Weekend Links

• Meteor shower this week as we cut through comet trails – NASA’s Fluxtimator says I’m out of luck on this one.
• Paranoia Strikes Deep – Thanks to Jay Lake.
• Court Silences CIA Operative Despite Yellowcake Scandal
• Government Will Pay $3 Million in Coffee Table Spying Suit
• Bush Feared Successor Might Revoke Telco Spy Immunity – Sadly, there seems to be no danger of that.
• Copyright Time Bomb Set to Disrupt Music, Publishing Industries
• SPDY: Google wants to speed up the web by ditching HTTP
• Go: new open source programming language from Google
• SFLC tech director finds one new GPL violator every day
• First universal programmable quantum computer unveiled
• Examining science on the fringes: vital, but generally wrong
• Nov. 11, 1930: Einstein Gets Ice Cold – Einstein’s Icebox – Cool!
• Using photosynthesis to power hydrogen production
• In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for
• Will probe's upcoming fly-by unlock exotic physics?
• Comet Hunter’s Last Look at Earth Is Haunting
• Impact reveals lunar water by the bucketful
• Scientists confirm abundant water in lunar crater
• Lunar Impactor Finds Clear Evidence of Water Ice on Moon
• NASA sees "significant quantities" of water on the moon
• Pluto 2015: Journey to the Rim of the Solar System
• Two solar sailing trials readied for launch next year
• Propelled by light: the promise and perils of solar sailing
• Mars rover battles for its life
• Spirit's roving chances bleak, team cheered by discoveries
• Troubled asteroid mission stumbles on road home
• NASA’s Scrubbed Escape Pod Glides to New Home – X-38 lifting body finds a retirement home.
• Backward star ain't from around here
• City Streets a Mortal Threat to Pedestrians
• Tuna in peril as catches reach triple the limit
• Extinction Countdown: Tuna fishing kills an albatross every 5 minutes
• Natural Gas Drilling Produces Radioactive Wastewater
• Stop selling out science to commerce
• Yes Men punk US Chamber of Commerce on climate change, sued
• Mini ice age took hold of Europe in months
• Common cold may hold off swine flu
• Less loud sounds can still damage ears
• New Brain Cells May Knock Out Old Memories
• Darpa: Freeze Soldiers to Save Injured Brains
• Bering in Mind: Who says love hurts? Romantic partners alter our perception of pain
• The Peeriodic Table of Illusions
• Human-Chimp Gene Comparison Hints at Roots of Language
• Bones Show Biggest Dinosaurs Had Hot Blood
• Colfer’s Hitchhiker’s Guide Sequel Will Be His Last
• Scott Brown on Why America Is Finally Ready for Doctor Who

Bamberger Ranch Preserve Gets an Observatory

I finally get to show my photo of the XXXXXXXXXXX that David Bamberger embargoed until he could make his official announcement on-line: The Bamberger Ranch Preserve now has an observatory, as you can see below.

That was a 30-second, ISO 400 exposure shot by moonlight using a 10mm lens at f/4.5. Because the auto-focus system on my camera didn't have enough light to operate, the focus was accomplished with a bit of luck and a binary search.

The observatory will be a great addition to the Preserve's education programs, and is located within an easy walk of the the Center (see my panorama of the main room of the Center), where groups of school kids come to spend as many as three days participating in educational activities. For myself, despite the moonlit sky, I was able to see Jupiter’s clouds first-hand, for the first-time in my life.

Weekend Links

• Maryland Voters Test New Cryptographic Voting System – Hmm... Interesting....
• Texas snatches voter system from $863m IBM contract
• Xoie Claims $1 Million Lunar Lander Prize
• 'Space elevator' wins $900,000 NASA prize
• NASA juggles manifest for future Ares test flights
• Video: Aerial View of Ares I-X Flight Test
• Aerial video provides view of Ares 1-X parachute trouble
• Hubble’s New Camera Delivers Another Stunner
• Orbiter camera sees ice-covered Phoenix lander
• Mars rover plans its escape – Spirit not a weather station, yet.
• Ground teams struggle to save Mars orbiter from itself
• Strange Brew at LCROSS's Crash Site
• LRO Image of Apollo 17 Landing Site
• Signature of Antimatter Detected in Lightning
• Ionic batteries could multiply battery life by 11
• How to Keep Planes From Colliding With Lasers
• Nov. 3, 1993: Theremin Fades Out
• Generation specs: Stopping the short-sight epidemic
• Does Vitamin D Improve Brain Function?
• Oldest American artefact unearthed
• Darwin’s Wolf Mystery Solved
• Was life founded on cyanide from space crashes?
• Frozen Antarctic lakes yield new viruses
• Giant crack in Africa formed in just days
• Civil War In Corporate America: Banks Battling The Chamber On Accounting Rules
• Copyright Treaty Is Policy Laundering at Its Finest
• The ACTA Internet provisions: DMCA goes worldwide

Enchanted Rock State Natural Area, Panorama no. 8

This panorama was shot at sunset on December 29, 2008, at Texas’ justly famous Enchanted Rock, a billion-year-old granite dome exposed by eons of erosion. This was shot on one of the boulder strewn slopes, as the sun was rapidly disappearing beneath the horizon. The lighting changed so much during the shoot that I was sure this panorama was a write-off, but this weekend I decided to assemble it anyway, thinking that one or more subsections might be usable and interesting. Surprisingly (to me at least), modern panorama generating software was able to compensate for the continuously changing lighting, and produced, with a little effort, a pristine 360° image. And, because the pano was shot high dynamic range, the ever deepening shadows caused no loss of information.

This was the only panorama I managed to shoot that day. My earlier attempts to shoot a panorama whose centerpiece would have been a boulder about as big as a small house, failed when I had, with great care and not a few misgivings, setup my equipment on the absolute edge of the furthest point of the ledge on which it sat, and found that the boulder still didn’t fit entirely in frame, even with my 10mm lens (which was acting like a 16mm lens on the camera I was using).

I’d planned to spend two days shooting at Enchanted Rock, staying overnight at the Bamberger Ranch in between, but I was so disgusted at that first day’s failure (and the amount of time I wasted in getting there by following an absurd “short cut” to the Rock that Google Maps had selected for me, and the staggering number of people that were there, and the difficulty/danger of climbing to obscure boulders while carrying 40lbs of camera equipment), that after dinner with the Bambergers (and Leroy Petri) I decided to throw in the towel and just go home. At the time, Margaret said she’d like to join me at the Rock for a day of photography, and we’d planned to do that this past summer. Sadly, she died before that could happen.

What’s the line from the Death Cab for Cutie song (What Sarah Said), “every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time”?

I’ll See Your “Monday Moment of Zen” and Raise You...

Old friend Jay Lake offers a “Monday Moment of Zen” photo this week, and, for a change, I think I can get in on the action.... Consider this your “Tuesday Moment of Zen.” © 2007, 2009 by Chris W. Johnson.

Weekend Links

• In Industry First, Voting Machine Company to Publish Source Code – Even if the source code was absolutely complete—representing every element of logic in every piece of hardware in the entire voting system (which isn't going to happen)—and absolutely correct, and absolutely uncorruptible, how would voters, or election officials, know that it was that software running in the machines they vote with? This is a nice gesture, but, ultimately, a meaningless one.
• House, Senate get separate bills to kill net neutrality
• Intel touts NAND-killer breakthrough
• Little, big, and green: a biography of the solid-state disk
• Slim, warm superconductors promise faster electronics
• Quantum gravity theories wiped out by a gamma ray burst
• Baffling Patterns Form in Scientific Sandbox
• Silence! The Last of the Giant Radio Telescopes Is Listening to the Universe
• 3,000 Images Combine for Stunning Milky Way Portrait – It won't really be stunning until we get a much higher-resolution look at it, but it sounds like a great piece of work.
• Huge Explosion Was Biggest Space Rock to Strike Earth Since 1994
• Taking Earth’s Temperature With 30-Mile Thermometer
• NASA assessing parachutes and dented Ares 1-X booster
• Parachute failure causes damage to Ares 1-X booster
• Pad 39B suffers substantial damage from Ares I-X launch – Parachute update
• Asteroid blast reveals holes in Earth's defences
• Little X-Plane Pushes Bottom Edge of the Envelope
• Army’s Robot-Man Walks Like the Real Thing
• Animal Robots: Marine Machines Made in Nature's Image
• Magnetic 'eyesight' helps birds find their way
• A Short History of Vaccine Panic
• The secret history of swine flu
• US swine flu vaccine too late to beat autumn wave
• Swine flu: Eight myths that could endanger your life
• Autoimmune disease cells harnessed to fight cancer
• US FDA says omega-3 oils from GM soya are safe to eat
• Inside a Cellphone Radiation Testing Lab
• Where do ghosts come from?
• Don’t Tell Geico: You May Be a Natural Born Bad Driver
• Clever 'chopped' cars promise cheap electric commuting – Of course, they'll still sit in the same traffic jams as conventional vehicles.
• Probably guilty: Bad mathematics means rough justice
• Daylight Savings Time 2009: When and Why We Fall Back

Drought Plus 10 Inches, Minus Barbecue

I was out at the Bamberger Ranch Preserve this evening for their annual volunteer appreciation gathering. Arriving with the sun low in the sky, but with a little time before sunset, I quickly found the legendary J. David Bamberger and asked for permission to head up into High Lonesome to re-photograph the tanks I showed in my Drought with a Side of Pig posting, early in September. He agreed, and I dashed out of the party just as the food was beginning to show up.

I borrowed a friend's truck (having bummed a ride to ranch), drove out along the ranch's main road, took a right at the misleadingly named Hes' Country Store (it's half museum, half bunkhouse, and not one bit a store), there leaving pavement behind, then bumped and juddered my way up a pair of well-worn, rock strewn, tire tracks into High Lonesome, and eventually parked in my usual spot, halfway up a valley wall. Shouldering my 40 pounds of photographic equipment, I started hiking toward my favorite valley as fast as the terrain would permit. My interest was in in seeing how the tanks had changed after at least 10 inches of rain had fallen in the last month or so.

Regular readers will recognize the photo above of the drought-stricken tank cooking in September's hot afternoon sun. The photo below was taken by twilight this evening. Leaving aside the gentler lighting, though still far from full, the tank is transformed. The bare, burned ground with a shrinking pool of sickly orange water at its center is now a decent-looking body of water, and every bit of grass and other ground cover has surged back to life.

That tank has looked a lot better in the past, for example in April of 2007, as seen below, but the rains have made a huge difference, nonetheless.

Unfortunately, in order to a make-up for the drought's damage, we need even more rain than the latest photo suggests. As you may recall, the tank in a neighboring valley had dried-up completely when I visited it this September:

This evening, seen below from a different angle, that tank is still dry. More than ten inches of rain simply vanished into the bone-dry soil. In exchange, there's a lot more vegetation, but still not a drop of available water.

So, wish us more rain, world. Central Texas is far from recovered from its drought.

* * *

Those pictures turned-out to be more expensive than I expected, by the way. The camera and tripod took a tumble from my shoulder to the ground as I struggled to simultaneously untangle a leg of the tripod from both the branch of a bush on the trail, and one of the little bungee cords on the back of my camera gear backpack. The camera wouldn't power-on after that fall, and only a methodical disassembly and reassembly of all the bits and pieces led to the discovery, to my relief, that the problem was confined to the camera's battery grip. Removing that and going back to single-battery operation brought the camera back from the dead.

Adding hunger to injury, by the time I made it back to the volunteer appreciation party, all of the barbecue, side dishes, and even the cake had been eaten. I had to settle for a plate of beans, and the last fragment of cake – so sad a remnant it was that nobody else had been willing to touch it.

Alas, trying to take a beautiful photo can be an expensive undertaking in a lot of ways, and, while you can bet on the expense, the beauty has a way of being elusive.

* * *

As it happens, my best photo this evening was of the XXXXXXXXXXX, shot hours later by moonlight, but David has embargoed that image until he's ready to announce the XXXXXXXXXXX at some unspecified, future date on his blog.