It’s raining metallic space junk

A news of the weird item for you. A hollow ball of metal has dropped from space down into the Namibian countryside, according to a report from the Agence-France Presse.

Credit: AFP

This is not a new occurrence. Apparently, numerous similar objects have fallen from space over the last 20 years in various locations around the globe. I did see that any locals were hurt in the incident, and the ball does not seem to pose any risk, although I don’t know what to make of the testimony that locals heard “explosions” several days beforehand.

Here is some more information:

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.

Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.

With a diameter of 35 centimetres (14 inches), the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of “two halves welded together”.

It was made of a “metal alloy known to man” and weighed six kilogrammes (13 pounds), said Ludik.

It was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 meters wide.

Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past twenty years, authorities found in an Internet search.

The sphere was discovered mid-November, but authorities first did tests before announcing the find.

Police deputy inspector general Vilho Hifindaka concluded the sphere did not pose any danger.

“It is not an explosive device, but rather hollow, but we had to investigate all this first,” he said.

A depraved viewpoint on Hitchens

Fischer: God Sent Christopher Hitchens to Hell Because He Loved Him

I understand the point from a doctrinal standpoint. But from a philosophical one, really? Really?!? This god knew before the beginning – there in the “chaos” – that man, once God created him, that Adam would fall. God knew before the beginning of time that Christopher Hitchens would not accept Christianity or any of religion’s tenants. And god knew that millions of others, if we assume that the doctrine is basically true, would also not accept this “gift,” which isn’t really a “gift” but an extortion (because if you don’t accept it, you perish. By definition, that’s not a “gift.”). God knew all of this before he created man. If he did not know all of this, he is by definition, not god, unless believers are willing to concede that god isn’t omniscient.

I didn’t think so. This supposed god knew all of this before he chose to create man. This, as it happens, makes god the criminal, not man. God foreknew every single person who would come to reject him, yet, he supposedly created mankind anyway, knowing full well that he was sentencing millions to an eternity of hell fire. Some loving father.

And again I ask the question that I once poised to a preacher friend of mine about god creating man, and it has has yet to be answered: why did god even bother?

An atheist’s sermon

Thanks to Reasonable Doubts and Jeremy Beahan for providing this. The following is a description of a sermon delivered by Beahan on Dec. 11, 2011 at All Souls Unitarian Church:

Those who reject religion go by many names; atheist, agnostic, skeptic, freethinker, secular humanist–but please do not call us “unbelievers.” If you ask you will find there are many things we believe in. We believe that the natural world, as revealed through science, is more beautiful and inspiring than any mythology. But a world without the supernatural also confronts us with disturbing possibilities. If there is no God then the human story comes with no guarantee of a happy ending. Humanity must solve it’s [sic] own problems but it’s not at all clear we are up to the task. If there is hope, it will be found in those who reject the hollow consolations of faith and choose to press on instead of hoping for a miracle. By living with courage and integrity, pursuing truth for truth’s sake, we can make our lives and our world significant.

Here is the actual text in PDF form and the audio: audio of the sermon.

Giant telescope to detect subatomic particles

Not that I understand this very well — I’m afraid I didn’t learn much about neutrinos in my English classes in college — but according to this article, scientists are preparing to build a telescope that will be the second largest structure ever constructed by man, coming in second only to the Great Wall of China.

The KM3net telescope planned for the sea bed under the Mediterranean will be a network of detectors with a volume of several cubic kilometres, built to detect neutrinos - tiny, fast-moving particles that pass straight through water and even solid rock.

And to what purpose: to scope out neutrinos under the Mediterranean sea. Neutrinos are fast-moving subatomic particles, and detectors are often installed deeply underwater to eliminate most of the interference. Each detector, and there will be a network of them, will be taller than the [[Burj Khalifa]] tower in Dubai:

The sea water in between the 900m KM3Net detectors works as a giant optical ‘detector’ – the detectors look for ‘flashes’ caused by neutrinos hitting water atoms.

Most of the neutrinos pass straight through, but the few that do collide with atoms will be picked up by the huge telescope.

The detector’s discoveries could propel research in dark matter and high energy physics.

Construction could start as early as next year.

Moral dilemma: testing the ‘trolley problem’

I’m sure many readers are familiar with the famous “trolley dilemma” in which a person much choose one of two scenarios: imagine you are driving a trolley and in front of you are five people who will die if you don’t switch the tracks to divert the car. If you divert the car, however, one person is standing on the other track and will be killed. Most people, I would bet, would choose to save the five people versus the one, unless there was an important reason why the single person might be more significant or special than the five.

Say, for instance, that on the first track, there were just five blue collar railway workers, all single men with no wives or children, but on the other track stood a single mom who was eight months pregnant. True, five lives is still greater than a woman and an unborn child, but the decision, I think, then becomes a little tougher. Or, say the scenario included the five blue collar workers versus the Dalai Lama, Bill Gates or some other figure who has had a sweeping impact on humanity. Or, five privates who just enlisted in boot camp on the one side and one four-star general on the other track.

Nonetheless, the dilemma is an interesting one to think about because it forces us to put value judgments on life itself. Is one important person’s life more valuable than a bunch of nobodies? Should we always choose to save the greatest number of people no matter who the single person is on the second track?

Carlos David Navarrete, a evolutionary psychologist at Michigan State University, recently put 147 participants using a virtual simulation. Ninety percent of those tested pulled a switch to divert the car, while 14 let the car kill the five people. Three people pulled the switch to change the tracks but subsequently changed their minds.

Here’s a brief analysis of the findings:

While the findings corroborated with the results of a previous study that relied on self-reported methods, the experiment also showed that participants who did not pull the switch were more emotionally aroused. This means that their inaction might not be so much a conscious choice but a result of freezing up during highly anxious moments, which is akin to a solider failing to fire his weapon in battle, Navarrete said. Perhaps if they had remained calm enough to process what was happening, the percentage of people who would have pulled the switch to save five and let one die might have actually been greater.

“I think humans have an aversion to harming others that needs to be overridden by something,” Navarrete said. “By rational thinking we can sometimes override it – by thinking about the people we will save, for example. But for some people, that increase in anxiety may be so overpowering that they don’t make the utilitarian choice, the choice for the greater good.”

And a video (with some nifty accompanying music, I might add):

The meaning behind the banner

For the record, I don’t know if I am going to stay with the banner that I just added to the site, revert back to the old one or create several that I can just rotate in and out. If anyone has feedback on it, good, bad or ugly, shoot me a comment or email me.

I’m into [[fractal art]] and that was what I used to create the banner. Here is the original image:

Credit: Jeremy Styron

The idea behind this piece is a philosophical one, and it expresses the kind of dread that we would be faced with if, indeed, there was a permanent, unalterable god watching us every waking and sleeping hour of our entire lives, and, as Hitchens said many times, even after we are dead and when the real fun begins. The “man” in the image is seen kneeling and cowering in the shadows at the bottom and heaven’s various “entities” (God and the angels) are portrayed by the blue and white forms above. The image and the banner are not to be interpreted with a kind of acceptance of such a scenario, but rather, sardonically, as I hope the quote from Bertrand Russell, and well, the content of this site, indicates.

Our daily universe: more Kepler planets found

As I noted here, Kepler-22b was discovered earlier this month. Kepler-22c and Kepler-22d have also been found as part of the mission.

The announcement came today that too more planets have been discovered by the Kepler spacecraft. These two planets have been named, appropriately enough, Kepler-22e and Kepler-22f.

Here is a snippet from The New York Times’ article:

Astronomers said the discovery showed that Kepler could indeed find planets as small as our own and was an encouraging sign that planet hunters would someday succeed in the goal of finding Earth-like abodes in the heavens.

Since the first Jupiter-size exoplanets, as they are known, were discovered nearly 15 years ago, astronomers have been chipping away at the sky, finding smaller and smaller planets.

“We are finally there,” said David Charbonneau, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was a member of the team that made the observations, led by his colleague Francois Fressin. The team reported its results in an online news conference Tuesday and in a paper being published in the journal Nature.

You can learn more about Kepler here.

Now accepting banner ads

As readers will see, I am now attempting, shamelessly, to monetize this site.

For more than three years, I have offered original commentary, book reviews, film reviews, etc., on this site for free. I liked that model, as this website remained free of clutter. But let’s face it. My stream of consciousness prose takes time to produce, and if this site can generate a little extra scratch, I might as well jump in.

This site generates more than 100,000 hits per month, and I thought it was time to begin seeking out sponsorships for the website.

So, here’s the deal: As an introductory offer, I will offer advertisers 50 percent off on a banner ad of your choosing and regular price after the first month.* Available ad spots include at the top of this site, along the right sidebar and at bottom. I would prefer spots to be at least remotely relevant to the content of this site (i.e., book stores or other retailers, graphics or web design companies, musical acts, photographers, or anything else artsy) but will accept any type of ad so long as it does not contain explicit or pornographic content.

Here are my regular rates and banner sizes (subject to change):

  • 125×125 — $150
  • 468×60 — $315
  • 160×600 — $450
  • 728×90 — $490

For now, I am using “canned” ads but will simply replace those ads with your ad or run them alongside your ad.

Contact me here for ad inquiries.

The second round of business: notice in the menu bar, I have added a link titled, “My Amazon Store.” Here, you can find book in topics that are of interest to me (philosophy, history, literature, etc.). You can also follow the link to purchase any or all of the books that I have read in 2011 or on which I have written reviews in the past year.

That’s about it. I hope these changes aren’t too distracting. Just trying to bring myself into the 21st century of blogging, even if my reading list keeps me, enchantingly, trapped somewhere between the 18th and 19th.

Please support this site’s sponsors, and as always, thanks for reading.

* Note: Ads must be free of explicit or pornographic material and must be approved by me before going live.

Our daily universe: Kepler-22b

Earlier this month, NASA’s Kepler mission found its first star orbiting in a habitable zone around a sun similar to our own. This is another important discovery because as we know and as I have pointed out before, any planet that can be found within the habitable, or “Goldilocks zone,” as it is otherwise called, has the potential to support life (as long as water is also present).

According to the article:

The planet is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth. Scientists don’t yet know if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like planets.

Previous research hinted at the existence of near-Earth-size planets in habitable zones, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Two other small planets orbiting stars smaller and cooler than our sun recently were confirmed on the very edges of the habitable zone, with orbits more closely resembling those of Venus and Mars.

“This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin,” said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Kepler’s results continue to demonstrate the importance of NASA’s science missions, which aim to answer some of the biggest questions about our place in the universe.”

Kepler discovers planets and planet candidates by measuring dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars to search for planets that cross in front, or “transit,” the stars. Kepler requires at least three transits to verify a signal as a planet.

“Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet,” said William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who led the team that discovered Kepler-22b. “The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season.”

Here are a couple illustrations of the planet and its orbit:

Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech - This artist's conception illustrates Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star.

Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech - This diagram compares our own solar system to Kepler-22, a star system containing the first "habitable zone" planet discovered by NASA's Kepler mission.