You are currently browsing the daily archive for September 12th, 2007.
The Dawn spacecraft is currently sitting on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral, where it will wait until September 26th for launch. NASA always chooses these vague, optimistic names for spacecraft. The Mars rovers have names like Spirit and Opportunity or old probes with names like Voyager and Pioneer. Of course there are the dreadfully functional names like Mars Polar Lander. And of course, the odd barbarian always finds his way into the crowd: Viking. But I think that Dawn is named well. Here we have a spacecraft that is actually going to the asteroid belt and examine the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet (ala Pluto) Ceres. Of course, Ceres is a smidge smaller than Pluto having a radius of 475 km versus Pluto’s 1153 km. The great thing about asteroids, though, is that their escape velocity is relatively minor. Ceres is only 1.2 km/s, or about 4320 km/h (2685 mph). This is nothing when you consider the escape velocity of Mars is 18,097 km/s (11,247 mph). The bonus here is that spacecraft going to Ceres expend less fuel in their approach (slowing down) and less fuel on take-off.
Dawn will only be orbiting these bodies, not landing on them. Dawn’s mission is to study the formation of these two objects, but I think the longterm effects are much more important. For one, it will give us experience in working with the asteroid belt. Many sci-fi writers have speculated that the asteroid belt will be a great place for space stations and mining operations. If Dawn finds the right things, it could spur further exploration of the asteroid belt. Maybe one day my great grandchildren will visit the space mining museum on 243 Ida (below) and spend the night at the bed and breakfast on its moon Dactyl (the speck on the right).
There are a disturbing number of Jason Michael Adamses in the world. Two years ago, I tried googling myself and gave up after 20 pages. Using searches that included schools I went to yielded two math competitions from high school in 1992 and 1994 where I ranked in one and my team ranked in the other. Now I am proud to announce that I have made it to page 2 for the search “Jason Adams”. Woot! And “Jason M. Adams” puts me on page 1. I don’t know why I care about this since I’m the only one liable to search for myself. I’m very happily married so I’m not out dating, which is probably the main purpose of googling. I guess people might also google me when I make stupid comments on other blogs. Maybe I care because it’s like being on TV. You might not want to admit that you want to see yourself inanely answering a question on the 6 o’clock news about Mother’s Day cards just after you were ambushed at a local Wal Mart, but you rush home and program your DVR.
On a side note, my friend Melinda clued me in on the term Googlewhackblatt. A Googlewhackblatt is a single word that has only one search result on Google. There is perhaps some debate whether additional search results that were omitted (because they come from the same site and the same link on that site) might nullify Goolgewhackblatt status. My contention is no. If the primary search returns 1 of 1 results, it’s a GWB (I’m getting tired of typing it out). So anyhow, Mendicant Bug is not a Googlewhack (when it’s two words instead of one). Obviously it’s not anymore since I’ve been blogging under that title, but even when I started there were search results like “… mendicant. [BUG] 2006-04-31″ etc. I couldn’t find any uses of the term that were in the same sentence, though, so decided to go with it.
Another thing that has gotten me excited is finding search terms that put me very close to the top on Google. I’ve compiled a short list.
- blagoblag
- “evil politicians”
- “dogbook parks”
- “language technologies institute” (this is my academic home page)
- “nasa slogan” (i was #2 a couple days ago, but more popular sites have dominated me)
So anyhow, if you’re bored out of your mind and find more, let me know.
Update
I happened on a political tracking website today that rocks. Wonkosphere scans the political blagoblag for buzz about presidential candidates. Blogs are classified as conservative (if they support a conservative candidate), liberal (if they support a liberal) or independent (if they don’t indicate support of anyone and choose to be considered as such). Scanning these blogs, they keep track of the buzz in the blogosphere that each candidate is generating. Each candidate’s page shows a graph of the amount of buzz amongst conservative and liberal blogs they are generating as well as the tone on those blogs. The tone is gauged by the language used on the blogs and it would seem that the average tone is slightly in the positive range (or else Wonkosphere needs to tweak its tone algorithm). This is some seriously cool analysis all done automatically. I wonder how well this will correlate with actual elections.
Sadly, Dennis Kucinich isn’t generating a whole lot of buzz at the moment. I submitted this blog to them and we’ll see if they accept me. I’m not exactly a political blog, but I don’t shy away from voicing my opinion here and there. Dennis appears to be largely ignored by liberals but is attracting some conservative attention. The negative levels in conservative blogs for him is definitely much higher than is typical, which means he’s doing something right.
