Dispatches from the Flying M

Bread bad

No, seriously, I love bread.  Especially baguettes. 

But in a rare event--two science posts in a week--I have to share this one, about the baguette that overpowered the Large Hadron Collider. Take a look.

Going up?

I'm no scientist, as anyone who's read my science fiction works can tell you.  But this is too cool not to link to: space elevators aren't as far off as you might have thought. Take a look.

It was 40 years ago today...

Most Americans I know watched the first moon landing in America.  But I was in France when it happened, on a 6-week summer trip with a school group.  We landed in Paris, stayed there a few days, then went to a boarding school in Strasbourg where we lived for the bulk of the time.  On the way out, we stopped in London, then came home on a ship.

So the moon landing happened at a very inconvenient time of day--about 3 or 4 in the morning, as I recall.  There were no TVs at the lycee, but there was a television station across the street, and they kindly consented to allow bleary-eyed American kids to stream in and out all night and morning long to watch the progress, and the landing.  We were all, at that moment, particularly proud to be Americans, to watch our guys up there where no one else had been, to know that human engineering and ingenuity had done the job.

The next day was Monday. Without telling the girls, a bunch of us boys decided to dress for dinner.  We came down in jackets and ties and said we were dressed for Moonday dinner.  The next Moonday we did the same, and kept it up for the rest of our time there (and quickly, the girls caught on and dressed up as well).

Where were you when that small step was taken?

UPDATE: Courtesy of Barry Eisler, here's a cool photomontage of the year 1969.  So many important things happened that year, in society and pop culture (like the release of some of my favorite movies, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Godfather, Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, the Stonewall riots, the first Led Zeppelin album and the last Beatles concert, and more.  Check it out.

Clock restored

Early last month I posted about the digital clock in my XTerra that got stuck on 6:66, worrying me just a little.  After that, it more or less faded to a meaningless group of lines.  But I left it there, stuck to the dashboard, because I was unable to find anything to replace it with.

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed that it was, once again, telling an actual time.  I set it.  It seemed to keep the time.

No telling how long it'll last, of course.  And I'm still not convinced that it's not possessed.  Maybe it's just trying to lull me into a false sense of security.

Or maybe it was a test of faith, checking to see how long I would keep it around.  Now that it trusts me, it'll demand that I do its bidding...

Invasion

The first two summers we were here, we saw horse lubbers on the road well north of our place. Last summer, they finally made it down here.  But this summer, somewhat wetter than average, we've been under attack from them.

They're like grasshoppers, but huge grasshoppers.  We have every size this year--if you walk through tall grass (which is discouraged, since there have also been reports of chiggers, a newcomer this year) you'll see hundreds of smaller grasshoppers jumping away from you.  Horse lubbers might amble away from you, but it takes a lot to scare them.

They're maybe 2.5-3" long, and big around as a Cuban cigar.  They hiss when they're angry or feeling threatened. They go up into trees and yuccas at night and hang around up there, then come back down during the day.  There have been times when there are 20 or so in any given square yard.  They can fly, and look like freaky birds when doing so.

And they're meat-eaters, and cannibals.  They'll eat dead horse lubbers.  They'll even eat dead rabbit, killed by Will, our current barn cat.

If they get any smarter, they'll realize that a few thousand of them could break down the doors.  If you don't hear from us for a few days, that's what happened.

Below are some pictures taken this morning.  First are a couple of the very tip of  a yucca stalk, maybe 12-15 feet high, followed by a couple showing how they spend the night clinging to yucca leaves. Click on them to see them full-size.  The big one at the end shows their cannibalistic behavior, as these two are chowing down on a dead one.  The lens cap, in there for scale, is 2.5" in diameter.

                 

3 planets

We were out just after sunset last night, and there were three planets, Mercury, Venus, and a very faint Mars, visible in the evening sky, surrounding the moon.  It's rare that you can see three of them in such close proximity--take a look toward the southern sky tonight if you can.

Perseids tonight

Tonight's the night for this year's Perseids meteor shower.  Last year one streaked over our head, a bright green flash that seemed almost low enough to catch in a net.  Look to the skies late night to just before dawn--there should be at least one a minute during the late night.

Mars

We went to Mars yesterday.

Okay, only figuratively. But we did visit the Tucson facility from which the Phoenix Mars Lander program is being run (the name Phoenix refers to the mythological creature that rises from its own ashes, not the other Arizona city).

Every Wednesday they hold an open house where you can see the duplicate lander they have here on Earth. Before they can send a command to the lander on Mars, they have to test it here to make sure that a) the lander can do it, and b) they know the right way to tell it what to do. The entire mission is being run from Tucson, as opposed to previous missions run from places like Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It's the first time a public university has been able to run a space research mission like this, start to finish, and it was fascinating to see where they do it, as well as being shown some of the great pictures the lander has sent back and learning a bit about its findings (like, water ice on Mars).

Here are a few pictures from the facility. The mission is about half over (after years of planning, there's only about a 90-day window in which the sun is on the polar region they wanted to explore, and when it's gone, there's no more power to the big solar panels, so the lander goes bye-bye). It'll probably be covered by CO2 ice by next summer. And yes, it's cold on Mars--but as recently as the summer equinox it was colder in Antarctica than where the lander is near Mars's north pole.  Be sure to check the website (linked above) for regular weather reports, new science and photos, etc., and if you're in Arizona over the next month or so, make an appointment and go check it out!

This is the duplicate lander, arranged in a setting as much as possible like that on Mars:

Here's a smaller model that the public can get closer to.  Look how big the solar panels are compared to the rest of it.

Here's a diagram showing what everything is.

And the Phoenix logo.