“In November 2011, the Russian space agency launched the much-anticipated Mars probe called Phobos-Grunt (which means “Phobos dirt” or “ground”), which would go to the Red Planet, soft-land a probe on the tiny moon Phobos, and return a sample of the surface to Earth. Unfortunately, the booster that would take it from Earth orbit into a Mars-intercept trajectory failed to fire, stranding the spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. Atmospheric drag has doomed the mission; it will most likely burn up sometime in the next two weeks.

Phobos-Grunt is visible to the naked eye as a bright star if it happens to pass overhead.”

Doomed Russian Mars probe seen from the ground.

Inventor Thomas Edison captured the event on film. He would release it later that year under the title Electrocuting an Elephant. A means of killing initially discussed was hanging. However, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals protested and other ways were considered. Edison then suggested electrocution with alternating current, which had been used for the execution of humans since 1890

Topsy was fed carrots laced with 460 grams of potassium cyanide before the deadly current from a 6,600-volt AC source was sent coursing through her body. She was dead in seconds. The event was witnessed by an estimated 1,500 people and Edison’s film of the event was seen by audiences throughout the United States.

When Luna Park burned down in 1944, the fire was referred to as “Topsy’s Revenge”

Article From Wired

If the weather is right in the coming days, you may be able to see the Quadrantids coming around as many as 200 meteors per hour. Look north between the Big Dipper and Boötes, the plowman.

The shower is named for a defunct constellation. They do tend to come and go. If you only use Chinese astrological maps, you’ll find the shower located in the “Purple forbidden enclosure”

Apparently the Quadrantids have their own website. this one is better

Being Dependent upon things we don’t understand is nothing new.

It’s only what we are dependent upon that changes.

We used to depend on gods to bring the meat and potatoes.

Today we depend on virtual widgets collecting wireless data from weather satellites that predict the probability of rain.

1. Increasing complexity does not necessarily imply progress

2. Often complexity is unnecessary, and when it is, you can bet someone is gaining from it.

If we were all more selective with our complexities, we would be in a much better predicament.

————————————————

At MIT, Paul Griffith wrote a thesis entitled “self replicating machines”, a clever idea taken from nature.

in nature, it was the ribozyme that was believed to be the springboard to all self-replicating life. Imagine a string of data that can copy itself. And then… complexity and possibility.

Anyway back to Paul Griffith, in a recent interview, the guardian newspaper tried to nail down exactly how much energy the internet as a machine was consuming. The best estimates from independent studies is that the internet uses 1-3% of total world energy consumption.

Paul scoffed at the idea, noting all the complexities and externalities that don’t get included in the count. Says he, “Part of the reason humanity is in the situation it is with climate change is that we weren’t measuring how we were using energy and understanding the consequences.”

Notice he says humanity, not life…. life will be just fine.

Determining whether or not animals can be creative would require that we define what creativity means. In the meantime… in Thailand, elephants paint pictures and play improvisational fusion jazz. In New Guinea, male Bower birds collect tasty berries and flowers of bling to uniquely adorn their low impact love crib.

One observation of note, especially about the bower bird… or the bird of paradise… or even among men and women of leisure…

in any given habitat, as threats to survival decrease, the complexity of imaginitive creativity increases

There’s an 8 minute program from PRI available here    where you can listen to elephants rocking out and scientists being obtuse.

“When a problem occurs, ask ‘why’ five times to try to find the source of the problem, then put into place something to prevent the problem from recurring”      

-Sakichi Toyoda (founder of Kabushiki-gaisha Toyota Jidō Shokki)

Toyota began as a Loom manufacturer. In 1924 the company went viral when they invented the Type G machine. It was such an advancement in technology because it had the ability to shut itself off when it detected a single error. In 1933 Toyota took this inventive philosophy to  the automobile market and the rest of the story is magnificent as pleather.

Ever since it’s beginnings the Toyota company has maintained an office of “sensei”s that help with problem solving and better design through Jidoka, a kind of ko’an automation exercise. This framework of business model coupled with a strong sense of responsiblity among workers has proven to be a great service to humanity.

Case in point- the Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle, and Toyota’s ball of yarn.

The Hospital, hemorrhaging money and  overrun by megalomaniac doctors who always knew best, discovered that the efficiency they thought they had over their organization was in actuality just a great disservice to suffering patients.

There’s a great audio story about how the sensei’s were sought out and saved the day over at 99% invisible

Scientists at Notre Dame have developed “Paint on solar cells” using nanotechnology and the tears of the sun. This will have sociocultural effects that we cannot possibly foresee at this time. Coming soon, Solar skin… goodbye food. Details here

Is Jupiter Eating Its Own Heart? – ScienceNOW.

“In this study, the atmospheric concentrations of psychotropic compounds recorded in Italy were plotted vs. a series of criminal statistics. Meaningful links were found between atmospheric cocaine and the amount of drugs seized, the number of drug related crimes and the demand for clinical treatment recorded in the Italian regions. Atmospheric cocaine and cannabinoids also seemed to be correlated with tumour insurgence and mental disease frequency, respectively. However, further investigations are necessary to elucidate/explain/clarify if the behaviours observed for cocaine vs. the parameters usually adopted to estimate drug abuse prevalence (correspond to an effective relationships)/are directly linked, and to understand why the same approach failed when applied to cannabinoids. Moreover, according to our study illicit drugs are suspected to promote long-term ill health effects even when present at low concentrations the air.”

from

Cocaine Concentrations in the Air Above Italian Cities Correlate with Drug Use.

I was taking in some backlogged CoasttoCoastAM last night. The host was the ailing Ian Punnett. If you are a faithful listener, you well know that Ian stroked out on air a while back and now he’s being put out to graze more permanently as he seems to be going deaf.

So the discussion arose that human capacity to evolve further intelligence may have a limit. I looked up the article that started the broohaa, a well written piece from Scientific American writer Douglas Fox. I got the full low down from the in-house neuroscientist at The Southern Fried Science Network ( Click HERE).

In Brief, the idea is as follows

“Human intelligence may be close to its evolutionary limit. Various lines of research suggest that most of the tweaks that could make us smarter would hit limits set by the laws of physics. Brain size, for instance, helps up to a point but carries diminishing returns: brains become energy-hungry and slow. Better “wiring” across the brain also would consume energy and take up a disproportionate amount of space. Making wires thinner would hit thermodynamic limitations similar to those that affect transistors in computer chips: communication would get noisy.

“Humans, however, might still achieve higher intelligence collectively. And technology, from writing to the Internet, enables us to expand our mind outside the confines of our body.”

The argument is interesting as it brings into light some great ideas, but I was a bit befuddled by the assumptions it draws upon and the conclusions it leads to.

ARTICLE :First, intelligence is really hard to define, so for disscussion sake we assume it means processing speed. Because of the laws of physics, the energy requirements and the size of the proteins that make thought possible, there’s speed limit.

THOUGHT RESPONSE: So we’ll outsource. Interventionist evolution means machines do whatever processing we can’t handle. Besides Intelligence, whatever it is, is more than processing speed.

ARTICLE: Second, the demands of higher intelligence that have been produced by nature thus far, have led to larger brains with more distinct, more specialized regions in those brains.  It’s the limited space, the limited resources and the limited cellular functions that have made our brains the way they are and make us think the way we do.

THOUGHT RESPONSE: Wow, Marshall Mcluhan was right.

But we’re more than brain, and while Fox postulates that emergent intelligence and possibly the internet may one day complement the built in factory settings, I am a little surprised that the external hard drive option didn’t come up. Nor was there any hint that we may not have the monopoly on intelligence. After all the internet is the most successful machine ever built… if you don’t count dolphins.

We may just be one stepping stone (or rabbit trail) towards higher enlightenment.

For more wiring nightmares press here

How you express and package your genes
is just as important
as what they code for.

Every gene has a promoter that is responsible
for turning it on,
turning it up,
turning it off.

these promoters are influenced by
environmental signals, endocrine directives… other genes

the products are all very similar from person to person
the integration and orchestration make all the differences

baba shiv is a bald guy from stanford business school
you can see for yourself here

baba made an experiment
he asked participants to remember a number
and then walk down the hall and report the number
on the way down the hall
a woman in a polka dot dress
stopped them, thanked them for participating
and offered them some cake or fruit

people chose cake more often (significantly more often)
when they were given a large 7 digit number to remember

people that had a smaller number to remember
chose the fruit
implying that the higher rational centers of the brain had more bandwidth to
still be rational

so when the brain is pre-occupied
with a lot of rational gymnastics:
facts, figures, etc…
then decisions are more often made
based on emotions rather than reason

is that why dictators and populists come to power during hard times?
what happens when we’re bombarded with information 24/7?

i need to do more yoga.

*Painting above is Marco Fusinato
Mass Black Implosion (Agglomeration, Anestis Logothetis) 2007

when a queen bee
gets to be
dysfunctional, disinterested, demented

the workers, all the disgruntled femme-bots
who have been quietly nursing her kids
and keeping up the hive,
they give each other a wink
and spring on the queen

Balling up the queen,
they flap their wings incessantly
this raises
the temperature and CO2
to the point that she expires

The new virgin queen
who has been, up until this time,
secretly feeding on the royal jelly
now presents herself as the heir apparent
and decides to throw a lecherous party
to celebrate

The royal jelly is some potent stuff
normal honey is just regurgitated pollen
but  jelly royale has some other secretions in it
from the worker bees’ hypopharyngeal glands

there are enzymes in this jelly
that interact with the larvae dna
it will turn off the enzymes that usually turn off ovarian development
thus the new queen becomes THE keeper of the ovary

interesting how food can turn genes on and off. I wonder what kool-aid does?

S*it hits the fan

you try to respond and cope…
You’re told to keep a positive attitude-
it was part of the job description
it was step 2 in the troubleshooting guide
it’ll make you well

but it doesn’t
and then you start thinking you’re not trying enough
you blame yourself
and it gets harder to be positive

then one day you give in
and accept reality
and move on
and you discover that irrational exuberance
only complicates

The pretense of happiness
may be the more detrimental and dangerous
than we realize.

This is the second time in a year that the international space station has been backed up, My hunch is one of the Discovery guests has some contraband cherry bombs, either that or Keith Moon is haunting the US waste and hygiene compartment. The last time this happened, it was a broken pump. Repair took weeks and totalled 19 million dollars. This time the problem arose when six liters of 2001 flush fluid somehow leaked into the wrong compartments. Such leakage could be ruinous for a number of important experiments on-going in the next room, however having people in orbit with a limited number of toilets sounds pretty experimental. (via BBC)

With 13 people currently squatting on the ISS, i’m sure that there’s talk of mutiny. The Russians have their own toilet, the people who came up on the Discovery have their in-flight lavatory. NASA believes that there is enough duct tape on board to get the toilet back online soon.

]]> http://cultandpaste.com/2009/07/20/youre-just-going-to-have-to-hold-it-till-we-get-home/feed/ 0 cultandpaste iss space station toilet http://images.spaceref.com/news/2008/toilet.jpg http://www.qsl.net/dg7ro/iss/pict/iss_schema.jpg http://cultandpaste.com/2009/07/09/newly-released-tapes-from-july-1969-moon-landing-the-russians-almost-crash-the-party/ http://cultandpaste.com/2009/07/09/newly-released-tapes-from-july-1969-moon-landing-the-russians-almost-crash-the-party/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:50:02 +0000 cultandpaste http://cultandpaste.com/?p=1404 ]]>

If you still believe that the Lunar landings were filmed in AREA 51, your yarn has just become a little more discombobulated… as in the way a ravenous T-Rex discombobulates the Garden of Eden.

On July 3, 2009, The Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England released tape recordings it had been “withholding” from the Apollo 11 master tracks. In these radio transmissions, it is evident that the Russians were landing a robot the very same day that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were moonwalking, and they could have done a drive by and squashed the 15,264 kg Eagle module.

So apparently the Russians were there the whole time. When word got out that the Americans were going to send humanoids in 1969, they rushed up a robot (Luna 15) so they’d be around if the Americans screwed up. So while Neil was taking photos of his footprints and Buzz was taking communion in the camper,  the Russians were close by, ready to crash the Intergalactic Planetary party. Being good Communists, they decided instead to share the moment.

I. TIME WARP

In January 1969, the Russian space program was rolling. It had just docked two manned space capsules together.  Chalk it up- Sputnik, Laika the dog,  Yuri the space cowboy…. and oh yeah, best of all….   a remote Russian probe (Luna 9) that LANDED ON THE MOON on Feb 3, 1966. The machine snapped a bunch of photos, sent a few messages and then turned off after 8 hours. Note: No hammer and sickle planted.

Everyone was in a hurry to get to the moon, but the Russians planned on sending robots first. They were scared that a failed man mission would be too costly in the Western Press. The problem with Lunar expeditions was not getting there, It was getting back. The Russians thought the Americans were going to get stuck on the surface and not be able to take off again i.e. a crash landing would mess up the capsule and it wouldn’t be able to take off again. The Luna program was designed to land on the moon’s surface, grab some fairy dust and report back to the space commisars. Thus a better design for the ultimate worker’s spaceship.

The Americans had their eyes and ears open to all this traffic and they quickly realized that, as capitalists,  they couldn’t afford to lose. A communist moon would demoralize the population. Yet the problems and risks were large. Somebody high up in some office had to decide that Neil, Buzz and that other guy would just have to risk it. Take one for the team. Was it Nixon, Kissinger, Wernher von Braun? Any one of them would have been willing to offer up Apollo 11 as a burnt offering in the name of American progress.

In the end, it did pay off for the Americans. On the radio, the Russians gave the US its flight plan and also commented in real time about the missions… whether they thought the ship was coming down to fast, or where their probe was. What could have been a Cold War disaster, turned out to be competitive people working together.

II TIME LINE

USSR July 17, 1969-  Russian probe, Luna 15, has already entered Lunar orbit and is looking for a good place to crash.

USA July 21st at 02:56 UTC-  the Eagle lands in Tranquility Base. Buzz and Neil get on the horn and call everybody back home. They run around for 2.5 hours and then get back in their Winnebago and take a 7 hour nap.

USSR July 21st 2009 at 15:47 UT – The Luna 15 begins its own descent at in the Mare Crisium Crater (notice its proximity to the Sea of Tranquility). The landing did not go so well and within 4 minutes the craft was kaput.

USA July 21st at 17:54 UTC- the Eagle takes off to redock with the mothership.

How complex and bizarre things are.

Those pincer claws can grab for extra footing. Those small hairs adhere via surface tension. The smallest act as taste sensors. That’s why the fly has to constantly wipe its feet, everything gets stuck to them and then they don’t stick and sense the right way.

A team of Scientists in Stuttgart, Germany watched hundreds of videotaped detachment events at a slow speed. What they found is that the fly has not one strategy, but four, for freeing up a stuck foot. Pushing the foot away from the body tends to scrunch up the footpads, popping them free. They can also twist the pads loose, pry them up with the help of the claws, or just yank them away from the surface with brute force.

“Walking on a ceiling is very different from normal walking because the gravity tends to pull an inverted insect away instead of pressing it to the surface” explains Dr. Stanislav Gorb of the Max Planck Institute. “Our results, in combination with the knowledge on the microstructure of pads, provide important inspiration for mimicking locomotion of wall and ceiling walking machines, which use micropatterned polymer feet for generating adhesion”.

Gorb’s group is now working on modeling various materials to scale fly feet up to a human size, so that we too can dance across the ceiling. Well, probably the Delta force guys first though.

(via EurekaAlert)

Though Michael Wandelmaier’s woolly whales are long gone, the Right Whale is still holding on… just barely. It was dubbed “right” because it was the right type to kill, i.e. it floated when jabbed.  Moby Dick was a Right whale. These mammals of the sea live to be 60+ years and their communities are run by old, post-menopausal females, esteemed for their sharp memories and watchful eyes. Yet these communities are growing smaller and smaller as local ecosystems are increasingly erased.

When I say communities, what I really mean is culture. Whale culture. Certain pods, within the same species, have habits, tendencies and rituals that are unique to the pod. Skill sets are passed down with nurturing. Whales are a lot more like us than we let on. For instance, some pods have childcare options and some don’t. Some groups sing for certain festivities where others won’t. Some pods are friendly to mama’s boys.

NOTE-  Right whales have the largest testicles in the animal kingdom: each weighing a little over one ton (500 kg).

Size matters. When these whales mate, they mate en masse (a whale orgy). As females take on more than one sperm type at a time, it’s the sperm not the whales that have to compete. Those males with the largest semen production, therefore have the greater chance of winning the egg. Dr. Elin Kelsey has just written a book entitled, Watching Giants: The Secret Life of Whales in which she delves into enlightening whale details that we’ve been always wanted to know but were afraid to ask.

With the technology of underwater tracking doodads and satellite gadgetry, we now stand on the brink of truly realizing the wisdom of nature. Even today news of test tube sperm is breaking through the headlines. Of course, this very same march of  “progress” is about to obliterate it all too. We need to “smart” better.

(via TDW)