Return science to its proper place.

Phil Plait has an exceptionally important post over at Bad Astronomy. It's about a new effort to reinstate the Office of Technology Assessment, a bipartisan group that provided scientific advice to the president. There is an online petition as well as a Facebook group. Check it out.

Detroit Lions Draft Chat

A bit off topic, but if you follow the Detroit Lions, you'll want to catch the draft podcasts led by Bob Gaunt. It's really good stuff!

Catch it at Mlive.com/lions!

The internet just got more awesome.

Something Awful's (warning: typically not safe for work) Comedy Goldmine article brought a new world of wonder to my attention: Google Trends! You can finally see the trends in internet searches and unlock the hidden wonders of our E-world.

A few examples of what the SA.com Goons have discovered:
Figure 1: Well, duh.


Figure 2: I don't know how to explain this.


I've done a few of my own. There's a spike in searches for "alcohol poisoning" at every new year, and searches for "zombies" did not correlate very well with "brains" (surprisingly). Unfortunately, there's not enough data to see if searches for "space weather" fluctuates with the solar cycle...

The sun and global warming.

A large ice shelf in Antarctica has finally separated from the continent. This is a shelf that has been unchanged for a better part of the century, but over the past two decades has receded enough to break off. Climatologists are pointing to this as hard evidence of the severe global warming currently occuring on Earth.

I initially read about this story on Fark.com, a news feed website with a healthy comment section for each story posted. The comments, as they tend to do on this site, were extremely diverse but had a stronger-than-usual dose of global warming deniers. An argument brought up repeatedly by this crowd was that the Sun is chiefly responsible for the increase in global temperatures, so we shouldn't worry about anything.

I don't buy it at all.

I will preface this entire argument with the following: I am NOT a climatologist, and my expertise lies in magnetospheric physics.

That said, I have a huge problem with the "Sun does teh warmnigs!" argument. I've already discussed that we are in a historically weak AND long solar cycle, and that we are floating in the duldrums of a pathetically long solar minimum (see this post and this post). While I focus on sunspot number when discussing the solar cycle, solar energy output follows the same pattern. This means the amount of energy delivered to the Earth by the Sun is less during solar minimum than solar maximum. We actually have a fairly good proxy to demonstrate that weak solar activity corresponds to global cooling in the Maunder Minimum.

The current solar cycle and the loss of this section of the Antarctic ice shelf is completely contradictory to their claims that the degree of global warming we are currently experiencing is a natural, solar driven process. If we were in a period of strong solar activity (or were within 5 years of solar max), the deniers might have a point -- but the exact opposite is currently true. Given this evidence alone, I reject the hypothesis that our global warming situation is due entirely to changes in solar activity (or even strongly influenced by it!)

Some caveats that must be posted: 1) The relationship between solar activity changes and our climate is complicated and far from understood. 2) I am not a climatologist. Nor am I a true solar physiscist. I'll see if I can scrounge up a specialist to comment on this. 3) This argument completely neglects the evidence demonstrating human influence on global warming.

Go Spartans.

Yes, I am a U. of Michigan alum, but I have a hard time disagreeing with this editorial. Michigan is a great place seeing tough times; excellence in sports is one of our last remaining sources of pride.

Go Spartans, go green!

Sew What?

A side project of mine has been to get a lot of interesting video footage of Los Alamos from many different perspectives. This has started slow, but it's coming along.
One of the more ambitious segments is a working dash cam to capture the landscape as one drives through it. Early attempts suffered from car vibration and window glare. The glare solution is forthcoming; I may have solved the vibration issue this past weekend.
During my trial run I realized that I needed something to hold the camera that was both heavy enough to stay in place but soft enough to damp the shaking of my poor ol' Ford Focus. The ideal object would be cloth, with a bean-bag type bottom but a cotton-stuffed top. With a prototype in mind and my dear wife assisting, I took to the sewing machine to see what I could do.
Spoiler Alert: Sewing is not as easy as it looks. I swore a lot. In the end, I believe I am much closer to instituting my personal dash cam. I am hopeful that I can have some test footage up here soon.

Texas Bans Vista.

From this article:

"We are not in any way, shape or form trying to pick on Microsoft, but the problems with this particular [operating] system are known nationwide," Hinojosa said. "And the XP operating system is working very well."

Wow. Doesn't get more damning than that. Microsoft can't wait to get Windows 7 rolled out to end this Vista nightmare.
This post brought to you by Linux.

Opening Day!

Detroit Tigers at Toronto, 7:15 PM. Let's see if Verlander can get the team rolling!

Space weather affects us all - even the hooved ones.

A colleague and I were discussing Google street view (see previous post) and Google Earth today when he mentioned that using Google Earth, researchers have found that grazing animals, such as cows, tend to align themselves in a North-South direction. This would imply that these animals can sense the Earth's magnetic field. I responded that, in a possibly related story, one of the Google street view cars had hit a deer. Conclusion: get back to work.

Later, a good friend who now works at NASA called to let me know that he had run into a ground-breaking peer reviewed article. As it turns out, low frequency disturbances of the Earth's magnetic field (say, from power lines) effects the animals' orientation, breaking the typical poleward tendencies.

What can't science do?

I will now desperately try to make this relevant to this blog. During solar storms, there are strong deflections of the Earth's magnetic field, even on the surface. This leads to a plethora of effects: overloading of electric relay stations, intense heating of long oil pipelines, and... THE CONFUSION OF OUR CATTLE, WHO PREFER TO FACE NORTH-SOUTH.

Space weather affects us all. We must remain vigilant.

I'm torn on this one.

Is this hilarious, brash, or justified?

I'm leaning towards hilarious only because I only imagine angry villagers, complete with pitchforks and torches, chasing the small google-mobile away.

EDIT: ...while the driver of the car yells, "RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!"

One last Detroit post...

If I had any readers -- and it may be a long time, if ever, before this blog has any following -- I am certain I would be boring them with all of this discussion concerning one of my favorite cities. The reason I wax poetic about the problems of Detroit is because I find it to be a modern day parable that teaches the lesson of what happens when citizens, under the guise of caring about their city, do nothing. Those currently in control found power in the overarching apathy. Without concerned citizens constantly fighting for true leadership, true accountability, those with misguided and ill intents can silently grab the reigns.

At this time, no one better embodies this than council president Monica Conyers. She is the focus of yet another unflattering news article, one that brought the typical grimace to my face. Desensitized to her madness, it wasn't that she hired her brother to a city position that upset me. Nor was it her brother's growing list of felonies, nor the fact that she lied about their kinship, nor the fact that he was constantly reassigned to the position for 2 years despite it being a 120 day post. Instead, it was the single sentence haunting the end of the article:

"[This] practice is not uncommon in Detroit."

A small step.

Anyone familiar with Detroit politics is familiar with the monster that is Monica Conyers. Inflammatory, ignorant, racist, power hungry. Check out a few of the youtube videos of her in action. As president of the city council, she has worked hard to bring more shame to a once proud and beautiful city.

It looks like someone has finally decided that enough is enough. Councilman Kwame Kenyetta is fishing for some punishment. This may be a mere slap-on-the-wrist, but it's a small step in the right direction. Detroit's leaders cannot be bullied forever.

Hmm... two D-town posts in a row. Time to put down the Free Press for a while and do some science.

This is unexcusable.

This blows my mind.

Let that sink in for a second: 40 to 70 schools will close.

Oh, Detroit... what will we do?

Apparently I am a Psychic.

Minutes after posting about how little solar activity there is at the moment, I have found out that it's even calmer than I thought! We are currently in the fourth longest solar cycle in recorded history and will likely climb further up the list as the sun spot number (SSN) continues to fall. In March, we experienced 28 days without a sun spot (last year, March saw only 17 days without a blemish.) The averaged sunspot number values imply that we are likely to dip lower in the solar cycle, with fewer sunspots in April and possibly May.

Boring.

What are we missing out on? Check out this and this.

Solar min sucks.

All's quiet on the space weather front.

I may have made a critical mistake by instituting this blog during solar minimum. Space weather is boring right now. booorrrriiinnnggg.

The solar cycle is the 11 year period in the number of sunspots appearing on the surface of the sun. During maximum, the number of spots is at a peak and solar storms occur frequently. This leads to great videos of solar flares and coronal mass ejections, space weather storms at Earth, strong aurora, and bad impacts on technology (more on that in forthcoming posts.)

Right now, we're in solar minimum. What's happening in space? Jack crap, that's what. Just to give you an idea of how boring the sun is, examine the following:

This graph, from the Space Weather Prediction Center, is up-to-date as of the end of February. The blue/black lines are actual data; the red line is the sunspot forecast. As far as sunspots, we have bottomed out. This limits the amount of space weather news I can blog about -- especially exciting stuff.

As for the forecast, this is an extremely difficult prediction and rarely is accurate. In a few weeks, SWPC's annual Space Weather Workshop will commence and an updated prediction will be reported. While I won't be attending this year, I will blog on any important news that I hear from it.