Tonight I allowed myself to step back from work long enough to exclaim “holy crap, you’re flying to Mexico City on Thursday”. In my world booking time off work is mechanical formality, idle vacation chit chat abstract, dedicated planning elusive until holy crap screams “smarten up, stop working long enough to pack a suitcase!”. I’m looking at an empty suitcase, found my passport, tossed a load of laundry in the washing machine and realize packing can wait until after work tomorrow. Not bothered by lack of conventional planning, I’ll be on a plane to Mexico City Thursday evening with or without meticulous preparation. Truth is, I wouldn’t have it any other way. See you when I get home. :
In 2016 planetary astronomers at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory discovered a small ( 100 meter ) object moving with Earth around the Sun. Dubbed 2016 OR3, initial science speculation wondered if it might be a piece of space junk, perhaps a rogue rocket booster caught in wobbly orbit occasionally intersecting Earth orbit.
Last week at the annual Division For Planetary Sciences meeting in Provo, Utah Vishnu Reddy from University of Arizona laid speculation to rest, identifying 2016 OR3 as an asteroid, stating in part –
“2016 HO3 is a small near-Earth object (NEO) measuring no more than 100 meters (330 feet) across that, while orbiting the sun, also appears to circle around the Earth as a quasi-satellite. Only five quasi-satellites have been discovered so far, but 2016 HO3 is the most stable of them. The provenance of this object is unknown. On timescales of a few centuries, 2016 HO3 remains within 38 to 100 lunar-distances from us.”
“One way to visualize HO3’s orbit is by picturing a hula hoop dancer — the sun in this analogy — twirling two hoops around the hips at the same time, ever so slightly out of sync. While it orbits the sun, the object makes yearly loops around the Earth.
As a result, the object appears to orbit the Earth, but it is not gravitationally bound to our planet.”
2016 HO3 is seen at the top left corner of this animation made of ten 2mn long exposures in I band using MODS1 on the left side of LBT – The telescope is tracking the moving asteroid, so background stars (and even a couple of galaxies) are trailed. Image via LBTO.
Asteroid 2016 OR3 is hardly a harbinger of doom – orbiting politely at 38 – 100 lunar distance from Earth, it is a cosmic companion which now bears official designation of quasi-satellite. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said –
The asteroid’s orbit also undergoes a slow, back-and-forth twist over multiple decades. “The asteroid’s loops around Earth drift a little ahead or behind from year to year, but when they drift too far forward or backward, Earth’s gravity is just strong enough to reverse the drift and hold onto the asteroid so that it never wanders farther away than about 100 times the distance of the moon,” said Chodas. “The same effect also prevents the asteroid from approaching much closer than about 38 times the distance of the moon. In effect, this small asteroid is caught in a little dance with Earth.”
“Caught in a little dance with Earth” makes me smile. Not for knowing Earth has an asteroid buddy, but for affirmation everything in our universe is caught in a little dance.
This morning Canada woke to news of a nation without Gord Downie, tonight our hearts fly at half mast.
Tears ran down Justin Trudeau’s face as he said goodbye to “Canada’s friend”. Speaking not as politician, but a man who understood and shared the collective sorrow of a nation.
Others can write biographical paragraphs detailing Tragically Hip front man Gord Downie’s life. Tonight, all I can do is watch and listen to an undeniable presence in Canadian music history. Starting softly with Ahead By A Century, then Bobcaygeon –
Eventually finding my way to Tragically Hip performing Grace, Too at Woodstock 1999. Love it, hate it, get it or don’t – know this clip epitomizes Gord Downie – poet, performer, unabashed storyteller, improvisational wizard, musical savant and embodiment of Canadian grace. Tonight Gord Downie walks among the stars, his constellation will shine for eternity.
NASA had me at CosmoQuest, Image Detective sweetened the pot. A NASA funded citizen science project seeks public help identifying geographic features in photographs taken from the International Space Station. ISS astronauts take scores of photographs, science needs citizen help in creating a searchable image database of natural and man-made global locations. All you do is sign up, look at images and identify features.
Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) lead investigator Pamela L Gay said –
“The astronauts’ photos of Earth are visually stunning, but more than that, they can be used to study our changing Earth. From erupting volcanoes, to seasonal flooding, these images document the gradual changes that happen to our landscape.
The trick is, we need to make these images searchable, and that means taking the time to sort through, analyze, and label (add metadata) the unidentified images within the database of 1.5 million plus photos.”
Jennifer Grier, Senior Education and Communication Specialist at PSI, CosmoQuest’s lead support scientist added –
“This is a unique, powerful, and beautiful image data set that has already yielded excellent research science. But the data set needs the many eyes and minds of citizen scientists to reach its full potential as a publicly available, searchable catalog. With the additions that citizen scientists as detectives can make, professional research scientists will be able to conduct more research into our changing world, and do so much more effectively.”
Opened YouTube tonight and found “The Hardest Mandelbrot Zoom 2017” under recommended viewing. Fractals leapt off the screen (thanks to https://geneticfractals.wordpress.com/) – admittedly, recognition and comprehension play in different leagues. Mesmerized by the elegance of fractal expansion, I vowed to grasp a foundation of understanding.
Mandelbrot zoom had to wait, instinct demanded clear definition of fractal. Nailing down fractal began with “In mathematics a fractal is an abstract object used to describe and simulate naturally occurring objects”. The key word being “abstract”, as in wrapping your head around a infinite curved line winding through space that appears one dimensional, but in truth harbors a surface defined in fractal dimensions. Further research insisted “A regular line is conventionally understood to be 1-dimensional; if such a curve is divided into pieces each 1/3 the length of the original, there are always 3 equal pieces. In contrast, consider the Koch snowflake. It is also 1-dimensional for the same reason as the ordinary line, but it has, in addition, a fractal dimension greater than 1 because of how its detail can be measured. The fractal curve divided into parts 1/3 the length of the original line becomes 4 pieces rearranged to repeat the original detail, and this unusual relationship is the basis of its fractal dimension”.
Defining fractal called for a simple analogy, I found this – “imagine that you were to measure the trunk of a tree. We humans look at it at the largest scalelet’s say that you wrapped a measuring tape around it. That tape would give you a decent estimate, let’s say 1 meter, but it wouldn’t be getting all the little bumps and crevices. If you were to have, say, a beetle crawling along the surface of the trunk, it would be going up and down those bumps, so it would measure a longer distance, maybe 3 meters. But even that beetle would just be walking over tiny little slits in the bark that are too small for it. If you had something even smaller (an extraordinarily tiny insect, for example), it would have to go up and down even more, and it could measure the distance around the tree at huge numbers, such as 100 meters. And this can continue for a long time, getting smaller and smaller, but seeing basically the same thing at each level, just a lot more of it. Of course, this breaks down when you get too small, since everything is composed of atoms, but for the scales where life occurs, tree trunks are actually fractal in nature.”
Back to YouTube’s recommended viewing of the Mandelbrot Zoom – according to Wikipedia the Mandelbrot set is a nod to mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot who coined the term fractal when he theorized mathematical definition of roughness and self-similarity in nature. Confused? Shake it off and immerse yourself in this clip. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense, all that matters is willingness to accept it exists. For those who need hard facts over abstract wonder, some links –
The clip below isn’t new to this blog, I’ve lost count of how many times Will McAvoy’s scene from HBO’s short lived series The Newsroom graced this page. I vow to post this over and over again. Not for the certainty most won’t bother to watch, but for the slim chance a handful of Americans might take sentiments of a television news anchor to heart.
America, you elected a swell president A year ago this week, a month before the election, you said “Meh” to “grab them by the pussy”. Nobody cried “fake news”, how could you – Trump’s abominable core was irrefutable. Amid the propaganda frenzy of “crooked Hillary”, did you think the world would overlook dismissal of a “grab them by the pussy” president? How about your wives, daughters, sisters, mothers? Could Trump grab your daughter by the pussy provided he made America great again?
If you support Donald Trump watch this video. When you’re done, explain to your wives, daughters, mothers and sisters why a great nation condones exploitation of women as sexual objects. When you’re done, ask yourself if a man like this represents your core values. Have a word with yourself, explain to your sons they too can take advantage of women if they’re rich and powerful enough. A year after “grab them by the pussy” defined your president, ask yourself how excusing his loathsome sense of entitlement makes America great.
Between July 9 and August 1, 1953 U.S. military airplanes flew over Winnipeg, Manitoba, dusting residents with zinc cadmium sulfide. Zinc cadmium sulfide is used as a fluorescent tracer, a way to monitor dispersion of radioactive and chemical weapon fallout. According to research by St. Louis sociology professor Lisa Martino-Taylor in her recently published book “Behind the Fog”, Canada willingly participated in what they believed a test of “chemical fog to protect Winnipeg in the event of a Russian attack”. America neglected to divulge zinc cadmium sulfide lurked in that fog.
In 1964 American military returned, crop dusting oblivious residents of Suffield and Medicine Hat, Alberta. Declassified documents detail U.S. military plans to “advance” experiments to include radioactive phosphorus-32 and nerve agent VX. By combining the two, America hoped to create a radioactive nerve agent. Internal memos discuss transporting 100 pounds of VX to Suffield. Additional memos inventory available hospital beds around Suffield. Fortunately America never got around to testing their project on Canadian citizens.
As experimentation without consent goes – Canada got off easy. It would be rude to complain over a foreign government misting a few hundred thousand Canadians with dubious chemical compounds.It wasn’t as if they spared their citizens, millions of Americans went about their lives blissfully unaware of Operation LAC ( Large Area Coverage ) spritzing them with odorless, colorless particles of zinc cadmium sulfide.To this day America stands by a 1997 National Research Council report declaring-
“After an exhaustive, independent review requested by Congress we have found no evidence that exposure to zinc cadmium sulfide at these levels could cause people to become sick,” said committee chair Rogene Henderson, senior scientist, Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, Albuquerque, N.M. “Even when we assume the worst about how this chemical might behave in the lungs, we conclude that people would be at a higher risk simply from living in a typical urban, industrialized area for several days or, in some cases, for months.”
Violation of medical ethics, international law and military policy has bigger fish to fry than zinc cadmium sulfide.America blisters with contemptible examples of human experimentation without consent. The link below is a mind blowing testament to flagrant disregard for human rights established in the Nuremberg Code of 1947 –
August 20, 1947: Judgment at Nuremberg
August 20, 1947: Judgment at Nuremberg: 16 out of 23 doctors were found guilty of crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg verdict also set forth the parameters of “Permissible Medical Experiments” known as the Nuremberg Code.
The Nuremberg Code laid the foundation for biomedical ethics mandating that medical experiments conducted on human beings must conform to well-defined humane, ethical standards; foremost is immutable standard:
The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential;
The information sought is “unprocurable by other methods or means of study;
The anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment;
The experiment is designed “to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering or injury;”
Risks to subjects be minimized to protect against “even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death.
The Nuremberg Code makes clear that ethical standards protecting individual human rights supersede arguments invoking the “greater good of society.”
America fancied itself above the Nuremberg Code. Government didn’t stop at inmates, institutionalized psychiatric patients and developmentally challenged children, any citizen was fair game.
Human experimentation without consent is an ugly truth, a callous end justifies the means disregard for basic human rights. Much as we’d like to believe government safeguards citizens, common sense dictates a measure of caution. History proves ethics are subjective.
Take a long hard look at Jagmeet Singh. Who is this man, where was the photo taken, does he frighten you, make you nervous? If seated next to him on a flight, would you ask to change seats, initiate conversation, bury your head in a book? All you have is an image and name – faith, politics and geography determine whether you see a smile or menacing scowl.
Enough playing around – allow me to introduce Jagmeet Singh, as of October 1, 2017, leader of the federal New Democrat Party. World media qualifies Singh as “Canada’s first non-white politician to lead a national party”, and first “turban wearing Sikh to sit as a legislator in Ontario”. Apparently it never occurred to world media someone should ask Canadians for perspective. Had anyone bothered, it wouldn’t fall on my shoulders to tell you Canadian tongues aren’t wagging over Singh’s colourful turbans. It makes no difference to us, all we see is a fresh face and youthful enthusiasm.
Singh’s turban isn’t remarkable, Canada’s Minister of Defence Harjit Sajjan sports a tidy turban. We’re not shielding our children’s eyes or spewing right wing hatred of secret religious agendas.
Hargit Sajjan
Time to meet Roy Moore, Alabama Republican gearing up to face Democrat Doug Jones in December election to fill senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions.Moore isn’t one to distinguish between Sikh and Muslim, one look at Singh would send Roy into Biblical orbit. Moore’s record of fundamentalist absurdity reads like an extremist right wing manifesto. Where to begin, do I start with once a Judge Roy suspended twice from the position of Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court – first for refusing to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments outside the Alabama Justice Building, again for instructing probate judges to enforce a state ban on same sex marriages despite a federal ruling that found it unconstitutional. Heck no, that would be regular crazy, Moore”s crazy deserves a shrine of shame. Ponder 9/11 and the Sandy Hook massacre being God’s way of punishing America for lack of religious commitment. He rejects evolution, wants homosexuality to be against the law, opposes homosexuals running for political office, wants to ban Muslims from entering politics, opposes preschool because attendees are “much more likely to learn a liberal social and political philosophy”, doesn’t believe Obama is a U.S. citizen and believes God put Trump in the White House.
Jagmeet Singh champions all that Roy Moore abhors. Jagmeet Singh wouldn’t be possible in America, Roy Moore couldn’t exist in Canada. Ponder that as a tale of two nations.
August 20, 1947: Judgment at Nuremberg: 16 out of 23 doctors were found guilty of crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg verdict also set forth the parameters of “Permissible Medical Experiments” known as the Nuremberg Code.
notestoponder 