...12:34:56 07-08-09.

Previously.

The Extinction Oscillator

Using the revised timescales and Fourier analysis, Rohde and Muller looked for a periodic signal in the history of biodiversity. They were looking for evidence of a 26-million-year extinction cycle that had been hinted at in the 1980s; the strong peak in their power spectrum indicating a 62-million-year cycle was a surprise. We found evidence of the same cycle in three more data sets.

Nothing known in the motion of the Earth itself can make a 62-million-year cycle. Further, the laws of celestial mechanics rule out any object orbiting the Sun with such a long period; it would be so distant that the gravity of other stars would pull it away. But other astronomical cycles are still in play.

It takes about 200 million years for the Sun to complete one orbit around the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Moreover, the galaxy is a thin disk, and there is also a motion along a vertical direction. As our solar system slowly orbits the Milky Way's center, it oscillates through the galactic plane with a period of around 65 million years. When we move up in the disk, we are pulled back down by gravity, coasting past the midpoint, then rising back up again, akin to a weight bobbing up and down on a spring.

Was this the missing mechanism? In fact, Rohde and Muller had considered this and dismissed it, for the same reason almost anyone would: One would think that any effect would occur when we passed through the disk of the galaxy, or perhaps when we got very far away from it. But that would happen twice per cycle, every 30 million years or so, which doesn't explain the 62-million-year signal.

It turns out that the biodiversity minima of the 62-million-year cycle happens when the Sun is "bobbed up" on only one side of the galaxy, when the solar system is on the disk's upper, "north" side. The galaxy's north side lies toward the constellation Virgo, as well as the largest concentration of mass in our neighborhood, the Local Supercluster some 60 million light-years away. This supercluster is so massive that its gravity pulls our galaxy toward it at a velocity of about 200 kilometers per second.

As our galaxy falls into the Local Supercluster, it should disturb this gas and create a shock wave, like the bow shock of a jet plane. Shocks in hot gas at such high speeds generate cascades of high-energy subatomic particles and radiation called "cosmic rays." These should be showering the north side of the galaxy's disk. We are protected by the galactic magnetic field, much as the Earth's magnetic field protects our planet. When we rise to the north side, we are less protected -- and the ensuing flux of cosmic rays contains particles of such energy that they can reach the Earth's surface.

dreadwhimsy writes:

Looking back, was the short enslavement of humanity by our alien overlords, Mieux-Mieux and Praxis, really such a "reign of terror," the way the cable news media's trying portray it?

Let's not re-write history. It wasn't all that bad.

"Now I'm not saying I believe in stealing moon rocks or that shit. Don't get me wrong." "Yeah, we respect moon rocks and all." "But if I was gonna be a moon rock thief... I'd be Mickey and Mallory."

Building 31 North is one of the few buildings on earth constructed under Class 100 standards -- it is a structure that can withstand 1000 years of water submersion, among other durability metrics that should not be tested this side of Armageddon. [...]

In the bathroom, when Thad and Tiffany put on their wetsuits, they also stopped to check their breathing apparatus. The moon rocks were in a chamber devoid of oxygen in order to keep the rocks from rotting by oxidation. They would have 15 minutes of air supplied from their tanks once they entered the nitrogen-filled chamber, past the airlock. [...]

Thad and Tiffany had only 3 minutes to crack the safe, or they wouldn't have enough air to get back outside. As the seconds crept onward, Thad continued to struggle with the code, so he quickly moved to plan B, which involved unbolting the heavy safe from the ground, loading it on to a small dolly and carting it back out to the car. [...]

The samples they took were from every Apollo mission, ever. Sometime between the heist and its resolution, Tiffany and Thad arranged the moon rocks on a bed -- and had sex amongst them.

A Battle to Preserve Wardenclyffe, Tesla's Bold Failure

A science group on Long Island wants to turn the 16-acre site into a Tesla museum and education center, and hopes to get the land donated to that end. But the owner, the Agfa Corporation, says it must sell the property to raise money in hard economic times. The company's real estate broker says the land, listed at $1.6 million, can "be delivered fully cleared and level," a statement that has thrown the preservationists into action.

Also: Sherpa Who Led Neil Armstrong To Moon Dead At 71

NASA recruited Dorje from a lunar-savvy band of coastal Sherpas outside Cape Canaveral. The small tribe is locally known for its proficiency in high-altitude work and its ability to survive in the harsh regions around the moon. Recognized for his innate skill at navigating the upper stratosphere, Dorje was chosen by John Glenn to be lead guide on the 1962 Mercury-Atlas 6 mission. Dorje worked with NASA cartographers for months to map out his people's ancient navigational route to the moon, which, until that time, was known only through oral tradition.

Space Solar Power

PG&E is seeking approval from state regulators for a power purchase agreement with Solaren Corp., a Southern California company that has contracted to deliver 200 megawatts of clean, renewable power over a 15 year period.

Solaren says it plans to generate the power using solar panels in earth orbit, then convert it to radio frequency energy for transmission to a receiving station in Fresno County. From there, the energy will be converted to electricity and fed into PG&E's power grid.

I haven't found anything that explains how the power transfer works, anyone know? Is it an orbital death ray that heats a boiler on the ground, or what?

Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe

The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.

There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale. [...]

According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people. [...] The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. "From the surveys I've done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more," says Kappenman. "A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two." Within a month, then, the handful of spare transformers would be used up. The rest will have to be built to order, something that can take up to 12 months.

Even when some systems are capable of receiving power again, there is no guarantee there will be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. Coal-fired power stations usually keep reserves to last 30 days, but with no transport systems running to bring more fuel, there will be no electricity in the second month.

With no power for heating, cooling or refrigeration systems, people could begin to die within days. There is immediate danger for those who rely on medication. Lose power to New Jersey, for instance, and you have lost a major centre of production of pharmaceuticals for the entire US. Perishable medications such as insulin will soon be in short supply.

Hurricane Katrina's societal and economic impact has been measured at $81 billion to $125 billion. According to the NAS report, the impact of what it terms a "severe geomagnetic storm scenario" could be as high as $2 trillion. And that's just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years.

Previously, previously.

If you're like me, you've been seeing blog posts about "OMG it's time_t 1234567890!!" for the last two weeks. Stupid decimalists. There weren't nearly as many posts when time_t hit 0x40000000, and that's a far more interesting number.

Anyway. It's in about three hours.

perl -le 'print time'
perl -le 'print scalar localtime(1234567890)'

3:31:30 PM PST, today. Please make a note of it.

The Space Power Facility at NASA Glenn Research Center's Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio, houses the world's largest vacuum chamber. It measures 100 feet in diameter and is a towering 122 feet tall. The facility is currently undergoing construction to support Orion crew exploration vehicle testing in 2010. Making its first flights early in the next decade, Orion is part of the Constellation Program to send human explorers back to the moon, and then onward to Mars and other destinations in the solar system.

The dozens of ways that scientists, as well as crackpots, have proposed to geoengineer the world's climate won't all be equally effective. In fact, some of them, particularly the ones that rely on sucking up carbon dioxide instead of blocking out solar radiation, will hardly have any impact at all, a new study in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics found.

"By 2050, only stratospheric aerosol injections or sunshades in space have the potential to cool the climate back toward its pre-industrial state," earth scientists Tim Lenton and Naomi Vaughan of East Anglia University in England write.

Long, Stretchy Carbon Nanotubes

Currently, the Cambridge team can make about 1 gram of the new carbon material per day, which can stretch to 18 miles in length. "The key thing is that the process essentially makes carbon into smoke, but because the smoke particles are long thin nanotubes, they entangle and hold hands," Windle said. "We are actually making elastic smoke, which we can then wind up into a fiber."

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

According to Bulletin C of the International Earth Rotation Service:

A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2008. The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be:

2008 December 31, 23h 59m 59s
2008 December 31, 23h 59m 60s
2009 January     1,   0h   0m   0s

The difference between UTC and the International Atomic Time TAI is:

from 2006 January 1, 0h UTC, to 2009 January 1 0h UTC : UTC-TAI = - 33s from 2009 January 1, 0h UTC, until further notice           : UTC-TAI = - 34s

This means that tomorrow, 3:59:59 PM PST will be followed by 3:59:60 PM PST prior to the advent of 4:00:00 PM PST.

Previously, previously.

I want to believe that Ellis just makes these things up. But he cites references.

Gaia Has A Bumhole

So I wake up this afternoon to Alex Steffen informing me that We're All Doomed. To wit, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com was telling me that permafrost on the Arctic seabed has been warmed away, allowing vast underground pockets of methane to ascend in great "chimneys," causing the sea to foam and scientists to fall over in horror because methane is a greenhouse gas twenty times better at its planet-cooking job than good old CO2. These underground deposits were lidded over before the last ice age, apparently, and would have stayed bunged up if, ha ha, there hadn't been rapid climate change in the Arctic over the last twenty years.

Should all concerns be confirmed, it appears that we're all going to die from the escape of monstrous planetary farts from beyond history.

Funnily enough, though, Spook Turds From The Bottom Of The Sea are washing up on the shores of New Zealand. Now, this is New Zealand for you: a six foot long barnacled white lump of fatty crap turns up on the beach. What do the locals do?

Mrs Wilkie was keen to cut the greasy lump into blocks and sell it as moisturising sunblock.

Because that's the first thing you think of when an alien turd the size of a Smartcar plonks itself on the sand. Not "what in hell did that come out of?" But "can I screw a few dollars out of people by conning them into rubbing sea-monster shit on their skin?" You can at least rely on the English to try and screw it or smoke it first.

I can't yet construct a workable theory explaining that these things were fired out of an underground sphincter in the Arctic. But I'd like to, if only to make James Lovelock swallow his tongue. Wouldn't it be lovely to explain to him that we discovered where all the indigestible trans fats that we place into the earth in the form of dead people actually go?