Hubble has given us so many beautiful images

In its 23rd year it gives us a new and amazing look at the Horsehead Nebula, which has been an iconic astronomical image for many years. Gorgeous. Simply breathtaking.

There's a place where an 'anti-incest' app is a good idea

It's really hard to know what to say about this app created in Iceland to avoid awkward social situations other than I suppose it's understandable in a country with a population only two-thirds the size of Kansas City. Just the city, no suburbs or ex-urbs counted.

Deja Vu in Asia all over again

This sounds eerily familiar. What would be wrong with just ignoring the lunatic ravings of North Korea? Seriously. Negotiations will never go anywhere for the foreseeable future since China has far too much patience with the regime. Just don't bother responding and continue with appropriate reactions when they actually do something.

Alien Things

I will not bother with links to stories about the tragedy in Boston. I think anyone reading this knows about what happened there. They might not know that bombs still go off in Iraq and Afghanistan constantly. In those countries weddings, funerals and religious celebrations are popular targets. Now in the U.S. it is one of the most famous sports events in the world. I often see comments, whether in fiction or non-fiction that we are all capable of violence, that we don't know what we are capable of until we are tested in some way. But I do know that these people murder, maim and destroy with no true threat to them or theirs and no regard for who might be killed and that makes them as alien to me as any being imagined by the best science fiction writers I know.

Ford and GM partnership an example of every little bit helping

DailyTech reports on a R&D partnership between Ford and GM. The new partnership will develop 9 and 10 speed transmissions for the automakers. Although it's unlikely that they will license this technology to competitors it would be nice. At the least I would expect that it will push competitors to come up with their own versions of the technology. Estimates are that it should improve gas mileage 5 to 10 percent. Given the number of vehicles that the two produce between them it would save a lot of fuel once enough vehicles with the new transmissions roll out but that's years away.

It's not just CO2 we need to worry about

Researchers from NCAR and Scripps find that cutting other pollutants could make significant contributions to slowing rising sea levels. These are pollutants that have a much shorter life time than CO2 and should therefore be more amenable to correcting the problems caused by excess amounts in the atmosphere.

How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life

Ars Technica has a great story about NASA engineers "reverse engineering" an F-1 engine so that the plans could be put into modern systems for design and computer modelling purposes. Starting from the outside everything was imaged and in one case a custom torque wrench was recreated. The original work was done in ways that wouldn't be used now and basically resulted in an engine where every one built was unique in some way and built largely by hand. It's a really fascinating story.

The Problem of Too Many Books

OK, so there is a bit of a problem with having thousands of books in the house. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was re-reading the Dresden Files books. Well, I hit a bit of a roadblock. I can't find my copy of Turncoat, the eleventh book in the series. I'm still looking but this is really, really annoying. Then there's the other minor inconvenience of occasionally buying a duplicate of a book you just haven't seen on the shelves for a few years.

NOAA says Arctic will be nearly free of sea ice by the middle of this century

NOAA researchers now think that Arctic sea ice could decline even faster than previously thought, actually being nearly ice free by 2050 and maybe even within the next couple of decades. It's not good news and we don't really know every possible consequence of this event.

My name is Jim...

...and I am a book-a-holic. I haven't posted that much lately because I've been on a binge of reading. First I went through the Dubric Byerly series by Tamara Siler Jones. I'd read the first two soon after they came out and just bought the third one recently and I decided to re-read the first two before reading the third. On her own blog Ms. Jones writes a post about Dubric as a character. I know I remember seeing a post somewhere where she said that her publisher didn't want any more Dubric Byerly books which I consider to a major fail. She accomplished something difficult for a writer to do with me, which is make me care about a character who often is a complete ass. She also created a world and set of characters that definitely kept me involved and I'd like to see more of it and will probably pick up Fire - A Lars Hargrove Story this weekend. Then in the same spirit I started re-reading The Dresden Files series again to lead up to reading the latest book in that series that hit paperback, which I just picked up.

Governing Kansas badly

The state of Kansas joins the ranks of states that put ideology ahead of good governance with an anti-choice law. The law states that life begins at conception but has other provisions that seem to say it isn't an attempt to completely ban abortion. It will still probably be challenged in court, though, because of provisions that explicitly block any organizations that provide abortions from taking part in sex education programs in schools, presumably directly targeting Planned Parenthood. In addition the bill blocks any type of tax breaks for any organization that provides abortion services in the name of not providing any tax money, no matter how indirectly, for abortions.

This is in a state that is busy cutting taxes and planning on eliminating the state income tax even while promising to not hurt education any further than existing cuts to education have already done. Governor Brownback and his fellow Republicans seem to be fond of making promises they almost certainly can't keep and wasting even more state money defending the state from lawsuits they didn't have to incur.

Nat Geo fact checks some science conspiracy theories

National Geographic does rational people bombarded with misleading claims about several issues in science a favor with their article Fact Checking 6 Persistent Science Conspiracy Theories. Back in 2009 Scientific American had a piece about why people believe in conspiracy theories.

In the age of internet research being so easy it would also help if people would ask themselves if an idea really passes the smell test, do some research on it and not accept one source as being authoritative and consider the reputation of every source they find while doing their research.

Engage.

OK, so if you didn't watch Star Trek: The Next Generation you have no idea why this post is titled "Engage". Even if this NASA scientist's research bears fruit it will probably be a long time before Captain Picard's spiritual descendant can give that command on his ship's bridge but we can hope.