GalacticMu

This is older than stardust by internet standards, but a kindred spirit (bitchin’ NASA jumpsuit!) over at Damn Interesting wrote a nice bit about Buzz Aldrin’s proposed Cycler vehicle.

To summarize Damn Interesting’s summary, a very elegant solution to the fuel problem of trans-planetary travel is to keep a sort of Space Winnebago (no, not that one) perpetually looping around Earth and Mars. This would require a connecting ship to merely burn fuel getting up to the Space Winnebago as it passes close to Earth and then back to it again as it passes close to Mars. It’s actually a very understandable, simple concept (well, simple is relative, I’m not going to be drunkenly building one out of used Kotex any time soon) made lovable by everyone’s should-be-favorite astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

But enough summarizing; Damn Interesting already wrote it about it clearer than I can and they have a video. Brown nosers.

The Martian Express via Damn Interesting

I have to get something off my chest: NASA has broken my heart before, but like any beaten lady I keep coming back for more.

A quick summary of this tumultuous relationship is easy. NASA is a handsome, charismatic and manipulative shit. NASA will do what ever it takes and to whomever it takes in order to stay popular. It’s a respectable point of view - if we love science and we love space exploration, who cares if we do it by sucking Bush’s tiny, crooked, fungal dick?

BECAUSE IT’S THE MOST MORALLY WRONG THING TO DO EVER IN THE HISTORY OF EVERNESS, THAT’S WHY.

But on the other hand, NASA clearly loves and respects their astronauts and it only takes seeing film of the technicians watching Discovery’s fuel tanks explode to know their looks of eternal, world-shattering hurt are for their friends - not machines. Not money. They watched their friends die. Goddamn it I just made myself cry again.

In a discussion about this BattleGate and I agreed that we have such boundless love and admiration for these people because they aren’t doing it for any one person, any country, they are performing dangerous acts of pure science because it’s the right thing to do. Not in response to a threat, not to win land or oil. They do it for motherfucking science, and knowing there is a good chance they’ll die doing it.

Most days, it’s enough to make me forget NASA’s tawdry political ways.

So! Space Center Houston! To my great joy the surrounding town of Clear Lake is chock-a-block with random space references (Galactic Tacos! Interstellar Coin Operated Laundry!). To my even greater joy we arrived at the Space Center to see a great big sign reading WELCOME BIKERS! because some biker group had rented the spacious parking lots of the Space Center. What? I don’t know either. All I know is that there were bikers everywhere, and that’s all anyone really needs to know.

These are not my tan hands.

It should also be noted that everyone working in the Space Center wears astronaut jumpsuits, reinforcing my personal belief that jumpsuits should be an option no matter what your place of employment.

Pretty immediately I had a very mild apprehension reinforced: The Space Center is touted more as an educational service than a museum, and the level of screaming children reflects this. I tend to question the motivation of putting a gargantuan tidal wave of shrieking adolescent human monkeys directly inside the Center’s entrance, but I also failed to receive the gene that makes people tolerate species propagation, so maybe I’m not such a good judge.

ACES and a Constant Wear Garment (astronaut panties).

Ultimately, everything was great and wonderful and NASA-logo’d and sciencey. Except for two things that need calling out: the food court was offensive to all creatures that digest organic matter for energy -

What could be more futuristic than several-hour-old hotdogs and microwave pizza? Charging $20 for it!

- and the NASA Tram Tour was nearly ruined by mentally retarded teenage employees. For anyone that is angry that I used the words “mentally retarded” as a joke insult, I’ll have you know that I just misspelled “retarded” and couldn’t figure out how I’d misspelled it (hint: there’s only one ‘t’!).

Each tram requires people to wait about an hour in order to ride - the hour we spent waiting meant that we missed a few other of the main attractions at the Center. Nevertheless, this was a choice we made because the Tram Tour famously tours the actual Johnson Space Center, the real facilities where astronauts train to be astronauts. For reals. Also it means enduring BattleGate whispering, “Ooh, that he could be an astronaut! Or him! Or her! That guy could be an astronaut! Take a photo of him! Take a photo!“

The positive elements of the tour are numerous, and what you’d expect: seeing historic Mission Control and sitting in the original VIP seats is worth the price of admittance alone. Aargh sat in what was revealed to be the Queen’s seat, a fact which upon learning he gave a suspiciously excellent queenly wave. Here we were surprised to find that our teen tram driver (whose name, no shitting, was Jor-El) (except I think it was spelled differently) was also our Mission Control guide. Despite Jor-El’s previous complaints of it having been “a long day” (the park opens at 11:00 and it was then 4:00), he was charming and educational in the way that slightly self-conscious teenagers can be charming and educational.  Which is to say: slightly more than not at all.

But the negative elements belong to Charlie.

OMG, when are they going to invent the technology to text message by rolling your eyes?

See this tool up here? Meet Zac Efron Charlie, our main tour guide. Somehow Charlie missed the email explaining that rockets and spacemen are FUCKING AWESOME and instead feels that working at NASA is in line with bagging groceries. ROCKETS, CHARLIE. Could you muster up a teaspoon of enthusiasm?

In seriousness: we’re talking about the genesis of human space exploration. This place is deeply meaningful to many people. I overheard several languages being spoken by other visitors, or maybe it was all just Mexican, they all sound the same to me. People - many people - have lost their lives as a part of this endeavor. Why Space Center Houston cannot muster up the fucking willpower to hire someone with ANY interest in the subject matter AT ALL is totally beyond my comprehension. I apologize for how much I am using the caps lock, dear readers, but I save my emotions for one or two subjects and space science is one of them.

Charlie slurred, mumbled and generally sort of douched his way through anything he ever had to say on a loudspeaker. He never once spoke to anyone in the tour unless he had to (and marginally more when he did have to). On two occasions he needed the whole group to move to one side of a room, a task he attempted by weakly mumbling that some people should “try to move” while gesturing vaguely with his hands. Not surprisingly, people wouldn’t move. Other times he ask us to queue up while giving zero indications of where he meant us to queue.

While walking through the primary astronaut training facilities, he’d spout his memorized lines with the kind of derisive, careless disregard for punctuation that is generally relegated to telemarketers and Department of Licensing employees. Like so:

Okay to the left you see a training module used for logisitcal purposes astronauts train here daily to get an idea of what (INTAKE OF BREATH) moving through these modules might really be like to the right you can see a black tarp that represents (INTAKE OF BREATH) the black empty space where I might once have had anything to offer to humanity (INTAKE OF BREATH)…

And in truth I blame the Space Center, not Charlie. Other trams carried a staff of equally teenaged employees, a practice that can only be blamed on low pay and a lack of benefits OR some kind of ill-perceived educational exchange with the local high school.  Just because I’ve had better tour guides at breweries than I did at the Johnson Space Center does not make Charlie directly responsible.  Just 49%.

By the end of the day BattleGate had failed to get photos of me crying due to my expert skills at weeping only when in dark rooms or hidden behind giant biker dudes.  All three of us started to cry at the private memorial set up for astronauts killed in the line of duty only to be blasted with audio of George W. Bush’s well-written but nevertheless spoken by himself Challenger speech.  If I recall I actually said “You shut up” aloud.  Anyone who wastes trillions of dollars on killing people instead of sending people to Mars does not get to speak.

We ended the day by drinking Piña Coladas and eating lobster bisque.  True story.

When I was in high school I thought I was going to be a epidemiologist. I wanted to be an astronaut, but the Crohn’s Disease left me a memo that said “Bitch, you can’t do math anyway, so get over it.” Some years before my mom had purchased me a copy of The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett (it was on sale and looked like the kind of thing a introspective, unpopular teen might like, I guess) (I love my mom) and from then on I was hooked. It helped that The Andromeda Strain was one of my favorite movies of all time.

But time does strange things and my interest waned. It may or may not have had to do with finding out that any epidemiologist worth their mitochondria spend years wading knee-deep through corpses in sub-Saharan Africa. And it wasn’t the corpses that bothered me, it was the safari outfits and the appreciation for eating grubs. It also might have been the copious amounts of LSD and an FBI file the size of the Manhattan Yellow Pages. I can’t remember those years too well.

So you can imagine that when I read the Pennsylvania State University announced they’d found the source of influenza I blew a little of my coffee all over the place. Researchers have long known that viral “reservoirs” must be present in order for the viruses to achieve longevity - in other words, they require a vacation home. Influenza has been a real bitch over the years, spreading reliable little farts of infection with taunting ease. But where the hell is it when it isn’t “flu season?”

The answer? “We think it is a reservoir in the tropics.”

I can only hope that the original Nature article had something more to say about the reservoir other than guessing it might be in a tropical climate. Because anyone with a DVD player and a tolerance for Dustin Hoffman could speculate that the reservoir might be in the tropics.

Terrible article that makes it sound like the Penn State researchers came up with the idea that influenza infects in annual waves from United Press International

Much better article found at Science Daily

Back when my mom first started poking around the internet, she was understandably distraught by the overt lawlessness of it all. This was a time when email viruses made the evening news - remember that? Don’t open an email with a subject line that says “I love you”!!! Lightning will shoot from your monitor and destroy your child’s inheritance! At the time she had vague notions that the government might need to step in and control things.

Pshaw! I said, and described it thusly: the internet is like the Wild West; if you prefer things controlled, safe and predictable, stay in the established areas. If you are interested in independence, discovery and deviancy, then feel free to roam. Like the time of western expansion, these latter options are vital: those willing to take risks and explore new things are in fact forging a new lifestyle and future for the rest of the populace. People get hurt and porn pop-ups occur, but such is the price of sitting back and letting the maniacs win all the rest of us fun new things. My mom was agreeable to this idea and has since become a happy webizen. Not that she needed me to make this fairly weak analogy, but I think it might have accelerated her acceptance: we’re a family that believes the bleeding edge must exist.

These days I find myself thinking of the internet as an organism. Clever, right? Shut up. Anyway, in my mind it has become a vibrantly pustular, fecund, pendulous, expansive, obese, tentacular creature, saturated with diseases, genetic mutation and facing a future unknown. Which means that I love it.

Lucky for me, I am not alone. Lucky for all of us, people like Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu like to make it visible (like the Trojan to the left there).

By entering a few parameters into a 3D rendering program, Dragulescu has produced organic-looking objects by which we may delight and entertain ourselves, much in the same way we once marveled so satisfactorily at the brutal shape of the HIV virus two decades ago.  After all, Grendel wasn’t a monster until he had a face.

What Does A Computer Virus Look Like? at eWeek.com

The entire world including the C.H.U.D.s already know about this because it was on Boing Boing, but sometimes my mind gets a little blown and then I have to vent.

In summary: a man’s house in Bosnia has been hit by meteorites FIVE TIMES in the last six months. Unsurprisingly, the man suspects that aliens are pissed off at him. I myself would have a combo Job/paranoia reaction: Why are the aliens testing me? It doesn’t matter, I still love them. Unless it’s not aliens.

The thing is, most folks, like Boing Boing, categorize this under “That’s funny!” Mmm, yes, what kind of fool would think aliens would chuck carbonaceous chrondrite at him? Also, imagine that being said by someone with a monocle and a mustache. I do.

However: seriously? Five times? In six months? That is as close to impossible as I care to bother with, statistically. Which means that it is not random. Clearly there are further explanations, but each of these is as unproven as alien malevolence. Magnetic resonance? It only happens when it rains, which makes it even more bizarre - why would atmospheric precipitation affect the trajectories of space objects? That’s a trick question, since it wouldn’t. Unless we are looking at it entirely the wrong way - what if the objects aren’t coming from space? What if they are coming through a trans-dimensional wormhole that also triggers rainclouds? Eeee!

So anyway, welcome to my internal thought processes.

Man ‘targeted by aliens’ via Boing Boing

What’s better than being a scientist named Krzysztof Matyjaszewski? Being a scientist named Krzysztof Matyjaszewski who has invented a way to make nanoparticles “invisible”.  I’m uncertain as to the usage of the quotation marks over there, because they aren’t faking being invisible, they really are.  Visible to the naked eye, anyway.

Basically, nanomaterials are often whitish in color, or milky, due to the way they refract light.  By combining them with a polymer,  Matyjaszewski and pal Michael Bockstaller had produced a way to “grease” the light on through, as Matyjaszewski says.  And I can never argue with a scientist who says that photons can be greased up.

And while Bockstaller says the invisible materials have use in the “aerospace and cosmetics industry” I think what he means by this is UFOs and cyberpunk urban camouflage cloaks.  Or some kind of new and totally revolutionary Apple product that is packed to the gills with DRM and costs more than your mother’s hip surgery.

Secretive and teaser-y article here at Scientific Blogging.

The Lunar X PRIZE (hoping to do for lunar landings what the Ansari X PRIZE did for civilian orbital capability) has announced their official contenders. The teams now have until December 31, 2012 to win the whole $30 million purse - late-comers will then have a further two years to win a lesser amount.

I’m a big X PRIZE supporter (minus the spelling and all-caps) (and also, not actually monetarily, just spiritually) and I encourage you to at least respect their endeavor enough to read up about it. The Ansari X PRIZE triggered unexpected emotions for me; I expected to be excited, but I didn’t expect to weep and then get a tattoo of the SpaceShipOne, which is exactly what happened. Seeing Mike Melvill emerge from the tubby little hero of a spaceship broke something loose in my black, dessicated heart, and that something is still floating around in my eyeballs - truly, I couldn’t even resize this photo without getting weepy.

In all seriousness, I’m a pessimistic person. For me, scifi apocalypse stories are where I find solace, because, strangely, they offer the most hope; they at least have a chance of coming true. SpaceShipOne is as close as I get to feelin’ churchly, particularly because it was just a few earnest nerds deciding to make something happen for real. I have true awe for the little man and the underdog, and while many would argue that Paul Allen is as far from those two descriptors as a human can get, I prefer to focus on the designer Burt Rutan, for whom money was not the motivating factor. Rutan was a life-long devotee of aviation culture, a rogue aerospace engineer who often followed his gut rather than established norms. The knowledge that SpaceShipOne now hangs next to Chuck Yeager’s “Glamorous Glennis” in the National Air and Space Museum is enough to make me break into alarming sobs - these are the people that would risk their life for the black, the great vacuum sea, the siren call of an entire universe.

Are you with us?

Jack Finney’s classic novel The Body Snatchers is re-re-re-made in this science fiction thriller starring Nicole Kidman and the delightful Daniel Craig. Kidman plays the role of Carol Bennell, a psychiatrist on the run from emotionless drone-people seemingly infected with some kind of extraterrestrial virus after the crash of the space shuttle Patriot. Car chases ensue.

Spoilericious review after the jump.

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