The fury of a brightening Mars
Back at the beginning of July, I wrote about the Mars hoax, which stated that Mars was to come closer to the Earth than it has in recorded history. This, of course, isn’t true, but as with almost every rumor, there is a grain of truth behind the absurdity: Mars is getting closer to Earth. On October 13, Mars will be within 69 million kilometers of Earth, which isn’t the closest it’s ever been, but it’s closer than normal, and is the closest the two planets will get for the next 13 years. (In August of 2003, Earth and Mars came within 56 million kilometers of one another.)
As a result of the two planets getting closer together, Mars appears to be getting brighter, and it will become brighter still until October. Right now, Mars appears to be an intensely bright red-orange star to the east. Between now and October, Mars will double in brightness. It will appear brighter than it did in August of 2003 because it’s higher in the night sky, (66° as opposed to 34°) — this is good news for backyard astronomers who will be able to see the purple haze on Mars’s north pole as Martian winter begins.
On August 10, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter lifted off on its six month journey.
In other related news, Mars appears to be more volatile than previously thought. It is suspected that the planet endures more earthquakes than before, and climate warming appears to be melting the polar ice caps of Mars. The findings come as a result of geological surveys conducted on the red planet: gullies are appearing where there previously were none three years ago. Researchers also discovered several boulders that rolled down a crater wall sometime over the course of 13 months. The suspected cause is seismic activity.
A planet which is still having tectonic activity suggests that the planet is still warm at its core, which could mean volcanos. Seismic activity on the planet has not been measured because the two Viking landers had broken equipment, and the the two rovers still in operation do not have such equipment because their own movement would interfere with the readings.
NASA has an interesting an animated GIF of the progression of change in the ice caps that you can check out here. It’s 8MB.
British formulary for children launched
In the UK, another new reference book has been created, called the British National Formulary (BNF) for Children, designed to aid doctors prescribe for children from newborns up until the age of 18. This would be especially helpful for doctors who aren’t pediatricians who prescribe for children, who rely on their memories or sometimes outdated charts for their information. In the United States, we have doctors who diagnose a problem and then to pick a drug out of a book. This results in occasionally-funny situations at the pharmacy that often go something like this:
“I need this filled.”
“OK, Hmm.” *wanders off to pharmacist* “Hey what’s this?”
“Haha! I haven’t seen a prescription for this in fifteen years! It doesn’t exist anymore.”
This type of scenario wouldn’t happen, because the book will be kept current, with a new issue every year. (This is similar to Drug Facts and Comparisons in the US, which is updated monthly.) The guide is written by experts from Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the Neonatal and Paediatric Pharmacists Group, the British Medical Association and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. The guide will be made available free of charge to practitioners, and will be a companion to the BNF for adults that has been a British medical staple for years.
The creators of the publication wouldn’t be amiss in creating an electronic version of their text: updates would be easier, and as doctor’s offices progressively become more digitized, cross-referencing with a resource like BNF could be more easily integrated into sending an electronic prescription somewhere.
“Traditional” gender roles
I was reading an article in the NYT today whose headline struck me as being remarkably retro and modern at the same time: “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood.” My first thought was of the movie, Mona Lisa Smile, where one of the characters gives up being a lawyer to stay at home instead. Indeed, the article goes on to talk about several high-achieving young women at Ivy League schools who plan on giving up their career when they start having children.
I’m conflicted over the concept — while I think it’s good that they intend to have the affluence necessary to be stay-at-home moms, I’m depressed by the idea that they won’t be out working and contributing to society in a meaningful way. I don’t intend for that statement to be demeaning towards those who stay at home, but I have known several girls throughout my life who were extremely gifted in academics, and were just very smart all-around, who simply gave up what could have been to stay at home and raise the kids. People who might have been doctors or researchers, simply opting to stay home instead. And I wonder to myself what the world at large has lost by their being stay-at-home moms. I will say that their children are very fortunate, however, to have such women as parents. I’ve no doubt that they will be raised well by a loving family.
There was a survey conducted, and the results were not unexpected:
The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years.
Two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to stay home with the children while they pursued their careers. Two others said either they or their husbands would stay home, depending on whose career was furthest along.
In general, those just starting out in college (their first or second years) tend to be fairly clueless about 1) what they want and 2) how life really ends up going. For instance, I was a hotshot student in high school who liked to overpower people with my intellectual first gear and beat them down in debates and such, but I absolutely floundered when it came to college. I started out as a computer science major and ended up in medicine instead. I don’t regret the change, but the person I am today is completely different than the person I was four years ago. I suspect these women will discover the same thing.
Those respondents in the second paragraph, I think, didn’t take into account their husband’s drive. Most men are very aggressive when it comes to being the primary breadwinner, and when it comes to sacrificing their career because their wife is further along… well this can create more than a little bit of tension. Expecting their future husbands to give up their careers simply because their wife had children and/or is further along in her career is very naive.
I found the first part of this quote to sum up my feelings about most (American) students quite well, both men and women.
“What does concern me,” said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, “is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn’t constructed along traditional gender roles.”
Though I would, perhaps, have said “contained within the bounds of existing commercial infrastructure or constructed along traditional gender roles.” I find the lack of entrepreneurial spirit and “grab the bull by the balls” attitude in modern American students frustrating and sad. I don’t know if it’s always been this way, but finding kindred spirits when it comes to ambition is difficult: most would rather take the easy way out. (Which certainly has its own appeal.)
In any case, lamenting “traditional” gender roles seems somewhat unfounded to me. Men and women are quite different physically, and as a result, emotionally: our muscle structure is different, and more importantly, our hormonal makeup is different. Testosterone lends itself to aggression and violence. Without delving into pecking order, in a modern first-world society like America, violence isn’t done on the battlefield, it’s done in the boardroom. Dominance is established by success. Men, it stands to reason, will be more aggressive than women due to their hormonal makeup, and as a result, these “traditional” gender roles form. Are these roles “bad”? I would venture to say that they aren’t, so long as one — male or female — has the personal freedom to choose what kind of life they want to live, and the opportunities available to them are fair and balanced compared to their counterparts of the opposite sex.
On the other hand, I do think it’s acceptable to lament for what society potentially loses every time a gifted person chooses to stay at home fulltime to raise their children. The upside of this, of course, is that their children will likely be better equipped, to make their own contributions when the time comes.
Bullets: tongue biters, London crackheads, and the return to the moon
Woohoo bullets!
- NASA is going back to the moon. On paper, anyway. Probably most of you have heard about this by now, so I’m not going to do an extensive writeup on it. Ars has the best coverage, as usual, and New Scientist also has san article on it.
- A few days ago, I wrote about Cymothoa exigua, the tongue biters who strangle or eat (it’s still unclear) the tongues of their host fish, substituting themselves instead. But why stop at one tongue biter when you can have two? That page also has more pictures of normal fish tongues and other cutaway photos of the fish.
- Apparently one in every hundred Londoners could be a crack cocaine user. Sounds like they’ve got the same problem as Italy. Maybe Virgin should start a cocaine refinery: Virgin Coke.
On the subject of NASA returning to the moon… while this is nice to see, and the moon provides a good stepping stone on the way to Mars or a similar mission, I can’t help but feel just a little disappointed. While no one in my generation has ever seen anyone walk on the moon, we have seen the Apollo 11 video footage. My mom was 14 when Apollo 11 landed, and I’m 22 years old. It’s been decades since we’ve been to the moon, and now, all of a sudden, we’re going back and there’s this big to-do about it, as though something extraordinary is about to happen.
We were on the moon in the sixties. Almost 40 years ago. Why should we be excited to go back to a place we went to two to three generations ago? This is not new or spectacular. This is redundant. Unlike Halley’s Comet which comes around once every 75 years, and is constant, science and technology is fluid and always progressing. The moon is the best we can do, now, 51 years after we did it the first time? Please tell me I’m not the only one disappointed by this. Is a moon landing something that’s only going to happen once every 50 years, so we should simply get used to it and enjoy it while it’s here? Or are we going to make a decision to finally push beyond the bounds of Earth and keep going instead of throwing up our hands only to sit back complacent in the knowledge that we “did it” and there’s nothing more to be done?
I realize that the space race was a political tool more than anything else, and that it served its purpose (along with the nuclear arms buildup) in bankrupting the Soviet Union, but I would have expected a little more out of NASA than merely a plan to return to the moon 50 years after the first landing. If not NASA then a private corporation, though I suppose that (right now) there isn’t much money to be made in space simply because of the prohibitively high cost of transportation. Anyway, so is this return to the moon to accomplish some major political end, or is it finally in the interest of science? I don’t know the answer, but I hope it is the latter, because if it is, there’s actually a chance that we’ll stay there or even push on instead of returning to Earth once it’s “mission accomplished.”
The problem of heavy crude
A few weeks ago I wrote about gasoline prices in the US, sharing one of the ideas about why they’re going up: China. Business Week has an article today about gas prices, and why the American public shouldn’t blame OPEC. They should blame the US refineries who cannot refine the crude available, because they’re not set up for it. In fact, the crude reserves in the US are higher than they have been in the past, while reserves of gasoline are somewhat lean, hence the higher-than-normal gas prices of late.
Fact is, OPEC is willing to sell whatever its customers want. And those customers are turning up their noses at the 2 million barrels per day or so of heavy crude — most of it in Saudi Arabia — that OPEC is not pumping now.
Their refineries just aren’t set up to run the stuff. “What can OPEC do?” asks Jamal Qureshi, an analyst at PFC Energy, a Washington, D.C.-based energy consulting firm.
[...]
And the U.S. government has had only a tepid take-up on its offer to supply refiners from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Clearly, the industry isn’t all that thirsty for crude.
While pointing fingers at the oil suppliers is fun and exciting — as well as being the American Way — in this case, it’s not justified. Oil refineries need to change with the times and build capacity to process heavy crude. Until they do, gas (and home heating oil) prices will remain high. Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin, unsurprisingly wants to start Virgin Oil by building a $2 billion oil refinery. If it would help with the gasoline shortage, I’d be all in favor. Actually, I’m in favor of it anyway just because I admire Richard Branson, and competition in this arena can only be good for consumers.
This recent gasoline shortage isn’t artificially-created, as it has been in the past. It’s real, and it’s created by the US refineries who cannot process what’s available.
The dangers of repopulating too soon
Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans has encouraged residents to return to their homes this week, despite warnings from Vice Admiral Allen, the officer in charge of the recovery effort. While some progress has been made in the destroyed city, most of the city’s infrastructure remains offline, or extremely flimsy. This includes hospitals, firehouses, and police stations. 40% of the city is still flooded, and many of the parts that have been drained still have mud-caked streets, which contain unknown levels of pathogens and other toxins.
Doctors warn that major disease risks remain, and Vice Admiral Allen says the city stills lacks basic services, contradicting the Mayor’s request.
“The second wave of disaster is when you welcome the people back and the infrastructure of the city is not in place,” said Dr Peter Deblieux, a casualty specialist at a New Orleans hospital.
Vice Adm Allen said the mayor’s plans to get 200,000 people back to their homes within the next 10 days were “extremely problematic”.
Ironically, this misplaced call to return comes even as some residents are still being forcibly evacuated. Tourism has been “slammed,” and many business owners who are returning to discover the state of their business are without customers, if they are even able to open at all. This begs the question: how do you rebuild a city with no commercial infrustructure? Without places to make or spend money, the city is a black hole of an economy. With most of the foodstuffs coming from the government or organizations like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, what will residents do with their time once they return to the city? How will they rebuild if they are financially crippled, as many are? How does a city with a population without money jumpstart the wheels of economy? Government handouts? I’m not sure that would work either.
Health issues aside, the city of New Orleans is too broken to support rebuilding quite yet. The city and its people would be better off following Vice Admiral Allen’s suggestion to wait a little while longer.
Trendy “green” energy
Back in June, Wired reported on the growing trend of “green” webhosts. That is, those web hosting providers who power their datacenters using renewable energy sources: wind and solar energy. I thought this was unique, but not something that you’d expect to hear in this day age. Green energy for datacenters sounds almost like a dot-com bubble era type of extravagance. Nonetheless, these companies exist, and they’re thriving. This might lead one to wonder what sort of reliability these datacenters might have in the face of a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina. Many Internet denizens followed the drama of DirectNIC, a New Orleans datacenter, from the Interdictor LiveJournal. Nonetheless they’re a popular option for those environmentally-minded.
Green energy is also making headway in other venues, though with questionable financial success. In Great Britain, government subsidies are paying for alternative energy sources — mostly wind “farms” — sometimes twice what the companies need to break even. I’m not sure why this is, but it is happening. This BBC article implies that the companies do need government money to succeed, but not as much as they’re getting. Rachel Ruffle of Renewable Energy Systems responds stating:
“I don’t think people mind paying a small subsidy for clean, green electricity. As more renewable energy schemes are built, then the price will come down. People want green electricity because they’re concerned about climate change and pollution.”
While this is largely true, if I were a citizen of the UK, I would be troubled by the findings of the government report. People are concerned about climate change and pollution, but not (usually) to the tune of £1 billion in extra funding. It is unclear whether the money is going towards research and development or some other purpose. In any event, I would expect some changes to be made in the near future. The British public seems too pragmatic as a whole to let such excesses slide for too long, despite assurances that the “subsidies [are] essential to develop renewable energy.”