Rover astronomy

It seems the Spirit Mars rover has a new job: astronomer. It's currently stuck in loose soil and not able to move, and a recent gust of wind cleaned off it's solar panels so it's got more power than it can use. So rather than wasting it, mission control has set Spirit up to stay active overnight and photograph the Martian sky.

Things I won't work with

While I'm killing time, some chemistry fun:

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/

Things that make nitroglycerin look downright tame. You know those old leather coats they show steampunk chemists wearing? There's a reason for those, OK? They weren't just made-up, real chemists wear those when working with reactions that sane people don't work with. This collection of stuff goes downhill from there.

Things we probably don't want to think about around Christmas

Back in the 60s, a man named Milgram conducted an experiment to see how people responded to pressure from authority. The results were... not exactly nice. The experiment has been recently repeated, with pretty much the same results. BoingBoing covered the story, and included some related links. Not a shining endorsement of humanity. I can't say I'm surprised, though. And people really should think about it. The worst atrocities aren't committed by monsters who do it deliberately, they're often committed by ordinary people who are just under pressure from the people above them to get results. This should be taken into account when, for instance, looking at the current prosecutions for torture in intelligence-gathering in the War On Terror. The higher-ups say "Don't prosecute us, we didn't do it. Prosecute those evil soldiers who actually did the dirty work.". These results pretty graphically demonstrate that the "But we didn't do it!" plaint from the people at the top shouldn't fly. The people at the bottom of the chain of command very likely wouldn't have done those things if the people at the top hadn't been applying the pressure to get results in the first place, and sending the message down that anything that got results was OK.

Yeah, they found geothermal all right...

A drilling company was drilling a well looking for a geothermal heat source. Well, they found one all right. They put the bit right into a magma chamber. 1000+ degree molten rock = "Boss, you know that new bit? Well, we're sorta not getting it back outta this hole.". Geologists and volcanologists are spooging over this, it's the first time they've been able to get at live magma in it's natural environment, under pressure and with the dissolved gasses intact. Normally all they get is lava that's on the surface, after it's depressurized and degassed and altered itself. And this stuff is at a relatively shallow depth, only 2500 meters down, and turns out to have the composition of continental base rock, not ocean-floor rock.

Recognizing music

Interesting effect I noticed driving to work today. I've noticed it before, but it finally piqued me into writing about it. When noise interferes with music, so I can't hear all the notes or words, the song turns completely alien. The first beat of a measure doesn't even happen at the correct place in the melody. It's sometimes not even immediately recognizable as music or singing. It won't be until I finally place the song and remember the correct melody and lyrics that it'll snap back into synch and turn into a song again. It makes me wonder how much I really hear music, and how much is is just playback from memory with the audible song only providing markers to sync to.

LHC self-destruct

The LHC's coolant may explode. Basically, if you expose a Bose-Einstein Condensate to a very powerful, rapidly changing magnetic field, the attractive forces holding it together flip to repulsive forces instead. Not usually a problem, the amounts of BEC normally involved are tiny. But superfluid liquid helium is a BEC. And the LHC uses 700,000 liters of the stuff. Now, the statement that no other facility handling large quantities of liquid helium has exploded sounds good, until you realize that no other facility is using the liquid helium to cool extremely strong electromagnets.

One up-side: if the theory turns out to be right and the BEC does explode, it won't require any special equipment to verify it.