- Google invests in offshore wind grid project.
- Verizon going for simultaneous voice and data to new CDMA network.
- Spy school coughs up $610,000 for peeking in on students.
- Samsung TAB delayed in Korea.
- Malaysians have the most social network friends.
- Twitter wants one billion users. Meanwhile 75-percent of all tweets are ignored.
- We were almost killed by an asteroid.
- The Richard Branson rocket joyride expected to be open for business next year.
- Palm Pre 2 coming any minute. It will run WebOS.
- Michael Dell may buy back Dell. What?
- No cut and paste on Phone 7.
Right click here and select ‘Save Link As…’ to download the mp3 file.
Shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
Good for Mike…the stockholder model fails. I’d like to see Dell come back to Austin and hire Americans. As if.
I can see it now, Michael is trying to buy the company and he has to open a chat window and discuss it with Betty in India. He wants to know if he can stack those coupon codes and will they ship it for free. You just know the company won’t work when he receives it and will have to return it. Betty will try and up sell him EMC at a substantial discount too. He wants the company in lime green.
A thirty foot rock could take out a modest sized city if it hit it dead center however the government never authorized anyone to look for those.
Good luck to Google on the wind power. I hope it works but some of the reports I’ve read makes it clear wind power is pretty much a hit and miss thing. Pay back depends on how much wind you get and that isn’t a certainty.
The IT department was neither reasonable nor prudent. Turning on the camera to locate a computer, if it was listed as missing, was reasonable but then you recover the computer and deal with it up front as a missing/stolen computer. You don’t use it to do long term observations without consent!
On the small asteroid, read the article on Bad Astronomy:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/
“Video of asteroid near miss from this morning.”
More interesting on the same page:
”
Blogs / Bad Astronomy
Riding the sky
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icstars_leonids_uluruTaking the trash out the other night, I did what I always do: I looked up. The crescent Moon was setting, and I could see the Summer Triangle easily (after a few minutes, when my eyes adjusted a bit, I could see the Milky Way piercing through, too).
As I walked back in, I happened to turn to the east. I could see the big square that marks the constellation of Pegasus, and to its lower left, the two curved lines of stars denoting Andromeda. Instantly, I saw something wrong. Andromeda doesn’t have two stars so close together, I thought. Ah, I realized a second later, one of them must be a satellite.
Sure enough, as I watched, one of the stars could be seen to be moving. I had a moment of disorientation when it was hard to tell which star was moving away from the other, but after a few seconds it was obvious which was the star and which was the satellite.
It looked to be about second magnitude to my eye — bright, but nothing special — and moving quite slowly, slower than the space station does at that altitude off the horizon. Must be in a higher orbit, I thought, maybe twice as high? A bit higher? It was moving to the southeast, I noted.
cosmos2219_passI went inside, washed my hands (I was taking out the trash, after all) and got online. Firing up Heavens-Above.com, I quickly found a passel of satellites that had just gone overhead. Looking at the sky tracks of each, one jumped out: Cosmos 2219, an old spent Russian booster rocket. The path across the sky matched what I saw pretty well.
Not only that, the orbit is listed as being about 830 km (500 miles) above the Earth’s surface. That’s much higher than the space station’s orbit of 360 km (215 miles). Sure enough, that would account for the slower moving satellite I saw; the higher up the orbit is, the weaker Earth’s gravity pulls on an orbiting object, and the slower it moves. And my initial guess of the actual orbital height wasn’t that far off.
And the pièce de résistance? As I watched the satellite move, I thought to myself, the Sun set over an hour ago. That means that right around that part of the sky — mentally flagging a region near where Jupiter was — the satellite’ll fade out.
Boom. Right on the money. Satellites are up so high that even when it’s dark on the ground, they are in sunlight. As they orbit, they can move into the Earth’s shadow and fade out. The height off the horizon of the edge of the shadow depends on how far below the horizon the Sun is (draw yourself a picture, or use a flashlight for the Sun and a ball for the Earth and experiment). So I was able to eyeball where the object would fade away, and like clockwork, it was right on schedule.
I know I’m a scientist, and something of a dork, but it’s still undeniable: science is everywhere. It’s all around us, if you just take a moment to notice. From things too small to see (washing my hands to get rid of any germs from the trash) from things almost too big to grasp (the Milky Way laid out above me, sprawling across the sky a hundred thousand light years wide).
Had I put the trash bin on the street and turned clockwise instead of counterclockwise, I might’ve missed that satellite, never predicted in my head when the Sun would set for it. But seen or unseen, it would have done what it did nonetheless. The Universe rolls on with or without us.
But as I stood there, as I had so many times before, it reaffirmed what I know, what I’ve known for so long:
This is a great ride.
I’m keeping my eyes open. I don’t want to miss anything.
Leonids over Uluru image courtesy Vic and Jen Winter at ICSTARS.
October 13th, 2010 7:57 AM by Phil Plait in Astronomy, Cool stuff, Piece of mind, Science, Space | 1 Comment »
Conan, what is best in astronomy?
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While I’m more of a Craig Ferguson man myself, Conan O’Brien has his moments. Like, for example, here:
Of course, if you want a talk-show host to do your astronomy homework, I’m thinking continuous, absorption, and emission spectra are the least of your worries.
Tip o’ the spectrograph to Krelnik, who crushes his enemies, sees them driven before him, and hears the lamentation of their women.
October 12th, 2010 12:53 PM Tags: Conan O’Brien
by Phil Plait in Astronomy, Humor | 27 Comments »
Video of asteroid near miss from this morning
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Yesterday I wrote about asteroid 2010 TD54, a small rock 5-10 meters in diameter that was due to buzz by the Earth this morning at 11:25 UT. Apparently all went well, and it passed us as predicted.
Amateur astronomer Patrick Wiggins was able to grab some images of the asteroid shortly before closest approach and put them together into this nifty animation:
[I recommend viewing at the 480 resolution; it looks much nicer.]
Nice. He used a 36 cm (14 inch) Celestron telescope with a sophisticated astronomical digital camera to get these. Each exposure was only five seconds long, giving you an idea of how quickly this rock was zipping along, even more than two hours before it actually passed us. He also has an animation where he was able to track the asteroid better, so it looks nearly stationary while stars zip by.
Images like this one can actually be pretty important: they can be used to nail down the orbit of the asteroid. The orbit is calculated mathematically using images of the asteroid over time. Uncertainty in the measurements, the exact position of the asteroid, the user’s location, and more can all add up to the orbit being imprecisely known. That means that we might be able to predict where it is in the near future, but as time goes on the prediction gets fuzzier. The more observations we get, the more we can smooth out those issues.
Also see:
“Solar storms coming our way this week?”
Think about satellite interference.