Pollyanna is here despite SOPA & PIPA

Pollyanna is back, cheerful as ever, independent of whether there is much to be glad about.  Still we will give you some relief from brother Titan's rants.  She is pleased that a movie actress has taken her name and is helping to make her famous.  Thank you, Pollyanna Woodward--you give her an idea what to anticipate when she grows up.

 IN MEMORIAM
Steve Rawlings, a well known British astrophysicist and Oxford professor,

died this week in circumstances that led to suspicion being directed against his long time colleague and collaborator the Oxford mathematician Devinder Sivia at whose home he was found dead.  In the meantime, the evidence against Prof. Sivia has been found to be flimsy and he has been released from custody.  Prof. Rawlings played a major role in the design and planning of the Square Kilometre Array – a next-generation radio telescope that will be built in Australia or Southern Africa – and played a prominent role in the redevelopment of the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station in Cornwall as a radio-astronomy facility.  The world astrophysics community is in deep shock.
We also note the 100th anniversary of the arrival of Robert F. Scott and his party at the South Pole where they found that Roald Amundsen and his group had arrived earlier.  Scott and his companions perished en route back to the coast of Antarctica.

Happier times in Antarctica: British explorer Robert Falcon Scott stands alone in the glittering white wilderness, months before he began his final push to the South Pole, in an image taken by expedition photographer Herbert Ponting.
CREDIT: © 2011 Richard Kossow.

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 Pollyanna wants to be a bit didactic today and give you a scale picture to show you the relative sizes of solar system objects, this time Earth, Titan and our Moon.

Earth, Titan, and Earth's Moon compared

Titan may be larger than the planet Mercury--and (the dwarf planet) Pluto-- but it is still considerably smaller than the Earth. Despite Titan's  diminutive size, its atmosphere is dense enough that the barometric pressure at Titan's surface is one-and-a-half times greater than that of the Earth's at sea level.

 She also would like to point a finger at crackpot "science" blather and to show how careful we must all be in making statements that can be picked up by UFO nuts and posted on the Web as fact.  In this case, atmospheric chemistry of Titan has been twisted to show that "life has been discovered" there.  Indeed, there are hydrocarbons in the atmosphere and oceans of Titan, derivatives of methane, and you could speculate that if there were life there it would have to metabolize methane as an energy source. (The field of psychoceramics deals with cracked pots...)

Pollyanna is very sensitive to environmental matters and is delighted to learn that President Obama is standing up to Big Oil and denying permission to lay a pipeline from Alberta across the United States.    Read more.

Protesters marching in Washington against the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, 11/06/11. (photo: Daniel Lippman/MCT)

As you all know, Pollyanna is very happy to see women advancing to greater equality in all areas.  She is delighted to tell you about the election of the first Native American openly lesbian woman

In a special election, Susan Allen won a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives.

to the legislature of our native state of Minnesota.  Another woman won election to the state Senate, thus enhancing the representation of women in Minnesota state politics.

In Israel, Pollyanna commends the Israel Medical Association for refusing to take part in a conference on gynecology at which women speakers were banned.  Please join her in thanking our doctors.
The argument that religious leaders would walk out if women spoke is specious and unacceptable. We have nothing against religion per se but when organized and established religion starts to push its views on society as a whole, as we are seeing now in Israel, in every aspect of life, we cannot but agree with James Madison the author of the First Amendment, in which establishment of religion is forbidden, and the fourth president of the United States:
 "What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not." –James Madison-"A Memorial and Remonstrance", 1785

We would like to share with you a video that Yosefa brought to our attention.  It is a discussion by Riccardo Muti of the art of conducting.  It is lovely and amusing as well



In the past week we have seen the 39th anniversary of the death of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the legal holiday of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King.  In synagogue, we read as the weekly portion the opening chapters of the book of Exodus. Last Saturday, we gave a sermon connecting the prophetic mission of Moses and Aaron in the Bible with the 20th century mission of Rabbi Heschel and Dr. King who stood side by side in two  titanic struggles, for the civil rights of the African-American population of the US and in particular in the South and against the war in Vietnam.  Pollyanna and I have written up an expanded version of the sermon and it is available on Googledocs for those who read Hebrew.  For the Hebrew-challenged, we recommend the Web site of Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia who discusses the conjunction of these dates every year.  We also refer you to a posting by Bradley Burston who writes about the dreams of Dr. King and what we can all learn from his life and mission.

ASTRONOMY
Pollyanna would like to share with you an interview with the scientist Tom Statler from Ohio University who specializes in galactic astronomy.

Recently the greatest cluster of galaxies ever seen was discovered and dubbed El Giordo, the fat one.

STARS BRIGHT: A composite image shows El Gordo in X-ray light from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue, along with optical data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in red, green, and blue. (Photo: NASA, ESO)

 On the same day at the same conference another group announced the observation of the farthest, i.e. the oldest  galaxy cluster ever seen.

The composite image, taken in visible and near-infrared light, reveals the location of five tiny galaxies clustered together 13.1 billion light-years away. The circles pinpoint the galaxies.
CREDIT: NASA, ESA, M. Trenti (University of Colorado, Boulder, and Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK), L. Bradley (STScI), and the BoRG team

View full size ima

Both announcements were made at the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin TX on January 10.  We are living in a very exciting time for galactic astronomy and Pollyanna is very glad about it
Apropos astronomy, it is worthy of note that a major international debate is going on over the leap second.  The leap year, needed to account for the slight inaccuracy of the year as a measure of the period of revolution of the Earth around the Sun (yes, you Copernicus skeptics, that is what happens) which involves adding a day every four years except for end of century years (x000) that do not divide by 400, is easily accepted, unless you are apprenticed to a pirate.  The leap second is added every few years to keep the rotation of the Earth in synch with atomic clocks and vice versa.  The US would like to abolish it, other countries want to keep it, but I doubt if anyone will go to war and you will not really need to reset your watch when the next event comes up on June 30.  Stay tuned.

WALKING THROUGH DOORS can make you forget things.  A recent Scientific American article explains why we forget things when we go from one room to the other.

Turn the handle and leave the past behind. Image: iStock/Robert Vautour

We are reminded of the elderly lady who complained about her memory problems to her vicar who told her that she should be thinking about the hereafter.  She replied that indeed that is what she does, i.e. goes from one room to another and then asks herself, "what am I here after?"

Recently, whenever we are online with Skype, a mysterious person named Faustina has tried several times to contact us.  We have consistently declined since contact attempts by women have always turned out to be either harassment or pathetic attempts at enticement.  We tried to look her up and in light of what we found, apparently she only had good intentions.  She had been granted the  Cook's Tour of Hell and just wanted to warn us.

The Apostle of Divine Mercy
St. Maria Faustina Kowalska
of the
Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy

Alas, she lacks the poetic talent of Dante Alighieri.

We were thinking of skipping this week as a protest against SOPA.  Instead we will let XKCD express our opinion.

As we have told you, Gene Weingarten who used to be the funny man of the Washington Post has moved on to the world of comics.  It has not really been a step up as you can see from this:

Pollyanna and the New Year

Mary Pickford as Pollyanna

Pollyanna is taking her turn to wish all of you a very Happy New Year.  Let us hope that 2012 will be a better year than its predecessor which was marked by disasters both natural and man made.  The natural disaster of earthquake plus tsunami in Japan was exacerbated by human failures such as the inability to prevent the radiation catastrophe at  the Fukashima nuclear power plant.

This week we present nature's version of the Death Star from Star Wars, the Kronian moon Mimas.  It apparently was hit hard in the past by an asteroid or comet and came near to disintegration.

Size: Sub-spherical, 418 x 392 x 382 kilometers - 7th largest moon of Saturn
Orbital radius: 185,520 kilometers - 3.08 Saturn radii - within the E ring
Orbital period: 0.9424 days - about 1/17 of Titan’s
Discovery: 1789 by William Herschel

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Cassini Image

Mimas is the first of Saturn's medium-sized moons, lying outside the main ring system but within the tenuous E ring. Its surface is completely saturated with craters, indicating that it has not changed much in billions of years. The largest crater, Herschel, is named for Mimas’ discoverer. All of the other craters are named after characters from the Keith Baines translation of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur legends of Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The life of William Herschel is also a fascinating story, about which you can read here. 

The mythological Mimas was a giant who was killed by Mars in the war between the Titans and the gods of Olympus. Even after his death, Mimas' legs -- which were serpents -- hissed vengeance and sought to attack his killer.  
Mimas was named by John Herschel, the son of discoverer William Herschel, who explained his choice of names for the first seven of Saturn's moons to be discovered by writing, "As Saturn devoured his children, his family could not be assembled round him, so that the choice lay among his brothers and sisters, the Titans and Titanesses."

POLLYANNA RANTS 
Normally Pollyanna deals with things to be glad about or otherwise worthy of note and leaves ranting about human rights, social justice and political malfeasance to her brother Titan.  There is, however, one notable exception to this rule and that is matters connected to the abuse, rights violations and marginalization of women and girls.  Unfortunately these constitute a far too common phenomenon and Pollyanna does not contain her anger when she discusses such matters.  Today she is calling your attention to a blog posting on Women's Media Center concerning the way women, who were instrumental in starting the social protest and Occupy movement have been pushed to the side as the revolt developed.  While women do indeed start movements, anything that seems successful becomes a guy thing.  This goes back to the French Revolution and even before.  Robin Morgan puts things in focus, loud and clear.

Mexico city collective, from Occuprint.org

MURPHY GOES TO THE BEACH
As Titan told you last week, we have added a new canine member to our menage.  We took him to the beach for the first time.  Since he is half Labrador and half Australian Cattle Dog, we expected  him to take to the sea.  We are in the aftermath of a fairly major storm and the surf is still quite heavy.  In fact, Murphy was totally spooked by the waves rolling in and wanted no part of them.  He did get in a good run and expended some of his great supply of energy.  Indeed Murphy is a mixed breed dog, what some would call a mutt, but there are several good reasons to love mutts.   Here he is looking over his domain.

The beach is a great place

Friday we took him to the vet to be registered and weighed him while there. 34.4 kg is a lot of dog  especially when he indulges in puppyish behavior or has to be hoisted into the car.

IN MEMORIAM
Yaffa Yarkoni (1925-2012) died this week.

She was a famous Israeli singer whose voice is associated with the heroic period in the history of Israel.  She was famous for going to all places to entertain the troops even at the front.  To many she will always be associated with her signature song Bab el Wad, about the narrow valley on the road to Jerusalem where the convoys to the besieged city encountered ambushes during the 1948 war.  Despite her intense patriotism or more likely to our mind because of it, she parted company with the military establishment in 2002 and strongly criticized the brutal actions of the Army in the West Bank in the wake of the second Intifada.  Because of this many of her admirers turned against her, but she stuck by her guns.  We append an obituary from the New York Times.

BACK TO SCIENCE

GRAIL ORBIT SUCCESSFUL 
No we are not talking about the Holy Grail but rather about a pair of spacecraft called Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory that achieved orbit about the Moon and will be used for the most detailed study ever of our nearest neighbor in Space.  Read more.

MEET BONNIE
While browsing through the JPL pages for Mimas images I came across a profile of my friend,  Bonnie Buratti whom we visited a few weeks ago in Pasadena.  She is profiled as one of the Senior Scientists of JPL and has some good advice for anyone, particularly young women, who might be contemplating a career in space science.

SPEEDERS CITED
As any young driver knows, his/her parents disapprove of speeding.  The same seems  to hold for neutrinos who have received many citations for exceeding their speed limit, the speed of light.  Now it seems that their  parent pions are getting into the act and are casting doubt on the reported result.  As more and more evidence against the speeding neutrinos piles up, we can hope to have the matter resolved, certainly when the replication experiments report in.  It will be a relief for everyone, including the OPERA people to have the doubts about Special Relativity allayed.

STINGRAY NEBULA

Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the nebula (Credit: M. Bobrowsky and NASA)

One of the most exciting discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope was the death of a star and the birth of a planetary nebula, in this case the Stingray Nebula , named because of its shape.  This is a poorly understood process in astrophysics and the observation of the rapid evolution of the system
as observed by Hubble  was a great piece of good fortune for science.  IKCD gives it a unique perspective.


TRIVIA, NONSENSE AND A BIT OF SUBSTANCE
The Mother Nature Network has come up with a list of the most most anticipated space launches of 2012.  Many of them are trivial billionaires' games, others are nonsensical efforts  involving a huge investment of public resources in manned spaceflight which achieves nothing of significance and finally we have the wonderful robotic missions  that truly advance the cause of science and expand human knowledge and understanding of our universe.  The manned flights, such as the ISS, which does nothing and consumes much, are of the genus "Panem et Circensus", literally "bread and circuses",which was the formula for the control of the  population in Rome by the regime in power (a term invented by Juvenal )*.  We are told that unless we have  some clown in space wasting  both money  and time we would not have funding for the real science done by robots such as Cassini, Voyager, Pioneer and the others.
 
*(The full quote is:  The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things - bread and circuses!
        Juvenal, Satires
        Roman poet & satirist (55 AD - 127 AD))

Gene Weingarten was rather gross and unfunny to us this week, so we are giving you a pair of cartoons  from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.  The first  will enhance your knowledge of history and the other a comment on our species, homo sapiens.

Pollyanna is back from California

Our message to all of you

 Pollyanna is  back from her trip to California with YandA and Titan.  We all had a great time, but now we have to get back to the serious stuff of life.  Why?  Because the sky is high or kacha or whatever.  Here is a Hannuka treat from Saturn.

The huge storm churning through the atmosphere in Saturn's northern hemisphere overtakes itself as it encircles the planet in this true-color view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
› Full image and caption

Over the past year, a great disquiet has swept across the face of Saturn. The normally serene countenance of this giant planet was pierced last December by the sudden eruption of a bright, discrete, and powerful convecting storm that over the course of two months grew and spread to become a planet-encircling colossus, a wide kaleidoscopic band of commingled waves, vortices, and eddies, all in continuous swirling motion .... a mesmerizing display of snaking, sensuous, churning, turning, chaotic, roiling atmospheric  turmoil.
Outbursts like this are not new to Saturn and, in fact, are known for their episodic behavior. The largest of these appear every 20 to 30 years in the northern hemisphere and spread completely around the planet. But this one is different. With a 200-day interval of intense, hissing convection, it holds the record as the longest-lasting Saturn-encircling storm ever. And it has become the largest by far ever observed on the planet by an interplanetary spacecraft, giving us an unparalleled opportunity to study in great depth the subtle changes on the planet that preceded the storm's formation and the mechanisms involved in its development.

Some of you might be interested to know that the Pollyanna movie from 1960 is now available on DVD.

This week saw the deaths of three famous people, two of whom will be missed.
IN MEMORIAM

Vaclav Havel,(1936-2011) the former president of Czechoslovakia and later of the Czech Republic  died this week at age 75.  He was a man of incredible courage and integrity who led the "Velvet Revolution" and brought his country into the family of democratic nations.  Of all the obituaries I found that of the Guardian to be the best and I link you to it along with an appreciation from Amnesty International.

IN MEMORIAM

Justin Lane for The New York Times

Christopher Hitchens in Washington, D.C., in 1999.

Christopher Hitchens who died this week at age 62 was a journalist and writer,  a beacon for liberal causes and one of the world's most articulate atheists.  In an age when fundamentalist religion and mass superstitions are taking over from rationality, his voice was a call for clear thinking and logic.  We are appending an obituary from the New York Times.

IN OBLIVIUM
The world is rid of the noxious presence of Kim Jong Il.  He will be succeeded by his equally odious son and the misery of the people of North Korea will continue.  We were told that war needed to be waged in Iraq to liberate the people from Saddam Hussein, indeed an evil dictator.  It was rank hypocrisy to go after him while Kim developed nuclear weapons and persecuted his subjects.  Read a profile of this monster.  Andy Borowitz has news of a possible alternative candidate to succeed Kim Jong Il.

VERY SLOW MUSIC

Composer, John Cage rehearses his 12-hour composition "Empty Words" in Hartford, Conn., in 1981. (Anonymous - ASSOCIATED PRESS)

The composer John Cage (1912-1992) is famous for many beautiful pieces including 4:33 in which a pianist sits in front of a piano and plays nothing for that time.  He has come up with another rebuke to the noise and bustle of modern life with a piece that has been  playing for 10 years and will be finished in 2640.  It is called “Organ²/ASLSP(As SLow aS Possible),” and it requires a bit of patience.  
HIGGS BOSON MAYBE
The Large Hadron Collider is giving tantalizing hints that the discovery of the Higgs Boson, which gives particles mass, may be around the corner.  This is most exciting and provides much food for thought.  It has been dubbed the "God particle" and if found will add a piece to the Standard Model puzzle.  If it is found not to exist, it will mean that physics has deeper subtlety than imagined so far.  Stay tuned as the reports come out and verification becomes closer.  Indeed some of the press accounts may have jumped the gun and we would do well to wait until the 5 sigma level is reached. 
DEAD SEA SCROLL AUTHORS may be identified by new research being conducted in Israel on the textiles used to wrap the scrolls.  The research reveals that all the textiles were made of linen, rather than wool, which was the preferred textile used in ancient Israel. Also they lack decoration,  some actually being bleached white, even though fabrics from the period often have vivid colors. Altogether, researchers say these finds suggest that the Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect, "penned" some of the scrolls.  This may help understanding of how the scrolls made their way to Qumran,shown in this picture.

First excavated by Roland de Vaux in the 1950s, the site of Qumran in Israel is mired in controversy. De Vaux believed that it was a monastic settlement used by the Essenes and that the Dead Sea Scrolls were composed here. More recent archaeological work has cast doubt on this idea. The new textile research may help resolve the debate.
CREDIT: Joseph Calev | | Shutterstock

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NEWLY DISCOVERED PLANETS
While we were in San Francisco at the meeting of the AGU, NASA came up with the announcement of a Goldilocks planet (temperature appropriate for the existence of liquid water) named Kepler 22b orbiting a solar-similar star just around the corner, 600 light years away.  It is doubtful that the planet could support life as we know it, but it is exciting that planets like the Earth are around in the universe.  In addition to Kepler 22b, we now are told about planets Kepler 22e and 22f that are also of great interest since they are comparable to the Earth in size although far too hot to contain liquid water.  While at JPL  (see YandA blog), we heard a lot of talk about the subject of Astrobiology.  I could not but remember what my friend Yuri said about this field, that it is interesting because it has no subject matter.  That is not quite fair today since much good laboratory work is being done on finding out what kind of environments might support life somewhere.  The search goes on and although we shall never visit these places, it is fun to know that they are there.

Pollyanna shares with XKCD the confusion of priorities in the modern world.


ATHEISM VS THEISM IN SANTA MONICA 
While in Santa Monica (where Tom Lehrer likes to spend Hannuka) last week we came upon the atheist answer to the Nativity Scenes usually seen along Ocean Avenue.  We reported on it in the YandA blog, but here is a more detailed discussion of the issue.  The result of the lottery by the city government would tend to show that God has a soft spot for his atheist children.

YandA photograph

BOOK REVIEW
Our book review for this blog is by Helen Brown writing in the Telegraph who  reads A More Perfect Heaven, Dava Sobel's new book about Copernicus (273pp, Bloomsbury).  It appears to be well worth a read as has been our experience with all her other writing, such as Longitude and Galileo's Daughter.  It is an open secret that we are harboring in our midst many crypto-adherents of  Claudius Ptolemaeus .

A DIET IS IN ORDER 
The four of us, Pollyanna, Titan and YandA all came back from Calfornia with some added weight and are trying to do something about it.  A consultation on the subject with Gene Weingarten yielded some not very useful advice.

Pollyanna is here again

Agnes Marin, raped and murdered, age 13, credit AFP

 Pollyanna is back and before she gets into the nice stuff that you expect from her she is going to rant.  In fact, she is going to give her brother Titan the ranter a lesson in ranting, foaming at the mouth and infinite outrage.  In this, she is joined of course by Titan and YandA.  We are ranting about the rape and murder of this 13 year old girl,  Agnes Marin in France.   She was raped and killed by a 17 year old schoolmate who is awaiting trial for the rape of a 15 year old who at least survived.  Despite this, he was admitted to a boarding school and it appears that no one told the principal that this young man constituted a danger to his schoolmates.  You can read the details and rage with us at the utter incompetence of the juvenile justice system in France.  Excuses abound, but the bottom line is that parents are entitled to assume that their children are protected in school against marauders and killers.  It is incomprehensible that the unnamed 17-year old was granted admission to the private boarding school in Chambon-sur-Lignon, central-southeastern France, given that he had spent four months in prison last year over the rape of another fellow pupil in another region.

POLLYANNA HIATUS 
Pollyanna and Titan are joining YandA for a trip to the West Coast of the USA.  You may get a Titan next week, but Pollyanna is sparing you until December 23.  We will attend the Annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco and then visit colleagues and friends in Los Angeles.  We will be back for Hannuka.

 CRAZY MOON IAPETUS

Iapetus is an oddball moon of Saturn.
 Iapetus
Two-Faced Moon

Two faced Iapetus  NASA

Iapetus has extreme topography and one of the most ancient surfaces in the solar system. It also has a tall mountain range running exactly around its equator.

Iapetus ridge NASA

Size: 1,460 km - 3rd largest moon of Saturn
Orbital radius: 3,561,000 kilometers - 59.1 Saturn radii - far outside Saturn's ring system
Orbital period: 79.33 days - 5 times Titan's
Discovery: 1671 by Giovanni Domenico Cassini

Iapetus [pronounced eye-APP-eh-tuss; adjective form: Iapetian] has been called the yin and yang of the Saturn moons because its leading hemisphere has a reflectivity (or albedo) as dark as coal (albedo 0.03-0.05 with a slight reddish tinge) and its trailing hemisphere is much brighter at 0.5-0.6. Giovanni Cassini observed the dark-light difference when he discovered Iapetus in 1671. He noted that he could only see Iapetus on the west side of Saturn. He correctly concluded that Iapetus had one side much darker than the other side, and that Iapetus was tidally locked with Saturn.  Since Cassini's time, the spacecraft named for him has taken much better views of Iapetus including an encounter on September 10, 2007 a few samples of which are shown above.

In mythology Iapetus was the father of Prometheus, Epimetheus, Menoetius, and Atlas by Clymene.   He was regarded by the ancient Greeks as the father of the human race.

IN MEMORIAM
This week Anne Mccaffrey the famous fantasy and science fiction author died at age 85.

Camera Press

Anne McCaffrey in 1981.

She will be remembered as the author of the Perm novels for young adults in which it became possible for girls as well as boys to ride dragons.  We append an obituary by the New York Times.

Lynn Margulis whose ideas turned evolution theory on its head, died this week at age 73.  Her work on evolution at the microorganism level challenged conventional wisdom in the 1960's and was initially rejected.  She stood by her guns and her ideas of symbiotic evolution have now become the standard theory.

Paul Hosefos/The New York Times

Lynn Margulis, wearing her National Medal of Science Award.

 Her first husband was the noted late astronomer Carl Sagan, but she did not need his reflected light and become a distinguished scientist on her own.  

GOOD NEWS from Oregon--the  governor of Oregon has announced that he will not permit any executions to take place in the state as long as he holds the position.

( Don Ryan / Associated Press ) - Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber  announcing in Salem, Ore., Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2011, that the execution of convicted killer Gary Haugen will not go on as scheduled next month and no more executions will happen while he is in office

An execution was due to take place very soon but Governor John Kitzhaber announced on 22 November that he was issuing a reprieve in the case of Gary Haugen, a 49-year-old man scheduled for execution on 6 December after waiving his appeals. We, together with Amnesty International welcome the decision by the Governor and hope that it will eventually lead to abolition.

SPEEDING TICKET FOR NEUTRINOS
You may recall that a while back we reported on a preprint by Cohen and Glashow in which they pointed out that if the Gran Sasso neutrinos had exceeded the speed of light they would have emitted Cherenkov radiation.  This is radiation emitted when the passage of photons through a medium is impeded and falls below the speed of light in vacuum.  In such a case, particles can move through the medium faster than the local light speed.  If that happens, then the particles emit a characteristic radiation and lose energy.  The ICARUS group at Gran Sasso reports that its search for Cherenkov emission yielded no positive findings.

Bubble chamber tracks like this one display the motions of electrically-charged particles as they move through a superheated liquid. The ICARUS team used a bubble chamber to study radiation (or lack thereof) from a beam of neutrinos at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy.
CREDIT: Fermi National Laboratory

This may be a crucial blow to the overfast neutrino results.  Stay tuned.

MORE SCIENCE
A new rover named  Curiosity is on its way to Mars where its predecessors, Spirit and Opportunity have been gathering in data for years.

Meet Curiosity who is off on a long journey

 Among other things it will look for methane, which can be interpreted as an indicator of life.  Life on Earth can be detected from space  by the methane emitted by cattle and sheep in Texas and Australia.  We note the daintiness of the New York Times science team who tell us that cows "burp" methane.  The question of whether life ever existed on Mars is not in the agenda of Curiosity, but it is indeed an interesting question and should be looked at someday, when scientific funding is less tight.  We are proud to tell you that the name of our grandson Maayan will be on a chip carried on board Curiosity.  He even has a certificate to prove it.

NEW PHYSICS?
There are several mysteries floating around in physics such as  retrocausality, entanglement and other weird things.  One of the most challenging has been the question of why the universe is here at all.  Matter and antimatter mutually annihilate and since at the time of the Big Bang more or less equal amounts of matter and antimatter came into being, not much if anything should have been left.  It now appears, albeit not at a compellingly conclusive level yet, that the Large Hadron Collider beauty group  may have found an answer to this question.  If so, we may have to revise the Standard Model of physics and go in new directions.  Indeed, that was the reason for building this very expensive machine.  Maybe supersymmetry, who knows what the future holds for physics?  Meet an LHC group:

The LHCb team stands in front of their experiment, the LHCb detecor, at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
CREDIT: CERN/Maximilien Brice, Rachel Barbier

CANCER VACCINE There is a claim by an Israeli biomed firm Vaxil that it has developed a vaccine against cancer.  This is a huge claim and since the link that we just gave you connects to a blog of an Israel promotion propaganda site, we are a little skeptical.  We ran a search and came up with some reservations that tend to cast doubt upon the claim.  In fact, we are told that the claim contains some untrue statements.  Judge for yourself, but we share the doubt caused by the fact that the company officer quoted is not the Chief Scientist or a laboratory scientist, but the the Chief Financial Officer Julian Levy and one might wonder about his qualifications.  We checked him out and he has a law degree from Cambridge University and a resume of business administration in the biomed field.  Indeed Hadassah is doing the clinical trials and it may well be important.  Nonetheless, we find the bombast to be a bit exaggerated.  Again, stay tuned.

LUNAR MAGNETISM Our Moon has long been considered an inert body, but it had a wild past and maintained a magnetic field for 400 million years, much longer than might have been expected.  Now there are interesting theories coming to explain the phenomenon, mainly by the effects of asteroid bombardment that shook things up in the interior and possibly the influence of the Earth and its gravitational field.  The subject is interesting in itself and we coauthored a paper on the detection of vestiges of fossil magnetism by an orbiting spacecraft, long ago, certainly before the authors of the new paper were born.  The popular report is free, but you might require library access for the  new Nature paper and the  old Science paper..

BOOK REVIEW This week Pollyanna calls your attention to a review in the NYTimes (Published: October 21, 2011) of Jose Saramago's last novel Cain (Translated by Margaret Jull Costa, 159 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $24.) by Robert  Pinsky.   Some people like Saramago more than others.  You might like to give him a try.

FUND RAISING APPEAL We are sure that many of you make use of Wikipedia.  The folks there are putting out a call for some financial support from the user community.  Please consider donating to support this most useful Web utility.
Click to donate online.

It is interesting to note that many people, including some very close to me, boggle at moving big files around.  Nothing is simpler than an ftp server or just plain  ftp or Dropbox that synchs files.    XKCD  makes the point very well. 

We wind up with a comment on Black Friday from Andy Borowitz which would be funny if it were not so tragic.  People go out of their minds in shopping and consumer madness.   Of course, we could not let you off without a new chapter in the ongoing saga of Gene Weingarten and his interaction with the canine world

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Pollyanna returns

Pollyanna has decided to say thank you to the author who gave birth to her in 1913, Eleanor H. Porter:

She might be credited (or blamed) for distorting reality for generations of girls, but Pollyanna appreciates being granted her existence.
Pollyanna has been frustrated all week because, although she has sworn off politics, the shenanigans of the two Katzenjammer kids

Hans and Fritz, inspired by Max and Moritz

who serve as PM and Defense Minister in this pathetic country are enough to wipe out the gladness game forever. She sincerely hopes that cooler heads will prevail and no one sends air crews out to bomb Iran with no hope of success and little chance of returning alive. We will let Titan rant next week about this and other things of that ilk, such as the attacks on democracy.

Today Pollyanna is giving the moons of Saturn a rest and is focusing on even smaller objects, in particular asteroids. (click for Asteroids 101. ) This solar system flotsam and jetsam is left over from the earliest days of planet formation and can provide knowledge of the primitive solar system.  They can also be dangerous if big enough.  Tuesday at 0130 or so our time we were  visited by an asteroid of substantial dimension, about 400 meters.  It flew by at about 85% of the distance to lunar orbit and astronomers, both professional and amateur, had a field day.

In the wake of the flyby, Nasa offered two places to take a closer look at the action - Asteroid and Comet Watch on the main NASA site, and Asteriod Watch on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's website.  Both of them should be great fun.   Read more.

An answer to the Fermi paradox, i.e. if life exists elsewhere and there has been sufficient time for propagation through the galaxy, then where are they?  His friend, the physicist Leo Szilard had a different answer to the question of where the aliens are.  "Enrico, they are here amongst us and are known as Hungarians."  At least the US Government has no knowledge of their existence outside of Hungary.

Astronomers are listening to the cosmos; but no evidence exists yet for alien life

IN MEMORIAM
Norman Ramsey the 1989 Nobel Laureate in Physics died this week at age 96.

Norman F. Ramsey in 1989. AP

His research on the internal structure of atoms and molecules led him to the technology of super-accurate atomic clocks. He participated in the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb during WWII.

Dr. Ramsey signing off the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.

He was possibly the last survivor of the giants of  the Golden Age of 20th century. physics.

Joe Frazier
 
the great heavyweight boxer died this week of liver cancer at the age of 67.  He is famous for his fights with Mohammed Ali and lived greatly in Ali's shadow, but was a person of worth in his own right.  I append an obituary from the New York Times.  RIP

 Andy Rooney

passed away this week at the age of 92. Recently we marked his retirement from the 60 Minutes show after over three decades of serving as the curmudgeon par excellence of humanity.  Titan, age 4.6 billion, Pollyanna,age 98 and I are all old enough to have empathy with curmudgeonry and feel that something has gone out of our culture. Rest in Peace Andy and tell the Management wherever you are now that things have gone downhill since whenever.  Harps with plastic strings should not be considered acceptable.... Titan claims to have fond memories of his childhood when a T Tauri Sun provided some entertainment and Pollyanna complains that it was easier to play the gladness game when we did not have digital information flow telling how bad things are all over the place. I on the other hand "love" the modern world especially the rise of superstition masquerading as religion and reincarnated Neanderthals masquerading as political leaders.

WOMEN'S RIGHTS
As you all know by now, Pollyanna forgets about gladness and goes ballistic over abuse of women and girls by anyone, governments, institutions or individuals. She is outraged about what is happening to lesbian women in Ecuador presumably a civilized, progressive First World country.  It is shocking that this is happening in 2011.   At 207 "clinics" across Ecuador, lesbians are held captive, raped, tortured, starved and beaten in an attempt to make them straight. Pollyanna is calling upon all of you to go to the petition site, to click on the petition, sign and pass it on via Facebook, Twitter, email and in general to everyone you know.

On the other hand she is happy about the results of the  referendum in Mississippi. Mississippi voters slapped down GOP attempts to define “personhood” as occurring at the moment of fertilization. They proved that conservative southerners can say no just as easily as voters in Colorado to a measure that critics say would imperil birth control pills and in vitro fertilization and restrict doctors from treating cancer patients who are pregnant.

The EU betrays women by preventing the release of a film on the abuse of women in Afghanistan. Women who complain about abuse are themselves imprisoned and rape victims are prosecuted for fornication and adultery, all this a decade after the fall of the Taliban. The  systematic violation of the human rights of women and girls  in Afghanistan is a major scandal and the world should be aware and proactive in putting an end to it.
OIL IN THE NIGER DELTA
Pollyanna also has very strong feelings about environmental issues. The actions and inactions of Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world's largest and most profitable corporations, have devastated the lives of people living in the delta of the Niger River. There used to be life and hope in the Niger Delta town of Bodo, a village filled with thriving fish ponds and mangrove trees. Then in 2008, two oil spills changed everything -- twice, nearby Shell Oil pipelines spewed toxic oil for weeks before they were repaired.

"It killed all the mangrove trees, the ecosystem, everything we put there. Everything just died in a day." --Bodo resident Christian Lekoya Kpandei

Shell's oil spills in the Niger Delta (pictured) mean the region needs the world's largest clean-up, says the United Nations Environment Programme. Photograph: AP

It is time that Shell be called to account  for the damage that it caused.   Pollyanna asks you to join this action initiated by Amnesty International.

EXTINCTION OF RHINOS
Two weeks ago Pollyanna reported to you on the extinction of the Javanese rhino in Vietnam. She is very upset about the news of the extinction of another breed of rhinoceros, the black rhinoceros,

which has been declared extinct in West Africa. This is a result of a superstitious belief in the medicinal and aphrodisiacal properties of rhinoceros horn and the venality of the poachers who are hunting these magnificent animals off the face of the planet. Indeed, poverty is terrible in the Third World, but it cannot be a justification for rhino hunting. It appears that for many  species on the brink, captivity offers the only chance of survival. 

SCIENCE THAT WE LIKE

 Prehistoric paintings such as this one from Pech-Merle show horses with spotted coats. It is nice that DNA evidence shows that the artists were not drawing fantasies, but actually saw the animals that they drew. Pollyanna likes this and is really glad about it.

Dreams have always fascinated people. ..We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.-Prospero in The Tempest.
Pollyanna is fascinated by the implications of lucid dreaming and its interaction with brain studies.   Lucid dreaming is the rare ability to direct behaviors while in a deep sleep. By all objective measures, the person is dead to the world, most muscles are paralyzed and the eyes are doing the quick jitters that characterize REM, the main dreaming phase of sleep. But at the same time, the lucid dreamer knows that he/she is dreaming and can control the scenes, says study coauthor Michael Czisch of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. “The world is open to do everything.” 

THE BOOK SECTION
A few blogs back we brought you the first part of an article by Saul Bellow in the New York Review of Books. Here is  Part II of his discussion of being a Jewish writer in America. We also would like to showcase another great writer, Romain Gary (1914-1980). We have just finished reading his autobiography (given to us by Yosefa) describing his life with his mother in Eastern Europe and Nice, his WWII experiences and his life up to 1960.  The book, Promise at Dawn, was a New York Times best seller in 1961.  Yosefa first introduced us to him via the novel The Life Before Us which won him a second Prix Goncourt (under an assumed name). His life is described in brief in The Telegraph by his biographer , David Bellos. He may have been a weird character, but he was a great writer and had a fascinating life.

Glamorous life, glamorous wife; but Gary and Seberg’s marriage went sour

Definitely worthy of our your attention.

As Titan told you a while back, our dog Chilik wandered off at the beach and has not been seen since. She was old and had a cancerous growth on her spleen and was dependent on steroids to stay alive, which she had been doing quite successfully. In any case, she is gone and we shall probably adopt another dog out of the pound as we did with her ten years ago. You will be told when it happens. We mention this now
 


because the Gene Weingarten tale for this week is of special interest and empathy for dog owners.