Our new room sucks with motor bikers ripping by at all hours in the night waking us up. We got moved because our old room had bugs in it. This morning when we woke up we requested a move back which will happen at 7 tonight after the bugs are cleared. Again we debated doing our advanced diving course which would certify us for night dives and down to 30m instead of 18m. After a bit of talking Jeff
Ho Chi Mihn City
On November 3rd at 8 a.m. we made our way up the Saigon River to the one and only Ho Chi Minh City. Yep thatrsquos in Vietnam. The whole voyage and the time up until the voyage I was looking forward to Vietnam I thought it was going to be an awesome experience as I didnrsquot really know too much about the place. It wasnrsquot until we left India and began studying Vietnam that I realiz
Boston Science Museum
Today Dean myself and my niece Ashley went to the Boston Science Museum. D and I haven't been there in years. Ashley has never been there until today that is. Anyway I asked Ashley if she wanted to go with me because they are having a Harry Potter exhibit. While Ashley and I were in the exhibit Dean waited for us in the lobby he doesn't care for Harry Potter. It took us about 40 minut
Plan a Runescape Theme Birthday Party to earn runescape gold
Runescape in real life Well the weapons may have to be left in cyberspace but there are many great Runescape online game concepts for a cool party. For a birthday party or another event teenagers will have fun bringing Runescape to life and it will also bring you much runescape gold.Runescape is an online browserbased game played by people all over the world. The game holds the Guinness world
Bahia Ballena
Bahia BallenaFor the folks in Ballena Isle Marina yes there is another Ballena Bay it Is just around Punta Abreojos. The Spanish words abre ojos mean open the eyes and is a reference to the nasty rocks called Roca Ballena just offshore and the dangerous shoals near this point. Again we departed Bahia Asuncion at dawn and found a perfectly flat sea and no wind at all. Motoring again
pre flight test…. again
just a before i go reminder on how to post here... still havent figured out pictures... sorry
Bahia Ballena to Bahia San Juanico
Bahia San Juanicoh2Another dawn start for the anchorage at Bahia San Juanico. It's Christmas day.Here is a photo of echo that shows what it looks like to be out sailing at the break of dawn. Once out of Bahia Ballena the wind picked up and by 0730 it was up to 18 knots with a little bit of sea. By 0830 the wind was over 20 knots and we both reefed down. By 0930 it dropped to 10 knots so w
A ghost of Christmas past
Book Excerpt: Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?
On allowing ourselves to see our mistakes as unique features of ourselves.
We’re the Government — and You’re Not
Peek-a-moon | Bad Astronomy
I don’t have a whole lot to add to this amazing shot from Cassini of Saturn’s moon Rhea reappearing from behind the giant moon Titan:
[Click to entitanate.]
Except: coooool. Titan is over three times the size of Rhea, and Rhea was more than twice as far from Cassini when this was taken, making Rhea look even smaller in comparison. Also, check out how the high-altitude haze in Titan’s atmosphere isn’t the same height all the way around the moon. Near the top you can see they poof up higher. If you look closely, can you see the Enterprise?
Code Protecting 80 Percent of Cellphone Convos Finally Cracked | 80beats
Are your phone conversations about to become less secure? A German encryption expert says he’s cracked the two-decade-old algorithm that protects most of the world’s cellphones: GSM (Global System for Mobile communication).
Karsten Nohl says his intentions were noble; he wanted to show the world that though GSM protects 80 percent of the cellphones in the world, it’s far from invincible. “This shows that existing G.S.M. security is inadequate,” Mr. Nohl, 28, told about 600 people attending the Chaos Communication Congress, a four-day conference of computer hackers that runs through Wednesday in Berlin. “We are trying to push operators to adopt better security measures for mobile phone calls” [The New York Times].
Nohl and a team of others had been working independently since August to hack the code. Developed in 1988, the system prevents the interception of calls by forcing phones and base stations to change frequencies constantly [The Guardian]. Nohl and the others generated countless random code combinations until they’d completed an encryption code book. As an analogy, think of encryption like a jigsaw puzzle where you have to find one specific puzzle piece. If the puzzle only has 25 pieces, it won’t take you too long to accomplish. That is like a weak encryption algorithm. However, if the puzzle has 10,000 pieces it will take significantly longer [PC World].
Despite the fact that it took 21 years before someone figured out their jigsaw puzzle, GSM’s creators at the GSM Association aren’t pleased. “We consider this research, which appears to be motivated in part by commercial considerations, to be a long way from being a practical attack on GSM,” said Claire Cranton, a spokeswoman. “To do this while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me” [The Guardian].
While Nohl claims his works was academic and GSM spokespeople say it’s not a threat, not everyone is convinced it’s so harmless. Law enforcement officials and well-financed cyber criminals have been able to crack GSM encryption for sometime, but the investment was so high that it didn’t pose much of a threat. This new method lowers the price of entry to the point that it is more of an issue, but still not a high risk [PC World].
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Image: flickr / Ed Yourdon
Specially Modified Music Can Rewire Brain & Alleviate Tinnitus | 80beats
Tinnitus, the perceived ringing and buzzing in one’s ears, may not be fully understood, but what is known is that it can severely disrupt a person’s life. Treatment for the condition has been unreliable, but now scientists are reporting a new way to turn down the ringing by turning up music, according to a new study.
Scientists altered participants’ favourite music to remove notes which matched the frequency of the ringing in their ears. After a year of listening to the modified music, individuals reported a drop in the loudness of their tinnitus [BBC News]. Participants who listened to music in which notes of a different frequency were removed reported no such improvement. The treatment could be a cheap way to help the three percent of the population that suffers from tinnitus, say the researchers, who published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The idea is to remove the spectrum of noise linked to tinnitus from the music a person listens to so that the area of the brain associated with that frequency will not be as active. The researchers propose that the therapy might work by re-wiring parts of the auditory cortex that have become over-active to instead tune into surrounding—but different—tones. Another possibility is that with deprivation, these specially tuned auditory neurons would undergo “long-term depression,” causing them to become less active overall [Scientific American]. How ironic that one of the causes of ringing ears may also be the solution.
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Image: flickr / Neil T
Free Tropical Vacation! (If You Try an Experimental Diarrhea Drug) | Discoblog
It’s about that time of year when people return home from spending holidays with the family, only to realize they need a vacation to recover from their vacation. Well, if you’re a resident of the U.K. or Germany who’s in good health, between 18 and 64 years old, and can keep a diary for two and a half weeks, your vacation to Mexico or Guatemala could be gratis. Oh, and one more thing: You have to be a guinea pig for a potential diarrhea drug.
A U.S. vaccine manufacturer called Intercell calls it the “Trek Study.” The company says it needs 1,800 volunteers between now and May to visit these locales, where sun-seeking tourists often get diarrhea. But fear not, travelers: A smaller study Intercell did on Americans showed a 75 percent reduction in diarrhea incidence, so perhaps fewer of you will spend your Caribbean holiday in excruciating, gut-wrenching pain than you normally would.
From BBC News:
Intercell’s clinical director, Nigel Thomas, told the UK’s Independent newspaper: “We are looking for people who have already planned to go to Mexico or Guatemala and think this would add another interesting aspect.
“It is almost like going on a package holiday. They will be met by a concierge who will take them to their hotel and arrange for them to give their first blood sample within 48 hours.”
Fake leprosy, it seems, isn’t the only way to snag a medical vacation in the tropics.
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Image: flickr / lightmatter
Halfway to Pluto! | Bad Astronomy
Today, December 29, 2009, the New Horizons Pluto probe crosses an arbitrary but psychologically important line: it is now closer to Pluto than it is to Earth.
If there were people on board the small interplanetary probe, no doubt they’d be popping champagne. I’m sure that back on Earth, the team behind NH are pretty happy. This probe has a checkered history, having been planned, canceled, re-planned, delayed, on and on. It’s amazing it got to launch at all. But on January 19, 2006 the small, half-ton probe was sent on its way, and on July 14, 2015 it’ll sail past Pluto and its collection of moons, snapping pictures and taking data.
Today marks the official halfway point, where New Horizons has half its path already behind it. Here’s a plot of its distance to Earth (in blue) and Pluto (red) care of the New Horizons site:
Distance in the graph is measured in Astronomical Units (a yardstick used by astronomers for convenience; it’s the distance of the Earth to the Sun, about 150 million km (93 million miles)). The distance to Earth is wiggly because the Earth goes around the Sun as New Horizons moves out, and the distance to Pluto decreases steadily as the spacecraft catches up on its journey. Where the two lines cross is where the distances are equal, and that’s now, today!
You may be wondering about the timing: New Horizons is halfway in distance to Pluto, but the mission timeline halfway point isn’t until October 16, 2010 (if I’ve done the math correctly). The probe was launched at high speed, slowed down due to the Earth’s and Sun’s gravity, picked up a kick from Jupiter in early 2007, and has been slowing ever since. Since it was moving faster before, it reached the distance halfway point before the schedule halfway point.
New Horizons is now 16.37 AU – 2.449 billion km, or 1.522 billion miles — from home. But maybe now, home is no longer Earth. Once it crossed that line today, home became deep space. Even Pluto and its moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra are only milestones for it. It won’t be stopping when it gets there; New Horizons will sail on by, continuing into deep space. It’ll become one of several other spacecraft we’ve sent out of the solar system itself, set to wander interstellar space forever.
That is, unless one day we catch up to them ourselves. I imagine in a few hundred years they’d make fine museum pieces. Or maybe, if poetry still exists in humans all those far-flung centuries from now, we’ll let those probes continue on. I rather like that idea better.
You can follow the New Horizons probe on Twitter, which is how I found out about this milestone today.
Art credit: ESO/L. Calçada
Fermi smooths out space | Bad Astronomy
This news came out a little while ago but I didn’t cover it at the time, and it’s cool enough that it deserves to be covered. I got it from my friends with NASA’s Fermi satellite outreach group. I used to work on Fermi outreach before the satellite launched and was still called GLAST (Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope), and it was fun trying to come up with lesson plans and educational efforts based on gamma rays (the Hulk came up a lot).
Anyway, one thing Fermi can do is measure the exact time when high-energy gamma rays hit its detectors. Not too long ago, photons from a distant explosion slammed into Fermi, and it found that all these photons arrived essentially simultaneously from the event, irrespective of their energies.
So what? So, Einstein was right. Check it out for yourself:
Basically, the idea is that some quantum mechanics theories propose that space is irregular, foamy, and bumpy on incredibly small scales, and this means the speed at which photons travel may change very slightly if they are more or less energetic. The difference is so small that it takes very long trips to detect it — imagine two cars traveling at 50 versus 50.5 kph: after a few seconds you’ll hardly see any difference, but over an hour they’re separated by half a kilometer. So the longer the trip, the easier it is to measure.
After 7 billion years, if those specific QM theories are right, two photons should arrive at very different times, but Fermi found that the high energy gamma rays hit Fermi less than a second after the low energy ones. This means that space really is smooth, or at smooth at scales smaller than predicted by those quantum theories. QM is still a solid model for the Universe — after all, solar panels, computers, and nuclear bombs do work — but this means that we need to rethink certain aspects of them.
I love hearing stuff like this. We have lots of ideas on how the Universe works, but we need observations of the Universe to know if we’re traveling down the correct path or not. Fermi has shown us that some of these paths lead to dead ends, and we need to look elsewhere for our journey to continue. And I will guarantee that not only will that journey go on, but we’ll find ever-more roads to investigate as we travel.
Good Things In Small Packages
CU Students to Build Tiny Spacecraft to Observe 'Space Weather' Environment
"The University of Colorado at Boulder has been awarded $840,000 from the National Science Foundation for students to build a tiny spacecraft to observe energetic particles in space that should give scientists a better understanding of solar flares and their interaction with Earth's atmosphere. Known as the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment, or CSSWE, the instruments package is expected to weigh less than 5 pounds."
Scott Brown for US Senate – Massachusetts: New TV Ad
Special Election - Ted Kennedy seat
It's being hailed as perhaps the most brillant political TV ad ever. But is it enough to propel Republican Brown to the US Senate from deeply Democrat Massachusetts?
New Moon Marvels
The Cassini orbiter has been working overtime during the holidays to deliver a cartload of gifts from Saturn and its moons. Highlights include fresh views of frost-spewing Enceladus and yam-shaped Prometheus, plus a "Nutcracker"-style ballet of Saturnian satellites. The excitement began last week with the animated images of moonsimage advisory, the folks who process Cassini's pictures compared the interplay to the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" ballet. passing back and forth with the giant planet and its rings as a backdrop. In an
My favorite movie is "Moon Jumble," which has Rhea in the starring role, joined by its siblings Janus, Mimas and Pandora. (That's the real Pandora, not the fictional "Avatar" moon). Make sure you stretch your browser window wide enough to take in the whole picture.
"As yet another year in Saturn orbit draws to a close, these wondrous movies of an alien place clear across the solar system remind us how fortunate we are to be engaged in this magnificent exploratory expedition," imaging team leader Carolyn Porco said. "So, from all of us on the Cassini Imaging Team to all of you, Happy Holidays!"
That might fool you into thinking the Cassini team was taking the holidays off. There's no way that was going to happen. On Christmas and the day after, the orbiter snapped pictures as it flew past Enceladus and Prometheus. Over the weekend, Cassini zoomed within 600 miles (960 kilometers) of Titan's north pole.
A sampling of the raw imagery released on Sunday includes a striking full-disk view of Enceladus and its geysers of water ice, spewing out from southern fissures that have been nicknamed "tiger stripes." Such geysers hint at the existence of a subsurface ocean beneath Enceladus' icy surface - an ocean that just might harbor alien life.
The latest picture was taken from a distance of 383,000 miles (617,000 kilometers), and it might make you wonder why those geysers hadn't been spotted decades ago when the Voyager spacecraft flew past. In a posting to the imaging team's Web site, Porco says it wouldn't have been that easy for Voyager to spot the frosty spray.
"We never got a good look at the southern hemisphere with Voyager; we even missed the tiger stripes back then," she wrote. Porco also said "some of the jets - and maybe all of them - are 'intermittent' in the sense that we expect they could turn on and off on a daily timescale (where 'daily' here means 1.3 Earth days)."
Another raw image provides the best view yet of Prometheus, a "shepherding" moon that along with Pandora helps keep Saturn's F ring in line. This view was captured from a distance of 36,000 miles (59,000 kilometers). A farther-out image from Cassini, released five years ago, shows Prometheus at work.
The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla put together the raw imagery to produce a natural-color composite photo of the moon, which measures 74 miles long and as little as 38 miles wide (119 by 87 by 61 kilometers).
"This is one of the more elongated moons to be seen in the solar system, almost exactly twice as long as it is wide," Lakdawalla observes. "The word 'potato' is commonly used to describe the shape of small bodies in the solar system, but I think that Prometheus, with its pointy ends, looks more like a related vegetable, a yam."
The fact that candied yams are a traditional holiday dish makes Prometheus even more palatable as a year-end picture - and whets the appetite for more from Cassini in the year to come.
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North Carolina Democrat Senate leader, resigns over Shooting incident and alleged Sex scandal
After a grand jury indictment for shooting a 22-year old man, North Carolina state Sen. R.C. Soles, a Democrat, said he will not seek re-election next year. A criminal attorney, Soles apparently maintained close relations with his former clients. He says this was to ease them back to a law-abiding life and denies it was because he was having sexual relations with them. Soles is the latest in a string of senior Democrats in the state legislature that are stepping down.
Soles, from Tabor City, is the State's longest serving legislator.
From the Raleigh News & Observer, Dec. 30:
Soles long was at the center of grumbling in his hometown of Tabor City about young men who were former legal clients and hung around his home or law office.
In the August incident, Soles shot 22-year-old Thomas Kyle Blackburn, who was allegedly trying to kick in Soles' front door.
Soles' lawyer, Joseph Cheshire of Raleigh, has said the shooting was self-defense. Cheshire and Soles repeatedly have said that Soles has been generous to former clients in hoping to ease them back to a law-abiding life. Soles has denied having sexual relations with any of the young men.
An NC political blog out of Wilmington - Clean it up Dammit - which regularly covers corrupt politics in the region has more details:
The boy, a 16 year old kid with some troubles that the good senator helped to deal with, told the senator that he would go to the news with stories that would ruin the senator's career. The Senator had the kid, Allen Strickland, arrested and the kid said, "see you in prison"
(Photo of the 16 year old accuser at the Clean it up blog.)



