BAN #60: NASA in 8k, Climate hope, Peryton place

Link o’ the ‘letter

Just a fun link I found or someone told me about

This is pretty cool: NASA has sent an 8k camera up to the International Space Station. They made a promotional video using it, and shocker, the resolution is ridiculously high:

I hope someone up there thinks to point it out the window for an hour or two hundred.

Grumble: Weirdly, when I tried to watch this in 8k the video keep stopping and starting, even though it had buffered a good 20 seconds or more in advance. I’m thinking it was just too much for either my processor or my RAM… but I have a pretty new Mac which I loaded with their fastest CPU and 12 Gb of RAM. That doesn’t bode well for being able to watch this smoothly.

Still, forward thinking, eh? 4k wasn’t widely used a couple of years ago and now I see TVs equipped for it everywhere. So it’s a good idea for NASA to be doing this. 8k won’t be going away.

Is it hot in here, or is it just anthropogenic global warming?

Climate change is real, y’all[Also, politics]

So the Dems took the House — hurray! — but the GOP strengthened its stranglehold on the Senate — boo! As I write this Trump is obstructing justice left and right, clearly in terror of what the House will do once the Dems take the gavel in January.

But as I noted over and again, the important issue here is that the Dems now can control the committees, including the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. This has been run by anti-science weasels for years now, but Eddie Bernice Johnson will be the new Chair, and she has been incredible the past few years holding the lame duck Lamar Smith’s feet to the fire when he was busy attacking NOAA and climate science.

So I’m hopeful. There are lots of problems to fix, like several Republicans who were actually moving on climate but lost their seats. I’m still thinking about all that, including the loss by John Culberson who was the champion for the NASA Europa mission. There’s a lot of stuff going on that’ll take a while to settle out.

But, while I was reading Twitter anxiously on Tuesday night, climate scientist Michael Mann tweeted a link to a very interesting site called Drawdown.org, created by a large group of researchers looking into ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They put together a comprehensive list of 100 best ways to do this, and it’s really worth a few minutes to peruse.

Perhaps the most surprising way to reduce GHGs is… to educate girls. Yup! It’s true. This is a great way to do it, in fact. For example, educated women tend to have fewer children, and their families tend to use fewer resources. This also means it’s a good way to keep our population from climbing faster than we can support the people being born.

This didn’t surprise me at all; I learned quite a bit about this when my team was researching population issues for season 1 of “Bill Nye Saves the World”. It surprised me at the time, but as we looked into it more the logic really shone through.

Anyway, that list fills me with tentative hope; much of it is implementable without too much trouble. The problem, of course, is convincing people of it, which means politics. So who knows? We don’t have a huge amount of time to fix our ways, and I’d hate to wait another damn two years to kick the anti-science GOP to the curb in the Senate, too.

I learned a thing!

Wherein I learn a thing

Astronomer Emily Levesque is writing a book right now called “The Last Stargazers”, which will feature stories from observational astronomers about their adventures. She contacted me to do a formal interview (which will be in a couple of weeks), and while we were chatting she told me about something I had heard about but didn’t know had a name: Perytons.

These are not a weird subatomic particle, but actually the name given to an odd set of very brief bursts of energy detected at the iconic Parkes radio telescope in Australia. They lasted a few milliseconds each, and were baffling astronomers. Weirdly, they seemed very similar to Fast Radio Bursts, another transient phenomenon that astronomers were (and still are) trying to nail down. The bursts were “frequency swept”, which means they rapidly changed in brightness and frequency (or wavelength, of you prefer). This is similar to a “chirp” seen in radio or in gravitational waves.

What I love about perytons is that they are not astrophysical sources. Decidedly not: After some experimentation, they found that the source of these fast bursts was… microwave ovens located on the observatory grounds.

Yes, seriously. If the microwave door were opened prematurely and the telescope pointed in the right direction, the brief burst of microwaves generated could escape and be detected by the telescope!

I love it. You can read more about this at Centauri Dreams, or the journal paper if you prefer the technical explanation.

The word, BTW, comes from a mythical beast, a winged elk that casts the shadow of a human. The idea is that you have one thing that looks like another with an ambiguous origin.

I hadn’t heard of either the myth or the full story of the explanation, so there you go. I learned a thing!

P.S. You can and should follow Emily on Twitter.

Et alia

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