Philibuster

Well yesterday Obama outlined his new plan for NASA. I took a look at it and I have to say that I kind of like it. The Constellation program got the ax but I’m not unhappy about that. Like you probably heard it was over budget and behind schedule and really wasn’t very impressive anyway. I favored the alternative program that was being designed by a group of scientists. I don’t know but don’t think that that has replaced constellation. It looks more like instead of trying to rework and slightly improve the old tech we are going to branch out and try to strike ahead with all new stuff. The alternative program called for a lot more reuse of the shuttle tech.

I think this is a good direction. It breaks NASA out of the hum drum that it has been in. NASA should be making the ground breaking stuff and the rest should start to fall to the private sector. The more people involved in space flight the better and if NASA can lead the way with private enterprise pushing and following up then things will start to take off.

There is also a lot more money in general for science. This makes me happy and the main reason why I like Obama. He understands what science is and why it is so important. These days with technology ruling so much of our lives science is the driving force behind it. The more we understand about the world the more we push our tech to the limit, in space travel, atoms, particles, etc it spawns a host of other possibilities that work their way into our everyday lives. It boggles my mind how people don’t see the connection between these things. “How does smashing atoms together and learning about particles so small they defy logic and reason affect me? What does that have to do with my life. How does making a 100,000 powerdrill to work in a vacuum and wide ranging temps?” These people are small time people they don’t see the big picture. If you push your tech to the limit of what it can do and design things so outrageously complex and crazy it WILL improve anything that has anything to do with it. Magnets, MRI, superconductors, data storage and transmission. Want an ipod that stores even more stuff well that is being pushed not only by the demand of the consumer but also by the scientists that need to store and transfer amounts of data that dwarf even college music libraries.

Politics has for the last 8 years demeaned the expert instead of revered them, they have attacked the person who dares imply they know more than the common man just because they have devoted their lives to pursing and understanding concepts that the average person barely understands. The politics of the last 8 years has been one of the small picture person. The person who can’t see any benefit unless it is explicitly dictated in clear easy terms. Something that you can’t really do much because the benefits are sometimes so far reaching. This is why I support Obama and this is why I like this plan. It’s a big picture plan that aims for the future.

Ah I like a good smack down of stupid claims. This one is a pretty good side by side of the 2012 garbage about the world ending. It lays out a few of the many unadvised claims about what will happen in 2012 and on the other side it shows actual information backed by evidence and facts. But you know don’t take my word for that or the chart’s either. Go look it up yourself, and if you go to any quack sites to find your information verify what they say.

Found via BadAstronomy.

The shuttle Atlantis is launching today at 2:28pm and everything looks good for launch. I’m watching at Night Sky Observer because Nasa TV is blocked.

The LHC has started up again after the problems last year. Nothing crazy so far and they haven’t really started doing any science in it yet. They’ve just inject beams and then dumped them shortly thereafter. By mid November they hope to have the first full pass of the beams around the whole ring and shortly after that starting collisions. There will be a burn in process where they calibrate the sensors and get used to the various quirks of the equipment but hopefully we’ll get something interesting by the time the shut down next fall.

Yay thank you weather for delaying the test flight to a time that I can watch it.

Today Nasa launches a dummy Ares 1 rocket to test various components. Currently the launch time is marching along the day getting latter every few minutes. I’m watching the broadcast online at Night Sky.

Wait scratch that the launch is scrubbed. I had to take a call (I am at work) and right after that I flipped back to the broadcast and saw dark clouds everywhere and thought to myself hah there’s no way they are launching in that and sure enough that’s the case.

So read this on io9 today. Russia plans on sending probes to Venus. Hell yeah. Nasa can’t be everywhere, esp with all the anti science clap trap that is in this country which isn’t helping them get funding. So this is cool news for me. Mars has been getting a lot of attention and it will be interesting to see what can be done/found on Venus.

Venus is pretty harsh and stuff doesn’t last long there so the missions will be short lived but hey if we can design something to live for a longer time on Venus just think about how that tech can be used here on Earth. People don’t understand that the knowledge we get from exploring space isn’t just in learning that Mars has water or whatever. It is also with the designing the equipment to do so. All of that filters down into our every day life. So when I see that they are wanting to build a craft that can fly around on Venus constantly for as long as it survives, I say HOLY CRAP AWESOME! for several different reasons. One: hey, duh they are going to build a plane, send it to a different planet 23 million miles away, and fly it around non stop while gathering all sorts of data. And two because designing something so outrageous like that is going to push the boundaries of what we are able to do as a whole. Possibly new light materials for aircraft making them more efficient, new and better and tougher solar panels, maybe better communication equipment seeing as they will have a delay between the planet and us. As better autopilot programs since well again that delay between us and it. And so on. Believe me I could go on for a lot longer.

Hell yeah space stuff is always interesting to me. A pity the first of the several probes will only be sent in 2016.

and BBC

Via io9 and BBC

Researchers have found a gene that seems to remove pain from mice when they snip that gene out. The mice still react to heat and pressure though.

One of the biggest problems some people have with eating meat is how horrible the conditions are in the meat factories. Now I love me some meat, enough that regardless I’m going to keep eating it, but I do feel that there is a line that should not be crossed when getting me that meat. Animals do feel pain/fear and there is no question about that. Any method that goes overboard in the slaughter of animals for consumption should be curtailed as to not cause undue suffering.

I believe that slaughter should be quick and clean as possible. Of course however you do it there will be that little problem with the pain aspect. Cost vs efficiency is always a debate with any product or service. Which has lead some scientists to wonder if we are just approaching the subject the wrong way. How about we just bred the animals so they don’t feel pain? If the animal doesn’t feel any pain then it opens up a lot of options for slaughter. There is still the fear aspect but that’s a lot easier to control when the animal just doesn’t feel pain.

Now of course this brings up some interesting points to consider that will probably render this idea to the mental trash can before anything comes out of it. It’s all well and good to make it so the animals don’t feel pain when they die, but they have lives too. Pain, while annoying at best, is a useful tool. It tells us to get the hell out or stop whatever the hell you’re doing because whatever it is, it’s fucking shit up. The care for animals who will happily walk into whatever danger because of a lack of pain, will probably be complicated to say the least. There will be/is the concern about the life condition and mistreatment of the animals. Which is right now a large talking point already. The slaughter houses end up hiring people who don’t really care about the animals and with lacks policy enforcement there will be mistreatment, just like there is now, but with the added difference of the removal of guilt. “Hey I can beat the crap out of this animal because it doesn’t feel pain.” That is not the goal nor something that I would nor do endorse.

In the end I think that this is not really the best option at all. There are too many problems with it and it doesn’t really accomplish what can’t and isn’t already being done. Something that the holier than thou vegans don’t tell you is that not every plant is a hell hole. Most slaughter houses do a fine job on making sure the animals die humanely. I’ve seen videos on various different mass farming plants for many different types of animals and have been quite impressed with with what I’ve seen. I have also seen the bad stuff as well and yeah I agree that kind of stuff should not happen. Not every farmer is a dumb animal hater who just got into the business in order to torture.

Via Io9

Awesome the LRO is taking more pictures and now it has some of the Apollo landing sites.  Link. Go look at them. I’ll wait.

Good ok well I hope you aren’t disappointed because all they are are a few dots on a picture of the moon. Because if you are I’m going to smack you for not understanding the real importance of the photos. It is enough to see that yes there is stuff up there, and have a picture of the most historic event in human history. Just like that blurry not awesome picture of your kid doing something special it’s not the quality of the photo but what’s in it that matters. Besides we’ll get some better photos once LRO has reached it’s final orbit. It’s still a little far away at the moment. They say it will get three times as clear. Awesome. It’s a pretty we don’t have HiRise up there because that would be even better. Meh, what I want is Moon landing and travel to be so common that we go back to the same site and see how it changed up close and personal. That won’t happen for awhile, it’s expensive and hard so why go back to the same place go somewhere new and well NASA has been stupid (Though most of the blame lies on the government and the public) and been stuck in low earth orbit.

We need to go back to the moon and elsewhere.

It’s 40 years to the date since Apollo 11. 40 years and we still are stuck in low earth orbit. As a kid that grew up in the late 80s early 90s I never understood why we had gone to the moon and that was it. Why weren’t we back there, why weren’t we still there. Where’s the moon base etc. But we are finally gearing up to go back but it’s taking too much time. I want to see men on mars before I die and it’s time to get moving. But anyways let’s celebrate Apollo. Nasa is and they are broadcasting a bunch of stuff on their website. Go check it out when you have a chance sometime today.

Nasa

Now something very interesting here is this.

“Eugene Izhikevitch [a mathematician at the Neurosciences Institute] and I have made a model with a million simulated neurons and almost half a billion synapses, all connected through neuronal anatomy equivalent to that of a cat brain. What we find, to our delight, is that it has intrinsic activity. Up until now our BBDs had activity only when they confronted the world, when they saw input signals. In between signals, they went dark. But this damn thing now fires on its own continually. The second thing is, it has beta waves and gamma waves just like the regular cortex—what you would see if you did an electroencephalogram. Third of all, it has a rest state. That is, when you don’t stimulate it, the whole population of neurons stray back and forth, as has been described by scientists in human beings who aren’t thinking of anything.

In other words, our device has some lovely properties that are necessary to the idea of a conscious artifact. It has that property of indwelling activity. So the brain is already speaking to itself. That’s a very important concept for consciousness.”

HOLY FREAKING CRAP! WOW! This is crazy in ways that I can hardly convey while busy at work. DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT HE JUST SAID? and what it means? also what it does not mean?

They reproduced a cat’s brain in a computer neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. Which, is a huge amount of work I imagine. Probably only a little less than doing it one by one. This isn’t anything new really, they have been making models of brains or parts of brains and then feeding it questions or whatever and seeing how the neurons fire and then comparing it to real working brains under a cat scan. I’m sure that data was useful in designing this model brain. I’ve seen the pictures of these models. A ton of multi color lines tracing out the patterns different information traveled through the connections. Looks pretty cool but normally after the question is answered it just sits there not doing anything. Like a computer, ask a question give a command, get activity. Even in your computer’s rest state it has a ton of commands and things for it to be doing so it’s always active but this is different because there was firing between the neurons. Things going on without being programmed to do so by the people running this test. AGAIN I can not explain how amazing that is.

It is not true AI, the brain model is not a thinking entity right now, but it is getting very close. Via Cosmic Variance