Seems a dubious use of the available technology.
http://jalopnik.com/5653873/chrysler-drops-worlds-largest-aerial-banner-spooks-faa?skyline=true&s=i
Oct 022010
Oct 012010
Akkadian, language of Babylon, has been dead 2000 or so years. Linguists seem to think they’ve figured out its pronunciation, and have posted a number of readings in MP3 format of things like the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Codex Hammurabi:
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/mjw65/BAPLAR/Homepage
It varies from “alien” to “kinda familiar.”
Oct 012010
An astronomer picked up a mysterious pulse of light coming from the direction of the newly discovered Earth-like planet almost two years ago, it has emerged.
Dr Ragbir Bhathal, a scientist at the University of Western Sydney, picked up the odd signal in December 2008, long before it was announced that the star Gliese 581 has habitable planets in orbit around it.
…
He went on: ‘We found this very sharp signal, sort of a laser lookalike thing which is the sort of thing we’re looking for – a very sharp spike. And that is what we found. So that was the excitement about the whole thing.’
The Mote In Gliese’s Eye?
UPDATE: Yet again, journalism FAIL: http://www.space.com/common/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19192
The signal we detected came from the southern constellation Tucanae.
Note that that’s not the constellation that Gliese 581g happens to be in.
About Gliese 581g: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap101001.html
The best fit to the data indicate the planet has a circular 37 day orbit, an orbital radius of only 0.15 AU, and a mass 3.1 times the Earth’s. Modeling includes estimates of a planet radius of 1.5, and gravity at the planet’s surface of 1.1 to 1.7 in Earth units.
At 1.7 G’s surface gravity, it would be an uncomfortable place… but not unlivable for adapted Terrestrial life… and certainly not for life locally evolved. One complaint I’ve seen is that since the planet is so close to it’s relatively small star, it would be tidally locked, meaning one side perpetually faces the sun, one side perpetually faces away. Some people thus assume that this means that the only livable spot would be along the terminator, where the sun is just on the horizon. But there are two additional possibilities:
1) The planet has a moon in close orbit. If so, it will be tidally locked to *that.* The moon would have to be in pretty close, which means it would loom incredibly large in the sky. A sizable moon would also remove some of the detected mkass of the planet, and reduce the surface gavity.
2) If the planet has any axial tilt, then the terminator is not a fixed band, but a much broader area. At the poles, the sun would seem to go up and down on a 37-Earth-day cycle. However, tidal locking would probably wipe out axial tilt over time.
Oct 012010
Getting back to blogging with something appropriately cheerful, here’re some astrophysicists who’ve run the numbers and think the universe might end before the sun burns out:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1316154/Time-end-3-7bn-years-it.html
The only way to make our current universe work is to include a catastrophe at some point in the future which ends time – and takes us with it.
Using complicated theoretical physics and advanced mathematics the team calculated when this is most likely to occur.
Bousso says: in the study: ‘Time is unlikely to end in our lifetime, but there is a 50 per cent chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years.’
This means that time and the universe would end before our own Sun has died.
Other physicists give us slightly longer, calculating the end of time to occur within the next five billion years.
But there is some good news. The research team say that, due to physics