From Gizmodo:
I love paying taxes! My money goes to great things like parks, and public libraries, and military projects that will doubtfully materialize anytime soon. Example: tiny flying drones that spray invisible terrorist-tracking fairy dust.
Read the whole article
From Lifehacker:
There are many reasons you might want to physically destroy a hard drive rather than use disk wiping software: higher confidence that the data is destroyed, a recourse if your drive has failed and no longer accessible, and sheer fun.
Read the whole article
An online repository of medical device labeling proposed by the U.S. Center for Devices and Radiological Health would be accessible by the public and provide useful product information to patients and professionals. While the database would not disclose proprietary information, some in the med tech
Seemed like VW had painted themselves into a corner with the car that appeared in 1998, and obviously, it took them a long time to decide to attempt a redesign. But what might at first appear to be a mild refresh is in fact a major overhaul of the icon, which brings it closer to the original H
Here are five facts about NASA's twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, the longest continuously-operating spacecraft in deep space. The Voyagers were built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which continues to operate both spacecraft.
Long-Distance Space Runners
Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, and Voyager 1 launched about two weeks later, on Sept. 5. Since then, the spacecraft have been traveling along different flight paths and at different speeds. Now some 17.4 billion kilometers (10.8 billion miles) from the sun and hurtling toward interstellar space, Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth. Voyager 2 is about 14.2 billion kilometers (8.8 billion miles) from the sun.
Can You Hear Me Now?
Both spacecraft are still sending scientific information about their surroundings through NASA's Deep Space Network. A signal from the ground, traveling at the speed of light, takes about 13 hours one way to reach Voyager 2, and 16 hours one way to reach Voyager 1.
Planetary Tour
The primary five-year mission of the Voyagers included the close-up exploration of Jupiter and Saturn, Saturn's rings and the larger moons of the two planets. The mission was extended after a succession of discoveries, and between them, the two spacecraft have explored all the giant outer planets of our solar system -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, 49 moons, and the systems of rings and magnetic fields those planets possess.
The current mission, the Voyager Interstellar Mission, was planned to explore the outermost edge of our solar system and eventually leave our sun's sphere of influence and enter interstellar space – the space between the stars.
The Golden Record
Both Voyager spacecraft carry recorded messages from Earth on golden phonograph records – 12-inch, gold-plated copper disks. A committee chaired by the late astronomer Carl Sagan selected the contents of the records for NASA. The records are cultural time capsules that the Voyagers carry with them to other star systems. They contain images and natural sounds, spoken greetings in 55 languages and musical selections from different cultures and eras.
Where No Spacecraft Has Gone Before
Voyager 1 has reached a distant point at the edge of our solar system, where the outward motion of solar wind ceases. The event is the latest milestone in Voyager 1's passage through the heliosheath, the outer shell of the sun's sphere of influence, before entering interstellar space. Interstellar space begins at the heliopause, and scientists estimate Voyager 1 will cross this frontier around 2015.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20110427.html
"Collisions between asteroids create rock fragments, from fine dust to huge boulders, that impact planets and their moons," said Dennis Bodewits, an astronomer at the University of Maryland in College Park and lead author of the Swift study. "Yet this is the first time we've been able to catch one just weeks after the smash-up, long before the evidence fades away."
Asteroids are rocky fragments thought to be debris from the formation and evolution of the solar system approximately 4.6 billion years ago. Millions of them orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt. Scheila is approximately 70 miles across and orbits the sun every five years.
"The Hubble data are most simply explained by the impact, at 11,000 mph, of a previously unknown asteroid about 100 feet in diameter," said Hubble team leader David Jewitt at the University of California in Los Angeles. Hubble did not see any discrete collision fragments, unlike its 2009 observations of P/2010 A2, the first identified asteroid collision.
The studies will appear in the May 20 edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters and are available online.
Astronomers have known for decades that comets contain icy material that erupts when warmed by the sun. They regarded asteroids as inactive rocks whose destinies, surfaces, shapes and sizes were determined by mutual impacts. However, this simple picture has grown more complex over the past few years.
During certain parts of their orbits, some objects, once categorized as asteroids, clearly develop comet-like features that can last for many months. Others display much shorter outbursts. Icy materials may be occasionally exposed, either by internal geological processes or by an external one, such as an impact.
On Dec. 11, 2010, images from the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey, a project of NASA's Near Earth Object Observations Program, revealed Scheila to be twice as bright as expected and immersed in a faint comet-like glow. Looking through the survey's archived images, astronomers inferred the outburst began between Nov. 11 and Dec. 3.
Three days after the outburst was announced, Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) captured multiple images and a spectrum of the asteroid. Ultraviolet sunlight breaks up the gas molecules surrounding comets; water, for example, is transformed into hydroxyl and hydrogen. But none of the emissions most commonly identified in comets, such as hydroxyl or cyanogen, show up in the UVOT spectrum. The absence of gas around Scheila led the Swift team to reject scenarios where exposed ice accounted for the activity.
Images show the asteroid was flanked in the north by a bright dust plume and in the south by a fainter one. The dual plumes formed as small dust particles excavated by the impact were pushed away from the asteroid by sunlight. Hubble observed the asteroid's fading dust cloud on Dec. 27, 2010, and Jan. 4, 2011.
The two teams found the observations were best explained by a collision with a small asteroid impacting Scheila's surface at an angle of less than 30 degrees, leaving a crater 1,000 feet across. Laboratory experiments show a more direct strike probably wouldn't have produced two distinct dust plumes. The researchers estimated the crash ejected more than 660,000 tons of dust -- equivalent to nearly twice the mass of the Empire State Building.
"The dust cloud around Scheila could be 10,000 times as massive as the one ejected from comet 9P/Tempel 1 during NASA's UMD-led Deep Impact mission," said co-author Michael Kelley, also at the University of Maryland. "Collisions allow us to peek inside comets and asteroids. Ejecta kicked up by Deep Impact contained lots of ice, and the absence of ice in Scheila's interior shows that it's entirely unlike comets."
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages Hubble and Swift. Hubble was built and is operated in partnership with the European Space Agency. Science operations for both missions include contributions from many national and international partners.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/asteroid-collision.html
The tracks are pale brown trails where green trees and plants have been uprooted, leaving disturbed ground. Though faint, the center track runs from southwest of Tuscaloosa, through the gray city, and extends northeast towards Birmingham. Two other tracks run parallel to the center track. The northernmost track is in an area where the National Weather Service reported a tornado, but no tornado was reported in the vicinity of the more visible southern track. In the southern region, strong winds were reported.
The tornadoes were part of a larger weather pattern that produced more than 150 tornadoes across six states, said the National Weather Service. The death toll had nearly reached 300 on April 29, making the outbreak the deadliest in the United States since 1974.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/severe-storms-20110429.html
"It's inspiring to learn that STEREO, which was designed to teach us more about the Sun's influence on our solar system, is able to detect other solar systems," said STEREO project scientist Joseph Gurman at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Although STEREO is primarily a solar mission, the team realized that the stability of the Heliospheric Imagers (HI) aboard the twin spacecraft could be used to monitor variations in the brightness of stars.
"STEREO's Heliospheric Imagers were designed for stable, accurate measurements to allow us to subtract out the stellar background and see faint coronal mass ejections --- but that same stability allows us to make the incredibly precise measurements necessary to detect such small changes in the brightness of stars,” Gurman remarked.
According to one of the leads in this survey, STEREO's ability to sample continuously for up to 20 days, coupled with repeat viewings from the spacecraft during the year, makes it an invaluable resource for researching variable stars. Observations from the HI cameras are enabling scientists to pin down the periods of known variables with much greater accuracy.
In addition to studying variable stars, the U.K. team announced that HI measurements may be useful for exoplanet and astroseismology research. Very small changes to the brightness of stars can be detected, which could reveal the presence of transiting exoplanets, or trace a star’s internal structure by measuring their seismic activity.
Teams from the Open University, University of Central Lancashire and the Science and Technologies Facilities Council Rutherford Appleton Laboratory carried out the study and their findings were presented at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales, on April 19.
STEREO is the third mission in NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probes program. The mission, launched in October 2006, has provided a unique and revolutionary view of the Sun-Earth System. The two nearly identical observatories - one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind - have traced the flow of energy and matter from the sun to Earth. STEREO is also key to the fleet of space weather detection satellites by providing more accurate alerts for the arrival time of Earth-directed solar ejections with its unique side-viewing perspective.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/binary-stars.html
The event will be held at NASA Headquarters in Washington and will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed at http://www.nasa.gov . In addition, the event will be carried live on Ustream, with a live chat box available, at http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2 .
After 33 years in space, the spacecraft are still operating and returning data from about 16 billion kilometers (10 billion miles) away from our sun. The Voyagers also carry a collection of images and sounds from Earth as a message to possible life elsewhere in the galaxy.
The participants are:
-- Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist and professor of physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.
-- Ann Druyan, creative director, Voyager Interstellar Message Project; Carl Sagan's co-author and widow
-- Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
-- Merav Opher, Voyager guest investigator and assistant professor of astronomy, Boston University
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20110426.html
This coming May I will be attending and speaking at Humanity+'s conference at Parson's University in New York. The theme of the conference is "Transhumanism meets design" and to that end I will be discussing the potential for 'designer psychologies.' The abstract for my talk:
Baseline human psychology is a legacy of our paleolithic ancestry. Its current configuration is the result of very specific evolutionary pressures, but it has become poorly suited for life in the post-industrial age. Not only are humans becoming increasingly susceptible to psychological disorders, they are also reaching hard limits in terms of memory capacity, attention spans and intelligence; humans are now having great difficulties keeping up with and adapting to novel technologies. Moreover, humans are coming to realize that there can be more to human psychology than the default state. In the space of all possible viable and desirable psychologies, the neurotypical mind is but a tiny speck. As the autism rights community has shown, there is considerable value to alternative psychologies. Looking ahead, and with the assistance of converging technologies like genetics, advanced psychopharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology, we will soon be able to design and create novel psychologies. This will be more than just intelligence or memory augmentation; designer psychologies will re-set and re-frame the way individuals perceive and process their environment in virtually all aspects. This design space is virtually limitless.
More about the conference:
Great article in the Economist on how to build a religion. Excerpt:
At the outset, you must realise that success is unlikely if you go wholly against the grain of human nature. Granted, religion is all about forging the perfect man, or at least ensuring that, as far as possible, he lives up to divine expectations. But preternatural power has forged man in such a way that he will swallow some of your ideas about how to achieve this more easily than others.
By stressing the right ones, then, you can do to give a fillip to the painstaking process of perfecting mankind. This is what some temporal powers have been doing of late, when trying to nudge their citizens towards individual choices which are more socially desirable, with notable success. You can do the same. This will, however, require that you rein in your dislike for a moment and listen to what those ungodly scientists have to say, despite their unremitting efforts to explain away the need for your enterprise.
As in the case of states, your principal concern is to encourage co-operation among your flock. In the long run, groups that co-operate more have an advantage over those whose members are less willing to do so. This also means limiting the number of actual and potential shirkers. People, it seems, are naturally inclined to do this anyway, but you can egg them on with a few simple tricks.
First, you are better off plumping for a personal god, rather than some sort of indeterminate life force. Research shows that people who profess a belief in such a deity judge moral transgressions more harshly, which in turn tends to make them more willing to abide by the rules, and expend resources on enforcing them. This may be down to a conviction that they are being incessantly watched over by an attentive minder, who tallies their contributions (or lack thereof) and rewards (or punishments) in a cosmic ledger. Speaking of which, incorporating the idea of just deserts is a fine plan, too. Apparently, people are born with an intuition to that effect. Just remember to keep the misfortunes visited on wrongdoers commensurate with their misdeeds. Otherwise people will think it unfair and won't buy it. No fire and brimstone for littering, and suchlike.
More.
One Green Planet has chimed in on our Rights of Non-Human Persons Program. In the article, The Post-Human Age? When Transhumanism and Animal Rights Collide, One Green Planet correctly observes that the IEET, as a promoter of non-anthropocentric personhood ethics, has outlined a strategy to allow nonhumans ranging from animals to future post-humans and their cognitive equivalents, such as artificial intelligences, to gain rough moral and legal parity with humans.
That said, the article goes on to list three objections to the program:
Quickly, in regards to the third point, it simply does not follow that sentient non-persons will suddenly become open season for experimentation. This argument is as pernicious as the human exceptionalist argument which contends that the value of humanity will somehow be lessened if we extend human-level rights outside the species. Ultimately, we have to ensure that all creatures capable of suffering will be protected.
Now, in regards to the first two objections: These arguments essentially express the fear that, under the IEET's plan, sentient non-persons will continue to be exploited as property and left out in the cold. All we're really doing, they argue, is creating a new hierarchy.
This is another classic example of how you can't please everybody all of the time. The RNHP infuriates the human exceptionalists as much as it does the die-hard animal rights advocates. Our middle-ground approach, as distasteful as it may seem to some, is both pragmatic and ideologically sound. And just as importantly, it's one that will get the job done where other attempts have failed. What we're doing at the IEET is unique; we've come to the realization that the extension of rights to non-human animals is an iterative process that will, out of necessity, have to involve a hierarchical approach.
Yes, all animals are capable of suffering, but not all animals are equal in terms of their capacity to suffer. Moreover, not all animals are equal in terms of their cognitive and emotional sophistication. A strong case can be made that the initial list of non-human persons we've designated are more susceptible of experiencing emotional and existential distress, and are thus deserving of special protections.
To reiterate an important point, we at the IEET do not feel that the circle of nonhuman persons stops at Great Apes, cetaceans, and elephants (or even advanced artificial intelligence). Because personhood follows a spectrum based on capacities, I fully expect entire sets and subsets of nonhuman person types to be included as time passes. What we're doing is a start. Initially, we're looking for buy-in on the concept of nonhuman persons and to get certain species protected by human-equivalent rights. Once we reach that milestone our efforts will not stop; the IEET will continue to work towards the extension of legal protections to more and more animals.
Animal rights folks are welcome to argue this approach with me all they want. But what they have to acknowledge is that, to date, virtually all strategies by animal rights groups to grant animals meaningful legal protections have utterly and completely failed. Traditional strategies are simply not working. What we at the IEET are offering is baby-steps approach that will eventually help us achieve our mutual goals.
From The Onion: Sullen Time-Traveling Teen Reports 23rd Century Sucks:
According to sullen teenager Steve Geremek, the 23rd century, a time previously restricted to the fantastical imaginings of science-fiction writers and futurists, "sucks."
Steve Geremek, shortly after his return from the "totally stupid and lame" year 2202.
"Ah, it was a bunch of boring stuff," said a slouching, mumbling Geremek, 17, at a press conference shortly after his return from the future Monday. "It totally blew."
Geremek, the son of renowned MIT theoretical physicist Irwin Geremek, was transported to the year 2202 last Thursday when he accidentally wandered into an experimental tachyon particle accelerator being developed by his father.
"I was messing around in my dad's thingy and, all of a sudden, there was this flash of purple light," Geremek said. "Next thing I knew, I was surrounded by a bunch of boring future stuff."
Asked to clarify what he meant by "boring future stuff," Geremek said, "I dunno... stuff."
More.
If I was going to start a new blog, it would be nothing but food under attack, shot with super slow-motion cameras. [Modernist Cuisine via brainpicker] More »
For years, South Korean activists have been sending pro-democracy propaganda to the politically and informationally isolated citizens of North Korea via balloon, in an attempt to share information about Kim Jong Il and his regime. Generally, it's information that is either censored or illegal in the communist country. Sometimes it's Bible verses. Today, AFP reports the activists sent out their latest bunch of information balloons even after Kim Jong Il threatened to attack them. Here's what they put inside. More »
Holy shit, this is basically the worst thing ever. Any developer who uses this must loathe their users. [YouTube via Daring Fireball] More »
Welcome to the future! It's an exciting place. We've got plexiglass chairs, faucets with chipsets, and this innocent-looking couch from designer Matali Crasset. What's so futuristic about a piece of furniture, pray tell? More »
Come Monday, AT&T will begin restricting more than 16 million broadband users based on the amount of data they use in a month. The No. 2 carrier's entry into the broadband-cap club means that a majority of U.S. broadband users will now be subject to limits on how much they can do online or risk extra charges as ugly as video store late fees. More »
Consider it a public service announcement: while it may seem like pornography is entirely for men, women watch it too! At least, they do if this video is entirely sincere and in no way whatsoever intended to be ironic or facetious or anything that dispels the fine notion that ladies are every bit as into adult material as you are. Which is how I choose to watch it (some NSFW language): More »
Hoping to keep up with Gizmodo beyond the window frames of our site? You can also follow Gizmodo's official Twitter account! Here you'll get to enjoy different brands of our writers' witty commentary, as a new Gizmodo staffer takes the helm and tweets from the account each week. More »
