Trial of Media Editor in Thailand Violates Free Expression

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Freedom House condemns the trial of online media editor and human rights defender Prachatai executive director, Chiranuch (Jiew) Premchaiporn, who is accused of allowing comments deemed critical of the monarchy to be posted on the online forum that she moderates. Freedom House urges the Thai government to drop all charges against her and to immediately amend the country's 2007 Computer Crimes Act (CCA), so that it conforms to international human rights standards.

Freedom House Condemns Crackdown on Peaceful WOZA Protest in Zimbabwe

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Freedom House condemns today's arrest of members of the Women and Men of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) during a peaceful demonstration, and strongly condemns the continued crackdown on freedom of expression and other basic human rights by Zimbabwean authorities. Freedom House is concerned that those arrested face imminent danger of abuse and torture in prison and calls for their immediate release.

Vesta’s Snowman Impersonation

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Interesting trio of craters on Vesta. Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ UCLA/ MPS/ DLR/ IDA

The Dawn spacecraft took this image of a trio of craters on Vesta that vaguely resembles a snowman.  There is a large version accessible on the Dawn webpage.

Given the low gravity of Vesta, probably in the range of three percent of Earth’s,  I’m trying to decide from what direction the impacting bodies hit.  I’m thinking top to bottom in the image.

Did everybody see the spectacular time-lapse video of the Earth from the ISS?  Check it out on Robs page – truly amazing!.

I Say YAY For the ATA!!

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One of the dishes in the Allen Telescope Array. Credit: setiQuest

 

Back in April you may remember my bemoaning the shutdown of the Allen Telescope Array and the subsequent end of SETI.  The shutdown was of course due to funding.

I am VERY HAPPY to be able to say the ATA is on the way back thanks to donations of SETIStars and the USAF Space Command.

The process of bringing the array out of hibernation began a couple weeks ago.

Keep up with the latest at setiQuest.

YAY AND CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL!!!!

North America Safe from UARS

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Click here to view the embedded video.

The latest word is North America is safe from the dead 6.5 ton satellite known as UARS (short for Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) that has been spiraling its way to an uncontrolled re-entry to Earth.  The expected time of the re-entry is sometime tomorrow (September 23rd) in the afternoon Eastern Daylight Time.

Better than 20 pieces of the satellite are expected to survive the return trip and hit the Earth, scattered over a 500 mile area..  North America is apparently safe but where?  Nobody is offering a guess yet, they will though as the satellite gets a little closer.

If you do happen by a piece of the downed satellite you are encouraged NOT to touch it and instead call your local law enforcement people.  Hey I know, who knows what they will do, but I feel obligated to put that warning in.

I particularly liked the video, not just because of the UARS but the depiction of an orbit in relation to the sine wave projection on a flat map.

You MIGHT be able to access the N2YO tracker but I’ve not been sucessful so far; but give it a try anyways who knows?

Speed of Light Broken? Plus UARS Update

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Several views of the UARS satellite in orbit, as seen from the ground with a 14" telescope. Credit: Thierry Legault Emmanual Rietsch via Universe Today

UPDATE:  Hearing UARS is down, started over the Pacific also hearing rumors of a fireball over Edmonton Alberta, anybody up there that can confirm?

UPDATE 2: NASA is saying the satellite is likely in the Pacific but they really don’t know.  Apparently this post upset a spammer.  Well most likely a spammer even if he was using a New Jersey IP address.  Oh well I removed the comment and updated the spam filter, I figure he can let me know if the comment wasn’t really spam.

A short post today.

This (last I knew) wasn’t “for sure” but  the question can be asked: Was Einstein wrong? Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water just yet.

The doomed satellite known as UARS is on the way down. Not sure where yet though AND solar activity is no longer playing much of a role in the rate of descent which is now slowing.  What’s that mean?  It means earlier assurances the satellite will not impact in North America could be wrong, although the chances are low, the possibility cannot be dismissed.  The last prediction I heard was 20:36 GMT give or take 20 hours.

The autumnal equinox occurred this morning at 0505 EDT.

From The ISS

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Another pretty for you from the ISS.  This one is a suset.

Image from NASA/ISS - As always, check out the enlargement

Thin blue Line

Using a digital still camera, the International Space Station Expedition Three crew captured a setting sun and the thin blue airglow line at Earth’s horizon. Some of the station’s components are silhouetted in the foreground. This image was taken on Sept. 16, 2001.

Image Credit: NASA

I cannot imagine what it would be like to see this not once, but many times each day.  What a sunset!

If you were on board the ISS, of what would YOU be taking pictures?  I couldn’t help myself; I’d have some type of telescope and would be looking at cities as we flew over.

The Soyuz Returns

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Click here to view the embedded video.

The crew aboard a Soyuz capsule in the Soyuz returned to Earth Friday from the International Space Station.  They are safe and sound and that’s good, BUT not all went well.  An as yet to be determined problem caused the three person crew which included NASA astronaut Ron Garan along with his two Russian cosmonauts colleagues to lose communications for several minutes during the descent.

Communications was restored eventually, although we don’t know how whether it was via a back up system or something as simple as a improperly position switch, it sure does seem to add doubt to future of the ISS without the shuttle.

Ah well.

Source

UARS update 5: new predicted re-entry tonight at 05:10 UTC +/- 2 hrs | Bad Astronomy

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The Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies has updated their predicted re-entry time for NASA’s UARS satellite. It is now 9/24 (tonight!) at 05:10 UTC (01:10 Eastern US time), which puts it over the southern Indian ocean:

See Related posts below for information and background. Note the uncertainty is once again smaller, at +/- 2 hours!

Related posts:

-UARS update 3: new predicted re-entry tonight at 03:16 UTC +/- 5 hrs
- UARS update 2: new predicted re-entry at 00:58 UTC
- Update: satellite *might* fall on Friday at 22:00 UTC +/- 9 hours
- NASA satellite due to burn up some time in the next few days


243 full human genomes sequenced per second | Gene Expression

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MIT Technology Review has one of those articles about the exponential growth rate in the number of people who have been fully sequenced. There’s nothing too exceptional in the piece. You do have to be careful about 10 year projections, especially if they’re exponential. But this part caught my eye: ” At this exponential pace, by 2020 it may be feasible—mathematically, at least—to decode the DNA of every member of humanity in a single 12-month stretch.”

What does that mean? Taking the U.N. estimate for the world’s population in 2020, and I get the following numbers:

- 874,087 genomes per hour
- 14,568 genomes per minute
- 243 genomes per second

Of course much of the sequencing would be done concurrently, so it wouldn’t be a constant rate of production. But still this would be awesome. I think being much more conservative there’ll be at least hundreds of thousands of people who are fully sequenced, if not millions. I don’t know if this is valid personally, but there’s a paper on data compression which claims it might be feasible to reduce the size of the raw sequence output to ~4 MB. That might be helpful, since even at that size you’d still have 30 million terabytes of information to store (I assume that any given genome will be replicated thousands of times in various data centers).

24 hour SGU podcastathon tonight! | Bad Astronomy

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The goofballs at Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe decided it would be a good idea to have a marathon 24-hour video/audio podcast, live, with special guests surrounded by dynamic conversations and covered with a creamy coating of skeptical goodness.

Crazy, right? And guess who they roped into it for the hour starting at 11:00 Eastern (US) time? Yeah, me.

The whole thing starts at 8:00 Eastern time (midnight UTC) TONIGHT, and you can get the details on the SGU 24 page. They even have their own skype chat room ("theskepticsguide") and Twitter hashtag: #sgu24. Kids these days.

Sorry. I meant, #kidsthesedays

Now, if only there were some sciencey things in the news for us to talk about…


Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos? | Cosmic Variance

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Probably not. But maybe! Or in other words: science as usual.

For the three of you reading this who haven’t yet heard about it, the OPERA experiment in Italy recently announced a genuinely surprising result. They create a beam of muon neutrinos at CERN in Geneva, point them under the Alps (through which they zip largely unimpeded, because that’s what neutrinos do), and then detect a few of them in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory 732 kilometers away. The whole thing is timed by stopwatch (or the modern high-tech version thereof, using GPS-synchronized clocks), and you solve for the velocity by dividing distance by time. And the answer they get is: just a teensy bit faster than the speed of light, by about a factor of 10-5. Here’s the technical paper, which already lists 20 links to blogs and news reports.

The things you need to know about this result are:

  • It’s enormously interesting if it’s right.
  • It’s probably not right.

By the latter point I don’t mean to impugn the abilities or honesty of the experimenters, who are by all accounts top-notch people trying to do something very difficult. It’s just a very difficult experiment, and given that the result is so completely contrary to our expectations, it’s much easier at this point to believe there is a hidden glitch than to take it at face value. All that would instantly change, of course, if it were independently verified by another experiment; at that point the gleeful jumping up and down will justifiably commence.

This isn’t one of those annoying “three-sigma” results that sits at the tantalizing boundary of statistical significance. The OPERA folks are claiming a six-sigma deviation from the speed of light. But that doesn’t mean it’s overwhelmingly likely that the result is real; it just means it’s overwhelmingly unlikely that the result is simply a statistical fluctuation. There is another looming source of possible error: a “systematic effect,” i.e. some unknown miscalibration somewhere in the experiment or analysis pipeline. (If you are measuring something incorrectly, it doesn’t matter that you measure it very carefully.) In particular, the mismatch between the expected and observed timing amounts to tens of nanoseconds; but any individual “event” takes the form of a pulse that is spread out over thousands of nanoseconds. Extracting the signal is a matter of using statistics over many such events — a tricky business.

The experimenters and their colleagues at other experiments know this perfectly well, of course. As Adrian Cho reports in Science, OPERA’s spokesperson Antonio Ereditato is quick to deny that they have overturned Einstein. “I would never say that… We are forced to say something. We could not sweep it under the carpet because that would be dishonest.” Now there’s a careful and honest scientist for you, I wish we were all so precise and candid. Cho also quotes Chang Kee Jung, a physicist not on the experiment, as saying, “I wouldn’t bet my wife and kids [that the result will go away] because they’d get mad. But I’d bet my house.” A careful and honest husband and father.

Scientists do difficult experiments all the time, of course, and yet we believe their results. That’s simply because it’s proper to be extra skeptical when the results fly in the face of our expectations: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as someone once paraphrased Bayes’s Theorem. When the supernova results in 1998 suggested that the universe is accelerating, most cosmologists hopped on board fairly quickly, both because we had a simple theoretical model in hand (the cosmological constant) and because the result helped explain several other nagging observational problems (such as the age of the universe). Here that’s not quite true, although we should at least mention that Fermilab’s MINOS experiment also saw evidence for faster-than-light neutrinos, albeit at a woefully insignificant level. More relevant is the fact that we have completely independent indications that neutrinos do travel at the speed of light, from Supernova 1987A. If the OPERA results are naively taken at face value, the SN 87A should have arrived a couple of years before we saw the explosion using good old-fashioned photons. But perhaps we should resist being naive; the SN 87A events were electron neutrinos, not muon neutrinos, and they were at substantially lower energies. If neutrinos do violate the light barrier, it’s completely consistent to imagine that they do so in an energy-dependent way, so the comparison is subtle.

Which brings up a crucial point: if this result is true (which is always a possibility), it is much more surprising than the acceleration of the universe, but it’s not as if we don’t already have ways to explain it. The most straightforward idea is to violate Lorentz invariance, a strategy of which I’m quite personally fond (although I’ve never applied the idea to neutrino physics). Lorentz invariance says that everyone measures the speed of light to be the same; if you violate it, it’s easy enough to imagine that someone (like, say, a neutrino) measures something different. Once you buy into that idea, neutrinos are an interesting place to apply the idea, since our constraints on their properties are relatively weak. It’s an interesting enough topic that there are review articles, and even a Wikipedia page on the idea.

And there are more way-out possibilities. Graininess in spacetime from quantum gravity might affect the propagation of nearly-massless particles; extra dimensions might provide a shortcut through space. This experimental result will probably give a boost to theorists thinking about these kinds of things, as well it should — there’s nothing disreputable about trying to come up with models that fit new data. But it’s still a long shot at this time. I hate to keep saying it over and over in this era of tantalizing-but-not-yet-definitive experimental results, but: stay tuned.

A few of the countless good blog posts on this topic:


UARS update 3: new predicted re-entry tonight at 03:16 UTC +/- 5 hrs | Bad Astronomy

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[UPDATE to the update (22:00 UTC): a new prediction just came out: tonight, September 23/24, at 04:04 UTC (midnight Eastern US time). The uncertainty is down to +/- 3 hours, and the location is the middle of the Pacific. Clicking the links below to CORDS or the image itself will take you to the most current prediction.]

The Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies has updated their predicted re-entry time for NASA’s UARS satellite. It is now 9/24 (tonight!) at 03:16 UTC, which puts it over the Sahara:

Note that again this is later than the last estimate. As the satellite has gotten lower, aerodynamic drag — the wind blowing on it, tenuous as it is — has changed its orientation, creating less drag, slowing the descent.

Please note that the time is still uncertain, though now it’s only +/- 5 hours. Still, that’s a wide swath of Earth in that range, so we’re still not sure where it’ll burn up.

Check the Related posts links below for more info on the satellite, why it’s coming down, and how to read that map. Again, the danger from this is pretty minimal. You may note that the three predictions we’ve had have put re-entry over the ocean or otherwise largely uninhabited areas, and that’s not a coincidence: most of the Earth is like that! That’s why the odds of someone getting hit are so low.

I’m sure we’ll get another update or two in the next few hours, so stay tuned. You can also check the CORDS site for updates, and the NASA page as well.

Related posts:

- UARS update 2: new predicted re-entry at 00:58 UTC
- Update: satellite *might* fall on Friday at 22:00 UTC +/- 9 hours
- NASA satellite due to burn up some time in the next few days