Once more with feeling...

from the AP update on Russian troop movements:

Russian tanks rumbled into the city of Gori on Wednesday and thrust deep into Georgian territory. Georgian officials said Gori was looted and bombed by the Russians. An AP reporter later saw dozens of tanks and military vehicles leaving the city, roaring south.

Troops waved at journalists and one soldier shouted to a photographer: "Come with us, beauty, we're going to Tbilisi!" But the convoy turned north, left the highway about an hour's drive from the Georgian capital and started setting up camp.

Huh. What could they possibly be doing hanging out between Gori and Tbilisi?

Georgia addendum

In April, a Georgian UAV was shot down by a Russian warplane over Abkhazia. Russia denied the plane was theirs until this video was made public. Oops.

Unraveling the War

Russia's invasion of Georgia was timed perfectly to coincide with the start of the Olympics. Well played, Putin.

A few pieces of relevant information:


1) The Baku-Supsa Oil Pipeline

Owned and operated by British Petroleum, the pipeline has been online since 1999. It carries oil from the giant oil field under the Caspian Sea, across Azerbaijan and Georgia (running just south of South Ossetia), to the Black Sea, where it's taken by tanker ship across and through the strait of Bosporus into the Mediterranean, and from there out into the Atlantic and anywhere and everywhere in the world. Essentially, Russia can choke off a main route of Caspian oil distribution from South Ossetia.

2) The Baku-Novorossiysk Pipeline

The main pipeline moving Caspian oil into Russia itself. The government of Azerbaijan was so pissed at Russia in 2007 that they halted all oil delivery. It's still offline.

3) The Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan Pipeline

A cooperative project between American and European oil companies and the government of Azerbaijan. Russia was completely left out. The pipeline went online in May of 2006. In 2005, Kommersant (the Russian Wall Street Journal) wrote:

"The only thing that could prevent the project from being finished is re-ignition of old ethnic conflicts in Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Osetia. These conflicts could directly threaten the pipe that is laying nearby. However, by now, the West has invested large amounts into the project and will not allow any risks. From now on, all games in the region will be played by new rules and will be linked to the Baku-Jeikhan axis. And the whole policy of the West will be directed to the pipeline protection."

Ah, hindsight. It's also worth pointing out that ALL of this oil flowing from the Caspian used to be owned by the Soviet Union.

4) What happened to North Ossetia?

Good story, actually. Ossetia was an "oblast", or province in the Soviet Union. When the USSR disintegrated, Ossetia was divided in half by the Russia-Georgia border. So North Ossetia is part of Russia now, and this is some part of Russia's interest in South Ossetia. Strategically, because unrest among the Ossetians in Georgia can easily spill over to the Ossetians in Russia. Conversely (and rhetorically), because Russia's "standing up for" the South Ossetians is domestically popular.

5) NATO

One whole chapter of Georgia's Foreign Policy Strategy for 2006-2009 was dedicated to the county's desire to join NATO. Yeah, NATO...the military alliance organized to counter-balance the Soviet Union, which has continued to grow and add member-states since the end of the Soviet Union. The addition of Ukraine and Georgia will push NATO's borders right up against Russia.

I suddenly want to play "Risk".

Wikipedia's default entry for "Love at First Sight"

Love at First Sight

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Love At First Sight)

This article is about the Kylie Minogue song. For the phenomenon about love, see Love at first sight.

Luckily, I was trying to look up the Kylie song, so it all worked out. Anyway, I defy you to stay in a crappy mood after watching this:

Note Kylie's revealing of spatial geometry, the invisible structure of the universe. Represented here by a "grid" superimposed over the world that Kylie inhabits, it's also shown to extend out into the universe. So is Kylie's point that love reveals the secret structure of the universe? Or, more interestingly, is she comparing not being in love to the pre-Einsteinian geometry of Euclid?

Euclid was the man until Einstein came along and showed that massive objects warp space and time to such an extent that Euclidean geometry becomes useless. The distance between points expands and contracts according to the mass of the objects between those points. So is Kylie saying that in the presence of love, all of our old points of reference are useless? Well played, Dr. Minogue.

Kylie continues her exploration of non-Euclidean spacetime in the video for "come into my world".

Feral Children

FeralChildren.com

What? How do you waste time on the internet?

Every story is some kind of tragedy, because of both the circumstances that led to the child going feral in the first place, and also because what the hell do you do with them afterwards?

Sometimes they have to clarify: "No, that child was not actually raised by squirrels, he's just autistic". A huge number of hoaxes, but many very true, very fascinating cases of children found, raised, protected, or reared by wild animals.

More

That time travel guy at UCONN

("Frame-dragging": The Earth, like anything with mass, warps spacetime around it. The math shows that it may also "drag" spacetime as it spins.)

Jumping forward in time is easy. We do it constantly. Every time you board a plane, drive on the highway, or move at any significant speed, time moves more slowly for you than for the rest of the world. At the speeds we can currently achieve, you gain only billionths of a second, and this has no practical effect whatsoever, but this is technically time travel as predicted by relativity. As the speed at which humans routinely travel increases over the next centuries, this effect will have to be taken into account. Eventually, as we begin to travel close to the speed of light, travellers will find that while hours have passed for them, years will have passed on earth. Take a light-speed ship out to the nearest star and back, and you'll return to a future earth. The real trick is travelling backwards in time:

I like Ron Mallett, I think he's a neat guy with a fascinating story, and his previous work on standard physics problems is solid. That said, his "laser time travel" device is cuckoo-bananas. The paper that lays out the physics behind his device is here.

Basically, Mallett has shown that by creating a circular high-energy laser, he can mimic the mass of a very large object. Awesome! We're all with him so far, but this is the point at which he leaves experimental physics and enters theoretical and speculative physics. From this spinning mass, he predicts, we might observe some amount of "frame-dragging". Now, frame-dragging is probably an observable effect, but we've not actually observed it yet.

(The math predicting frame-dragging has been around since 1918, but developing experiments to prove the theory took a bit longer to work out. Until last year, actually, when we began gathering data with "Gravity Probe-B". It's a pretty amazing satellite, launched in 2004 to detect the frame-dragging effects of the closest giant spinning object around, the Earth. The data is....complicated. The scientists doing the work think it will be at least 2010 before they've worked out exactly if / how the theory fits the reality.)

So okay, Mallett is on theoretically solid ground here. Whether he can replicate an effect with a desktop-sized device that we're barely sure is created by the whole earth is a different story.

Mallett then adds a theoretical property to a theoretical effect. With enough frame-dragging, he proposes, a "closed time-like curve" (CTC) could emerge, where space and time are so warped that "distance" (across space and time) becomes meaningless. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that space twisted around itself to that extent is not really a place you want to hang out (Mallett says just particles for now), and assuming he can work out all of the engineering problems that arise from channeling that much energy through some lenses and mirrors (no answers on this yet), the absolute best case scenario is that the particle would exit the loop just before it entered. That would be cool, but we won't be hunting T-Rexes anytime soon.

I gave him the benefit of the doubt several times there, and now I'm going to take it back. Mallett claims that the metric tensor he's worked out creates BOTH CTCs and an exit vector. Either I'm missing something big (totally possible), or Mallett's imagination has far outrun his math. Every solution I can think of just makes a death-trap, an inescapable loop that neither light nor particle can emerge from once entered. Essentially, a black hole. In order to bend a lightcone enough to make it fold back on itself (and therefore allow something to return to the place in time and space that it entered), you need A LOT of mass (or in this case, a VERY powerful laser mimicking a LOT of mass). This mass bends one edge of an object's lightcone around it, but it bends the other side too. So nothing could emerge without turning off the laser. But the device would have to be on to send a particle back in time. Theoretically, a particle should emerge the first time Mallett moves toward the "ON" switch. But then he'd have to be sure to turn the machine on anyway. Clearly, there are also some causality issues to be worked out.

In reading his paper, I couldn't help but notice that he solved the Einstein field equations with a metric based on an INFINITELY long cylinder of light. On one hand, this is genius (more on why at the end), on the other hand, it's a total cop-out. We've long known (since Frank Tipler in 1974) that an infinitely long cylinder of matter can produce relativistic effects that might make limited forms of time travel possible. This hasn't been particularly useful due to the...shall we say, difficulties, of building something infinite. This is the genius and the stupidity of Mallett's work. He's shown that light will behave the same way (genius), but ignored the irrelevence of the proof if it only works with infinite light (stupid). He has not addressed this issue, but has instead gone ahead with building a finite laser based on the theoretically sound properties of an infinite one.

Again, Mallett HAS done something genius here by applying the mass-energy equivalence rule of relativity to lasers. I can think of 10 amazing potential uses for this technology. Time travel, I'm afraid, will never be one of them.

Myths of Biofuel

(Schematic of Methyl Linoleate, a.k.a. biodiesel, a semi-energetic molecule. It's also one of the chemicals used by insects to communicate. Will widespread use of biodiesel cause a butterfly genocide? Probably not.)

Biofuel-Powered Jet Makes First Flight

Sorry to piss on Richard Branson's parade, but the coverage of this story has glossed right over the facts. The truth, as buried in a BBC "read more" piece (and mentioned nowhere in CNN's coverage):

"One of the aircraft's four engines ran on fuel comprising a 20% biofuel mix of coconut and babassu oil and 80% of the normal Jet A aviation fuel. "

Right. So despite all of the pictures of Branson juggling coconuts on the tarmac in front of the plane, giving quotes to the press on "the future of green aviation", all he did was water down the standard, petroleum-based jet fuel in ONE of the engines with 20% nut oil.

I'm all for alternatives, but stunts like this do serious damage to this cause. These are the things oil companies use to make looking for alternatives seem a waste of time. And looking for alternatives is not a waste of time. We just haven't found any good ones yet.

Biodiesel is not the silver-bullet solution for cars either. They pollute just as much as petroleum-fueled cars, it's just that their toxic by-product is not carbon dioxide. Biodiesel-fueled cars do however work well and as advertized.

Planes are a completely different story. Until we start seriously re-engineering the coconut genome, biofuels will NEVER be energetic or stable enough to power a jet. Until then, why is Richard Branson playing pretend?

Satellite Questions, Finally

The New York Times does some fact-checking:

"An Errant Satellite is Gone, But Questions Linger"

Rep. Ed Markey: “The geopolitical fallout of this intercept could be far greater than any chemical fallout that would have resulted from the wayward satellite. The Bush administration’s decision to use a missile to destroy the satellite based on a questionable ‘safety’ justification poses a great danger of signaling an ‘open season’ for other nations to test weapons for use against our satellites."

Andrew Revkin also did a bit of research on the chemistry, which should have been done (by someone besides me) when this story first broke. His findings are published on one of the Times blogs, not the actual print edition. Better late and net-only than never I guess:

"If it was, in fact, about limiting toxic peril, I’m not quite sure what drove that concern. (...) Hydrazines easily evaporate to the air, where they are broken down by reactions within minutes or hours."

Think we'll get any official response to these questions? Me neither.

A Direct Hit for Propaganda

(In red, the orbital path of debris created by China's 2007 anti-satellite missile test. This debris will stay in orbit for roughly 35 years, creating a hazard that satellites and spacecraft must navigate around or risk being shredded by)

Missile destroys satellite - Video

James Jeffrey, deputy national security adviser, denied the allegation that the U.S. was flexing its military muscle. "This is all about trying to reduce the danger to human beings," he said.

The military also timed its efforts to minimize the chances that debris would hit populated areas. But the United States is "prepared to offer assistance to governments to mitigate the consequences of any satellite debris impacts on their territory," according to a report.

Well, that's nice of us. I still want to know what country the satellite would have come down in, had we not shot it down. Making that information public would go a long way toward justifying this whole episode, but no information to this effect has been released. This makes me think that it was just going to fall into the ocean, which means this whole adventure was unnecessary.

The Wall Street Journal fulfills the predictions I made in the last entry with stunning pomposity:

A successful shootdown would be a useful warning to countries such as Iran, Syria and North Korea that are building ballistic missile programs. In the U.S., it might even silence diehard critics, who still say missile defense is impossible despite a string of successful tests. By the way, the systems that will be used in the satellite shootdown wouldn't be up to the job had the U.S. not withdrawn in 2002 from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which imposed serious technological constraints.

"See? These liberal international agreements actually make it harder to protect Americans!". What crap.

Deterrence and P.R.

From CNN: "The U.S. military may try within days to shoot down a failed satellite using a missile launched from a Navy ship, officials announced Thursday":

"While much space trash and debris have safely crashed to Earth after burning up in the atmosphere on re-entry, authorities said what makes this 5,000-pound satellite different is the approximately 1,000 pounds of frozen toxic hydrazine propellant it carries."

Oye, where to start with this one? Essentially, the military is temporarily overstating the risk this satellite poses just long enough to try to destroy it with a missile, not because it's actually dangerous, but because there's a P.R. opportunity for missile defense.

Hydrazine, despite the scary name, is just hydrogen peroxide. While you probably don't want a lungfull of the stuff, we're talking about a thousand pounds that will first be incinerated by atmospheric re-entry, then, if any survives, spread and diluted by the atmosphere. Wherever you're reading this from, I guarantee there's a factory, refinery, or plant nearby dumping far worse things into the atmosphere, according to EPA regulations. Hydrazine has been used as rocket fuel since world war 2, so plenty of it has already been dumped into the atmosphere.

My favorite part:

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said there's nothing the military can do to make the outcome worse. "If we miss, nothing changes. If we shoot and barely touch it, the satellite is just barely in orbit" and would still burn up somewhat in the atmosphere, Griffin said. "If we shoot and get a direct hit, that's a clean kill and we're in good shape," he added.

Here's what happens next: either the military is able to hit and destroy the satellite seconds before it hits the atmosphere, and it becomes a big story. A reminder that despite having trouble with the low-tech stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military's still got us covered with the high-tech stuff. Or, they miss and the satellite burns up, with maybe a few chunks hitting the ocean.
In this case, the story is "we're safe, all went according to plan, and missile defense technology wasn't really designed for this kind of thing anyway". I think it's 50/50 which way it'll go.

What's conspicuously missing from the current story is that the military knows exactly where and when this satellite is coming down. They're tracking it with radar, and before they could begin putting the assets in place to attempt to shoot it down, they'd have to know exactly where it was going to be, and consequently, where it would end up. If you recall, the original story was all about how they had no idea where or when it would come down. I explained in my last entry that this didn't necessarily mean it was a threat. Somewhere between then and now, they ran the math and didn't tell anyone. Lame.

One other super-relevent piece of this story: in the first test of this technology by any country since the 1980s, China destroyed a weather satellite with a missile last year. So that's been hanging over us.

I can't wait to see what happens.

Big Science!

Ben Stein is at it again in the run up to the release of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed", his "intelligent design" propaganda movie. PZ Meyers tears into the "Darwin Day" post on the film's website:

"In a way, I'm impressed; I'd have to really struggle to write something that was such a dense array of concentrated stupid, but for them, it seems to be a natural talent, allowing them to blithely and effortlessly rattle off a succession of falsehoods without blushing.

Let's begin with the beginning. You don't even have to be a biologist to be embarrassed by these wankers."

I can't wait to see this movie and tear it up. In the meantime, I've been writing a review of "The Privileged Planet", another ID propaganda movie, so that will be posted sometime this weekend.

Don't be a Donna

Satellite Weeks Away from Hitting Earth

This worked better as a West Wing C-plot than in real life.

From season 2, "The Fall's Gonna Kill You":

Ed and Larry approach, laughing.

LARRY: Donna.
DONNA: Yeah.
LARRY: Have you seen C.J.?
DONNA: No. What’s so funny?
LARRY: Ed just got a fax... [laughing] I’m sorry. Ed just got a fax from a man named Byron Talmadge. He’s the Associate Administrator for NASA’s Office of Space Cadets....
ED: Flight.
LARRY: Office of Space Flight.
ED: The OSF.
DONNA: What’d the fax say?
LARRY: A huge Chinese satellite is gonna come crashing to Earth, and we don’t know where, and we don’t know when.
DONNA: Seriously?
ED: Yeah, it’s right here in the fax.
DONNA: A satellite is... crashing to Earth and NASA sent us a fax?
ED: Yeah.
DONNA: This is for real.
LARRY: Yes.
DONNA: [terrified] A satellite is gonna crash into the Earth?
ED and LARRY: Yes!
DONNA: Why are you laughing?
ED: We thought it was funny.

The two of them turn to leave.

DONNA: I’m an assistant. What am I supposed to do with this information?
LARRY: The fax was for C.J., just give it to her when you see her.
WOMAN: Donna, they say it’s not going to rain this afternoon.
DONNA: Well, that’s a relief. [walks off]

Later, end of Act 4

C.J. turns away. Josh follows after her.

JOSH: You know, uh, Donna got hold of this fax that was sent to the press office from the OSF at NASA.
C.J.: What, something falling out of the sky?
JOSH: Yeah.
C.J.: We get that fax once a week.
JOSH: Yeah, but Donna doesn't know that. She thinks it's an emergency.
C.J.: And you didn't want to tell her?
JOSH: No, 'cause the other way you get a day's worth of entertainment without leaving the office. She doesn't know that these things fall out of the sky all the time... once every ten days, as a matter of fact. Since the first year we started putting man-made objects in space, 17,000 have come back and remarkably, not one person has been hit. [beat] So I suppose there's an argument to be made that we're due.
C.J.: Yeah. You picked me right up there, Josh.

C.J. crosses the street.

JOSH: See you tomorrow!

We pan up to the "Pennsylvania Ave 1600 Block" street sign and -

DISSOLVE TO: END TITLES.
FADE TO BLACK.
THE END

P.S. - The math says you're safe. Several tons of meteors actually make it through the atmosphere and hit the ground every day, and no one's ever been killed. Every planetary science undergrad at the University of Arizona gets to / has to crank out the math on this one. Bottom line, there's sooo much earth and sooo few people. You're good.

Did everyone else know Ben Stein is nuts?

It's too bad, I always found his disinterested sarcasm very funny. Ben Stein has made a movie called "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" in which he seeks to show that Intelligent Design proponents have been widely discriminated against in the scientific community, and that it's actually the theory of natural selection that is dogmatic and resistant to criticism. By all means, check out the trailer here.

According to the movie's website, "scientists are being ridiculed, denied tenure and even fired for the crime of merely believing that there might be evidence of design in nature, and that perhaps life is not just the result of accidental, random chance."

Ugh, where to start. Let's zoom in on this phrase: "believing that there might be evidence". Do they actually have this evidence? Nope. They BELIEVE this evidence MIGHT exist. So these scientists are being ridiculed and fired for believing something WITHOUT EVIDENCE? They should be. That's not how science works. The end of this quote is equally telling. The minute someone uses the phrase "accidental, random chance" to describe natural selection, you can be sure they've never actually studied it. Natural selection is the exact opposite of random chance.

Intelligent design people are the same as 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Both make claims that run contrary to an enormous body of evidence, and that's actually good. Critical thinking requires accepted truths to be constantly challenged, so bring 'em on. Both groups have had their evidence-free claims considered, studied, and ultimately rejected. See this debate between the "Loose Change" guys and the Popular Mechanics guys, or the Penn and Teller: Bullshit episode looking at 9/11 conspiracy claims here. On intelligent design, see Kirk Cameron's "scientific proof" for the existence of god here, or the Judge's decision in Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District (in which the scientific merits of intelligent design were considered) here.

In the 9/11 conspiracy debate, one of the Popular Mechanics guys said "when you ask questions, you also have to look for the answers. When you find answers, you can't just ignore them". That, unfortunately, is exactly what's happened with both groups. For the conspiracy theorists, it's been easy to move on. They just say that the huge amount of experts that disagree with them are part of the conspiracy. For the intelligent design people, it's a little harder. I'm not sure what Ben Stein is going to use to explain why legally and scientifically, ID claims have not withstood scrutiny. Apparently this explanation requires a whole documentary. Expect a full review when "Expelled" is released.

Intelligent design is rooted firmly in scientific illiteracy, that goes without saying, but I think ID is also rooted in the insecurity many people have in their own scientific understanding. Molecular biology is extremely complex. That's not to say the scientific basis for evolution is beyond the comprehension of most people. It's not, but it does require some homework. If one chooses not to do a little reading and thinking to try to understand why the theory is supported, then one is also abdicating the right to criticize its legitimacy.

Myth Watch

The myth of the Golden Age is one of the most pervasive, influential, and destructive fallacies ever constructed. It goes something like this:

"Remember when things were simple? Remember when we had values and the world was safe? We knew who we were and who our enemies were. Now the world is dangerous and complicated. New-fangled arts and sciences have made us question our basic values. We have to fight to return to the way things used to be, back when the world was perfect."

This is the essence of the Garden of Eden and thousands of other nostalgic myths that recall "the simpler time". The problem is, there was never a simpler, safer, better time. There are very few points in history where people could honestly say that things were better in the past.

I use this myth as a teaching tool because there are so many instances of it being used in history to motivate people to do terrible things and believe ridiculous things. It's dangerous because it's so effective. I was shocked then, to hear Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council, use this myth while talking to Lou Dobbs on CNN last night. Dobbs asked Perkins why he thought religion was so central to the Republican platform in this election:

PERKINS: I think in part a number of the topics you've had on your show tonight, the problems we're facing as society, there was a very common world view 50 years ago. There was a very set way we viewed the issues around us. There's been a battle raging with the elite secularists that have tried to keep religion out of the public square. So there's a push back. That's why you see a strong confrontation. There are those trying to reinsert it and those trying to push it out.

(full transcript)

That's actually pretty amazing. Is he idealizing the 1950s despite the youth crime, rural poverty, racism, and repression? Or is he idealizing the 1950s because of those things? Who is this "we" in his statement that "There was a very set way we viewed the issues around us"? Perkins takes the myth to the next logical step, which is to blame a group for our collective fall from grace. His choice: "elite secularists". What does that even mean? Well, nothing actually. He's invoking an enemy which is left intentionally ill-defined.

So why is this myth so effective? Because it references our childhood. It transfers the feelings and memories we have of being safe and protected. As children, we didn't have to understand the complexities of the world. On some level, we all wish we could go back to that, but we can't. We can't mix up our personal history and development with world or national history. The world wasn't any simpler in the past, we just remember it that way because we were children.

Background Check: Joseph Smith

"This story raises some very absorbing questions, concerning what happens when a plain racket turns into a serious religion before our eyes."

If you're not familiar with Christopher Hitchens, then everything you need to know about where he's coming from can be taken from the title of his book, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. He's got a bit of an agenda. That said, none of the facts of the origin of Mormonism in this excerpt from his book are in question.

In the absence of a cohesive scientific theory, everyone gets to choose what they believe about the nature of the universe. But don't you want to know what you're signing up for?