Martians see it every morning and now you can too!

The best Mars map ever made is now available online for planetary scientists and armchair astronauts alike.  And citizen scientists are invited to help make it even better.

Websites developed recently at Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Facility, in collaboration with NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Microsoft, make it easy for anyone to trek the craters, volcanoes, and dusty plains of Earth's small red neighbor world.

"We've assembled the best global map of Mars to date," says Philip Christensen, Regents' Professor of geological sciences in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "And we made it available via the Internet so everyone can help make it better."

THEMIS 100 METER GLOBAL DAYTIME MOSAIC.

Anybody got an old Speak N' Spell I can cannabalize???

So SETI is going about it the wrong way. Naw really? What this article narrows down to is the idea that signals from Advanced, Intelligent ET's would be short and sweet, like text messages (only without all the misspellings). Because they're trying to to keep the costs of their GREAT, VAST, INCREDIBLY GOD-LIKE technological advances at an all time low. They're saving all that money for FUEL!

The Benfords suggest a continuous signal blared at thousands of stars would simply cost too much energy. They say aliens might use short bursts say, anywhere from a second to an hour long and point these signals in narrow beams at one star and then another in a cycle involving up to thousands of stars that repeats over days or years.

For civilizations that constantly watch the skies, the bursts would convey enough data to be recognized as undeniably artificial. As observant civilizations concentrated on this simple beacon, other beacons could broadcast more complex data at lower power (assuming the aliens were still pursuing a frugal strategy).

If I don't expose the 'stupid' then who will? Oh right...the smarter people.

An AWESOME old MAP of the MOON

Flickr.

Gravity doesn't ex---wait... What?

According to Erik Verlinde (String Theorist and Professor of Physics @ The University of Amsterdam *cough*), gravity is an illusion. You can read his paper on the subject here. What I think he is saying is that Gravity as we know it just isn't, well, Gravity. And the ideas we have about it are hindering our progress as far as understanding the way the Universe works goes.

He's not smoking anything. I don't think. He's just saying it like it is and of course the media is blowing it out of proportion. He didn't say the Earth was flat people. All he said was the reason you are rooted to the surface of the Planet needs to be re-defined and refined in order for further and future endeavors to be made.

We must make strides my fellow humans (and Robots, Aliens, Dolphins and Unicorns). It all starts with revolutionary thought. Read what the man actually has to say. Word for word.

Is it true?

The Rumor 

It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result. That the result comes from the Tevatron is for sure, since the LHC experiments do not have nearly enough data yet to search for that elusive particle, and other particle physics experiments in the world have not nearly enough energy to produce it. However, I am unable to understand whether the rumor comes from CDF or from D0. 

Lest you jump at conclusions too early, I need to explain something more: despite being a CDF author, I unfortunately do not follow actively the works of the Higgs Discovery Working Group within CDF, so a Higgs excess in CDF data could well have escaped me. In principle, if I now took on digging hard enough in the internal pages of the CDF experiment I might be able to find out if this signal is coming from there, and maybe learn more about it. But there are at least a dozen analyses to dig into! Too much work - while wild speculation is more fun! 

read more here.

Chupa or really ugly dog?

Syfy's attempt to delve into the mystery of Area 51 made of FAIL

Maybe I'm just disenchanted altogether. I can accept that. But what I can't accept is the fact that I watched "Inside Secret Government Warehouses: Shocking Revelations" on Syfy, and was anything but shocked. Annoyed maybe. Perplexed. Not shocked.

And why would I be? I've heard and seen all this shit before. Maybe it shocked a few arm chair newbies who up until tonight thought 'Wright-Patterson' was a Rock band. And I will say that the effort to get more from the Government (as far as answers go) was kind of noble, but still. Same. Recycled. Garbage.

No offense to Lester Holt and the Researchers who stepped in to get some answers, but c'mon...they tried this like 15 years ago and some years later, they still got nowhere. I do applaud the effort. I do applaud the interest. But for the life of me I seriously don't get it.

Area 51 is like a bad itch that won't stop irritating me. It's the gangrene cousin of Roswell. The things that seem to always captivate you but for all the wrong reasons. The secrets that are meant to be secrets. The Pandora's box of our lifetime. At the end of the say I just want to turn off the tv and ask, "Who gives a shit?"

But that sad thing is I do give a shit. I just don't have the power to do anything about it.
If there was one intriguing aspect that kind of compelled me to pull the chair a little closer to the tv, it was the 'Mandible of Unknown Origin'.

The lower jaw cast taken of an unknown creature (one that even an expert couldn't identify)---after death. The story of the Dentist who made the cast. The fact that it was in a vault, waiting for someone to ask, " Hey, you got an alien mandible in here?"

Like I said, intriguing.

Then there's the Vatican and its 'special-not-so-super-secret-library'. I am not going to lie...someday I want to walk in there, smell all those old parchments and sit down as a scholar run my hands over half of those priceless bound mysteries. But still... Dan Brown is a bad influence. He writes about a Vatican Library and all'a'sudden it's the stuff of legend like the imaginary Pentagon Warehouse from Indiana Jones.

I must say Hollywood kind of fucks everything up. It sets the bar too high for mysteries that really aren't that mysterious. Independence Day did Area 51 in. For good. Now we will always think there are spaceships from some Galactic empire being R&D'd down there.

"You let us fuck around on your planet and we'll let you take apart our really old and useless shuttles that even the Queen of the Universe wouldn't be caught dead driving. Sure..."

Yeah. I'm bitter.

Blame Syfy.

Sucker Free Summer In Danger of Sucking

No seriously though. According to WFAA (Dallas/Fort Worth), El Chupacabra is rampaging Texan Cattle, dressed like a Chihuahua. A hairless Chihu---

Okay, ya know, I can't even get serious about this. It has nothing to do with Farmers who are losing livestock or the mythical Chupa itself. It has everything to do with the fact that damnit, not one good picture...not one video. Not one honest-to-true corpse. Just...annoying shit like this: "I saw a Chupacabra and it ate my dog."

I refuse to take this shit serious anymore.

The Nine

Philip Coppens dives, headfirst into the 2012 phenomena and with surprising results. I've been equally disturbed and intrigued by the "9". The idea that Nine Demi-gods have been visiting Earth for ages and leaving chaos, mayhem and destruction in their wake.

You can read Coppens assessment here.

The question nevertheless remains as to who these Nine Gods truly are. Indeed, “Nine Gods” are not just an ingredient of the Mayan culture. There were also Nine Gods in the ancient Egyptian religion, as well as many others (e.g. India). To the Egyptians, they were also known as the Nine Principles and they were directly linked with their Creator Deity, Atum. 
Control over these Nine Principles was deemed to be instrumental in the successful rule of a Pharaoh: proper control over them meant that balance – linked with the deity Ma’at – was maintained and all was well with Egypt, the world and the universe. We can therefore see that The Nine in an Egyptian or Mayan setting, were closely related; in both instances, they determined the ruling of an era, whereby their consultation was of extreme importance to the success of the nation.

Finally...my REAL parents are coming to get me!

A mystery object 500 light years away, in the Constellation of Scorpius (incidentally a topic of discussion last night at my Bat Mitzvah), shouldn't exist. But it does. And why? Oh yeah...because Science can't dictate what SHOULD and SHOULDN't exist.

Did these people not learn anything from Einstein?

Here's an excerpt:

"There is no theory for how a true planet can form at 300 AU (astronomical units, with one unit equal to 93 million miles, the mean distance between Earth and the sun). It's not really a lack of imagination. It's a lack of physics," California Institute of Technology astronomer John Johnson told Discovery News.

Current theories, observations and computer models show that planets form from a disk of gas and dust that circles young stars. Less material is available as the distance to the parent star grows.

"You actually have to have material out there to have the planet forming," Johnson said.

Another option is that the object, designated as 1RXS J160929.1-210524 b and located about 500 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius, is a new type of failed star — something akin to a brown dwarf, though about half the size — which formed along with the primary star about 5 million years ago.

But scientists similarly are at a loss to explain how such a relatively small object could have survived the stellar birthing process.

"The models show it's difficult to successfully produce a low-mass object next to a much more massive object," said University of Montreal astronomer David Lafreniere, who lead a team that photographed the object in 2008, the first time a planet beyond the solar system was directly imaged.

There is more at DISCOVER NEWS.

I said it before and I'll say it again... if I was gonna scope out the universe, I wouldn't do it in a fancy-schmancy spaceship that attracts attention. I'd do it in a vehicle that resembles something ordinary in space, like a planet, asteroid or comet.

Things that make ya go...'What the frak, yo!?'...

Ball Lightning: All in your head (Like Bad Porn)...

Ever seen 'ball' lightning?

Ever wonder if it was just your electromagnetic superpowers interfering with the Maestro's Universal Master Plan? Basically you're hallucinating. And get this...the same cause for 'hallucinatory ball lightning' is going to be the next (but not new), explanation for why we see UFO's.

Science. Gotta love it. Especially when it's used to propagate an agenda.