Where the side shows are lightyears from the main tent...

Carnival of Space 108.
Carnival of Space 109.
Carnival of Space 100.

Back atcha, Lemming

Last week I posted that the entire inner solar system was visible in the predawn sky. The reason for this is that Venus (and Mercury) were in between Earth and Mars. One of the reasons Mars (the dim red dot in the picture) was so dim is that it is on the opposite side of the inner solar system.

Figure 1. positions of the inner planets on June 19. Note that Mars, Venus, and Earth are co-linear.

Of course, any Martians looking back at Earth in the evening sky would see something very similar. Venus and Earth would be close together in the evening sky, with Mercury low on the horizon. Figure 2 shows a simulation.


Figure 2. What Venus and Earth would look like as seen from Mars.

This may seem like a silly thing to wonder about, since there is obviously nobody up on Mars looking back at us. But here’s the catch: even though there are no people on Mars, there are several robots controlled by people. And those robots have cameras.

Figure 3. Spirit rover picture of Venus and Earth in the Martian twilight.
Picture from here.

Arctic sea Ice pool: 5 weeks to go

With 5 weeks left to guess, the graph for the 2009 Arctic sea ice minimum gaussian guessing game is looking like this:


Contestants have solid, colored curves. The thick black/grey curves are the Ensemble 1 and 2 outputs from the Wegener Institute’s June 2009 Sea Ice outlook. The collective contestant’s pdf is the dotted light grey line (click to embiggen), and shows a bimodal distribution around the 2007 and 2008 minima. Thusfar only Nick Barnes (4700 ± 200, pink) has been mathematically eliminated at the 2 sigma level. Nick, you can take another guess, if you so desire.

The current value (as of Thursday) is 10,224 thousand km².

Proof God exists

Recently, every man and his dog has been yammering on about whether atheists should be fundamentalist dickheads or not. As long-time readers of this blog know, two years ago, when my daughter was barely 2 months old, I left my cozy, stable university technical job for a stint as an exploration geologist.

This meant leaving Mrs. Lemming home on her own for up to a month at a time with a very little child and no-one to turn to. Time has passed, and the chaotic unpredictable-by-science economy has come and gone, causing me to get sacked, rehired in a short term contract, and finally unemployed as of three days from now.

As a result, Mrs. Lemming is going from part time work to breadwinning, and I'm becoming the full-time Dr. Daddy. The timing of this change corresponds perfectly with the Littlest Loveliest Lab Lemming's potty training. And that, my friends, can only be described as Divine justice.

As Divine justice implies a divinity, I can only assume that He or She (probably She, considering the situation) is smiling at one member of the Lemming family and laughing at the other.

Edit: due to transition hecticness, this blog is on autopilot for a little while.

Minimum Arctic sea ice extent betting pool

Update: 9 days to go

See this page for the current status of this contest.
Posting guesses under that entry will prevent the spam filter from holding your comments.

The previously announced Arctic sea ice extent minimum prediction pool is now open.

Guesses are to be in the form of extent and sigma (a mathematical measure of uncertainty), in thousands of km² You may use decimal places if you insist.

Your guess will define a Gaussian curve.

The function with the highest value for x=minimum daily measured ice extent (from IARC-JAXA) wins.

Here’s an example graph, for those who are afraid of equations:
The input data are (in thousands of km²):

Color	extent	sigma
Black	5420	300
Red	4100	75
Orange	4800	40
Green	4600	135
Purple	4400	100
Blue	4500	200

For the 2008 minimum extent of 4708 thousand km², the winner would be green, not orange, due to green’s higher stated uncertainty.

Obviously, the best choice of sigma depends on the number of entrants, among other things. Since I have no way of predicting how many people will enter, there is a second chance rule:

Anyone who is mathematically eliminated at the 2 sigma level will be allowed to guess again. In the graph above, blue would qualify, as they are completely buried in the interval 4100-4900.

The closing date is August 1.

The winner gets to nominate a topic for this blog, which I will attempt to link to mineral sciences in as humorous a manner as possible. Here are some examples.

If you want to tell a bit more about yourself- profession, interest in climate, preferred line color for graph- that would be great. My secret agenda here is to see how the guess distribution varies between climatologists, non climatologist, friend who only want to win to force me to blog about an embarrassing episode in my past, etc. I doubt I'll get enough entries to be able to do that, but if y'all guess and invite some friends along, then we might get somewhere.

So place your bets folks; you have nothing to lose, and I have nothing to gain.

Update: Five weeks to go.

Inner solar system

Here are all the terrestrial planets (incl. moon), visible in the dawn sky from now until the new moon. And because it is the winter solstice, you don't even need to get up early to see them. But you only have a day or two left!

Click to enlarge if you want to see Mercury and Mars.

Minimum arctic sea ice extent betting pool- ground rules

Attention, anyone more interested in the current climate than that of the paleoproterozoic snowball Earth:
This year, I will be running a betting pool on the 2009 minimum extent of arctic sea ice.

Betting will open on the (arctic) summer solstice, and close at 00:00 of the first of August, UTC.

Betting will probably be of the form value, sigma, as used by Cosmic Variance for the US election last year, but with some added details to be announced on Sunday. Climate statistics nerds, who complain about the inappropriateness of Gaussian curves will have their spokes loosened.

This post is intended to set some ground rules, and ask for advice from those Earth scientists who work in years instead of gigayears. You see, I'm a bit rusty on everything that happened after shells.

So, minimum arctic sea ice extent.
That is extent, not area. Ask a climatologist if you want to know the difference.
I plan on using the lowest daily measurement from the IARC-JAXA satellite webpage (data file). As of yesterday, the extent was: 10,652,813 km². If there is a better source, please let me know ASAP.

For simplicity, I'll just go with the lowest 'daily' number (probably from sometime in September).

As a prize, the winner gets to nominate the topic of a blog post here at the Lounge.

Any questions, suggestions, or tips?

The rebel alliance speaks

Today the Obama administration is starting its human spaceflight review with the first open meeting of the Augustine commission. In short, the successor to the space shuttle program is over budget and behind schedule. In fact, their ready date has slipped four years during the first three years of the program, equating to negative progress.

A few months back, I came across the website of the Direct proposal. This is basically a shadow launch system, designed by NASA engineers in their spare time as their “what we should be doing” project. For a while now, I’ve been applying my crackpot detectors to this, but I’m having trouble detecting anything. They seem to act and think like technical people, not deranged idealists.

Now, one wonders- if their design is better, why isn’t senior management using it? But then, during the last 7 years there were a number of US government departments with ineffective administration. Seen in this light, the current boondoggle is not terribly surprising.

The hopeful development is that the Direct team has been granted a 30 minute presentation at the Augustine commission hearing today. Whether anything further develops is something I can’t predict, but at least senior government people are now listening to alternative solutions instead of blindly staying the course and squashing dissent. I’m optimistically hopeful that America will get back to the moon before I turn 50. Since the last man left before I was born, I’d kinda like the opportunity to see someone new have a crack at that field locale.

After all, the rocks are Da Bomb.