Time-Lapse: The Mountain

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Less than a month ago I linked to a stunning video produced by Terje Sørgjerd called "The Auora". A little over a week ago, he posted a second video filmed on El Teide in Spain. El Teide is Spain's highest mountain and, as Terje writes, "one of the best places in the world of photograph the stars and is also the location of the Teide Observatories, considered one of the world's best observatories". Terje goes on to write:

The goal was to capture the beautiful Milky Way galaxy along with one of the most amazing mountains I know El Teide. I have to say this was one of the most exhausting trips I have done. There was a lot of hiking at high altitudes and probably less than 10 hours of sleep in total for the whole week. Having been here 10-11 times before I had a long list of must-see locations I wanted to capture for this movie, but I am still not 100% used to carrying around so much gear required for time-lapse movies. A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on the 9th April and at approx 3am in the night the sandstorm hit me, making it nearly impossible to see the sky with my own eyes. Interestingly enough my camera was set for a 5 hour sequence of the milky way during this time and I was sure my whole scene was ruined. To my surprise, my camera had managed to capture the sandstorm which was backlit by Grand Canary Island making it look like golden clouds. The Milky Way was shining through the clouds, making the stars sparkle in an interesting way. So if you ever wondered how the Milky Way would look through a Sahara sandstorm, look at 00:32.

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

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John Gruber linked to an article this morning that I found very interesting, "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science." John summarizes:> Chris Mooney on why cold hard facts and scientific evidence seldom change the minds of those who already hold a strong opinion. (E.g., climate-change deniers on the right, vaccines-cause-autism believers on the left.) Fascinating but utterly depressing.

Helicopters Dropping Water on Affected Reactors

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I was reading on the MITNSE blog this morning how the Japanese government/TEPCO was using Chinook helicopters to drop water on the stressed reactors. From the post:

Crews began aerial water spraying operations from helicopters to cool reactor 3 at Fukushima Daiichi shortly before 9 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, March 16. The operation was planned for the previous day, but was postponed because of high radiation levels at the plant. News sources said temperatures at reactor 3 were rising. Each helicopter is capable of releasing 7.5 tons of water. Spokesmen for TEPCO and Japan’s regulatory agency, Nuclear and Industry Safety Agency, on March 17 Japan time refuted reports that there was a complete loss of cooling water in the used fuel pool at Fukushima Daiichi reactor 4. Listening to Anderson Cooper on CNN and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC last night, I remembered a few facts. These spent nuclear fuel pools are large, much bigger than a normal swimming pool, and much deeper. CNN said about 40 feet deep of water, at least. Now my parents used to have a swimming pool at their old house, in their back yard. It was a standard 20 x 40 foot swimming pool. This is by far the most common size for a swimming pool that would be at a residential home. I specifically remember that our pool took 33,000 gallons of water to fill it. In the "deep end" of the pool, it was 9 1/2 feet deep. The "shallow end" was 3 1/2 feet. I'm going to hypothesize, given that these spent nuclear fuel pools are rectangular, and have no "shallow end", and are over 40 feet deep, that they have a LOT more water in them (or are supposed to have). I'm going to guess that it would take many more times the water from my parents' old pool to fill them. How much? 5 times (165,000 gallons)? 10 times (330,000 gallons)? More? No idea...but a lot. Now - from the MITNSE article quoted above, they were dropping 7.5 tons of water on this pool at a time. I watched it happen live and the commentators said that they made 4 drops before giving up. Why did they give up? They mostly missed their target. Why did they miss? Because the helicopters cannot get low enough to the ground to accurately drop their water without exposing the helicopter crews to too much radiation. So most of the water missed. Seven and a half tons of water sounds like a lot. But in the back of my mind, I was suspicious. I kept asking myself, doesn't water weigh a lot to begin with? After a bit of quick math, I determined that 7.5 tons of water is 15,000 pounds. One gallon of water is approximately 8.35 lb therefore 15,000 pounds of water is 1,796.4 gallons of water. So in a pool that is at least over 33,000 gallons - probably more like 100,000-500,000 gallons, they're attempting to drop less than 2000 gallons on it at a time, from several hundred feet in the air and only hit the target with 1 of 4 attempted drops. You really have to ask yourself of the competency of the Japanese nuclear regulatory officials and TEPCO at this point. Or are they just doing things like this for the benefit of the cameras because they've completely lost control of the situation and have run out of ideas?

Horrifying First Person Footage in HD of Tsunami Hitting

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I first saw this video posted on Saturday, March 12. This video made the rounds on sites like Reddit & Twitter due to is spectacular nature. Apparently the author managed to get access to a good internet connection since then and post an HD version of the video. This video illustrates just how powerful the Tsunami was and how quick it struck. As you can see, this town went from dry to almost completely destroyed in less than 5 minutes time.

MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub

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This MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub blog has been the best, most accurate, resource that I've been able to find during the last few days to get accurate and fairly up-to-date information about the nuclear plant disaster going on in Japan. The quick blurb description on the blog bills itself as:

Information about the incident at the Fukushima Nuclear Plants in Japan hosted by http://web.mit.edu/nse/ :: Maintained by the students of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT.

NASA - The Frontier Is Everywhere

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Youtube user damewse has grown frustrated with NASA's inability to communicate its message to the masses...so he made them a promo video on his own. From his youtube page:

I got frustrated with NASA and made this video. NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings, and their media sucks. Seriously. None of their brilliant scientists appear to know how to connect with the social media crowd, which is now more important than ever. In fact, NASA is an institution whose funding directly depends on how the public views them.

In all of their brilliance, NASA seems to have forgotten to share their hopes and dreams in a way the public can relate to, leaving one of humanities grandest projects with terrible PR and massive funding cuts. I have a lot of ideas for a NASA marketing campaign, but I doubt they'd pay me even minimum wage to work for them. I literally have an MSWord document entitled NASAideas.doc full of ideas waiting to share. I thought maybe, just maybe someone might be able to work their magic for me on that. But the primary point of this post is to vent my frustration with NASA. Sure, they've fallen victim to budget cuts but I honestly think cutting media will seal NASA's own fate. Unless they can find a way to relate to the general public, support for their projects will always be minimal, and their funding will follow suit. A social media department would easily pay for itself in government grants because it could rekindle the public interest in the space program.