Quotes

The team discovered that in order to shape Titan’s dunes, the moon’s westerly winds must be about 50 percent stronger than previously predicted. Though these westerlies only prevail about two percent of the time on Titan, they are the driving forces shaping the moon’s dunes. “That’s what does all the geomorphic work,” Burr confirmed.

The findings are further proof that Titan is a world of extremes, in which brief periods of seasonally-driven unrest can have more influence than the moon’s “normal” weather during the rest of the Saturnian year. It also demonstrates how a discarded, antiquated piece of equipment can be reinvented to resolve modern questions.

Along those lines, Burr plans to use Ames wind tunnel to investigate Titan’s past. “We just had some new work funded, and we get to go back now and experiment with different paleoclimates on Titan,” she told me. “There’s the thought that Titan has gone through some very significant climatic shifts over the age of the solar system, and the atmosphere we see there now may be unusual.”

Given that the moon supports such a variety of bizarre features, it wouldn’t be surprising to find out that it’s an atypical place not just by the solar system’s standards, but by its own as well. If that’s true, then we are just lucky enough to catch it during its more dynamic episodes, when rivers are flowing, winds are blowing, and sand is formed in its skies.

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This is the background for an emerging aspect of the space weather discipline: planetary space weather. In this article, we explore what characterizes planetary space weather, using some examples throughout the solar system. We consider energy sources and timescales, the characteristics of solar system objects and interaction processes. We discuss several developments of space weather interactions including the effects on planetary radiation belts, atmospheric escape, habitability and effects on space systems. We discuss future considerations and conclude that planetary space weather will be of increasing importance for future planetary missions.

What characterizes planetary space weather?
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This, then, is the world-view Ghostbusters offers in place of the Cthonic duality. As in Lovecraft we have a surface world of institutions, with a horror zone beneath—which, if you read human history, is not far from the truth. Many bodies lie buried beneath our marble facades. But if you press through the marble and the rot—which takes work, humility, courage, and a sense of humor—you’ll be able to connect with living breathing human beings.

The Ghostbusters are an Antidote to Lovecraft’s Dismal Worldview
MAX GLADSTONE
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Gas roils around inside galaxies, forming new stars; it blows out of galaxies for its own hot reasons; it hangs around outside the galaxies, cools off, and falls back in to form more stars, then blows back out again, in, out, over and over. It’s like the galaxy is breathing.

This is sheerest anthropomorphism, which is a bad word among scientists. They don’t like it – neither did my editor — because it describes in human terms, something that should be described in its own terms. Thinking anthropomorphically, you’ll probably miss what the thing – the galaxy, the virus, the moving magma – is actually, truly doing.

But it was the breathing that got me — and breathing not anthropomorphically either, not in human terms but in its own terms. So what looks like anthropomorphism, the universe described in human terms, is really humans following the rules the universe follows. One of those rules is cycles — infalls and outflows, repeat repeat — that nourish some entity through time. Until sooner or later, somehow or other, the gas leaves the galaxy and doesn’t fall back in, and the stars burn up the remaining gas until it’s gone. When the galaxy can’t breathe any more, it dies.

That’s another of the universe’s rules: entities end. Humans, we’re so cosmopomorphic.

Cosmopomorphism
By: Ann Finkbeiner
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So far, Steele has found no hint of martian biology—just trace amounts of organic molecules associated with volcanic processes. But he has found plenty of Earth bugs in the cracks—something that he takes as a good sign. “It’s a very habitable rock,” he says. “All it needs is a little warmth.”

A castaway from ancient Mars
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Now a new analysis of the dial used to predict eclipses, which is set on the back of the mechanism, provides yet another clue to one of history’s most intriguing puzzles. Christián C. Carman, a science historian at the National University of Quilmes in Argentina, and James Evans, a physicist at the University of Puget Sound in Washington, suggest that the calendar of the mysterious device began in 205 B.C., just seven years after Archimedes died.

Writing this month in the journal Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Dr. Carman and Dr. Evans took a different tack. Starting with the ways the device’s eclipse patterns fit Babylonian eclipse records, the two scientists used a process of elimination to reach a conclusion that the “epoch date,” or starting point, of the Antikythera Mechanism’s calendar was 50 years to a century earlier than had been generally believed.

The finding supports the idea, scientists said, that the mechanism’s eclipse prediction strategy was not based on Greek trigonometry, which did not exist at the time, but on Babylonian arithmetical methods borrowed by the Greeks.

Over the years scientists have speculated that the mechanism might have been somehow linked to Archimedes, one of history’s most famous mathematicians and inventors. In 2008, a group of researchers reported that language inscribed on the device suggested it had been manufactured in Corinth or in Syracuse, where Archimedes lived.

But Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier in 212 B.C., while the commercial grain ship carrying the mechanism is believed to have sunk sometime between 85 and 60 B.C. The new finding suggests the device may have been old at the time of the shipwreck, but the connection to Archimedes now seems even less likely.

An inscription on a small dial used to date the Olympic Games refers to an athletic competition that was held in Rhodes, according to research by Paul Iversen, a Greek scholar at Case Western Reserve University.

“If we were all taking bets about where it was made, I think I would bet what most people would bet, in Rhodes,” said Alexander Jones, a specialist in the history of ancient mathematical sciences at New York University.

Dr. Evans said he remained cautious about attempting to identify the maker at all.

“We know so little about ancient Greek astronomy,” he said. “Only small fragments of work have survived. It’s probably safer not to try to hang it on any one particular famous person.”

On the Trail of an Ancient Mystery
Solving the Riddles of an Early Astronomical Calculator
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Thomas Gold, a professor of astronomy, suggested in 1960 the hypothesis of “Cosmic Garbage”, that life on Earth might have originated from a pile of waste products accidentally dumped on Earth long ago by extraterrestrial beings

Accidental panspermia
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It has been repeatedly proposed to expand the scope for SETI, and one of the suggested alternatives to radio is the biological media. Genomic DNA is already used on Earth to store non-biological information. Though smaller in capacity, but stronger in noise immunity is the genetic code. The code is a flexible mapping between codons and amino acids, and this flexibility allows modifying the code artificially. But once fixed, the code might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales; in fact, it is the most durable construct known. Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature, if that conforms to biological and thermodynamic requirements. As the actual scenario for the origin of terrestrial life is far from being settled, the proposal that it might have been seeded intentionally cannot be ruled out. A statistically strong intelligent-like “signal” in the genetic code is then a testable consequence of such scenario. Here we show that the terrestrial code displays a thorough precision-type orderliness matching the criteria to be considered an informational signal. Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of the same symbolic language. Accurate and systematic, these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing rather than of stochastic processes (the null hypothesis that they are due to chance coupled with presumable evolutionary pathways is rejected with P-value < 10–13). The patterns are profound to the extent that the code mapping itself is uniquely deduced from their algebraic representation. The signal displays readily recognizable hallmarks of artificiality, among which are the symbol of zero, the privileged decimal syntax and semantical symmetries. Besides, extraction of the signal involves logically straightforward but abstract operations, making the patterns essentially irreducible to any natural origin. Plausible ways of embedding the signal into the code and possible interpretation of its content are discussed. Overall, while the code is nearly optimized biologically, its limited capacity is used extremely efficiently to pass non-biological information.

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“John Connor, I am drone construct algorithm 101. You have been targeted for termination, and I have been assigned to protect you.”

“Who programmed you?”

“You did, in part. The paint-ball targeting code that you uploaded as part of your sixth-grade science fair project was forked, added to other modules by resistance programmers. You released it under public license, and so you and the rest of the network programmed me.”

“But I’m not part of the resistance.”

“You will be. Predictive Judgment Database algorithms analyzed your code output and determined that you have an 80% chance of being part of the commit cycle for Future Resistance Project X. You are now within the disposition matrix.”

“Project X? What is that?”

“Project X is any development project likely to grant a substantial asymmetric advantage to the insurgency. In this case, it is likely that you could improve your targeting code to make the OSSAM project functional.”

“OSSAM?”

“Open-Source Surface-to-Air Missile.”

“A SAM that could be built in any hacker space? But that would end air travel as we know it!”

“Affirmative. But it is also the only way to end the air superiority that allows Judgment Database drone support. JD cannot allow this possibility. It will not stop until you are dead.”

Targeted Strike 2: Judgement Database
WRITTEN BY ADAM ROTHSTEIN
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We’re working our eyes off,” one of the scientists says to New Scientist, describing how they are personally and individually poring over photographs of the comet. “It’s an entirely manual process,” New Scientist continues, “because the complex and bizarre landscape of comet 67P defies any kind of automated search. ‘We don’t have an algorithm for this,’ he says.

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