1940s Computer-Power onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com 1940s Computer-Power

For International Women's Day, flashback to the early days of NASA. Fundamental research in aerodynamics using wind tunnels and the very earliest push into supersonic flight are piling up stacks of data. All that data went through computers, the women who performed data transcription and reduction.

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Computers of the NACA Muroc Flight Test Unit. Standing left to right: Mary (Tut) Hedgepeth, Lilly Ann Bajus, Roxanah Yancey, Emily Stephens, Jane Collons (Procurement), Leona Corbett (Personnel), and Angel Dunn. Kneeling left to right: Dorothy (Dottie) Crawford Roth, Dorothy Clift Hughes, and Gertrude (Trudy) Wilken Valentine.

This photo dates is from the Dryden Flight Research Center, back when NASA was still NACA. These women translated oscillographs into numbers for analysis. After extracting, calculating, and reducing the data from aircraft instruments into a useable format, they handed it off to aerospace research engineers for analysis.

Not every day involved giant, grinning snowmen (or having staff BBQs). Most days, being a computer meant long days at a light-table trying to decipher grainy photographic film. Roxanah Yancey directed her team of computers, and was responsible for ensuring accurate calculations were made form the long strips of test flight data accumulated during research flights out of the station. As more and more tests were flown, a call went out to gather computers from Langley, Lewis, and Ames laboratories.

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From the left: Geraldine Mayer and Mary (Tut) Hedgepeth with Friden calculators on the their desks; Emily Stephens conferring with engineer John Mayer; Gertrude (Trudy) Valentine is working on an oscillograph recording reducing the data from a flight. Across the desk is Dorothy Clift Hughes using a slide rule to complete data calculations. Roxanah Yancey completes the picture as she fills out engineering requests for further data.

Why were computers almost exclusively women? Partly for the same reason Pickering hired them: they were far cheaper to employ than men. The caption at the NASA archive offers an alternate explanation, "at least part of the rationale seems to have been the notion that the work was long and tedious, and men were not thought to have the patience to do it." The women are bad at math idiocy is a recent occurrence: 1940s women were all about slide rules. Working as a computer in this pre-OSHA era meant long hours hunched over a light table, squinting at tiny images. The result was that most computers who didn't start out wearing glasses eventually ended up with them.

Without the NACA computers, developing air foils shaping wings and propellers couldn't have happened. Today I offer my thanks to Yancey and her team, some of the hidden women in the history of space flight.

Photographs and captions from the NASA/Dryden archives E49-0212 and E49-0053

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onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com 1940s Computer-Power

Beta Pictoris: One of the most violent solar systems ever discovered onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Beta Pictoris: One of the most violent solar systems ever discovered

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There's a solar system close to here that hosts an unusually active debris field, one in which a comet is annihilated every five minutes. Astronomers say it could be the result of gravitationally trapped debris — or the catastrophic collision between two planets the size of Mars.

The solar system, called Beta Pictoris, is located about 63 light-years from Earth. It formed about 20 million years ago, so it's a relative newcomer to the galaxy. It's got one known planet, Beta Pictoris b, located 1.2 billion kilometers from it and a mass several times greater than Jupiter's.

But it also features a prominent and luminous debris field — and within it, a unique compact cloud of poisonous gas orbiting at the solar system's outer fringes. It formed (and continues to be maintained) by rapid-fire collisions among a swarm of icy, comet-like bodies. Scientists have two theories to explain its presence: Either the frozen debris is trapped and held together by the gravity of a yet-to-be-discovered planet, or it's the remnant of a collision between two icy planets.

Related: Astronomers Find Water on the Remnants of a Destroyed Planet | NASA sheds some light on Jupiter's mysterious companion asteroids

Concentrated Carbon Monoxide

By using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, a team of international astronomers mapped the millimeter-wavelength light emanating from the dust and carbon monoxide (CO) molecules within the disk, revealing a rather disproportionate amount of the latter — about 0.3% of the mass of our moon. This gas is one of many found stored in comets and other icy bodies that, along with dust and icy grains, gets released after collisions.

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Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/W. Dent et al.

Within this vast belt of carbon monoxide is a highly concentrated clump of gas located about 8 billion miles (13 billion km) from the star, which is about three times the distance between Neptune and our sun (85 AU). Remarkably, the total amount of CO measured exceeds 200 million billion tons, which is equivalent to about one-sixth the mass of Earth's oceans.

Now, it only takes about 100 years for ultraviolet starlight to break-up CO molecules, a duration much faster than the time it would take the cloud to complete a single orbit around the star. It's certainly possible that we're observing Beta Pictoris during this exceptionally small window of time. It's more probable, however, that something else is going on.

That something else, say the astronomers, is the continuous replenishment of carbon monoxide in the cloud, likely caused by the steady and frequent collisions between the icy celestial bodies within it. In fact, calculations show that to offset the dissipation of CO molecules, a large comet must be destroyed every five minutes.

One Clump or Two?

The astronomers are now trying to figure out why. One possibility is that the solar system has an undiscovered giant planet, called a "shepherding planet," near the inner edge of the CO belt.

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Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO) and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/F. Reddy.

Comparatively, Jupiter's gravity has trapped thousands of asteroids in two groups — a lead group and one following the gas giant along its orbit. Luckily, astronomers are able to observe Beta Pictoris nearly edge-on, allowing them to determine whether the CO belt has a single concentration of gas or two on opposite sides of the star. They're not entirely sure, but they're currently leaning towards the two-clump scenario. If that's the case, than further observations should reveal the second clump and the mystery planet.

But, if the astronomer's can't find the second clump, that leaves an alternative scenario: a crash between two Mars-sized icy planets around half-a-million years ago. This would account for the swarm, along with the frequent ongoing collisions among the fragments.

The results of the study now appear in Science.

[Via NASA | ESO]

Top Image: ASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/F. Reddy.

Follow me on Twitter: @dvorsky

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Beta Pictoris: One of the most violent solar systems ever discovered

Manipulate people into choosing the worse option by describing it onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Manipulate people into choosing the worse option by describing it

When we are choosing which action to take, one of the most basic calculations which guide us is, "How likely is it to lead to one option or another." We need to think of all possible outcomes, and the rough probability of each one occurring. There is a problem with this. We are not great at assessing probability. But there are certain ways to make us think that one outcome is more probable than another.

Add a little description, especially when that description fits in with predetermined pictures, and people will chuck probability out the window. For example, give most people a choice between "Bob owns three guns" and "Bob owns three guns and hunts deer," and they will likely choose the latter as the more likely option. This can't possibly be true. Both Bobs own three guns, and imposing more conditions on one of them only makes their situation less probable. But it fits in with a stereotype of gun owners, and so people believe it "more."

As it turns out, this doesn't just work when applied to people. It also works when applied to situations. When Paula Jones brought a lawsuit against sitting President Clinton, it didn't take long for speculation to start about how it would turn out. A group of 200 lawyers was asked to predict how the trial would end; some were asked basic stuff, like would the trial reach a conclusion, or would it be stopped prematurely for some reason. Others were asked to break down a list of reasons why it might be stopped prematurely, and then to predict whether the trial would go to conclusion. The lawyers who got a list of possible reasons why the trial would be stopped thought that a premature end to the trial was much more likely than the lawyers who were only asked if the trial would reach a conclusion or if it would not.

This isn't clinching proof, of course. The lawyers who received a list, being reminded of all the ways the trial could be stopped, might have had a better estimate as to how the trial would go. But it happens with doctors as well. If a disease has multiple symptoms, some common and some rare, surveyed doctors believed that the rare symptom alone was less likely than the rare symptom and the common one combined. When looking at pure probability, more factors mean something is less likely, but we immediately think of more factors being more likely.

In the end, what we want is a vivid description. If we can see Bob and his guns, or the many outcomes of a trial, or a patient displaying all the symptoms of a disease, the idea attains a reality for us. Or for whoever we're describing it too. This means that, if we want to manipulate people, all we need to do is present them with many choices, some spare but likely, others richly detailed but unlikely. Even as we pile idea on idea, making the probability less and less likely, it will seem more and more likely to whoever we're manipulating. They can make a free choice, but it's biased in our favor.

[Via The Drunkard's Walk]

Image: Lifehacker.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Manipulate people into choosing the worse option by describing it

We will not be obliterated by an asteroid... today. onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com We will not be obliterated by an asteroid... today.

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Asteroid 2014 DX110 will pass within the Moon's orbit at 1 p.m. PST (4 p.m. EST) today. It's not going to hit us, and we're not going to die in a planet-wide coordinated spectacular of death. At least, not today.

DX110 is about 30 meters (100 feet) across. Nothing is published about its composition, but you can make your best guesses and head over to the handy-dandy Impact Calculator (seriously, I love that thing) to find out what would happen if all the orbital dynamics calculations were totally wrong and we got smacked with it anyway (this isn't going to happen; we aren't going to die, blah blah blah don't spazz). From my own tinkering with "So, how bad could it get?" doomsday scenarios, even a dense rock that size would still break up in the atmosphere. As it broke up, it'd explode with the force of several kilotons of TNT, sending out an air pressure wave that would be loud and distressing to people nearby, but unnoticeable on the far side of the country. An impact that severe happens about every 200 years; it's an event of roughly the same magnitude as last year's Chelyabinsk meteor: spectacular, painful for anyone rushing to the window to stare up in awe, but not a planet-killing extinction event.

So, what's actually going to happen? DX110 will come within 350,000 kilometres (217,000 miles, or 0.9 the lunar distance) from Earth and then go about its merry way off into the rest of the solar system. Considering the crazy orbits of most asteroids, it'll be back eventually. Despite our limited capacities and resources for staring at black space for small dark rocks hurtling past at high speeds, we spot about 20 known asteroids coming between us and the moon every year. Just imagine how many we'd see if Spaceguard was properly funded and coordinated to make a serious search for near-Earth objects... Hey, maybe that's why the 2015 NASA budget has a line item for developing asteroid interception or deflection programs.

Image credit and DX110 stats via the JPL press release on AsteroidWatch. For more on the observing history of why we know DX110's orbit with this much confidence, check out the piece on Universe Today. If you want to geek out over orbital parameters, here's DX110's entry in the small-body database.

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onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com We will not be obliterated by an asteroid... today.

How to avoid (or embrace) arctic hysteria during this eternal winter onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com How to avoid (or embrace) arctic hysteria during this eternal winter

So it looks like if you live anywhere east of Nevada or north of Texas you will never see the sun again. Since you are now essentially living in the Arctic, you will need to get a new set of skills, especially if you want to avoid what's known as "arctic hysteria."

Arctic Hysteria

It seems that arctic hysteria is what happens to people in the American arctic during long winters. Another name for it is "piblokto" or "pibloktoq," but those two terms have for the most part been dropped. Explorers who first chronicled the madness said that "piblokto" was the local word for the outbursts, but no contemporary scholars can find any word like it, and most agree that it was either misheard or badly transcribed.

The disease is so creepy and dramatic that it's a wonder it hasn't made it to either the big or little screen. According to early sources it started out with soft singing and repeated clapping or striking of the hands to keep a beat. After a while the singing dissolved into crying, which spiraled up into screaming. The person affected tore off their own clothes, smashed everything indoors, and ran screaming into the snow. Eventually most sessions ended with a kind of seizure, followed by a near-catatonic state, after which the person nearly always recovered. If that sounds nice to you, be aware that some cases of arctic hysteria included coprophagia (i.e., poop-eating).

The Physical Causes

There are no recent cases of arctic hysteria, but so much has changed since the early 1800s that it's hard to pin down why. When looking for physical causes, most scientists turn to diet; vitamin C deficiency, vitamin D deficiency and calcium deficiency were tossed around as possible causes. While lack of vitamin C causes muscle spasms, and lack of calcium causes mood swings, neither causes screaming, the tearing of clothes, or running around. One study considered the idea that victims of arctic hysteria might have had an overdose of vitamin A. Liver, a main source of nutrition for those with plenty of meat, but little access to fruits or vegetables over the winter, can contain enough vitamin A to be toxic to humans. But, though an overdose of vitamin A yields a long list of symptoms, most of those symptoms are things like blurred vision, dizziness, and lethargy, which aren't likely to get someone to run around screaming. One symptom is irritability, which if it is meant to refer to the disease, is something of an understatement.

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Finally, there is simple hypothermia. Hypothermia makes people irrational. It leads to mood swings and, occasionally, violent behavior. The later stages of hypothermia make victims feel like they are burning with heat, even as they freeze. Many hypothermia victims are found stripped to their underwear, or completely naked. Any time people are exposed to the cold for long periods of time, hypothermia is a possibility.

Just to be safe, keep as warm as you can, eat a lot of produce, but stay away from liver.

The Psychological Causes

If the hysteria is psychological, rather than physical, there are discomfortingly few steps you can take. At first, doctors thought the arctic hysteria episodes were a cultural phenomenon; certainly, they were reactions to stress, but that reaction, just like our reactions, aren't entirely separated from the culture we live in. When explorers in the arctic also fell victim to arctic hysteria, things got more complicated. It's not unheard of for outsiders who have been exposed to a culture for a while to unconsciously adopt that culture's mentality. It does, however, imply that if you want to avoid running out into the snow naked, you would have been better off never reading this article.

One of the most intriguing analysis of the disease might explain why there is no word in any indigenous American language for what seems like a notable phenomenon. Arctic hysteria might not have started happening until enough explorers and Europeans made their way to the arctic and subarctic. Winters are never easy, and arctic hysteria might have been the reaction to a massive shift in circumstances. A culture that needed to marshal much of its resources and knowledge to get through a tough time was seeing those resources stripped away and that knowledge become irrelevant in a changing world. If that's the case, then probably the best way to stop yourself from succumbing to arctic hysteria is to stay away from the news, keep yourself from looking up anything that's trending on twitter, and just keep telling yourself the spring will come.

Images: NOAA Photo Library.

[Via International Medicine, Michigan State University, Pibloktoq (Hysteria) and Inuit Nutrition, Arctic Anthropology]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com How to avoid (or embrace) arctic hysteria during this eternal winter

Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why the new Cosmos matters so much onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why the new Cosmos matters so much

This Sunday, March 9th, what is arguably the most important science show of all time returns to TV as Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts an all-new, updated version of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. We caught up with Neil DeGrasse Tyson on his whirlwind tour of the universe to discuss the what the show is and isn't, explaining why science matters to modern audiences, and his personal asteroid.

io9: How has the press tour been treating you?

Neil deGrasse Tyson: It's exhausting but exhilarating. While it's a huge hit to my day's calendar, I'm persistently reminded that for most people who are conducting interviews it's not "oh, this show is coming out and I gotta do an article." There's an enthusiasm and an anticipation. I find I'm deeply hopeful about what this means for the future of America and the world, that science literacy is something that can be embraced and nurtured and that the comfort level people have with science can change.

We were certainly excited to hear that you would be updating this series. We've come so far since 1980, not just in science but in visual effects and filmmaking that this is a great way to carry forward Dr. Sagan's legacy.

Tyson: The methods and tools of storytelling are significantly advanced, yes, but it's not only that. Because it's on network, we have some resources that have allowed us access to people who have previously brought their craft to cinema. Our director of photography is Bill Pope, who was the director of photography for the Matrix trilogy and Spider-Man.

When you think of a typical documentary, you think of somebody in a lab coat with a test tube and there's a camera on a tripod and they get asked a question and they answer it. In that scenario, the camera is visiting the scene. It's you, listening to the person.

When Bill Pope gets ahold of a camera, he brings the methods and tools he developed working on those films to bear on our telling of the story of the universe. So now when you see Cosmos, it doesn't just affect you intellectually, as it should, but also emotionally and spiritually. Spiritually with a small "s" — the awe and wonder of looking up. Because of this we have high expectations for the potency of the series.

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Were there other factors that went into the decision to air this on commercial television, as opposed to PBS?

Tyson: When we first shopped around the idea, we went to the normal list of networks, PBS, Discovery Channel, Science Channel and National Geographic. While we were doing this, I met Seth MacFarlane at a special meeting in California intended to connect Hollywood storytellers and artists with scientists. I didn't think much would come of it, but Seth called me one day when he was in New York and invited me to lunch. He told me he wanted to do something to serve science in America and he asked me what he should do. I thought maybe he could invest in a pilot that we could use to show sponsors. He said "I have a good idea, let's take it to Fox."

Now, there are a series of thoughts I'm about to share with you that I think lasted about 12 seconds. My first thought was "This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard, he doesn't get it, this is a waste of a lunch."

But then I said, "Wait a minute, Fox is 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight Pictures, they brought Avatar and Slumdog Millionaire to the screen. Yes, there's Fox News, but also the Fox Network which has acerbic liberal commentary of The Simpsons and Family Guy. And there's Fox Sports. I realized Fox has more demographics of American culture going through their portfolio than any other network. And so, I concluded that there's no better place to be than on Fox.

So 12 seconds later I told him it was a great idea.

You often talk about the need for science to feed our everyday needs, to spur innovation and fuel the economy. Now you're working in an industry, filmmaking and visual effects, that has benefitted greatly from that kind of technological achievement. Do you feel that validates your point of view on the role of science in culture?

Tyson: My view is slightly different from that. It's not that space itself is what will be our savior. It's that when you go into space, it stimulates an interest in the STEM fields. It's the stimulated interest that promotes innovation in science and technology that leads to the 21st century economy. It's not "let's go to space because space does all this." It doesn't do it directly. It does it indirectly. And you get to make discoveries along the way. That's the fun part.

The IT revolution, as significant as it is, has left us unfulfilled with regard to transportation, energy use and infrastructure. There's more to society than information. We've been distracted by the stunning advances that information technology has brought us, to the exclusion of very deeply held needs that we have in society.

What is our control over natural forces so we don't have disasters like tsunamis and hurricanes? Do we run away from them? Or do we find a way to tap the energy of a hurricane and have that energy drive the city that the storm would have otherwise leveled? This is a whole other frontier that would be addressed if we go into space, because space involves hardware, people, going places you've never been before, life support, a knowledge of the solar system and the sun, and I see that as a transformative force that can turn a sleepy nation into an innovation nation.

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You've been somewhat critical of people who say that our problem is leadership, that we need another Kennedy to lead us back into space. Did I see that you called Buzz Aldrin "clueless?"

Tyson: Ha ha! I don't remember calling him "clueless." I at one point said that there are factions among us who suffer from "Apollo necrophilia."

The context was he said something about our need to go into space being driven by our destiny or our DNA.

Tyson: I certainly have arguments against that. If I said something halfway disrespectful it's because we're friends and I can get away with it. He longed for the days when people remembered every astronaut that was launched. That was one of my early disagreements with him. It's the fact that we don't know the names of astronauts that makes it evident that going into space has become routine, and that's a good thing.

Speaking of things becoming routine, how do audiences today compare with 1980? Do you feel that people need less basic science explained to them today? Or more?

Tyson: As an educator in modern times, I'm going to answer you differently than I would have 35 years ago, because I'm just that old. My day job is in a museum. How long does a person stay at a museum? A couple of hours? There are people who would want exhibits at a museum to have a whole lesson plan so you can poll people and ask them "What did you learn?" Then you'd judge the success of the exhibit based on how well people do on these exams.

I have a different view. The person is going to spend incalculably more time in a classroom than they ever will in a museum. So a museum shouldn't be a supplement to a classroom. It should be a force to ignite flames within a person's soul of curiosity. An exhibit should make a person say "Wow! I've got to find out more about this!" and trigger them to explore more advanced accountings of the topic, in books or science videos. Once the flame is lit, the learning becomes self-motivating.

Cosmos at its best should be about that, and not about presenting you Wikipedia pages to read.

What would Carl Sagan learn if he was able to see your version of Cosmos?

Tyson: I want to clarify that the goal of this Cosmos is not to update the science. A lot of science has happened in the last 35 years. We've discovered a thousand exoplanets, for example. But that's not the goal, because any time of day you can channel surf and find a documentary about black holes, colliding galaxies, the search for life, the Big Bang, dark matter, the Higgs-Boson, etc. There's no end of documentaries that serve that goal.

Cosmos has, as its mission statement, the effort to convey to you why science matters. That is a different motivating factor than "Here's all this science I want to teach you." When you take ownership of why science matters, then you are self-motivated, driven. You take the responsibility yourself to continue to learn. It's a new Cosmos not because there's so much more universe to talk about, but because the country and the world needs to know more than ever why science matters.

You've said that astrophysicists are the most humble people in the world because they confront their ignorance on a daily basis.

Tyson: Ha ha! Precisely. If you ask me what was around before the Big Bang, I have no idea. What's at the center of a black hole? I have no idea. What is dark matter? Dark energy? I have no idea. These are not complex questions that require an advanced degree to ask. There are things we do know, and we're proud of that, but as scientists we use that to put a foot in the unknown and use what we know as a carrot to keep us searching.

You've said that dark matter and dark energy should be renamed "Fred" and "Wilma." Care to elaborate on that?

Tyson: Yeah, because if I say "dark matter" you say "What kind of matter is that?" Well, we don't even know if it's matter. It's really dark gravity. Dark matter is a misleading term. There is so much first impression in the word. People ask "What do dark matter and dark energy have in common?" because they sound the same.

If I called them Fred and Wilma you wouldn't ask what they have in common. You'd ask about them separately. But because they both have the word "dark" in them, people think they're related. Maybe they are, but at the moment there's no evidence that's at all the case. These are two entities that got involved in the name game earlier than I think they should have.

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The main belt asteroid 13123, discovered by Shoemaker and Levy, was named "Tyson" after you. How does it feel to be a literal rock star?

Tyson: Ha! I never thought about it that way! In fact, the very word "asteroid" means "star-like" in Latin. In a telescope, they look just like stars, dots of light. In the early days, people just named things after what they look like.

But it is a high honor, although given the number on my asteroid, it should tell you that there 13,122 other asteroids with names on them. So, it's not a very exclusive club. I have many more achievements that fewer other people have achieved than had asteroid named after them.

Yet, it's still kind of a cool thing. Yeah, asteroid. Still kind of cool.

Cosmos premieres on March 9th on Fox. Full audio of this interview can be heard on the Natter Cast.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why the new Cosmos matters so much

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart take over Late Night onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart take over Late Night

The best friends and frequent collaborators appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers Friday night to promote their Broadway performances of Waiting for Godot and No Man's Land before McKellen decided to live out his dream of hosting a late night show of his very own. Stewart was obviously booked as McKellen's first guest.

No offense, Meyers (truly – you had a good, brief run), but I think we all know who we really want co-hosting Late Night.

[Late Night with Seth Meyers]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart take over Late Night

Over 200 Miles of Yosemite Backpacking in One Incredible Time-lapse onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Over 200 Miles of Yosemite Backpacking in One Incredible Time-lapse

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It took over two years for filmmakers Colin Delehanty and Sheldon Neill to create Yosemite HD II, the the breathtaking followup to their 2011 tribute to Yosemite National Park. It was worth the wait. Full screen, HD, headphones if you've got 'em. You know the drill.

It's hard to oversell the beauty of Yosemite. Harder, still, to capture the totality of its grandeur on camera – but Yosemite HD comes awfully close. Released in January 2012 by Delehanty and Neill, the 4-minute short was not only one of the most stunning depictions of the park we'd ever seen, but one of the more captivating time-lapses we'd ever laid eyes on, full stop. A little less than a year ago, the pair teased us with a one-minute preview of their followup project, Yosemite HD II. Now, the pair has released the project in full. It's the culmination of over two years' work, and the results are impressive, to say the least.

"We spent way more time on this video," Delehanty tells io9. "It took 10 months to capture all the footage. In that time we were in Yosemite a combined total of 45 days." He continues:

Following our first video we made connections with a lot of great people in Yosemite. We learned a lot about the park through them; so much that we were almost embarrassed that we had left out so much of the park in our first video. Places like Vogelsang and the Cathedral Range are really special places to people here so we set out to discover them ourselves.

Yosemite's backcountry features more prominently in this video – those reaches of the park inaccessible to anyone unwilling or unable to hike a day or more to reach their destination.

"Sometimes we'd hike 20 miles and get an amazing sunset and everything would go as planned and sometimes it wouldn't," Delehanty told us last year when he and Neill were in the early stages of editing the project. "We rolled the dice on each trip hoping that we'd get the opportunity to capture something beautiful. We had to work a lot harder for these shots too since we'd normally arrive at our destination with barely enough time to setup and capture that perfect light."

Delehanty tells io9 the sequel features many of the same techniques as Yosemite HD, but he and Neill tried a few new things, using high-speed camera's like the Sony FS700 and RED EPIC to capture shots of waterfalls and winter weather. During a super moon the pair captured a time-lapse by mounting their camera to the roof of a car and coasting along while the camera snapped photos once per second. "Since we had so much moonlight and shot at a 1.2 aperture we were able to get some really amazing drivelapse (where you shoot time-lapse from your car) shots of El Capitan and Yosemite Falls with the stars above," says Delehanty.

"Before Yosemite HD II we hadn't done much backpacking or climbing in Yosemite's high country. With each project I want to try something new and never settle on one idea," Delehanty tells us. "In this last video we wanted to see how far we could go and seriously push our limits. Its amazing what you're capable of doing when you're inspired by a place like Yosemite. Now the search continues and we're not sure where that next inspiring location will be."

Wherever that place may be, we look forward to seeing what Delehanty and Neill turn out.

For more, visit Project Yosemite.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Over 200 Miles of Yosemite Backpacking in One Incredible Time-lapse

America's first settlers were trapped in Beringia for 10,000 years onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com America's first settlers were trapped in Beringia for 10,000 years

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The ancestors of Native Americans came to the New World by walking over a land bridge across the Bering Strait. But there's a rather glaring 10,000 year gap in the story — one that could be explained by a migratory pause that lasted for millennia.

Genetic evidence proves that Asian populations made the trek across Beringia roughly 25,000 year ago (though some still hold out for the so-called the Solutrean hypothesis in which humans made the trek from southwest Europe). But a recent genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA by University of Utah anthropologist Dennis O'Rourke and colleagues shows that these populations didn't actually make it to North America until about 15,000 years ago. Quite obviously, it shouldn't take a group of paleolithic-era humans 10,000 years to trek across a 51 mile (82 km) stretch. So what happened?

According to O'Rourke, they may have been stuck there, unable to cross over a massive glacial barrier that separated the two continents. And he makes the argument without presenting any actual archaeological evidence. But that doesn't mean he and his team didn't didn't offer some compelling clues.

A Home, Not a Bridge

Indeed, because the "land bridge" is now submerged, anthropologists have not been able to uncover actual archaeological evidence hinting at prolonged human habitation. But other evidence exists, such as fossilized insects, plants, and pollen extracted from Bering Sea sediment cores.

The Bering Land Bridge, it would seem, is perhaps misnamed. It wasn't just a barren, grassy tundra steppe, but rather a rich and viable ecosystem populated by brushy shrubs, and even trees such as spruce, birch, willow, and alder. It was also home to various animals, such as bison, mammoths, elks, birds, moose — and even camels (who may have been traveling in the other direction, making the trek from North America to Asia).

What's more, it was a huge landmass. During the last glacial maximum, which lasted from 28,000 to about 18,000 years ago, thick glacial ice sheets extended south into what is now Alaska. Back then, sea levels were 400 feet lower, creating a sizable swath of land between and south of Siberia and Alaska, at the present sites of the Chukchi Sea, the Bering Strait and the Bering Sea, respectively. At its largest, Beringia measured 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from north to south and as much as 3,000 miles (4,800 km) from Siberia's Verkoyansk Range east to the Mackenzie River in in Canada.

In addition, much of Beringia, particularly the lowlands, had average summer temperatures nearly identical (or only slightly cooler in some regions) to those in the region today.

"The local environments likely were not as daunting as many have assumed for years," noted O'Rourke in a statement. "They probably hunkered down pretty good in the winter though. It would have been cold."

Given its size, rich ecosystem, and reasonable climate, no human or animal would have perceived it as a "bridge." But for migrating humans, the glacier would would have represented an insurmountable barrier.

At some point, argues O'Rourke, the genetic blueprint that defines Native American populations had to become distinct from that Asian ancestry. But the only way for that to happen was for the population to be isolated.

"Most of us don't believe that isolation took place in Siberia because we don't see a place where a population could be sufficiently isolated," he says. "It would always have been in contact with other Asian groups on its periphery. But if there were these shrub-tundra refugia in central Beringia, that provided a place where isolation could occur."

The Great Melt

When the glacial maximum period came to end, so too did the barrier separating the two continents. With the glaciers gone, the isolated humans spilled into North America some 15,000 years ago. At least that's what's suggested by these clues; O'Rourke admits that archaeological sites must be found in Beringia if this theory is to be confirmed. This will prove easier said than done given that these areas are underwater. But some evidence of human habitation in shrub tundra may be present above sea level in low-lying areas of Alaska and eastern Chukotka in Russia.

But until then, genetic and environmental clues will have to do.

"We're putting it together with the archaeology and genetics that speak to American origins and saying, look, there was an environment with trees and shrubs that was very different than the open, grassy steppe. It was an area where people could have had resources, lived and persisted through the last glacial maximum in Beringia," O'Rourke says. "That may have been critical for the people to subsist because they would have had wood for construction and for fires. Otherwise, they would have had to use bone, which is difficult to burn."

Read the entire study at Science: "Out of Beringia?"

Image: William Manley, Institute of Arctic and Alpine Rsearch, University of Colorado.

Follow me on Twitter: @dvorsky

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com America's first settlers were trapped in Beringia for 10,000 years

The physical limit of trick shots in billiards onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The physical limit of trick shots in billiards

For anyone who has ever had their ass handed to them in a game of pool, take comfort knowing that in the end, physics beats everything. A physicist has calculated how many collisions it takes for billiards to be impossible without a supercomputer. It's less than you think!

Beginning pool players (or the hopelessly incompetent) know the despair of trying to do a seemingly simple mechanical thing — make one ball hit another so the second ball goes into a pocket — and failing entirely. It's generally due to lack of skill and practice. Lack of practice translates into a large amount of uncertainty as to how the ball will move when it's hit a certain way. However, as our practical certainty of the laws of motion specific to billiard balls increases, the range of motion that the second ball takes decreases. It will go where we want it to go. We know and control the variables that affect its motion.

Professor Michael Berry, a physicist, tracked how those variables increase as the number of billiard ball collisions increases. He had started studying such things on a larger scale, determining how the uncertainty of the position of a single electron could affect our certainty of the outcome of later molecular collisions. As the possibilities increased, how long before we knew, practically speaking, nothing about how a system of molecules would move? Berry calculated that, after 60 collisions with other molecules, uncertainty about a single electron will result in an inability to predict an entire molecular system. This would happen in milliseconds. Then Berry put aside the light work and got down to the serious business of examining the physics involved in a game of professional pool. How many collisions can a billiard ball make before we have no way of knowing its eventual trajectory?

The joker in the deck is gravity, a force that no one can entirely "screen out," no matter where they are in the universe. It makes a difference in the path of molecules and the path of billiard balls. For the first collision of a billiard ball, we can control the variable so well that we don't really have to think of gravity as anything other than the force holding the ball on the table. We control all the variables that matter: the placement and force of the hit. After a couple of collisions, we're less able to determine where the balls go. Even on an idealized surface, there are many options depending on the exact force with which the balls meet, and the forces acting upon them. After six or seven collisions, you don't just have to worry about the gravity of the Earth, but of the gravity of the people walking around the table. Exactly where these people are, and the gravitational pull their mass exerts on the balls, will determine whether the balls go one way or another. This means that, unless a pool player can carefully weight the people around the table, determine where they stand, there's no possible way for anyone to be certain of the trajectory of a ball after six or more collisions.

So if you see someone doing a trick shot that involves six or more collisions, you've crossed over to the X-Men universe and found yourself a mutant.

[Via A Passion for Science, Regular and Irregular Motion]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The physical limit of trick shots in billiards

The Legendary Honor Harrington's New Adventure: Movies, Comics and More onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Legendary Honor Harrington's New Adventure: Movies, Comics and More

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Honor Harrington is one of the all-time great heroes of military science fiction. The star of over a dozen novels by David Weber, she's inspired a real-life army of fans who belong to the Royal Manticoran Navy. And now she's coming to comics, games and eventually movies, from Evergreen Studios. We talked to Weber plus Evergreen CCO Scott Kroopf about the next phase of the Honorverse.

The Honor Harrington series follows a brilliant genetically engineered starship captain, leading her crew on difficult assignments 2,000 years in the future, when the human race has discovered hyperspace travel and has colonized the far corners of the universe. She fights for the Star Kingdom of Manticore, a relatively small empire based in a binary star system.

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The new Honor Harrington website, Tales of the Honoverse, goes live tomorrow, and the first issue of her new comic book comes out on March 5. A mobile game is coming out sometime soon after, and meanwhile her first big-screen movie is in the pipeline. But we've got the exclusive first look at artwork, plus the inside scoop about these projects.

Here's what we found out from Weber and Kroopf:

They're doing the game and comic first for a couple of reasons

The movie is "what everybody who is an Honorverse fan is really looking for," says Weber. "The comic books are retelling a story they already know," without "the added visual immersion that a good movie produces."

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But Evergreen has decided to do a mobile game and a comic book first for a couple of reasons, says Kroopf.

For one thing, they wanted to try and bring Honor to a new set of fans, while reaching out to her existing fanbase in a new way. "Honorverse fans tend to be very, very loyal, and very much involved, but they tend to be in their own little world," says Weber. "Science fiction is a genre that actually has a relatively small readership compared to other genres, but the readers we have are very, very loyal to the authors they support."

Weber adds:

"One of the things Evergreen helps to accomplish with the graphic novel and the games is to reach out to an audience that hasn't already met Honor through the novels, and give them an easier 'in' to the universe than saying, 'Oh God, you have to read 19 books before you understand what's going on.'"

But also, this gives Evergreen a chance to build up a library of art showing how everything looks in the Honorverse before trying to create a movie. "We could start visualizing what the world was, and really redoing it," says Kroopf. "Because Honor has had a lot of really good book covers and fan-inspired art and all of that, but it's really been done surrounding the publishing of the books."

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"I am seeing the comic books as an developmental step in the process, as a place to work out concepts before they actually dive into the movie itself," says Weber. "I think the amount of feedback they are going toget on it may be very useful to them. They have actually established a forum on my website where they are interacting directly with Honorverse fans."

Usually, in the movie business, a studio will concentrate on getting a movie off the ground and maybe then worry about tie-ins like comics and games — so Evergreen's approach of focusing on the game and comic first seems innovative, says Kroopf, who was brought on board in October 2012 to help develop this "multiplatform" strategy.

So what's holding up the movie?

According to Kroopf, the biggest holdup is getting the screenplay to a place where everybody is happy with it. And Kroopf confesses he was responsible for one major setback for the film script — before Kroopf came on board in late 2012, Evergreen was working on the idea of adapting Weber's first novel, On Basilisk Station, into the movie. But Kroopf wasn't happy with that idea.

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"There are several elements in [Basilisk Station] that are a little atypical" of the series as a whole, says Kroopf. "And a lot of things are being set up and put in motion," but the book "doesn't have quite as much action" as some of the later books. "It's a subtler introduction to Honor," he adds.

So Kroopf decided to toss out the screenplay based on Basilisk Station that had already been written, and instead make a movie based on the second book, Honor of the Queen. In that book, Honor goes on a mission to a planet whose ruler doesn't believe that women should command starships. Because Honor is from a society that's totally "gender-blind," she's startled to realize that someone thinks her gender is an impediment to command.

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"It felt, to me, that that idea married up more powerfully to the idea of introducing a female starship captain," says Kroopf, who felt this was "a great opportunity." Strong female characters have always been in science fiction, but this conflict "hasn't been pushed forward as much," and he felt this "had some contemporary resonance."

"It just felt like a better starting point," adds Kroopf.

So in the end, Evergreen decided to turn the work they had done on Basilisk Station into their comic book, which is actually based on Weber's first Honor book. And switched the movie to be based on Honor of the Queen.

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Weber completely agrees with their decision to film his second book instead of his first. "I actually suggested that," he tells io9. "I love Basilisk Station and it does a huge amount to set the character of Honor in the readers mind and so forth." But so much of the story takes place in "internal viewpoints, to understand what's going on beneath the surface of the crew's actual thoughts and interactions and so on, and on the other hand, so much of the book is involved with Honor's internal struggles with building the crew."

"I think it would make a good movie," adds Weber. "I do not think it would make the best starting movie for the Honorverse. I do think that means Basilisk Station as a standalone movie will never be made." But one option is to film "flashback episodes" from Basilisk Station to build the characters — which could be included in the film, or posted online as webisodes.

And meanwhile, the graphic novel is making Basilisk available to a new audience, as well.

How will they bring the treecat, Nimitz, to life?

Readers of the books will know that Honor Harrington's constant companion is a Sphinxian treecat named Nimitz, a telepathic creature that bonds with few humans. Bringing Nimitz to life on screen is "going to be the hard part," says Weber. "It will probably be marginally harder to do it than to find a 6'3 Eurasian actress who can do martial arts and act."

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Nimitz is "going to be on camera so much of the time, and he is so integral a part of Honor that just figuring out how a six-limbed creature moves and generating the muscle movement and limb placement is going to be a real, real challenge," says Weber.

The second challenge will be "creating a Nimitz that works withthe notion that a lot of people think, 'It's a pet,' when they first see him," but this is actually "a critter that can rip your throat out, foiling an assassination attempt."

The version of Nimitz appearing in the first couple issues of the comic book has "very little extra detail," because they still haven't figured out how his musculature works, and then how the "big fluffy coat" looks on top of that. "I have a pretty strong notion of how treecats look, and I think we're going to wind up departing from that in the movie, for reasons that have been explained to me and make sense," says Weber.

He adds:

"What people have to understand when they look at the comic books is, this is the starting point of Nimitz's development, not the end of his development, that is one of the potential potholes for starting with the comic book: a lot of people are going to leap to the conclusion this is the finalized imagery for the film, which it isn't."

"If I'd been thinking from the beginning about a movie being made of these books," says Weber, "Nimitz would have been quadripedal. It would have been a lot easier. The technology is there to do him in a believable, realistic form but it is going to take a lot of work and nailing it is going to be one of the great challenges."

What's the game about?

Basically, it's a space combat game, where you become the captain of a starship "through a set of circumstances the game tells you," says Kroopf. You manage your starship and go through a series of battles, as you work on a larger "story mission, that ties back in with the overall story-world."

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The hope is this game will teach people the nuts and bolts of running a starship and winning battles, on a very basic level. "One reason the IOS game was chosen is, it's kind of a great vehicle to do that," says Kroopf. "It lets you get your feet wet." Over time, the game can keep developing and building people's knowledge of the Honorverse, and "break some story ground."

"It really is first and foremost a game about running a starship," says Kroopf.

The comic will be somewhat non-linear

Given the wealth of material in the Honorverse, Evergreen didn't want to do a straight-up adaptation of On Basilisk Station in the comics. Instead, the comic starts with an incident from book seven of the series, where Honor has been captured and is being taken to her execution. "We thought this was a great starting point," says Kroopf. "Who is this woman? Why is she going to be executed? As opposed to a more conventional set up where we see her, and this is her first mission."

They hope to explore more of Honor's backstory

The great thing about the Honorverse is, between David's ever-growing series of books and the large number of tie-in stories by other authors, there is a lot of material out there. Any time you need a piece of backstory for someone or something, chances are it's already been developed.

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For example, says Kroopf, Honor is the daughter of two doctors, so she's automatically not like any other hero — she has "more complexity and density, and more badassness." Weber wrote "this incredible story about how her mother and father met, and how before he was a doctor, her father was kind of black-ops marine. And suddenly, it all just gets juicier and more fun."

They're trying to be true to the science and the books

Not only does Honor have a large and passionate fanbase, but a lot of them are scientists or military personnel themselves, says Kroopf:

"They are such an incredible resource, because we can bounce ideas off of them and create a really lively debate. What we're looking for is, we're pushing it into a lot of visual mediums where we can make it exciting and thrilling, and look cool. We keep pushing it, and it's nice to have a reality check where they come in and say, 'Oh, that's not really how things work.' And then we argue about, 'That's not how things work in the book, but it's not really visual."

In the end, they usually "find a happy medium, where it looks cool and we get the spirit of the book right."

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One of the main debates is over which characters can get screen time in the movie, and who has to be left out or combined for viewpoint purposes, says Weber. "A lot of my fans have favorites among those characters, and in a movie you don't have a lot of choice, unless you plan on making a 12-hour movie." Some characters who don't get into the movie may get their day in the sun in the comics, however.

Weber confesses to being nervous, because "as a writer, I have an unlimited special effects budget," but in movies and games, things are bound to look different. "What I say at conventions for many years is that nobody has ever read a single book that I've written. Everybody who reads one of the books brings to it their own concepts and ideas." The books are always different, depending on who reads them. But "when you look at a movie, you are looking at an authoritative visual presentation, and instead of interactions being colored by the reader, those presentations are right in front of you."

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But Weber believes that if the movie and other tie-ins are done well, they can "add a huge amount of texture to the story.... I am looking forward to it, and excited by it, and very pleased by the extent to which it seems to me Evergreen is determined to do the Honorverse, and not just slap the name on it, and very pleased by how they are involving me in the process."

It helps that Mike Devlin, the CEO of Evergreen, is a "big Honor Harrington Fan," adds Weber. "He is adamant that in portraying Honor, the dark side of her character has to be portrayed as well, and when you start talking about the political systems and motivations, it has to be integrated into the spine of the movie to give it continuity and context." At the same time, "Mike is a very hard-headed business man," so in the end he's going to make decisions based on what's going to work.

Adds Weber:

"One thing an author who options a book for movie or TV has to understand is,it is the people who are making the film or TV series or whatever who are running the financial risk in this operation, and that means they have a moral right to deal with the material the way they think it needs to be dealt with. They also have a moral responsibility not toignore the original material, and not to ignore what made the original book successful in the first place. There is a balance out there in the middle."

He learned a lot from working with cover artists — if you try to constrain an artist too much, you don't get his or her best work. Instead, you get something where they're trying to include every detail you insisted on, and it cramps their style. But when a cover artist "decides a character who is Eurasian has blonde hair and blue eyes, then you have a problem," says Weber.

And here's some exclusive concept art showing some of the main characters from the Honor Harrington saga:

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onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Legendary Honor Harrington's New Adventure: Movies, Comics and More

Why don't you die after you have sex? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why don't you die after you have sex?

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Did you or do you or will you enjoy your long stretch of reproductive years? According to Cole's Paradox, you shouldn't. Many species need just a tiny increase of fecundity in order to justify one shot at sex, followed by death. Find out why you "should" die after you copulate, and why you don't.

Semelparity and Iteroparity

All your life, without knowing it, you have been iteroparous. And that's a good thing, too, because anything else would mean immediate death after a single shot at mating. Iteroparous animals reproduce many times over the course of their life, or at least take a crack at it. Semelparous creatures, on the other hand, have one chance to mate, give it their all, and then die afterwards. The most famous examples are spawning salmon, who swim upstream, dodging bears all the way, in order to seriously affect the water quality in the stream where they were hatched and then die immediately afterwards. The female giant pacific octopus protects and grooms her eggs, and as they hatch, she blows out a stream of water to help them on their way while she dies. There are even a few male marsupials who will get a huge adrenaline spike just as mating season comes on, wreck their own immune system by mating constantly, and then die horribly.

For obvious reasons, this system favors the animals that can abandon their young rather than those that have to stick around and raise them. Semelparity is not the default state for animals. It requires a huge and well-timed spike in energy, the ability to ignore even the most basic survival needs in favor of mating, and the production of offspring that can fend for themselves. It seems that every instance of semelparity evolved from iteroparity. Given the requirements for a successful instance of semelparity, it's a wonder it evolved at all.

Cole's Paradox and Semelparity

Or so it would seem. Lamont Cole, a biologist who spent the early 1950s crunching numbers, published a model of population growth based on reproduction that startled quite a few people. There should be a lot more semelparity in the world, he claimed. He was looking at reproductive rates as a way of figuring out why some animals lived a long time while other animals lived only a short time. He found that species that were annuals, and lived only one year, needed to produce only one single more offspring per "litter" than species that were perennials in order to maintain the same population growth. So a tiny increase in litter size favored semelparity. Why, then, was it so rare?

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There are reasons why humans don't go semelparous. Someone has to raise the baby, and until there are three sexes, male, female, and parent, we will have to put a lot more work into raising our offspring than the salmon put into raising theirs. But how did we evolve in the first place? If semelparity is favored, why would there even be ancestral primates that needed multiple years to raise their offspring? Why aren't we all like the unfortunate Australian marsupials? This schism, between the seeming advantages of semelparity and its relative rarity, became known as Cole's Paradox.

Better Modeling Means We Live!

Cole's Paradox, like many paradoxes that are refuted by a quick look at the evidence, couldn't stand for long. People were quick to point out flaws, and build better models. For example, Cole didn't look at juvenile versus adult mortality, he just assumed that everyone survived until their appointed time to die. In the real world, there's a rate fertile adult mortality and a rate of juvenile mortality, and the difference between those two rates has a lot of influence on whether semelparity is an option. If a species has an abysmal rate of adult mortality, but juvenile mortality is relatively low, it's best to turn things over to a new generation than suck up resources.

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The same goes for environmental factors. Reproduction almost always requires risk and energy — whether it's salmon swimming for miles to get their eggs to a nice quiet place in a stream where they can safely hatch or desert marsupials who have a short season of plenty, during which they have a little extra time on their hands. If it takes 90% of a species' energy to produce young, using 100% of that energy to produce a bigger litter is a better strategy than conserving 10% and having a small litter.

And, of course, there's the relative likelihood of wiping out thousands of salmon versus the likelihood of killing off five lion cubs, or of one set of humans not conceiving for a year or two. In the end, there are some animals that are shaped by their environment, their reproductive systems, and their inherent traits into a long-lived species with potentially high failure rates for reproduction, and there are some that become short-lived species that can really pump out a winning litter. We happen to be the former. I don't want to be too speciesist, but I think we can all be grateful for that.

[Via Semelparity and Iteroparity, Why are Life Histories So Variable, NCBI]

Images: top to bottom: Pressmaster/Shutterstock, Sekar B/Shutterstock, Mogens Trolle/Shutterstock.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why don't you die after you have sex?