An asteroid 400 meters across is set to ‘skim’ Earth on November 8th, passing with in the Moon’s orbit. This will give astronomers (and everyone else) the chance to see the asteroid (designated 2005 YU55) ‘up close’ in a way that would normally require a space mission to achieve.
Such asteroids are estimated to come close to the Earth every 25 years, but this is the first time we have had such advance warning; this is largely due to the work of the Near Earth Object (NEO) program of NASA. The NEO team was set up to detect and track potentially hazardous objects (such as asteroids and comets) that could be a threat to Earth.
2005 YU55 isn’t a hazard. At closest approach it will be around 320,000 kilometers away from us; which astronomically speaking is a close call but not anything to worry ourselves about. That said, I confidently predict that we’ll be reading about how it’s going to cause the end-of-civilisation-as-we-know-it in a few days time.
Where’s Bruce Willis when you need him?
Research from Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science shows that the hole in the ozone layer is linked to climate change all the way to the equator. The results link the hole to changes in air circulation systems and rainfall patterns.
This is a startling discovery and one entirely missing from studies of climate change modelling and investigations. If the study is backed up, it could have huge impacts on the sources of climate change and call in to question the role that greenhouse gas emissions really play.
Naturally, we can rely on the climate-change deniers to use this to attack the whole notion of anthropomorphic climate change. But whether it’s ozone depletion or carbon emissions, it’s still anthropomorphic.
It also doesn’t alter the need for us to change our habits. Environmental issues are connected with efficiency and responsible use of limited resources, not just ‘tree-hugging’ for the sake of it.
The new “Terror Alert” system for the U.S. has just two levels instead of the old system that had five colours ranging from Green to Red (Highest). The new states will be ‘Elevated’ and ‘Imminent’.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is reported as saying that the level is currently at an “elevated baseline” and went on to explain that the threat is -
at its highest since Sept. 11, 2001 because of the increasing number and types of international and homegrown threats. This does not mean there is a specific threat of an imminent attack.
How transparent can you get?
First they use highly charged words designed to communicate that a threat level is higher than ‘average’ and can’t describe any other situation. Secondly they then describe the ‘baseline’ as ‘elevated’.
Okay so a baseline by definition can’t be ‘elevated’, otherwise it’s not a ‘baseline’. But I guess that just wouldn’t scare people enough and ‘imminent’ doesn’t mean something is actually ‘imminent’, but it sure sounds scary too huh?
Homeland Security = FUD.
All of the ‘security’ organisations are playing this card. Get people scared enough and they’ll let the security forces do anything it seems. To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt; the only thing we have to fear are the fear-mongers themselves.
Researchers at the UT Southwestern Medical Center have published results showing that people taking anti-depressants continue to have many of the symptoms of depression including insomnia, sadness and decreased concentration.
“Widely used antidepressant medications, while working overall, missed these symptoms. If patients have persistent residual symptoms, these individuals have a high probability of incomplete recovery,” said Dr. Shawn McClintock, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry.
High probability of incomplete recovery? In other words they don’t work.
As I have said previously anti-depressants are an easy cop-out for doctors and a nice money maker for drug companies but they only mask the problems – they aren’t, and can’t be, a cure. The only value to anti-depressants is that they provide multi-billion dollar sales to drug companies every year ($20+ billion in the U.S. alone!), which is why they spend so much ‘persuading‘ doctors to prescribe them.
The only way to ‘cure’ depression is to tackle it head on. Find what is causing it and then remove/change that cause, or rework your reaction to it.
If you are a follower of space flight then you undoubtedly know about the increasing problem of space junk: the mass debris formed from fifty years of manned and unmanned space flight, satellite launches and everything else we’ve thrown up there without a proper recovery plan.
A new proposal suggests that we might deploy a tungsten dust cloud that would adhere to the junk, increasing its mass and causing it to fall back to Earth – burning up on re-entry.
The article linked to suggests a problem with this – that the tungsten could coalesce into balls adding more debris to the pile. But I see a more fundamental problem.
How do you stop the tungsten from sticking to the wrong thing?
If we launch tonnes of tungsten dust into orbit, isn’t it just going to stick to everything up there including sensitive functional satellites?
Putting more junk into the skies doesn’t strike me as a rational way of reducing junk in the skies.
You would think that raising kids would be pretty easy by now, wouldn’t you? After all the human race has around 200,000 years of doing just that fairly successfully (if we weren’t successful we wouldn’t be here of course!). But it seems in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that this has become suddenly complex beyond belief.
Children, we are told, must be cosseted, protected from any possibility of ‘harm’, no matter how slight. They must be indulged, served, pandered to and every waking moment must be filled with just the right mix of ‘structured activities’ that will guarantee that little James or Jemima turns into the next Einstein/Beethoven/Pavlova/Williams.
Recent research also shows that our children are unable to deal with just 24 hours without access to media and technology. After a short time they start to suffer symptoms of what is very obviously addiction withdrawal. One of the interesting conclusions was: “Particularly noteworthy was the short attention spans of the students – how quickly they became bored and lost interest in the alternative activities they did try.”
It seems clear to me that there is a connection between this and early development. This addiction starts in early childhood, encouraged and indeed fostered by parents. James/Jemima are given a TV and cartoons, electronic puzzles and toys; a little later it’s a PlayStation or similar. It’s very easy to fool yourself that your child is doing well if you can just sit them down in front of something electronic that’s labelled ‘educational’.
The problem with all of these things is that they are entirely passive, not just in a physical sense but also in a mental sense. James and Jemima don’t need to imagine a cave with monsters, they’re spoon-fed the whole visual experience. There’s no need to imagine a spaceship and aliens from another world, it’s provided for them. Not just that but in toys too, why imagine what anything looks like when they can just be given a detailed example where all the imagination has been done by the (adult) designers?
When I was young, my parents didn’t try to fill every minute of my time. In fact they used to just tell me to ‘find something to do’. The idea was that left to my own devices I would figure out a way of keeping myself occupied, whether by reading, inventing imaginary worlds, playing (physically) with friends. As long as we weren’t getting in to ‘mischief’ there was no problem and if we did we were *gasp* punished!
But think about this. All of that play, all of that imagination, all of that ‘unstructured time’ permitted and required that we use our minds, that we used our imaginations. By doing that we were training ourselves to think, to focus, to concentrate and develop our independence of thought. Sure, we didn’t know we were ‘training’ anything; we were just playing.
It seems obvious that we need to rediscover this idea. By providing everything in spoon-fed, predigested form we take away the tools and processes our children need to develop their minds (and bodies) fully.
Studies by the University of Michigan reveal the devastating trend – since the 1970s, “children have lost 12 hours per week in free time, including a 25 percent drop in play and a 50 percent drop in unstructured outdoor activities.” Not only that but “homework increased dramatically between 1981 and 1997″. The amount given to 6- to 8-year-olds increasing 300% .
We think by giving them everything, that we are being ‘good parents’, when in reality we are harming their overall development and raising people who can’t think for themselves, who suffer from ‘attention deficit’ and who believe that anything in the media is ‘real’. We’re breeding sheep for the exploitation of whoever controls the channels pumping non-stop drivel into our children’s heads.
Don’t handicap your kids by denying them the value of being bored. Boredom stimulates both imagination and activity, both of which are highly valuable and make people what they should be: intelligent, focused, adaptable and valuable.
Let them play.
“A new study in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy shows that the addition of alumina nanoparticles can improve the performance and combustion of biodiesel, while producing fewer emissions.” [ScienceDaily]
This looks like good news until you realise that if this took place we would be dumping tonnes of nano-particles into the environment, something that has already proved toxic to both the environment and humans. This hardly seems like an improvement.
Indeed the article later quotes R. B. Anand, one of the report authors, as saying that nano-particles ”should be used judiciously” because they ”entrain into human bodies”.
Let’s clarify that ‘entrain’ bit. The chemistry definition of ‘entrain’ is “To carry (suspended particles, for example) along in a current.” [FreeDictionary.com]. In other words, these particles get inside us and essentially poison us.
This might be seen as a reasonable risk to take given that we’re helping the environment by improving bio-fuels.
Bio-fuels do nothing to improve the cleanliness of vehicles or power plants of any type. They burn the same type of fuel as petroleum-based products and while petroleum products release most of their pollution when burned, bio-fuels release large quantities during their actual production too.
The push to market bio-fuels, whether in the form of diesel or ethanol, is a smoke and mirrors act aimed at deflecting the necessity to change our way of thinking. It protects vehicle manufacturers’ interests by lifting the requirement to invest in development of truly clean vehicles and also nicely lines the pockets of that other big industrial group – the farmers.
Oil is not about to run out overnight, despite the high prices caused by the supposed current ‘shortages’. What we need is a concerted investment into research aimed at developing truly efficient and environmentally-friendly power-plants. Electric or hybrid cars don’t help either – they just displace where the emissions are generated.
Hydrogen fuel-cell technology seems to be the best answer, but there is limited investment in this because of the politicised focus on so-called ‘alternatives’ that serve only to protect the status-quo of current big money concerns.
News from a recent study suggests that treating depression with anti-depressants may have a long term benefit by making it less-likely to re-occur. While this would be a definite benefit, if confirmed, I have to say that I am highly skeptical of the benefits – short or long-term – of using drugs to treat depression.
My experience with my own depression (and many others who suffer) is that it is always triggered by some form of physical source. It’s the situation that you are in, the bad relationship/job/environment etc. that causes the depression. How do you cure that with a drug?
It’s become fashionable now to say that everything is a ‘disease’ – depression, obesity, anxiety, growing up. This seems to be an especially popular viewpoint with people working with, or for, the big drug companies. This shouldn’t be a surprise; if everything is a disease of some form, then the drug companies can create (and market!) a ‘cure’.
Dr. Colman is quoted as saying that “Evidence suggests that cognitive behavioural therapies are as effective as anti-depressants”. In other words talking to someone who is depressed and helping them see that things aren’t as bad as they think, or that there is a way out from whatever is trapping them, works just as well as anti-depressant treatment. So why are we loading people (and often children) up with questionable drugs?
The answer seems obvious to me. Putting people on these drugs is a very easy solution for doctors. It takes two minutes, doesn’t involve a lot of time-consuming interaction and is a very effective way of deflecting ‘problem patients’. When you combine this with the fact that the drug companies provide generous benefits to Doctors who prescribe these products, the temptation is obviously overwhelming.
Anti-depressants don’t cure anything. They just mask the problem until – hopefully – it goes away. I’ve seen this with my own eyes on multiple occasions. They allow people to continue without addressing the actual root cause. Masking the real issues doesn’t seem to me to be a good strategy – but it is a nice easy one for everyone else but the person with depression.
It will be interesting to see if this research is confirmed. I suspect that we’ll see that it has no more benefit than a placebo.
Great news from the space development front. Independent Rocket company SpaceX have announced the development of the Falcon Heavy, their entry into the ‘heavy lifter’ category of launch vehicles.
The Falcon heavy will provide double the delivery capacity (a whopping 53 tonnes!) of all existing systems, dwarfing both the Delta IV and the Space Shuttle. This means that the cost of delivering payload to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) will drop significantly – in fact the company estimates that the launcher would save the US $1 billion in launch services per year.
The impact of this system when it comes on stream will be huge, providing access to space at a fraction of the current cost (something that the badly flawed shuttle was supposed to do and never achieved) and allowing the delivery of systems (Imagine a space telescope 5 times as big as the Hubble!) of previously unachievable size.
The engineering of the SpaceX fleet shows real imagination and a determination to push back the boundaries of what is possible in rocketry. We should all feel proud of the achievements that they have made and undoubtedly will achieve in the future.
No doubt they will have their share of issues in the future; as their rival Scaled Composites unfortunately showed, the path to Space is not an easy one. Nevertheless, let us hope that they (and Scaled Composites) continue the push to take us truly into space.
Nothing of any value is achieved without a cost.
Internet ID for the new Police State
The US government is reported to be pushing ahead with a new ‘Internet ID’ scheme. This will provide people with a unique ID that can then be used to do all kinds of useful things like access health information, check and file tax returns and err… provide linked tracking information to security forces.
That last point is being downplayed by everyone naturally. This is just a way to make it more convenient for citizens to access information – right…
Senator Barbara Mikulski was kind enough to let the cat out of the bag with her somewhat confused comments.
I hadn’t realised that buying things with credit cards was a ‘civil liberty’. I better check my copy of the U.S. constitution to find out where that is. I guess it must be lodged in the section that guarantees that obscenely rich banks must be bailed out when they destroy the economy and that obscenely rich oil companies need tax breaks…
The Senator continues though:
Ah! Now we see it. Forget protecting the civil liberty to consume. What we’re really doing here is helping law enforcement agencies. Bring on that old Police State boys – we’re back in business!
Of course this doesn’t affect people outside the U.S. We’re all safe and cozy, wrapped in the warmth of our own civil liberties. Yet, when we look at some of the recent news here in Canada and elsewhere, how far down the line would it be before we followed the ‘Land of the Free’?