Abandon the Cube

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If you have ever thought about “Abandoning the Cube” (that cubicle which has greedily eaten up most of your waking hours), then this is the blog for you. Though coming from totally different backgrounds, Mike and Lauren have abandoned said cube, come together and offer up a great insight on how to follow in their footsteps.

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The Roman Goddess of Beauty

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The Roman Goddess of beauty and love, and the brightest object in the night sky after the moon.  Venus appears as a glowing, bright blue star; beautiful, calm, serene, distant, cool.

Venus over the Pacific Ocean Image; Mila Zinkova, all rights reserved

That’s the image, anyway.  When you get closer to Venus, you start to see some serious cracks in the “love and beauty” image.

For one thing, Venus is hot.  Very hot.  There is a runaway greenhouse effect at work on the planet, making its surface temperature about 460 degrees C (860 F).  This is hotter than the surface of Mercury.  Venus is isothermal, meaning its temperature is constant; pole to pole, night and day.  What a steam bath.

The atmosphere on Venus is very dense, too.  About 93 times denser than on Earth.  You’d have to go about 1 kilometer below the ocean to experience the same crushing pressure as the atmosphere on Venus.  Above the CO2 layer, there are thick clouds of sulfuric dioxide and sulfuric acid.  There is a huge atmospheric vortex on the south pole of the planet, and the cloud layers produce lightning, much like the clouds on Earth.  They also make it impossible to see the surface.

So much for serene, calm, and cool.

Surface of Venus from Soviet lander Venera 13. Image PD/USGOV

Venus has an interesting retrograde orbit; it rotates clockwise instead of counter-clockwise with a near circular orbit.  On Venus, the sun rises in the West and sets in the East.

In orbit, Venus overtakes the Earth every 584 days, changing it from the Evening Star to the Morning Star.  Whether she appears in the morning or the evening, Venus is hard to miss.  In fact, she is so bright in the sky, she has been reported as a UFO several times.

Hans Glaser woodcut, 1566 Public Domain

However Venus appears close up, from a distance she is our beautiful Morning and Evening Star.  I like to look up and find Venus in the night sky.  She is, indeed, hard to miss… and she is a true beauty in the night.

Moon and Venus in conjunction three consecutive nights; Image by fdecomite, some rights reserved

Shell Eco-Marathon: Follow the Vehicle Mileage Competition Here All Weekend | Discoblog

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Greetings from sunny Houston. The hotels are overrun with basketball fans donning the colors of Duke, Baylor, and other colleges playing basketball here tonight. But the NCAA tournament isn’t the competition that brought DISCOVER deep in the heart of Texas.

We’re here for the Shell Eco-marathon Americas. All weekend long in downtown Houston, students from 29 universities and 9 high schools will he going head-to-head with their prototype ultra-high mileage vehicles. Most of the 50 vehicles are powered by combustion engines, but a smattering of vehicles running on ethanol, hydrogen fuel cells, solar, and petroleum gas have come down to challenge the traditional engine.

Check Discoblog over the weekend, as we’ll be continually updating on the wild cars and their brilliant young designers. Official competition runs Saturday and Sunday. However, given that winners of past eco-marathons have reached efficiencies in the thousands of miles per gallon, these vehicles might just keep on going.


Beijing Installs Giant Deoderant Cannons to Beat Stinky Landfill Stench | Discoblog

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stink_slayerFirst the smog, then the stink. Beijing’s white hot economic growth has led not just to smoggy skies but also stinky landfills that are literally taking people’s breath away.

Faced with overflowing landfills across the city, Beijing residents have been complaining about the rising stench of garbage that can be overpowering when the wind blows. So, the government decided to remedy the situation by installing 100 giant deodorant guns aimed at the city’s stinkiest landfill–the Asuwei dump site on the edge of Beijing.

The high-pressure cannons, like the one seen here being used at a public gathering, can spray dozens of pints of fragrance per minute over a distance of 160 feet. In addition to being bathed in sweet perfume, the Asuwei dump site will also get extra plastic layers to cover the garbage so that the smell doesn’t waft towards the city when the wind blows.

But The Guardian reports that it would take more than a few plastic sheets and perfume guns to zap Beijing’s garbage problems away:

According to the local government, the city of 17m people generates 18,000 tonnes of waste every day — 7,000 tonnes more than the capacity of municipal disposal plants.

The city recycles less than four percent of its rubbish each year, and the city’s residents continue to churn out trash too fast for the city to either bury or burn it. City officials want to build more incinerators, but those have pollution problems of their own–six incinerator projects within Beijing have been put on hold due to public protests. So, till those projects are approved, or the till the government figures out another way to take out the collected trash, Beijing residents will just have to spritz and bear it.

Related Content:
Discoblog: A Year After the Olympics, Beijing’s Air Quality Back at Square One
Discoblog: Could Beijing’s Polluted Air Sicken Olympic Spectators?
Discoblog: The Air Over There: As the Olympics End, a Look Back at Air Quality
80beats: 1/3 of China’s Yellow River Not Even Fit for Industrial Use

Image: The Register


Evolutionary Biologist/Former Catholic Priest Wins $1.5M Templeton Prize | 80beats

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ayalaFormer Roman Catholic priest and respected evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala has won this year’s Templeton Prize. The $1.53 million award honors a living person “who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.” The John Templeton Foundation cited Ayala’s dogged work through the years advocating the peaceful co-existence of science and religion in its decision. The somewhat controversial prize is often given to scientists who find common ground between religion and science, but previous winners have also included more traditional spiritual leaders like Mother Teresa and televangelist Billy Graham.

Ayala is the former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is respected for his research into the evolutionary history of the parasite scientists have associated with malaria, with an eye toward developing a cure for the disease. He also pioneered the use of an organism’s genetic material as molecular clocks that help track and time its origins [The Christian Science Monitor]. But he is known best, perhaps, for being an expert witness in the 1981 federal court trial that led to the overturning of an Arkansas law mandating the teaching creationism with evolution in science class. In 2001, he was awarded the National Medal of Science.

Ayala will receive his award at the Buckingham Palace on May 5, but addressing a press conference yesterday in Washington, D.C. he reiterated that science doesn’t have to contradict religion: “If they are properly understood,” he said, “they cannot be in contradiction because science and religion concern different matters, and each is essential to human understanding” [Templeton Prize]. Referring to Picasso’s paiting Guernica, which famously depicts the tragedies of war, Ayala noted that science helps us understand the painting’s proportions and pigments, but only a spiritual view conveys the horror of the subject matter. He argued that the spiritual and scientific analyses were both necessary to comprehend the totality of the masterpiece, saying: “Science gives us an insight on reality which is very important; our technology is based on our science…. But at the end of the day, questions important to people, questions of meaning, purpose, moral values, and the like” are not answered through science [The Christian Science Monitor].

Born in Madrid in 1934, Ayala felt the two pulls of religion and science early on. He became an ordained priest, but left the fold when he came to New York’s Columbia University to get an PhD in genetics. He’s currently a top professor of biological sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

Some scientists have criticized the John Templeton Foundation’s work, arguing that science and religion shouldn’t be mixed up together. Critics were further angered when the National Academy of Sciences hosted the Templeton Foundation’s announcement of Ayala’s award, saying that the foundation may gain scientific respectability by associating with scientists and their institutions [Guardian].

California Institute of Technology physicist Sean Carroll, who writes for the DISCOVER blog Cosmic Variance, was one of those who voiced his disapproval: “The Templeton Foundation is working in good faith. They’re in favour of science but want to see a reconciliation with religion. That’s not evil and crackpotty, but it’s incorrect. It’s a mistake…. I’m not asking NAS to put out an official statement of atheism. They don’t have to take a stand either way, but the academy is best served by just staying away” [Nature blog]. But the NAS president Ralph Cicerone waved the concerns away, saying NAS agreed to host the event when a member of the foundation requested a room for the ceremony.

Ayala plans to give his award money to charity.

Related Content:
The Intersection: Francisco Ayala Wins Templeton Prize
Gene Expression: Francisco Ayala & autogenocide
DISCOVER: The God Experiments
80beats: Quantum Physicist Wins $1.4M Templeton Prize for Writing on “Veiled Reality”
Cosmic Variance: In Bed With Templeton questions political spending by John Templeton, Jr.
Cosmic Variance: Templeton and Skeptics discusses a conference on science and religion

Image: Mark Finkenstaedt/Templeton Prize


Montreal presents a Leonard Cohen first

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Montral presents a Leonard Cohen first Never seen before artistrsquos notebooks on show Leonard Cohen has chosen Galerie Lounge TD in Montral to give the public an insight into his decorated notebooks for the first time ever. On show until May 9th 2010 the must see exhibition of this cult figure titled lsquoLeonard Cohen Artworksrsquo reveals the man behind the music and provides fans wi

Chinese New Year in Beijing Gawd it was cold

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Enis and I flew to Beijing for Chinese New Year. I checked the weather and I knew it would be cold but I had my hat gloves long underwear wool tights thick wool pashmina heavy wool sweaters and a bright orange North Face coat so I felt prepared. And I was. Sort of. Good gravy it was so cold And windy I hadn't been in cold like that in a long time. Our first night there it was 10

skole trene skole

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Har drlig samvittighet har ikke skrevet eller oppdatert bloggen p lenge. Har vrt s utrolig busy. Er s mye skole fortiden har vrt p skolen 3 lrdager p rad nrda sitter gjennomsnitt 10 timer om dagen. Grunnen er at jeg prver bli ferdig med noen oppgaver fre mamma og familien kommer p besk. Vi har jo ogs meldt oss inn o Fitness first treningsstudio og jeg har blitt totalt he

A Teacher At Last

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Training ended today. Wow that was nice to type. Almost 6 hours ago all 18 trainees and I finsihed training with 2 more written tests and a day full of Mock Teaching Evaluations. Disclaimer I am not sure how long I will last with this blog post...Training was a week long and was conducted about an hour subway ride away from our hotel. We left at 8 in the morning and got back around 530.