The Daytime Astronomer

The mystery of the solar corona may be resolved.  ScientificBlogging has covered this, as did space.com, Space Fellowship, and other sites.  Two of them couldn't resist the same money quote, too:"Why is the sun's corona so darned hot?" said study memberJames Klimchuk of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.Why is this useful?

What would you do with 3/4 of a kilogram of gear in space? For the price of a Harley-Davidson Sportster 883, you can now go to space.InterOrbital Systems (IOS) has announced their TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit. This is 'complete', giving you the basic interface bus for your payload and including the launch costs.If I were a salesman, I'd point out that launches alone typically cost five times that price!The previous low-access route to space was the CubeSat, which is still an active and viable program. TubeSat just adds competition, which can only be good. IOS even mentions "the new IOS TubeSat PS Kit is the low-cost alternative to the CubeSat."

I recently got back the referee's comments on my mad scientist speech, submitted to the Journal for Villains (JV).AbstractHa ha!1         They2 said3 it couldn't[could not] be done!4          1colloquial          2who? specify, cite previous work          3'wrote' [list citations]          4'accomplished'? give budget and timeframe exceeded

Time for a quick compare-and-contrast. Here is what "Physics Today" lists as their top stories and most popular articles for July 2009:
Farewell to the bevatron
Earliest astrophysical object yet seen
House narrowly passes climate change bill
Miller to run nuclear division at DoE

Apollomania is sweeping the nation! Well, not quite mania, perhaps just Apollostalgia.  That's defined as showing an interest in the Apollo program history, while lacking the will to actually recommit to exploring space. As we look at the 40th anniversary of humankind's first setting foot on a celestial body other than the Earth, I will state clearly that Apollo 12 was the peak of the Apollo program.Now, it's true Apollo 11 is when humans first set foot on the moon.  It's Apollo 11's anniversary, it's getting the lion's share of the attention right now. But I maintain Apollo 12, launched a scant 4 months later, was the most important moon landing in all of history.  Let's review:

Today's tale looks at whether ancient Sufi mystics predicted the current climate for science in the Western World.  Some see science as an ivory tower pursuit, others as a way of achieving technological advancement, still others as a path to personal glory.  But some of us see more.A quick look at the top ScientificBlogging stories this week gives us titles seemingly ripped from summer blockbusters and beach reading.  Shark Week, Chemistry of Love, Moral Lessons, the Indiana Jones Method of Science, Super Sexy.

Just what would time travel look like?  This question was posed to me by a movie director in L.A..  It turns out there are three parts to this question-- what physics suggests, what movies have done in the past, and what looks good.The last is up to her and her special effects staff.  The middle one-- Hollywood traditions for time travel-- are worth examining to scope out possibilities.  I'll then conclude with what I think physics suggests is most likely.Were I to invent categories for movie time travel effects, I'd create the following:
  techno with lots of lights and whooshing (ala 2001, though that wasn't time travel)
  high speed vehicle (similar to techno, but with speed lines)

Many people will write columns, fiction, games, et cetera for the joy of doing it.  But that leads me to an important distinction between writing versus publishing.  Writers-- good and bad-- will write for free.  History tells us that.  But a good editor won't, and publishing great works requires great editors.In all the Web2.0 talk of removing barriers between creators and audience, the role of 'publisher' is often considered a dark ages legacy, fit to be abolished.  But the role of editor rarely is invoked, and I think that's a mistake.  Yes, the editor is the bane to writers, but they are a hidden blessing to readers.  

Can you fly a house with balloons?  The recent Pixar movie "Up" does, but it's animated.  In the "Up" production notes, Steve May, the film's supervising technical director, writes"It was important to the film to have fairly realistic balloon simulations.  The balloons behave in a realistic way, although the notion of being able to fly a hosue with balloons is pretty preposterous.  We're not physicists but one of our technical directors calculated that it would take on the order of 20 to 30 million balloons to actually life Carl's house.  We ended up using [...] 20,622 when it actually lifts off."

At parties, some people are intimidated when I say I'm an astronomer (or, worse, astrophysicist).  They assume I'm a haughty ivory tower genius who laughs at little people like them.  It's so hard to reassure them that, no, I don't laugh, I merely chuckle.  But I do feel it's my duty to help make life easier for the non-astrophysicists out there.So, say you're at a party and you meet a famous astronomer.  It doesn't matter which one, we're all famous (or at least published).  Here are 6 things not to say.
I'm an Aquarius, can you tell me my future?
I'm angry because Pluto isn't a planet anymore!
What will happen in 2012 when the Earth, sun and the center of our galaxy line up?

Space weather can kill astronauts. This is one of the motivations for funding space weather. Solar events-- flares, particle storms, and coronal mass ejections-- can knock out GPS and cell phone reception, screw up radio and radar, and endanger airline pilots flying the polar routes. All of these damaging effects are well worth mitigating. But what about circumstances higher up?In an article titled Fake Astronaut Gets Hit by Artificial Solar Flare, NASA reports on their upcoming experiment to see just how much damage a solar flare would cause to an unprotected astronaut.

In two hours, under my guidance, a small group of 5th and 6th graders built a drawbridge. We were operating using a plan essentially sketched on the napkin, with the napkin left at home. We had a stack of wood, rope, 2 hammers, a drill, a hacksaw, and a box of nails. I had access to as many kids as we needed as labor. And, again, we built a portable, freestanding, working drawbridge in under 2 hours. And assembled it outside a classroom 'medieval museum' to serve as its entrance for the rest of this week.Just which skills of a computational astrophysicist made me especially suited for such a task?
my knowledge of geometry and trigonometry
my background in space-borne CCD camera assembly