One Last Load To Haul

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Discovery's Cargo Arrives at Launch Pad for Final Flight, Ken Kremer

"Discovery's primary cargo is a new module for the International Space Station which will provide much needed storage space for the resident crew of the orbiting outpost. The module -or PMM - will be the last permanent addition to be contributed by the United States to the ISS. The secondary cargo element is the Express Logistics Carrier-4 which will house exterior space parts. The Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM) - also named Leonardo - was transported inside a large shipping canister from the Space Station Processing Facility (SSPF) to the top of Launch Pad 39 A. The canister was then hoisted up to a holding position on the massive Rotating Service Structure (RSS) from which the cargo will soon be loaded into the shuttle payload bay."

How to Design an Automotive A/C Recovery Machine

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I've been working as an Instructor in toyota kuwait, and I want to build my own recovery machine because it is very costly. I bought a recovery tank a manchester 50 lbs dot 400, a 134a compressor 1/3 hp (1/2 hp, 50/60 hz is not available at the moment), I fabricated my 2 oil separator for the suctio

Bolden: Fading From View?

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Stormy skies for NASA's chief, Houston Chronicle

"Obama's decision to sign NASA's hard-fought legislation into law alone and without Bolden by his side robbed the NASA chief of the high-profile White House signing ceremony and cherished White House photo that amount to symbolic presidential backing in the status-conscious capital. "I don't think Charlie has been treated very well by the White House," says space historian John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. "He has been faithful in his defense of the Obama strategy for space, but some seem to believe he has not been totally convincing." Bolden, in the job since July 2009, did not comment for this story. Instead of standing out front, Bolden has been relegated to reading prepared statements and taking no questions during telephone news conferences."

Trip to Anclote Key on the Island Star

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I’ve been wanting to visit Anclote Key for a long time. Since we don’t have a boat, we took one of the tour boats out of the Tarpon Springs sponge docks. We chose Sunline Cruises for two reasons: (1)They appeared in Google search results for “anclote key cruise.” (2)They had great Tripadvisor reviews. Anclote Key [...]

"Of Dolls and Murder," A Documentary about the “Nutshell Studies” Dollhouse Crime-Scene Dioramas

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"Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell." --Police Mantra in Of Dolls and Murder

Wow. Looks like there is a new documentary film--narrated by none other than John Waters and featuring a cameo by our good friend John Troyer--about the fantastic and exquisite “Nutshell Studies” Dollhouse crime-scene dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee to serve as student aids in the 1930s and 40s.

Here is an excerpted description from the film's website:

The new documentary film, Of Dolls and Murder, explores our collective fascination with forensics while unearthing the criminal element that lurks in one particularly gruesome collection of dollhouses. Rather than reflecting an idealized version of reality, these surreal dollhouses reveal the darker, disturbing side of domestic life.

Created strictly for adults, these dollhouse dioramas are home to violent murder, prostitution, mental illness, adultery and alcohol abuse. Each dollhouse has tiny corpse dolls, representing an actual murder victim. In one bizarre case, a beautiful woman lays shot to death in her bed, her clean-cut, pajama-clad husband lies next to the bed, also fatally shot. Their sweet little baby was shot as she slept in her crib. Blood is spattered everywhere. And all the doors were locked from the inside, meaning the case is likely a double homicide/suicide. But something isn’t right. The murder weapon is nowhere near the doll corpses – instead the gun was found in another room.

Why would anyone create such macabre dollhouses? And why would anyone re-create crime scenes with such exquisite craftsmanship that artists and miniaturists from around the globe clamor (unsuccessfully) to experience this dollhouse collection in person?

Of Dolls and Murder investigates these haunting “Nutshell Studies” dollhouses and the unlikely grandmother who painstakingly created them – Frances Glessner Lee. Known as the Patron Saint of Forensics, Lee didn’t let gender biases and prescribed social behavior of a wealthy heiress keep her from pioneering the new arena of “legal medicine” in the late 1930s and 1940s.

To train investigators, Lee created 18 dioramas (20 actually, but two are missing) for detectives to study crime scenes from every angle, including the medical angle. She used only the most mysterious cases (cases that could have easily been misruled as accidents, murders, or suicides) to challenge students’ ability to interpret evidence. Almost 70 years later, Lee’s dollhouses are still relevant training tools because all the latest technological advances in forensics do not change the fact that crime scenes can be misread, and then someone will literally get away with murder. But the story does not end with Lee and her dollhouses of death.

The nation is obsessed with forensic justice television, and why? Why do we love to watch a skewed reality of crime-fighting forensics? The answer lies somewhere with the need we have to entertain ourselves with stories about our fear of untimely, brutal death. The societal truths about how loved ones often murder one another is far too wicked to face, let alone change. Instead, we prefer to escape into a safe haven where solving murders easily wraps up in under one hour.

For more about this production, visit the film's website by clicking here. You can read a post on the film by participant John Troyer--who just informed me that not only has the film been released (despite the website saying it is "still in production) but has already won Best Documentary at the Thrill Spy Film Festival in Washington, D.C.--by clicking here. For more on these amazing dioramas, check out Corinne May Botz's lush photo book The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by clicking here.

Story via Laughing Squid.

Images from the NY Times slide show "Visible Proofs: Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death;" you can see the full show by clicking here.

The New York Times on Atheist Infighting | The Intersection

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See here for Mark Oppenheimer’s report from last weekend’s secular humanism conference. He focuses closely on the panel featuring PZ Myers, Victor Stenger, Eugenie Scott, and myself:

At the liveliest panel, on Friday night, the science writer Chris Mooney pointed to research that shows that many Christians “are rejecting science because of a perceived conflict with moral values.” Atheists should be mindful of this perception, Mr. Mooney argued. For example, an atheist fighting to keep the theory of evolution in schools should reassure Christians that their faith is compatible with modern science.

“They resist evolution because they think everyone will lose morals,” Mr. Mooney said. “Knowing this, why would you go directly at these deeply held beliefs?”

The research I was pointing to includes a Time magazine poll from 2006, showing that for most Americans, if scientific research were to refute a strongly held religious belief, they would still cling to the belief; and things like the Wedge document, where moral decline is cited directly by anti-evolutionists as the reason for resisting the theory.

The article continues:

The panel must have been organized by someone mischievous, because the next speaker was the biologist and blogger PZ Myers — a confrontationalist, to put it mildly. In 2008, to make a stand for freedom of speech, he publicly desecrated a Communion wafer, a Koran and (for good measure) a copy of Mr. Dawkins’s book “The God Delusion.” He likes to say that he tries to commit blasphemy every day.

“I have been told that my position won’t win the creationist court cases,” Mr. Myers said. “Do you think I care? I didn’t become a scientist because I want to impress lawyers.

“The word for people who are neutral about truth is ‘liars,’ ” he added.

That seemed close to the view held by the physicist Victor Stenger, the last speaker. He accused those who live without God of cowardice: “It’s time for secularists to stop sucking up to Christians” and other religious people, he said.

I gave a response to this line of argument–about “truth”–on the panel and on the latest Point of Inquiry. Of course truth is important. However, practically speaking, we also have to pick and choose where we can set the record straight–there is a vast amount of nonsense out there, religiously impelled and otherwise, and it doesn’t go away easily, if at all. There is far more of it than any single person can argue with or refute, and not all of it is equally damaging or pernicious.

In this context, setting priorities is not dishonest.

Then comes what I suspect will be the most noted part of this Times article–the “clown” scene:

Afterward, Mr. Mooney and Mr. Myers quarreled about a figure frequently cited as living proof of accommodation between science and religion: Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian. In the past, Mr. Myers has called Mr. Collins “a clown” because of his religious beliefs.

According to Mr. Mooney, Mr. Collins, who was not at the conference, is an important ally for atheists: a leading proponent of the theory of evolution and a supporter of embryonic stem cell research. “By what metric is that a clown?” he asked.

“When it comes to the way he’s thinking about science, everything I’ve read that he’s written has been complete garbage,” Mr. Myers replied, adding later that he “will continue to call him a clown.”

You can read Mark Oppenheimer’s full article here.


Stuck in the Lagoon’s quagmire | Bad Astronomy

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The Lagoon Nebula is one of the more famous objects in the sky. It’s a big, bright gas cloud easily spotted using binoculars in the constellation of Sagittarius, and through a telescope reveals quite a bit of detail. I’ve seen it literally hundreds of times, observing in the summer when Sagittarius is up. You can even see it in a picture I took a few weeks ago (if you’re really curious, scroll to the bottom, click the pic of Sagittarius, and then look off to the right of center; the compact fuzzy pink thing is the Lagoon).

So when you take something big, bright, and close, and point Hubble at it, the detail is pretty spectacular:

hst_lagoon

As you might expect, I could go on and on about what you’re seeing here: dense clouds of gas and dust, star forming regions, shock waves, and the like. Instead, though, I’ll direct you to the four bumps, like a wave going across the nebula from left to right and downsloping a bit. Take a look at that third one from the left. Does it look familiar…?

[Punch line after the jump... don't wanna rue-een it...]

lagoon_quagmire

Oh yeah! Giggity giggity lagoon!

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about because you are even older than I am, then just assume it’s really Bob Hope. Or Nixon. Or given that eyebrow ridge, Neanderthal Nixon.

I’ll stick with Quagmire, though. But not too close. Because, y’know. Ewww.


UAVs vs Conventional Aircraft

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The U.S. military is now training more personnel to operate remote-controlled UAVs than conventional aircraft pilots. Using remote-controlled UAVs in place of conventional aircraft not only saves lives, but is also less expensive in terms of initial cost, fuel, and maintenance. With that in mind, wh

Evolutionary arms race turns ants into babysitters for Alcon blue butterflies | Not Exactly Rocket Science

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alcon_blue

This is an old article, reposted from the original WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. I’m travelling around at the moment so the next few weeks will have some classic pieces and a few new ones I prepared earlier.

In the meadows of Europe, colonies of industrious team-workers are being manipulated by a master slacker. The layabout in question is the Alcon blue butterfly (Maculinea alcon) a large and beautiful summer visitor. Its victims are two species of red ants, Myrmica rubra and Myrmica ruginodis.

The Alcon blue is a ‘brood parasite’ – the insect world’s equivalent of the cuckoo. David Nash and European colleagues found that its caterpillars are coated in chemicals that smell very similar to those used by the two species it uses as hosts. To ants, these chemicals are badges of identity and the caterpillars smell so familiar that the ants adopt them and raise them as their own. The more exacting the caterpillar’s chemicals, the higher its chances of being adopted.

The alien larvae are bad news for the colony, for the ants fawn over them at the expense of their own young, which risk starvation. If a small nest takes in even a few caterpillars, it has more than a 50% chance of having no brood of its own. That puts pressure on the ants to fight back and Nash realised that the two species provide a marvellous case study for studying evolutionary arms races.

Theory predicts that if the parasites are common enough, they should be caught in an ongoing battle with their host, evolving to become more sophisticated mimics, while the ants evolve to become more discriminating carers. These insects make a particularly good model for such arms races because their geographical ranges overlap in a fractured mosaic.

Alcon blues lay their eggs on the rare marsh gentian plant and it’s there that they first grow before being adopted by a foraging ant. Both gentians and butterflies are rare but the ants are common, meaning that only a small proportion of colonies are ever parasitized. The result is a series of evolutionary hotspots where the two species wage adaptive war against each other in contrast to the many coldspots where colonies never encounter the deceptive butterflies.

Myrmica_rubra

Nash found evidence of evolutionary hotspots when he looked at one of the butterfly’s host species, M.rubra. The chemical coats of populations that were victimised by Alcon blues were significantly different from each other, while those of uninfected colonies were much the same. Those that had encountered the parasitic moochers were adapting by shifting their own smells to distinguish their own from the caterpillars.

But when Nash looked at the second host species, M.ruginodis, he found no traces of evolutionary arms races. All the populations smelled very similar regardless of whether they were parasitized or not.

The difference lies in the mating patterns of the two ant species. M.rubra queens breed with local males, from colonies in the same gentian patches that are likely to also have a measure of resistance against Alcon blues. M.ruginodis queens disperse more widely and frequently mate with males from distant populations that do not encounter the parasites. Any new mutations for parasite resistance are quickly diluted by the flow of genes from these non-resistant neighbours.

Nash thinks that the butterfly uses M.ruginodis as a back-up host, a safe chump to manipulate when M.rubra evolves a strong enough resistance to its lies. To back this up, he found at least one site where M.rubra populations smelled very different but had no contact with Alcon blues. He thinks that these are populations that won their arms race – they once had to contend with the parasite but adapted so well that it abandoned them as hosts.

Images courtesy of David Nash

Reference: Nash, D.R., Als, T.D., Maile, R., Jones, G.R., Boomsma, J.J. (2008). A Mosaic of Chemical Coevolution in a Large Blue Butterfly. Science, 319(5859), 88-90. DOI: 10.1126/science.1149180

More on evolutionary arms races:

Market Thyself

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Don't assume your work will speak for itself; market yourself to your company just like your company markets to its customers. Read, reflect, and stretch yourself. Step back and look at the big picture. These are just a few of the ideas Brad Kenney puts forward to help you move your career forward.

Are YOU Ready for 3D TV?

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Lately, everyone is talking about the coming of 3D TV. TV manufacturers are introducing new models in time for the holiday season. Sky network in the UK is launching a channel specifically to broadcast in 3D. But 3D means more than just adding a dimension. It changes the way that shows will be writt

"Most Horrible & Shocking Murders: Murder Pamphlets in the Collection of the National Library of Medicine" Website Launch

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Michael Sappol--friend of Morbid Anatomy and historian in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine--has just alerted me to the launching of a new website based on his recent exhibition documenting the rich and quirky collection of murder pamphlets in the collection of the National Library of Medicine.

From the press release:

A new website, "Most Horrible & Shocking Murders: Murder pamphlets in the collection of the National Library of Medicine," has been launched by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library. The site features a selection of murder pamphlets from the late 1600s to the late 1800s-from a treasure trove of several hundred owned by the Library.

Ever since the invention of movable type in the mid-1400s, public appetite for tales of shocking murders-"true crime"-has been one of the most durable facts of the market for printed material. For more than five centuries, murder pamphlets have been hawked on street corners, town squares, taverns, coffeehouses, news stands, and bookshops.

These pamphlets have been a rich source for historians of medicine, crime novelists, and cultural historians, who mine them for evidence to illuminate the history of class, gender, race, the law, the city, crime, religion and other topics. The murder pamphlets in the NLM's collection address cases connected to forensic medicine, especially cases in which doctors were accused of committing-or were the victims of-murder.

You can visit the website--which I designed, in fact!--by clicking here. All of the above images are drawn from the "pamphlets" section of the website, which contains these images along with a wealth of others; click here to peruse that section. Mr. Sappol is also the author of perhaps my favorite book about anatomical illustration, the incomparable "Dream Anatomy," which you can find out more about--and order!--by clicking here.

Thanks, Mike, for doing such wonderful work, and for alerting me to its launch!

New Poll shows Republican for Governor in Massachusetts ahead for the first time

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From Eric Dondero:

As we reported on our headline banner late Thursday, a new poll has been released for the Massachusetts Governor's race. This is the very first poll to show Republican Charlie Baker in the lead over incumbent Democrat Deval Patrick.

From Boston.com:

The latest from an Opinion Dynamics poll of 431 self-identified registered voters conducted between October 7, 2010 – October 10, 2010:

Thinking ahead to the 2010 general election for Governor of Massachusetts if the candidates were Republican Charlie Baker, Democrat Deval Patrick, Independent Tim Cahill and Green-Rainbow Candidate Jill Stein for whom would you vote?

Charlie Baker 37%
Deval Patrick 32%
Tim Cahill 14%
Jill Stein 2%
Don't Know 14%

This will be a solid GOP pick-up. Moreover, it was considered a long shot for Republicans at best earlier in the year.

Baker is heavily backed by "New England's Neal Boortz" libertarian radio talk show host Howie Carr. It was Carr who first broke the news of the poll late Thursday.

Note - Baker's running mate is State Senate minority leader Richard Tisei. He is a prominent member of Gay Republican groups, and has been called a "libertarian" on social matters.

Reporting from New England.

OREGON: DeFazio accuses Republican opponent of being a "dangerous… ultra right-wing libertarian"

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From Eric Dondero:

In almost two decades far left incumbent Democrat Peter DeFazio has faced no serious opposition for his congressional seat. Now like Barney Frank in Massachusetts, John Dingle in Michigan and Steny Hoyer in Maryland, he's having to run the race of his life.

The sweat is apparent on his brow, from his most recent statements regarding his opponent.

From the OR Register-Guard, "Political darts fly in race for 4th- DeFazio and Robinson accuse each other of dishonest campaigning" Oct. 16:

The race, which has attracted national attention, is a spirited battle between DeFazio, a 12-term incumbent Democrat from Springfield, and Robinson, a Cave Junction Republican, scientist and author of home-schooling materials.

Robinson, standing in front of the U.S. Courthouse, said DeFazio, through television ads and comments is misrepresenting Robinson’s positions to “diminish my reputation and integrity.”

“There comes a point when a man has to stand up and say it isn’t true,” Robinson said.

DeFazio, also in Eugene on Friday, said his campaign is sticking to facts by using Robinson’s own writings and comments.

“This guy is very dangerous,” DeFazio said.

When confronted with controversial statements, DeFazio said, Robinson “is very good about saying that we are taking things out of context”

Robinson is an “ultra right wing libertarian,” DeFazio said.