Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Fall Everywhere

0
I love Fall - especially at Bryant Park. Everyday the park has something new going on - through the summer and fall and winter when the shops line up until New Years, along with the skating rink in the back. 

Every morning and evening I walk through the park and hope some day I will have time to sit back down and enjoy the quietness amidst the noise. In the mean time, I can only hold on to images thanks to wonders of modern technology. 

A Cosmic Flying Pencil — with Hair!

0
A spectacular image of the Pencil Nebula flying through space!

Pencil Nebula (NGC 2736) captured by ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. Credit: ESO
This odd-shaped cloud of gas and dust is nicknamed the Pencil Nebula, as the brightest part resembles a pencil. But this pencil looks like it has hair, flying off into the breeze! But that’s no simple breeze: these glowing filaments in NGC 2736 were created by a supernova explosion that took place about 11,000 years ago, and they are moving through the interstellar medium at about 650,000 kilometers (403,000 miles) per hour.


Monday, September 10, 2012

Living with others

0

The young man crossed the desert and finally reached the Sceta monastery. There he asked – and was given permission – to attend one of the abbot’s talks.

That afternoon the abbot spoke about the importance of farm work.

When the talk came to an end, the young man commented to one of the monks:

“That really impressed me. I thought that I was going to hear an illuminated sermon on virtues and sins, but the abbot only spoke about tomatoes, irrigation and things like that. Where I come from, everyone believes that God is mercy: all you need to do is pray.”

The monk smiled and answered:

“Here we believe that God has already done His part; now it’s up to us to continue the process.”

Friday, September 7, 2012

Animals Have Consciousness

0
About a month ago, a group of scientists got together in Cambridge and proclaimed --

“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”


i.e. animals, like humans, possess consciousness.

While a lot of us might find this declaration shocking, I only think it natural. In the Gita, as in many other religious scriptures, it is declared that all living things (animals and plants included) have a consciousness. The Gita goes a step further and says the actions of previous births determine your next life. So if you've been bad, you may be dropped to an animal level. Consequently, being born a human is one of the biggest blessings as it is only in this state than one can achieve moksha or Nirvana. 

While I am not too sure about de-humanizing anyone (animals or plants), I do think animals have a certain level of intelligence and ability to perceive things that are beyond us. How else can you explain bird migration during winter or dogs howling before a natural disaster? Obviously, nature is letting out subtle cues that we are closed to but animals are able to grasp. Plants, I think, share a similar ability; they simply go unnoticed because they are immobile. Ask a gardener who watches his plants everyday  and he will tell you his plants let out moods and convey emotions.

While humans are on top of the food chain, this does not at all mean we understand everything. Scattered in this universe are a lot of ideas and concepts that we have not grasped yet; some of them right here on Earth. 

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Awesome Power of the Sun!

0

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Moon Landing Due to Cold War?

0
I came across a very timely article to Neil Armstrong's passing. A young boy asked a Harvard professor if the moon landing would have occurred had there been no cold war. Its a very interesting question and certainly gave me some food for thought. 

Here is the professor's response.

Robert Frosch, a former NASA Administrator who is now a scholar and teacher at Harvard University, sent the following response (links are added for context) to a question posed to Dot Earth blogger Andy Revkin by his 14-year-old son, Jack.

After flipping through “Paper Astronaut: The Paper Spacecraft Mission Manual,” Jack asked: “Would we have gone to the Moon if there hadn’t been a cold war?” (From 8/25 post on the passing of Astronaut Neil Armstrong)


I thought it sensible to do a little thinking over the weekend before I tried to answer your son’s very interesting question.

I’m skeptical of the possibility of tying a particular event or sequence in history to a definite cause. History seems to me so contingent, chaotic, and noisy that it is probably not true that even when one sees a cause that it means much. It appears that evolution is the same: there are big pieces of chance and chaos in the system.

Keeping that in mind, I do think the cold war competition was a very important push to have going-to-the-Moon happen. However, it is also important to think about the Werner von Braun effect, along with the other imported Germans, and the push for ballistic missiles, as a logical weapons follow-on to the von Braun work during World War II. In addition, there is the effect of the immediately previous era of science fiction, including the movie “Destination Moon,” which more or less followed the plot of Robert Heinlein’s rather Ayn Rand-ish novel “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” (I was the right age to have been an avid reader of that kind of physics- and engineering-based science fiction, which was popular at the time, possibly because of the World War II developments in science and technology.)

It was strongly rumored that Jerome Wiesner of M.I.T., who was Kennedy’s science adviser at the time, was opposed to the whole Moon business, because it was (only?) engineering, not science.

I suppose my point is that there were a lot of potentiating pieces in place, many of them familiar to the general public, particularly the youngish public. Put these all together with a young, new president looking for something to give the country a push, at a time of obvious external competition, and they spell: Moon. I’m not sure the idea would have gone anywhere if the other pieces had not been in place, or if the opposition had been somewhat stronger.

Bottom line: I think the Cold War competition and Sputnik came together with the other pieces that were in place to push possibility into reality. The Cold War competition was a catalyst, but perhaps another catalyst might have come along.

The original NASA was ARPA, which was set up in the Department of Defense as a response to Sputnik (as I was told the history when I was in ARPA). It was later decided that a space effort should be civil, and not tied directly to military interests.

I met and talked with Jim Webb during my nomination period for Administrator of NASA. He was a very canny and careful financial and management guy, with no technical background, but likely to take a broad view of anything he took on. As far as I can tell, Webb’s response to his own lack of technological knowledge was to link up with Bob Seamans, and hire him. I suspect Webb was advising the president that any Moon push should be part of a move to learn about and use space possibilities in a broader way.

The Space Act of 1958, as originally written, certainly took a broad view, and set out the complete menu for NASA in a very succinct way. I think that was the doing of Hugh Dryden (of NACA), or President Eisenhower’s Science Advisor at the time, James Killian of M.I.T., but I don’t really know the history, and am certainly fuzzy on the details. I suppose there is an official NASA history, and many details must be available through the NASA history office, but I never got around to looking at that in detail. When I started with NASA, I just made it my business to know the Space Act of 1958 -- a remarkable document.

One other piece: From my own observation when I came to ARPA in the fall of 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson had taken up the role of spokesman for space, but I don’t know whether that was cause or consequence. The biographies probably say.

-- Bob Frosch, 8/27/2012

I am inclined to agree with Prof. Frosch although I do think that the landing would have been deferred several years had there been no Cold War; which was perhaps the biggest catalyst.