15/thousands-protest-health-care-repeal-faneuil-hall/CMBwr3f8vGpp7gTsyi7lCM/story.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-goldman-sachs-protest-idUSKBN15202G
http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/04/technology/loveathon-facebook-live/index.html
https://www.womensmarch.com/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2017/01/12/200-buses-have-applied-for-city-parking-on-inauguration-day-1200-have-applied-for-the-womens-march/?utm_term=.79a444756015
https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliareinstein/three-times-as-many-bus-permits-have-been-issued-for-the-wom?bftwnews&utm_term=.qyM92Z92N#.prEz0Mz0R
https://www.womensmarch.com/
http://gofossilfree.org/resist-reject-denial/?akid=19322.1038033.pVwONq&rd=1&t=1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=actionkit

Climate change: 2016 hottest year on record
https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-just-had-2nd-warmest-231445894.html
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-07/record-breaking-temperatures-will-be-new-normal-by-2030/8001720
http://wwlp.com/2017/01/09/u-s-had-near-record-heat-costly-weather-disasters-in-2016/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/11/17/the-north-pole-is-an-insane-36-degrees-warmer-than-normal-as-winter-descends/?utm_term=.affd41459fa9
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/science/global-warming-alters-arctic-food-chain.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/tufted-puffins-die-off-bering-sea-alaska-starvation-warm-water-climate-change/
http://krqe.com/2016/11/29/great-barrier-reef-sees-record-coral-deaths-this-year/
http://www.livescience.com/57016-west-antarctic-ice-shelf-melting-inside.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/not-even-trump-can-easily-reverse-our-progress-on-climate-change/2017/01/16/3d719356-dc25-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/23/1603345/-Trump-to-scrap-all-NASA-climate-research
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-fools-the-new-york-times-on-climate-change-180323fa5980#.tinsiugbo
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-09/trump-team-s-memo-hints-at-broad-shake-up-of-u-s-energy-policy

And Another Thing: total solar eclipse, August 2017
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_August_21,_2017

202.6 - And Another Thing: the Hubble Space Telescope at 25

The Hubble Space Telescope at 25

I don't know how I missed this last week but I did. This past Friday, April 24, was the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Hubble Space Telescope was named for Edwin Hubble, the American astronomer who in the 1920s showed first that the Milky Way is not the only galaxy, expanding our sense of the scale of the universe by a factor of multiple billions, and then later in the decade proved that the universe is not static but is expanding. The Hubble was conceived from the beginning as a telescope in space, one designed to operate outside the atmosphere of Earth and so without the visually-distorting effects of looking through that atmosphere.

It has worked brilliantly at that. But it didn't start that way. About a month after the telescope was set in orbit during a space shuttle mission came what's called in the trade "first light," the first image to be seen through a new telescope. It came - and it was blurry.

The media reaction was harsh. It was a failure, a boondoggle, a waste, a washout, useless. None of that was really true: Even the blurry images were superior to what could be obtained by Earth-bound observatories. But they were not nearly what they should have been or what the Hubble was designed to produce. It was a huge disappointment.

The problem was quickly diagnosed as spherical aberration, where light striking close to the edges of the telescope's primary mirror is not focused at the same place as light striking the mirror closer to the center, resulting in a blurred, out-of-focus image. The primary mirror in the Hubble is 2.4 meters (just about 8 feet) across and it was, in the words of one, "perfectly flawed" - it was made to the exact specifications called for, but the specifications were a little off. And so, therefore, were the images the mirror produced.

Happily for the Hubble, some optics specialists figured out a way to add small mirrors to correct for the aberraion, a process some described as fitting the telescope with a pair of glasses. In 1993, three years after the launch, another space shuttle mission did repairs - and the results were fantastic.

When those first images began to hit the media, for maybe the first time, no one needed to have an excuse for being an astronomer. No one needed to answer the inevitable "So what's the point?" for their interest in the stars and the galaxies and what they are made of and how they form and what will happen to them.

In the words of Adam Frank, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, Hubble

showed us the universe in ways we simply could not have imagined before. When it showed us light-year-spanning cathedrals of gas where new stars are born, Hubble revealed a new kind of grace. When it showed us glittering but ancient jewels marking the apocalyptic death of stars, it spoke of power on a scale words cannot embrace. Hubble gave humanity a new visual vocabulary for space.

But it was not just a matter of the glorious look of the images. It was what they revealed.

The Hubble Space Telescope triggered the discovery of the still-not-understood dark energy when it showed us that not only is the universe expanding, the rate at which it's expanding is increasing. The effect has been likened to throwing a ball into the air and having it rise faster and faster as it goes up.

The Hubble gave us our first visible-light picture of an exoplanet, a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun.

It has advanced the search for extraterrestrial life with its ability to reveal something about the atmospheres of exoplanets, where it has found cases of carbon dioxide, organic molecules, and even water vapor in some of those atmospheres.

It has advanced our understanding of black holes, those collapsed remnants of massive stars were local gravity is so great that even light can't escape and has provided evidence that a supermassive black hole lies at the heart of almost all galaxies (including our own Milky Way), advancing our knowledge of how galaxies form.

It enabled us to watch the impact of a comet or asteroid on Jupiter almost in real time.

It has enabled us to look deep into the history of the cosmos. Remember that the speed of light is not infinite; light takes time to get from one place to another. What you see is not how an object is at your own "now" but how that object was at time moment the light left it. Which means the further out into space you go, the further back in time you are looking. By looking into deep space, Hubble has enabled us to look into deep time to see galaxies and clusters as they were billions of years ago.

And by looking at those exoplanets, the Hubble Space Telescope has even helped better our understanding of how our own Earth formed.

Quoting Adam Frank again:

From planets to black holes to the large-scale structure of the universe entire, you'd be hard-pressed to find a domain of cosmic science whose textbooks haven't been rewritten because of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The fact is, how we see space and our place in the cosmos we now see through Hubble's eyes; it is a reflection of what the Hubble Space Telescope has seen and shown us.

The Hubble is nearing end of its life. The original plan was for periodic maintenance missions but with the end of the shuttle program in 2009, that possibility is gone. NASA expects that in another year or two the telescope's instruments will start to break down. At some point, it will be brought down from orbit, most of it to burn up in the atmosphere and the rest to splash down in the Pacific Ocean.

That won't be the end of the story, however, just the Hubble's chapter. The next space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, is to launch in 2018. It's an infrarad-detecting scope. Why is that important? Because of the expansion of space, the further away something is, the faster it is moving away from us. As it does so, the wavelength of the light it emits gets stretched, making the light redder and redder. It's called redshift and astronomers can use it to tell how far away an object is. (It's also how Edwin Hubble proved the universe is expanding.) It's a visual version of the Doppler effect, usually illustrated by noting how the sound a ambulance siren makes changes as it approaches you, goes by, and moves away.

The point of all this is that if an object is far enough away, the light it emits becomes so redshifted that it is no longer in the visual spectrum but is in the infrared. Yes, the Hubble could take images in the infrared, but the James Webb telescope is designed to maximize abilities in that range. Which means that by "seeing" in the infrared, the James Webb Space Telescope may well be able to see further out in space - and so further back in time - than even the Hubble could.

We'll have to wait to see what new wonders that can reveal.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/23/the-hubble-space-telescope-its-a-terrific-comeback-story
http://www.biography.com/people/edwin-hubble-9345936#acclaimed-career
http://www.npr.org/2015/04/23/401781449/hubble-telescope-celebrates-25-years-in-space
http://news.discovery.com/space/astronomy/hubble-at-25-science-that-transformed-our-cosmos-150423.htm
http://www.livescience.com/46593-how-earth-formed-photo-timeline.html
http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/waves/u10l3d.cfm

Left Side of the Aisle #202

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of April 30 - May 6, 2015

This week:

Good News: Pope Francis calls for equal pay
http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/04/29/pope_francis_compensation_disparity_a_pure_scandal/1140428

Same-sex marriage at the Supreme Court
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/04/28/supreme-court-hears-arguments-in-same-sex-marriage-case-obergefell-v-hodges-today/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/us/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage.html
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/04/28/marriage_equality_arguments_first_reaction_ginsburg_strikes_kennedy_wavers.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2015/04/23/National-Politics/Polling/release_395.xml
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/poll-gay-marriage-support-at-record-high/2015/04/22/f6548332-e92a-11e4-aae1-d642717d8afa_story.html

Footnote: April 28 in the history of the Constitution
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/04/23/how_john_bingham_s_edits_to_the_14th_amendment_paved_the_way_for_gay_marriage.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bingham
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

New evidence tells the same old story: guns don't stop violence, they cause it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_v._City_of_Chicago
http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2015/04/05/nra-nashville-things-to-know/25291131/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/07/1376216/-Gun-Control-at-NRA-Convention
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/true-cost-of-gun-violence-in-america

Outrage of the Week: more media failures on global warming
https://twitter.com/FossilFreeYale/status/586158848446181376/photo/1
https://twitter.com/DivestTulane/status/587986598265929729/photo/1
https://twitter.com/divestumass/status/585826051651198976/photo/1
https://twitter.com/DivestUMW/status/585843916550856705/photo/1
https://instagram.com/p/1FEnBrjSLZ/
https://twitter.com/ClimateActionME/status/583246819074936832/photo/1
https://twitter.com/SwarthMJ/status/581525588017614848/photo/1
https://twitter.com/hashtag/HarvardHeatWeek?src=hash
http://fair.org/home/as-drought-grips-california-networks-come-up-dry-on-climate-science/
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/march/temperatures-california-drought-030215.html

The Hubble Space Telescope at 25
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/23/the-hubble-space-telescope-its-a-terrific-comeback-story
http://www.biography.com/people/edwin-hubble-9345936#acclaimed-career
http://www.npr.org/2015/04/23/401781449/hubble-telescope-celebrates-25-years-in-space
http://news.discovery.com/space/astronomy/hubble-at-25-science-that-transformed-our-cosmos-150423.htm
http://www.livescience.com/46593-how-earth-formed-photo-timeline.html
http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/waves/u10l3d.cfm

Related series on gun violence in America referred to in the item on guns
#1 - http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/01/left-side-of-aisle-91-part-6.html
#2 - http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/01/left-side-of-aisle-92-part-6.html
#3 - http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/01/left-side-of-aisle-93-part-6.html
#4 - http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/02/left-side-of-aisle-94-part-6.html
#5 - http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/02/left-side-of-aisle-95-part-6.html
#6 - http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/02/left-side-of-aisle-96-part-6.html
#7 - http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/03/left-side-of-aisle-97-part-5.html
#8 - http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/03/left-side-of-aisle-98-part-5.html

195.8 - And Another Thing: researchers find fish living beneath 740 meters of ice

And Another Thing: researchers find fish living beneath 740 meters of ice

Enough of all that for now. It has been some time since we have done an episode of And Another Thing, our occasional side trip away from all things political to take a look at some cool stuff - usually, as it is today, cool science stuff. We have two such bits today, and to refer to this first one as cool science is especially apt because that's what it is: cool. Literally.

Scientists have been studying the interactions between glaciers and the land at the point where the glacial flow is entering the sea, the better to understand how glaciers move and the potential impact on them of climate change. To do that you obviously have to see the bottom of the glacier and to do that, obviously, you have to drill through it.

Researchers had been doing that at the Ross Ice Shelf, the world's largest slab of glacial ice. It hangs off the coast of Antarctica and yes, it is big: about the size of France. It's the one marked in red on the map. The drilling site, naturally enough, was right by the coast of Antarctica.

They drilled down through 740 meters of ice - that's over 2400 feet, getting close to a half-mile - to reach a narrow wedge of seawater at the bottom. This wedge of seawater is just 10 meters, about 33 feet, deep, trapped between hundreds of meters of ice above and the barren, rocky seafloor below.

It is a place of perpetual dark and perpetual cold, a location so remote, so hostile, the scientists expected to find nothing but microbes living there.

Instead, to their great surprise, they found fish. Fish and other aquatic animals.

To make it even more surprising, the spot is 850 kilometers - about 530 miles - from the outer edge of the ice shelf, which is the nearest place where the ocean is in contact with sunlight that allows tiny plankton to grow and sustain a food chain.

Which leaves the scientists with a big question: What the heck are these fish living on? There are ideas, but as of yet no final answers. Despite what too many think ("Scientists think they know everything.") this kind of thing, unexpected discoveries and unanswered questions, this is what scientists live for.

Something else this brings up is the possibility of life on other worlds, including even some within our own solar system - specifically, Jupiter's moon called Europa, whose frozen crust is believed to contain an ocean of liquid water within.

Fish under the Ross Ice Shelf

Creatures like the fish found under the Ross Ice Shelf are known collectively as extremophiles, creatures that live under conditions once thought too dark or too hot or too cold or too acidic or too something else to harbor life. The more we look inward at our own planet, the more we find that life is more tenacious, can sink its hooks into a wider variety of conditions, than we thought. And the more we look outward from our own planet, the more other planets we find - approaching 2000 and counting - and the more likely that some of them that are at least roughly the same as Earth - about the same size, rocky not gaseous, and in the so-called "Goldilocks zone" where the heat from the local sun allows for liquid water, a planet neither frozen solid nor boiling hot.

So are there ETs, is there any intelligent life, out there? Well, that's a difficult question, the answer to which would be sheer speculation. We certainly have no evidence of any. But is it reasonable to say, based on what we know today, that there life, life of some sort, out there?

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And how cool is that.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/510126/Ross-Ice-Shelf
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/discovery-fish-live-beneath-antarctica/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthly-extremophiles-prompt-speculation-about-alien-life/?WT.mc_id=SA_SPC_20150205
http://exoplanets.org/

152.7 - And Another Thing: ripples in spacetime

And Another Thing: ripples in spacetime

So we'll finish up this week with an edition of And Another Thing. This is where we talk about stuff that's not political; usually it's some cool science stuff.

I was going to do this last week but I didn't have enough time so I'm doing it now even though the news is a couple of weeks old because it is just too cool to let pass.

You've undoubtedly heard about this big breakthrough, about seeing "the beginning of time." You may have been unclear as to what it means. I read several articles and some were written by scientists, very familiar with the territory, who because they were so familiar with it wrote way too far over the heads of most people. Other articles seemed - well, I'm sure you've had the experience of reading something someone wrote and you can just tell that while they can say the words they don't have a real understanding of the topic. So the coverage was either too complex or too basic.

I hope to come somewhere in between.

There is a scientific theory about how the universe began. Understand, a scientific theory is not a guess, it's not an opinion, it's not just someone's idea, it's something that explains different phenomena and has been confirmed by observation, including observations that it predicted in advance would be made.

This theory about how the universe began became known as the Big Bang.

There were problems with the original Big Bang theory, things it struggled to explain. What those issues were isn't relevant here, what's important is that they were there.

In 1979, an astrophysicist named Alan Guth proposed the Inflationary Universe model of the Big Bang, which served to address those problems. The original idea of the Big Bang was that the universe at one point was incredibly dense and hot and expanded outward from there. The Inflationary model proposed that in the first incredibly short fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second of the universe, it expanded incredibly rapidly, then slowed down to a more moderate rate of expansion such as we see now.

COBE

The Big Bang theory got its biggest confirmation in the early 1990 by the COBE satellite, COBE standing for COsmic Background Explorer, and an image produced from the data gathered is the one you see here.

The image is of space, not Earth. And the variations in color are a graphic representation of tiny variations in the temperature, in the energy, that is coming at us from all directions, that energy being the cosmic microwave background. You could, if you wanted, liken it to a constant hiss everywhere in the universe (except, of course, it doesn't actually make a noise).

The point here is that this background "noise" filling the universe was a precise prediction of the Big Bang theory, down to the level of the energy detected. Which means the Big Bang fulfilled one of the base requirements of a valid theory: It predicted the results of future observations.

WMAP

The COBE image was later supplanted by a more detailed image from data obtained by the Wilkerson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP.

Here, however, is where an issue arises. These images graphically display tiny fluctuations in cosmic microwave background from a point in time about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. They are - again, you could think of it this way - kind of like the afterglow of the Big Bang.

We cannot see further back in time. This is not a technical constraint; if the theories are right, it's a physical constraint.

So when they say that scientists have seen "the beginning of time," that's not technically accurate.

But what we can do is consider our theories about the Big Bang, consider what is predicted, and examine the data we have about the cosmic microwave background, that is, to take what we know and what we predict in order to make further observations looking for evidence about the beginning of time, to look for the telltale signs of those first instants.

That's what the scientists involved did. And the image shows what they found.

Doesn't look like much does it? No, it doesn't. But those lines indicate or more accurately represent changes in light.

See, one of common predictions of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is that gravity bends light. This has been proved multiple times; in fact, it's so well-established that astronomers use it as a tool. According to theory, the Big Bang should have produced gravitational waves that would polarize light, gravitational waves rippling through the universe like ripples on a pond.

That's what those lines represent: the polarization of light under the influence of gravity.

So this is actually what they found: They found ripples in spacetime, ripples imposed on the infant universe by gravitational waves.

Ripples in spacetime dating from roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Ripples in spacetime that are a "smoking gun" for inflation.

Ripples in spacetime that offer insight into fundamental physics, including the idea that the four fundamental forces of the universe - electromagnetism, gravity, and the weak and strong nuclear forces - were all united as a single force at the Big Bang.

Ripples in spacetime that by showing the existence of gravitational waves provide proof for the last, great, untested prediction of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which was those very gravitational waves.

Ripples in spacetime, that is, that provide backing for three separate scientific theories all related to the fundamental nature of the universe.

And ripples in spacetime that represent the first real data we have - not conjecture, not hypotheses, not mathematical calculations, but actual data - about the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second in the history of the universe.

And if you don't think that's cool, there is no hope for you.

Sources:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26605974
http://www.livescience.com/44166-big-bang-inflation-gravitational-waves-physics.html
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/17/new_discovery_last_of_albert_einsteins_untested_predictions_may_have_proof/

Left Side of the Aisle #152

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of March 27 - April 2, 2014

This week:

Good News: Michigan is the latest to fall
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20140322/us-gay-marriage-michigan/
http://www.freep.com/article/20140322/NEWS06/303220043/Michigan-s-first-gay-marriage-performed-Ingham-County-couples-line-up-Oakland
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/22/michigan-same-sex-marriage_n_5014572.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2014/03/1495-update-same-sex-marriage.html
http://firedoglake.com/2014/03/22/judicial-sarcasm-takes-down-michigans-anti-marriage-equality-amendment/

The little Thing: Whodunit?
http://www.aol.com/article/2014/03/21/police-find-three-starving-children-in-california-home/20854605/

RIP: Fred Phelps
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/20/fred-phelps-dead_n_5000577.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/24/westboro-baptist-church-lorde_n_5021135.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/17/fred-phelps-excommunicated-wbc_n_4981300.html

Clown Award: State Sen. Richard Ross and Robert Leclair
http://daisysdeadair.blogspot.com/2014/03/haley-watch-watch-out-canada-queen.html
http://boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2014/03/23/bill-would-forbid-divorcing-parents-massachusetts-from-having-sex-home/LNdv86n7K86w1ioJ3Jp4FO/story.html
https://malegislature.gov/Bills/BillHtml/122340?generalCourtId=11
http://votesmart.org/candidate/biography/36049/richard-ross
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/05/18/mass-bill-would-require-divorcing-parents-to-obtain-judges-approval-for-sex/

Update: fighting wage theft
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2014/03/1511-good-news-low-wage-workers-open.html
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/03/19/3416054/mcdonalds-wage-theft-settlement/#
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/nyregion/dominos-franchise-settles-delivery-workers-lawsuit-for-1-28-million.html
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/18/how_new_york_could_crack_down_on_fast_foods_corporate_crime_wave/

Outrage of the Week: hang-ups on coat hangers
http://dcabortionfund.org/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/21/dc-abortion-fund-coat-hanger_n_5008010.html
http://dcabortionfund.org/2014/03/statement-from-val-vilott-president-of-the-dc-abortion-fund/
http://twitchy.com/2014/03/18/sickest-thing-ive-ever-seen-abortion-nonprofit-rewards-donors-with-horrific-token-of-thanks-pic/
http://www.caintv.com/help-pay-for-an-abortion-get-t
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/bristolpalin/2014/03/abortion-enthusiasts-wear-coat-hanger-necklaces/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

And Another Thing: ripples in spacetime
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26605974
http://www.livescience.com/44166-big-bang-inflation-gravitational-waves-physics.html
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/17/new_discovery_last_of_albert_einsteins_untested_predictions_may_have_proof/

139.6 - And Another Thing #2: Mars was at one time "Earthlike"

And Another Thing #2: Mars was at one time "Earthlike"

The evidence that Mars was once a wet planet where life might have existed keeps on growing.

New analysis of rocks collected by the Curiosity rover reveals that there was once fresh water on Mars, in fact right were Curiosity landed last year.

Researchers believe the dried-up lakebed may have supported colonies of microbes, the same type that now are found in caves and hydrothermal vents on Earth. What’s more, they now have reason to believe that those lifeforms emerged about 3.5 billion years ago - right around the same time life was emerging here.

John P. Grotzinger, the project scientist for the Curiosity mission, said that "All the essential ingredients for life were present." Including time: "The aqueous system could have existed for millions to tens of millions of years," he added.

Put simply, a couple of billion years ago, Mars was, he said, "extremely Earthlike." "It’s kind of cool," he said. I agree.

Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/09/curiosity_stumbles_upon_new_evidence_of_life_of_mars/

Left Side of the Aisle #139

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of December 26, 2013 - January 2, 2014

This week:
Why Christmas is on December 25
http://web.archive.org/web/20110430004539/http://www.bsu.edu/web/01bkswartz/xmaspub.html
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/news/2000/dec08.html
http://christianity.about.com/od/christmas/f/christmashistor.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20110430004539/http://www.bsu.edu/web/01bkswartz/xmaspub.html
http://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/lactant/lactpers.html#XLVIII
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/erin-r-brown/2011/12/13/war-war-christmas
http://religions.pewforum.org/reports
http://www.whychristmas.com/customs/25th.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great_and_Christianity
http://mith.umd.edu//eada/html/display.php?docs=bradford_history.xml
http://historyofmassachusetts.org/when-christmas-was-banned-in-boston/
http://www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org/index.shtml
http://festivusweb.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol_(Doctor_Who)
"The Christmas Connection," lecture at Plymouth Antiquarian Society, November 15, 1979

Santa Claus: Same-sex marriage comes to New Mexico
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/us/new-mexico-becomes-17th-state-to-legalize-gay-marriage.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/08/1232-good-news-2-same-sex-marriage.html
http://www.nmcompcomm.us/nmcases/nmsc/slips/SC34,306.pdf
http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/12/19/21972868-gay-marriage-advocates-win-out-in-new-mexico-other-state-efforts-more-doubtful

The Grinch: The GOPper and the free lunch
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/18/jack-kingston-school-lunch_n_4467711.html
http://www.obamacarefacts.com/federal-poverty-level.php
http://www.charlesdickenspage.com/twist_more.html
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/jimmy-williams/2013/12/19/the-idiocy-of-jack-kingston-and-the-return-of-the-welfare-queen
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/12/12/ethan_couch_affluenza_texas_teen_spared_prison_time_in_deadly_drunk_driving.html

New Year's resolution: Obamabots beware
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/17/mark-udall-cia-torture_n_4462587.html

And Another Thing: inheriting acquired characteristics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Lamarck
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/131201_epigenetic.htm

And Another Thing: Mars was at one time "Earthlike"
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/09/curiosity_stumbles_upon_new_evidence_of_life_of_mars/

And Another Thing: looking for lumpy electrons
http://www.boston.com/news/science/blogs/science-in-mind/2013/12/19/the-search-for-lumpy-electron-finds-perfect-sphere-instead/NpazIUk8BDv9bkM0xLIqcL/blog.html
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/12/19/electron.antenna.tunes.physics.beyond.higgs

134.7 - And Another Thing 2: billions of Earthlike planets

And Another Thing 2: billions of Earthlike planets

Habitable alien planets similar to Earth may not be that rare in the universe, in fact there may be a whole lot of them, according to recent findings drawn from data obtained by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft.

While the researchers had to do some statistical extrapolation to account for limitations of the technology, and they did use a rather generous definition of "Earth-size planet," including up to twice the diameter (and so eight times the volume) of the Earth, the number they came up with is still stunning: About one in five Sun-like stars could have an Earth-size planet in the so-called habitable zone, the range where liquid water - and, potentially, life as we know it - could exist. The nearest such planet could be just 12 light-years away, which on a galactic scale is barely more than down the block: Compared to the distance across the Milky Way, it's the equivalent of a quarter-mile compared to the air travel distance from Boston to Los Angeles.

How many such planets could there be? If the research team's estimates and judgments are correct, there could be 11 billion of them in the Milky Way alone. So even if they were too optimistic by a factor of 10, that would still indicate over a billion potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way.

Of course, a planet being in the habitable zone doesn't mean there is life there or even that life could be supported there: The planet might, for example, have no atmosphere or have one so dense, like for example the one around Venus, that pressures and temperatures at the surface would make life impossible. It doesn't even mean that even if the conditions for life exist there, that life actually got started. It just means that life as we know it is possible there.

So we still don't know if there is life out there - but with it being within the bounds of reason to say there the galaxy has well over a billion shots at it, well, the chances for it just keep getting better.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/earth-like-habitable-planets-kepler-space-video_n_4214758.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way
http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-earth-like-planets-20131105,0,2673237.story#axzz2joZzLISO

Left Side of the Aisle #134

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of November 14 - 20, 2013

This week:

Marriage equality advances in Hawaii
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/09/hawaii-gay-marriage-bill_n_4245015.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57612238/hawaii-becomes-15th-state-to-legalize-same-sex-marriage/
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/06/breaking_california_wal_mart_workers_strike_today_following_stunning_florida_victory/
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/08/largest_wal_mart_civil_disobedience_ends_with_over_50_arrests/

The attack on The Commons
http://www.epi.org/publication/attack-on-american-labor-standards/
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/31/newts_revenge_child_labor_makes_a_comeback/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/05/1253318/-Wage-theft-outstrips-bank-gas-station-and-convenience-store-robberies
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/31/the_rights_war_on_pregnant_women/

Poetic justice on voter ID
http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2013/10/greg-abbott-will-need-affidavit-to-vote/
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/wendy-davis-outsmarts-texas-voter-id-law

Outrage of the Week: 2nd Circuit blocks stop-and-frisk fixes, removes judge
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/08/1211-good-news-stop-and-frisk-smackdown.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/breaking-stop-frisk-blocked-judge-removed-article-1.1503092
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/nyregion/court-blocks-stop-and-frisk-changes-for-new-york-police.html?_r=0
https://www.ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/stop-and-frisk-lawsuit:-court-of-appeals-stays-remedies,-reassigns-case-new-judge
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/nov/01/how-uphold-racial-injustice/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/opinion/a-bad-ruling-on-stop-and-frisk.html
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/03/judges-appearance-of-impartiality/which-judges-breached-the-rules
http://herculesandtheumpire.com/2013/11/03/a-cheap-shot/

Clown Award: Mike Rogers
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/31/1252139/-A-congressman-s-new-interpretation-of-the-Fourth-nbsp-Amendment
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131029/18020225059/mike-rogers-you-cant-have-your-privacy-violated-if-you-dont-know-about-it.shtml

And Another Thing 1: light sabers coming?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/27/new-matter-light-saber_n_3998082.html
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/30/star-wars-lightsabers-invented

And Another Thing 2: billions of Earthlike planets
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/earth-like-habitable-planets-kepler-space-video_n_4214758.html
http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-earth-like-planets-20131105,0,2673237.story#axzz2joZzLISO

126.6 - And Another Thing: picture of baby star

And Another Thing: picture of baby star

One last cool thing. In this case, a hot cool thing.

The picture is a baby picture. It's a baby star. A baby star.

The picture was taken by the ALMA telescope in Chile. This is a great place to do this because this telescope is set in the Atacama Desert, which is one of the driest places on Earth. This desert makes the Sahara look like a rain forest. Which also means the air is incredibly clear and crisp because of the lack of humidity. This is wonderful for telescopes.

What the image shows is material streaming from the baby star, which is the bluish area in the center of the cloud, you see all that material being ejected out from the star at incredible speed and as it plows into the surrounding gas and dust, it heats it up and causes it to glow.

These illuminated jets you see are actually spewing out faster than any have ever been measured before. That's one very active baby.

Sources:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/08/20/stunning-images-capture-close-up-of-glowing-newborn-star/
http://www.musc.edu/cando/geocam/atacama/atacama.html

Left Side of the Aisle #100 - Part 13

And Another Thing #5: Astronomers measure spin of supermassive black hole 56 million light-years away

For our final exploration, we star trek out to some 56 million light years away.

I want you to imagine a ball more than two million miles across - that's more than eight times the distance from Earth to the Moon - a ball two million miles across that's spinning so fast that its surface is traveling at nearly the speed of light.

Such an object actually exists: the supermassive black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 1365. And yes, that is a picture of NGC 1365.

This is the first time anyone has accurately measured the spin of a supermassive black hole, which is the huge kind of black hole that sits at the centers of galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

A black hole is an object where so much mass is concentrated in such a small volume that the gravity is so great that nothing, no even light, can escape. In fact, for a supermassive black hole, this gravity is so strong that, as the black hole spins, it literally drags spacetime around with it. It's called frame dragging.

As material spirals in toward the black hole, it accelerates and the friction among particles that results generates so much energy that it produces a stream of x-rays. As a result of the distortion of spacetime, the material can get closer to the black hole before being lost - so by seeing where the x-rays are coming from, astronomers can measure the black hole’s spin.

Why do they go through all this? Well, for one thing, just two numbers define a black hole: its mass and its spin. If you know those two numbers, you can know everything there is to be known about that black hole. More importantly, a black hole’s spin gives clues to its past - and therefore by extension, in the case of a supermassive back hole, the evolution of the galaxy in which it sits.

In other words, astronomers measure the spin of a supermassive black hole 56 million light years away because it can help us to understand how galaxies form. And that is just cool.

Sources:
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/130228_blackhole

Left Side of the Aisle #100 - Part 12

And Another Thing #4: Curiosity finds chemicals for life on Mars

Taking our explorations from the sea out into space, we come to Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover has carried out an analysis of a rock sample it recently collected - an analysis that shows that in its ancient past, Mars could have supported living things. Perhaps only microbes, but living things.

In the words of Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program,

A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment. From what we know now, the answer is yes.

I'm sure you heard about this, but it's worth mentioning here for a reason beyond the basic coolness factor. Let's be clear: First, Curiosity did not find life on Mars. Second, this doesn't mean there ever was life on Mars. Third, what is does mean is that the physical and chemical conditions that would allow for life were available on Mars, at least in the distant past.

Is there life anywhere out there? We don't know. But it does seem that every discovery we make - especially in light of the fact that there are now nearly 1000 known planets outside our solar system and NASA's Kepler mission has discovered about 3000 more possible planets to be checked out adn we've barely started looking - it seems that every discovery we make, even as it doesn't prove there is life elsewhere, keeps on increasing the chances for it.

Sources:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/sciencefair/2013/03/12/mars-top-five/1982783/
http://www.dailytech.com/NASA+Curiosity+Rovers+Rock+Sample+Suggests+Life+on+Mars/article30108.htm
http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/12/17285137-curiosity-rover-sees-life-friendly-conditions-in-ancient-mars-rock?lite
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/12mar_graymars/

Left Side of the Aisle #100

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of March 21-27, 2013

This week:
Good News #1: Same-sex marriage advances
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/14/gay-marriage-inevitable-americans_n_2876601.html
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/poll-new-high-of-58-percent-support-same
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/03/18/gay-marriage-support-hits-new-high-in-post-abc-poll/
http://www.twincities.com/politics/ci_22769152/gay-marriage-bill-faces-crucial-committee-votes-tuesday?c=upworthy
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/15/rob-portman-gay-marriage_n_2881805.html
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2006/06/06/5669/inhofe-gay-marriage/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/15/james-inhofe-cpac-gay-marriage-rob-portman_n_2884724.html?ir=Politics&ref=topbar
http://greenstreetchurch.org/public-statement-weddings-green-street-united-methodist-church/#public-statement-weddings
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/18/n_carolina_church_stops_performing_straight_marriages_until_gay_marriage_becomes_legal/?source=newsletter

Good News #2: Maryland repeals death penalty
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/15/maryland-death-penalty_n_2885162.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20130315/us-death-penalty-maryland/
http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2013/02/executions-are-becoming-rare-in-us.html
http://www.aclu.org/capital-punishment/death-penalty-101
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_capital_punishment_by_country

Good News #3: Being overweight is not a disease
http://www.everydayhealth.com/sanjay-gupta/heavy-and-healthy-overweight-today-was-perfect-in-1913.aspx
http://www.digitalnewsrelease.com/?q=jama_3867

Good News #4: NSLs held unconstitutional
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/15/national-security-letter-_n_2886130.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303567704577519213906388708.html
http://75.101.159.206/documents/367107-104697082-us-dis-cand-3-11cv2173-2011-10-02.html#document/p6/a59670
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/nsl-found-unconstitutional/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/doj-sues-telecom-over-nsl/

Good News #5: Occupy protesters winning in court
http://www.care2.com/causes/5-exciting-verdicts-occupy-keeps-winning-in-court.html
http://articles.philly.com/2013-03-07/news/37503495_1_nina-n-wright-padilla-paul-hetznecker-trespass-charge
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/03/why_the_police.php
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/03/jury_finds_occu.php
http://app1.kuhf.org/articles/1361550856-Court-Case-Involving-Occupy-Protesters-Resolved.html
http://www.fightbacknews.org/2012/9/28/cook-county-court-dismisses-more-90-cases-against-occupy-chicago-protesters
http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/news/local_news/cleveland_metro/ohio-court-hands-a-victory-to-occupy-protesters
http://www.care2.com/causes/first-ows-trial-ends-in-acquittal-thanks-to-citizen-journalism.html
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/02/occupy-movement-files-lawsuit-against-every-federal-regulator-of-wall-street/

Good News #6: Nancy Pelosi questions Keystone XL pipeline
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/key-democrat-pelosi-voices-doubts-on-keystone-as-mulcair-visits-us/article9810656/

Hero Award #1: Croatian-Serb kiss
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mostar
http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/19wsy5/when_an_old_lady_asked_croatian_girl_how_she/?limit=500
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_World_Colleges
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/10/croatian-girl-kisses-serb_n_2839945.html

Hero Award #2: Bradley Manning in his own voice
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-ellsberg/bradley-manning-military-court-speech_b_2859353.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/12/bradley-manning-tapes-own-words
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/group-aims-to-be-a-conduit-for-wikileaks-donations/

And Another Thing #1: Billboard produces fresh water from the air
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/18/billboard-lima-peru-water-crisis_n_2901882.html

And Another Thing #2: FCC proposes free nationwide wifi
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/tech-telecom-giants-take-sides-as-fcc-proposes-large-public-wifi-networks/2013/02/03/eb27d3e0-698b-11e2-ada3-d86a4806d5ee_story.html

And Another Thing #3: Viking sunstones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows
http://www.polarization.com/viking/viking.html
http://www.ibtimes.com/viking-sunstone-evidence-found-sixteenth-century-english-wreck-1120939#
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/03/10/first-evidence-viking-sunstone-found/

And Another Thing #4: Curiosity finds chemicals for life on Mars
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/sciencefair/2013/03/12/mars-top-five/1982783/
http://www.dailytech.com/NASA+Curiosity+Rovers+Rock+Sample+Suggests+Life+on+Mars/article30108.htm
http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/12/17285137-curiosity-rover-sees-life-friendly-conditions-in-ancient-mars-rock?lite
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/12mar_graymars/

And Another Thing #5: Astronomers measure spin of supermassive black hole 56 million light-years away
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/130228_blackhole