The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Court to UK copyright troll ACS:Law: you can't drop your cases
- UK Tories get majority of funding from bankers
- Virtual caves of Nottingham flythrough
- Bomb-sniffing mice
- Toby Morse's One Life One Chance
- Patriot Act extension fails to pass
- FareBot: an Android transit-card sniffer
- Hiking up the outdoor staircases of Hollywoodland
- Kids' room Super Mario mural
- Make cool stuff with the new RJD2 album
- New 3D printing materials: clear plastic, skateboard-tough plastic
- More on Peru's trip-inducing temples
- Old cockpits in 360° panorama
- Colorado Springs school bans kid who takes THC lozenges for neuro condition from attending because of "internal possession"
- Hamster-powered strandbeest walker
- Aphids peeking (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)
- Spanish author mocks Latin pop star copyright troll to benefit hungry kids in Africa
- Sofa made from a coffin
- MPAA sues Hotfile.com
- Jane Jacobs medal: call for nominations
- Vintage television commercials from the 1950s through 1980s
- African luxury hotel now massive squat
- Skateistan: interview with the director
- Electrified kids' toys of 1950
- AT-AT walker made from scrap computer parts
- Stranger than fiction: The search for habitable exomoons
- Boing Boing Giveaway #whatsinthebox
- Masked monkeys wait on tables at Japanese restaurant
- A new view of the galaxy: Exclusive Kepler data visualization by Jer Thorp
- Rhode Island town ready to keep hundreds of "undocumented stop signs"
| Court to UK copyright troll ACS:Law: you can't drop your cases Posted: 09 Feb 2011 02:04 AM PST ACS:Law, the UK law firm that sent thousands of legal threats to alleged illegal downloaders on behalf of pornographers, has been told that it can't simply drop its suits against its victims and avoid having its methods scrutinized by the courts. The judge has clearly got ACS's number, characterising its strategy thus: "Why take cases to court and test the assertions when one can just write more letters and collect payments from a portion of the recipients?" Mr Crossley, who was not present in court, had said that he fully intended to prosecute the cases before pulling out.ACS:Law told file-sharing case must continue by court (Thanks, Ppopkin, via Submitterator!)
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| UK Tories get majority of funding from bankers Posted: 08 Feb 2011 11:56 PM PST The UK Bureau for Investigative Journalism has released a study that shows that more than half of the Conservative party's financing comes from rich bankers. Top donors met one-on-one with prime minister David Cameron and other Tory leaders. One major donor was made Tory treasurer, another was given a peerage. Revealed: 50% of Tory funds come from City (Image: Eat_The_Bankers, Adam Smith/Wikimedia Commons)
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| Virtual caves of Nottingham flythrough Posted: 08 Feb 2011 10:47 PM PST The sandstone cliffs beneath Nottingham are riddled with over 450 caves, scratched out of the soft material. You can tour some of them, but most of them are off limits and badly mapped. Not for long: the Nottingham Caves Survey is using laser rangefinders to map and model the Nottingham caves and releasing video flythroughs as they go. I once visited Nottingham and was impressed by the weird tourist stuff. One cave tour leaves from a shopping centre in the middle of town -- you go down and down a spiral staircase in the middle of the mall and end up in an ancient, dimly lit series of caverns. And then there was the epic, homemade Robin Hood dark ride that mixed about 10,000 words of voiceover narration with dozens of extravagantly weird impressionistic mannequins. Hooah! The Sandstone Caves of Nottingham (Thanks, Cmpalmer, via Submitterator!) |
| Posted: 08 Feb 2011 10:04 PM PST [Video Link] You know, it's all well and good to talk about how bomb-sniffing mice are the future of security, and sure, it sounds good. But ask yourself: What does the phrase "genetically-selected rodents, optimized by integration with Hi-technology system" mean? I think it means they stuff mice into a plastic shoebox and train them to push a button when they get the whiff of contraband. And all I'm saying is, if I were stuffed into a plastic shoebox at the airport I'd give some serious consideration to pushing the tiny button a few extra times to screw with my tormentors, or maybe just because I was bored. Unless it's a gag. It's gotta be a gag, right? It's a gag. I'm pretty sure it's a gag. (via dvice.) |
| Toby Morse's One Life One Chance Posted: 08 Feb 2011 03:28 PM PST  Toby Morse, singer for the NYC Hardcore band H20 has spent the better part of the last year or so building up his One Life One Chance project. Inspired by the creativity and positivity he experienced in the punk / hardcore scene over so many years, Toby decided to create a vehicle to share that message with school age children across the country. Adopting the Bad Brains' PMA (positive mental attitude) as his slogan, he spoke at schools and spread the word in 2010, and plans to do the same and more in 2011. His message is largely his own story about being straight edge and being in the band H2O. While he does talk about the upside of sober living, the bigger point seems to be the power of positive thinking and accepting people even when they are different than you. I think this is such a better approach than the old "Just Say No" or DARE campaigns. If you work at or with a school, check this out and consider having him come speak to your kids! |
| Patriot Act extension fails to pass Posted: 08 Feb 2011 07:11 PM PST Not a misprint: House Democrats and the Tea Party joined forces today to defeat the rest of the Republican party and the Obama Administration. [Wapo] |
| FareBot: an Android transit-card sniffer Posted: 08 Feb 2011 04:44 AM PST Eric Butler's Android app FareBot uses the RFID reader built into the Nexus S Android phone to sniff RFID-enabled transit cards, some of which carry unencrypted ride histories, making them vulnerable to reading by anyone who brushes past you (Butler dryly notes, "Transit agencies across the board should do a better job explaining to riders how the cards work and what the privacy implications are."). Butler's app is just the first step in building software-based transit-card cloners/replacements that allow you to download transit credit to your mobile phone and swipe your phone to pay for fares. Presumably, putting the RFID emitter into a programmable PC will allow for a higher degree of privacy and security for card-users. FareBot: Read data from public transit cards with your NFC-equipped Android phone (via O'Reilly Radar)
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| Hiking up the outdoor staircases of Hollywoodland Posted: 08 Feb 2011 10:48 PM PST  On Sunday my wife surprised the family with a guided hike around the old Hollywoodland neighborhood in Los Angeles. Our guide was Hargobind Singh, or Hargo for short. He met us at the corner of Hollywood and Highland and drove the four of us (plus another couple who also lived in Los Angeles) in his immaculate minivan a short distance to the Beachwood Canyon neighborhood of Hollywood.
While in the minivan I peppered Hargo with questions about his tour company, LA Active Adventures. An amiable and calm fellow, Hargo told me he started the company about three years ago on his wife's advice. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Hargo had become the de facto tour guide for visiting relatives from Texas, and he ended up discovering a lot of hidden gems in Los Angeles. The idea behind his company is to offer tours targeted at people who live in LA and want to see things other than the usual tourist attractions like Universal Studios, Disneyland, Hollywood Boulevard, etc. Hargo told me that up until a couple of months ago, the business had been basically paying for itself. But then he offered a deal on a Groupon-like site (I can't remember which one) and 1700 people signed up for tours. Now he's very busy, conducting 2-3 tours per day.
Hargo crossed Franklin and parked near the Beachwood Market. We all got out and followed him as walked up the sidewalk at a good clip. In a couple of minutes he pointed out a staircase (top photo) and said that the hike would consist of 865 stair steps and two-and-half miles. My 13-year-old daughter and her friend groaned, but the prospect of a vigorous hike sounded great to Carla and me. By the time we went up the first set of stairs, my thighs were burning and I was huffing and puffing, even though I consider myself to be in pretty good shape. I wondered how many steps I had just taken, but I was too embarrassed to ask Hargo. (We ended up climbing about five more staircases, most of them even longer and steeper than this one).
Hargo was knowledgeable about the neat old houses in the neighborhood. We took turns posing for photographs in front of this faux Moorish entryway, which had a wooden door encrusted with large colorful cut glass.
Further along the way, we came across this nifty little treehouse, which was built in a tree that seem to be growing on public property.
Here's an example of a storybook architecture house with a lovely curved roof.
There were plenty of toyon trees along the walk. Another name for the toyon is the Christmas berry or the Hollywood plant. The berries are edible, and can be eaten raw or boiled. Click here for a close-up of the berries. (NOTE: I removed the original photo, as several commenters said that the berries were *not* toyon, and replaced it with the photo above, which shows what Hargo told us *are* toyon berries. Again, do not use this photo as a source to identify toyon berries, especially if you plan to eat them because you could poison yourself.)
This is the most well-known staircase in the Beachwood Canyon area. Made from granite, the center divider was originally a cascading fountain that was converted into a garden after the fountain stopped working.
At the top of the staircase I noticed these copper pipes with large metal nuts on them. The sets of nuts were numbered from 1 to 8. Hargo told me what they were for, but I would like you to guess their purpose.
Did you know that the city of LA was made in India?
The Hollywood sign popped into view many times during the hike. As you can see, the weather was spectacular. It was about 70° at noon.
Hargo told us the scientific name for this plant, but I only remember the informal name: the Mercedes-Benz plant.
You can see why in this picture.
This is a fennel, or wild anise, plant. Hargo told us an interesting story about it: when Spanish missionaries came to California they brought fennel with them to grow in their medicinal gardens. They used it as a kind of air freshener, tossing it on the ground of their buildings so that when people walked on the fennel it would crush the plant and release the sweet smelling volatile oils. As a result, fennel seeds would stick to people's feet and the plant started growing in the wild. It's all over LA now.
Here's an example of a castle, one of many in the hills of Beachwood Canyon.
We got a nice look at Lake Hollywood, a reservoir and dam that William Mulholland designed in 1924. At the time the reservoir provided the city with most of its water needs. Of course back then the population of Los Angeles was 1 million people (today it's 11 million).
Welcome to Hollywoodland. Now Relax and Slow Down. After all the stairclimbing, I didn't need to be reminded to slow down. Carla asked Hargo if any of his clients ever had trouble completing the hike. He said occasionally people will tell him that they can't go any further, and he will walk back to his minivan and drive back to pick them up.
The man who lives in this house is in his 90s. He's an artist who worked and lived for many years with an Indian tribe in Alaska. According to Hargo, they gave him permission to paint this image of a beaver on his garage door.
On our way back to Hargo's minivan I saw this old This hike turned out to be a fantastic way to spend a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon. Hargo gave us a 50% discount ticket for a "future adventure," and we are definitely going to use it. |
| Posted: 08 Feb 2011 05:25 AM PST  Inspired by online photos of parents who'd redone their kids' rooms as massive, colorful Super Mario murals, Casey Fleser set out to do the same for his son's room, to excellent effect: Each $50 pack of ThinkGeek decals look to have about 8 of the ground blocks in them. If I figured right, I need about 170 blocks. Or about $1,100 worth of decals. Even then I probably wouldn't be able to recreate my World 1-1 scene exactly. But what if I made my own decals? Maybe I could print my patterns on some clear labels and stick those on the walls? Even if the labels had been clear, the ink would have smeared unless I applied some sort of clear coat, so that idea was out. My next idea was to create masking templates using those same labels and go back to the painting idea.This Year's Stupid Idea Super Mario Bros. Room (Flickr) (Thanks, Webslog, via Submitterator!)
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| Make cool stuff with the new RJD2 album Posted: 08 Feb 2011 02:42 PM PST  RJD2 has just released his new album 'we are the doorways' as his alter-ego The Insane Warrior. As he explains in this blog post, the album was inspired by endless hours on Netflix watching 1975-1984 era scifi and horror movies; in a sense, this new album is the soundtrack to a movie that was never made. And that's where you fit into this equation. Tara Brown (aka my wife) was inspired by his post idea, so she set up a fan/submission site where anyone can send in cool things they've done with the album. Visual, audio, whatever. You can make the movie for which this album is the soundtrack. Or make a video for one of the songs, or make anything, really. RJ thought this was rad too, and offered to, some point in the future, will pick his favorite submission(s) and dish out a bunch of prizes. You can submit stuff here. This project is completely fan-made, but has the endorsement of the artist. That is pretty cool. I wish more artists would be open to collaborating like this instead of just dishing out the cease and desists. |
| New 3D printing materials: clear plastic, skateboard-tough plastic Posted: 08 Feb 2011 04:48 AM PST Last December, Objet (a company that makes 3D printers and supplies) released a video preview of its upcoming 3D printer materials for 2011. The highlights are a clear plastic and a plastic that's durable enough to print a usable skateboard. Objet Gives A Peak at New Materials for 2011
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| More on Peru's trip-inducing temples Posted: 08 Feb 2011 11:39 AM PST  As I posted a couple months ago, Stanford University achaeologists and acousticians are studying the three-millennia old pre-Incan temples underground in Peru's Chavín de Huántar to understand the use of low-tech sound and light, in combination with hallucinogens, to create mystical experiences. Now, Stanford has documented more of that story, focusing on how acousticians are attempting to recreate and listen to sounds that worshippers heard 3,000 years ago. From Stanford News: "Ancient shells meet high-tech: Stanford researchers study the sound of pre-Incan conches" (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!) |
| Old cockpits in 360° panorama Posted: 08 Feb 2011 04:36 AM PST  The 360 Cities project has gathered up high-rez panoramae of 14 old airplane cockpits that fire the imagination and bring detail to your secret pilot fantasies. I Believe I Can Fly (14 Airplane Cockpits) (Thanks, Jeffrey!) |
| Posted: 08 Feb 2011 11:27 AM PST A teenager in Colorado Springs has been told he cannot attend school after consuming prescription THC lozenges that his doctor has turned to in order to control a rare neurological disorder. His diaphragmatic and axial myoclonus causes seizures that are only controlled by THC, but the school says that consuming the lozenges at home and then attending school violates the school's zero tolerance policy for marijuana, since the child is considered to be in "internal possession" of the banned substance after he takes it. This isn't just stupid, it's scientifically illiterate. Surely, this kid is in possession of the metabolites of marijuana lozenges, not the lozenges themselves. He was able to return to school in January but as the district would not allow him to possess or consume his prescribed medicine on campus, he transferred to a school closer to home so that he could walk home as needed to take his medicine.Teen's medical marijuana fight escalates as school says he cannot come back to class after going home for medicine (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
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| Hamster-powered strandbeest walker Posted: 08 Feb 2011 11:21 AM PST The mad genius at Crafbuartworks created a miniature, hamster-powered strandbeest walker. The walker is hamstered by the intrepid Princess, who is a champ. The hamster powered? that's just stupid, which is the exact reason why I did it. It's different, hasn't been done before, yet it's in so many what's-under-the-hood jokes. It also had a high likelyhood of working, so I had to attempt it. Only problem: I don't have a hamster, I don't want a hamster for a pet, and I don't know what sort of power and weight a little critter like that has. All I know is that I've seen them go ballistic on the hamster wheel, and so they must have great weight to power ratio.Hamster Powered Walker (via Making Light) |
| Aphids peeking (Boing Boing Flickr Pool) Posted: 08 Feb 2011 10:43 AM PST  "Aphid Peeking," a photograph contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by reader Aaron Muderick. "These guys are so tiny they appear as the merest speck of yellow dust to the human eye," says Aaron, "Under magnification, they appear to be snuggly and cute like Totoro." |
| Spanish author mocks Latin pop star copyright troll to benefit hungry kids in Africa Posted: 08 Feb 2011 10:30 AM PST Via the BB Submitterator, reader GuidoDavid says, "Juan Gómez-Jurado, who wrote a great piece against criminalizing of downloads in Spain, was challenged by copyright troll, tax dodger and singer Alejandro Sanz to offer his novel for free. He did, and donated the resulting 4000 euros to the charity Save The Children." |
| Posted: 08 Feb 2011 10:25 AM PST  Autum's Heretic coffin sofa is "Custom Built From an 18 Gauge, Steel Coffin" and is part of a limited run of three. I've seen other coffin conversions before, but this is certainly the most finished-looking piece. Heretic (Thanks, Art, via Submitterator!) |
| Posted: 08 Feb 2011 10:24 AM PST The Motion Picture Association of America just announced that it has filed a lawsuit against Hotfile on behalf of various movie studios. The MPAA charges that the 2-year-old website has "profited handsomely" from encouraging and providing the means for "massive copyright infringement." From the MPAA's press release: Sometimes referred to as cyberlockers, download hubs like Hotfile bear no resemblance to legitimate online locker services. In fact, Hotfile openly discourages use of its system for personal storage. Hotfile's business model encourages and incentivizes users to upload files containing illegal copies of motion pictures and TV shows to its servers and to third-party sites, so unlimited users can download the stolen content - in many cases tens of thousands of times. Hotfile profits from this theft by charging a monthly fee to users who download content from its servers. Hotfile also operates an incentive scheme that rewards users for uploading the most popular files - which are almost exclusively copyrighted works. Hotfile profits richly while paying nothing to the studios for their stolen content. |
| Jane Jacobs medal: call for nominations Posted: 08 Feb 2011 04:29 AM PST The Municipal Art Society writes, "This year The Rockefeller Foundation is giving $200,000 to honor two individuals with the 2011 Jane Jacobs Medal. The Jane Jacobs Medal is a project created by The Rockefeller Foundation, and administered by the Municipal Art Society of New York (MAS). Each year, the Medal is awarded to two individuals whose creative vision for the urban environment has significantly contributed to the vibrancy and variety of New York City. The Medal is given in two categories: Lifetime Leadership and New Ideas & Activism. The Rockefeller Foundation and MAS are currently holding a call for nominations for the 2011 Jane Jacobs Medal." |
| Vintage television commercials from the 1950s through 1980s Posted: 08 Feb 2011 10:12 AM PST  Duke University has a digital library of vintage television commercials spanning some three decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s. The body of work in this collection includes ads for once-classic and now obscure brands like Super Bravo, Fluffo, Byrrh, Heart of Oats, Klean n Shine, Virex, Ansco and others, as well as brands still common today: Avis, Bounce, Charmin and something weird called Maxwell House. You can browse the collection online and watch the commercials right in iTunes, and even subscribe to a specific brand and pull down every commercial they aired during those years. Check out Duke's AdViews. (Thanks Tara)
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| African luxury hotel now massive squat Posted: 08 Feb 2011 10:33 AM PST  Seen above is the Grande Hotel in Beira, Mozambique, a 50-year-old luxury hotel that is currently booked solid, by several thousand squatters who live there without electricity or running water. JG Ballard would have had a field day with this one -- a large self-organizing community of refugees living in what was once a palace of excess. Belgian filmmaker Lotte Stoops recently completed a documentary about this amazing self-organizing community of refugees living in what was once a palace of excess. (Watch the trailer after the jump.) From CNN: "Former luxury hotel home to thousands of squatters" (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!) |
| Skateistan: interview with the director Posted: 08 Feb 2011 09:52 AM PST Skateistan: To Live and Skate Kabul is a short documentary about the impact of the war in Afghanistan as seen through the young people who shred at a skate park there. Xeni first posted about it in 2009 when it was still in production and Andrea followed up with a trailer before it showed at Sundance last month. While at the festival, our friends at Turnstyle sat down with the film's director, Orlando von Einsiedel. |
| Electrified kids' toys of 1950 Posted: 08 Feb 2011 09:19 AM PST From the July, 1950 issue of Mechanix Illustrated, a glorious collection of kids' toys -- some you might find today, but others no contemporary corporate lawyer would approve: New Toys for Junior (Jul, 1950)
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| AT-AT walker made from scrap computer parts Posted: 08 Feb 2011 04:16 AM PST  Etsy seller TGNsmith's $450, 12-inch AT-AT walker sculpture was built out of recycled computer junk. It's not posable (the joints are welded), but it betrays its origins in delightful ways: "The main body is composed of power supply boxes from old computers, the head from floppy drive housings, legs and feet from various scrap metal. The entire piece has been welded together using the MIG welding process." The bullet scars were simulated by attacking the piece with an arc welder. Imperial Walker (AT-AT) from recycled computer parts (via Neatorama)
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| Stranger than fiction: The search for habitable exomoons Posted: 08 Feb 2011 08:55 AM PST  An artist's rendition of a habitable moon orbiting a gas-giant planet. / David A. Aguilar, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Nevermind the Ewoks. For astrobiologists, the best part of Return of the Jedi was probably the gas-giant planet Endor and its accompanying forest moon. This bizarre concept—a habitable, Earth-like world orbiting a massive planet like Jupiter or Saturn—has proved so captivating that it has inspired not only Avatar, the highest-grossing movie of all time, but also a canonical 1997 peer-reviewed research paper published in Nature. Besides the idea's pure novelty, there are sound reasons for scientific interest in habitable "exomoons." The growing consensus is that after the Earth, the moons of giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn appear most likely to harbor some sort of life. Europa has a vast liquid-water ocean beneath its icy crust that may be enriched with nutrients from the moon's rocky deep interior. Enceladus is a water-ice slushball that seems to have pockets of liquid water beneath its surface, which betray their presence in vaporous plumes jetting from the moon's southern polar regions. And Titan boasts not only a subsurface water ocean but also a thick atmosphere, complex organic chemistry, and a global methanological cycle that mirrors the aqueous rhythms of life on Earth. These are only the most notable and scrutinized potentially habitable moons in our solar system—there are others even more mysterious. Even generously including Venus and Mars in the inner solar system's tally of habitable places, the outer solar system still offers more worlds where life could conceivably exist. When it comes to the search for alien life in our own backyard, moons are the next great frontier, even though they are quite different from the environments we're used to on Earth. And, according to David Kipping, an astronomer at University College London, moons may also be the next big thing in the search for life beyond the solar system. Kipping has developed a way to look for habitable exomoons using NASA's Kepler mission, and says that we could conceivably discover one before finding another convincingly Earth-like exoplanet. It's even possible, he says, that the homeworlds for the majority of life in our galaxy more resemble Endor or Pandora than our familiar planet. As you read this, Kipping and his colleagues are sifting through the new Kepler data, looking for the telltale signatures of Earth-sized exomoons circling giant planets in the habitable zones of distant stars. Is all this too outlandish to be true? Is Kipping on to something, or has he been watching too much Star Wars? I chatted with him about his ideas and research to give you the information you need to decide. Lee Billings: How can someone detect an exomoon? David Kipping: Detecting exomoons is very similar to how astronomers detect exoplanets. The oldest way to try to find exoplanets is known as astrometry, which is basically just looking at stars very carefully and watching to see if they periodically wiggle and wobble about on the sky. If a star exhibits that periodic motion, that's an indication that there's a planet in orbit and tugging on the star. To look for a moon, we do the same thing, but we look at a planet instead of a star. The way we can measure these wobbles is through the transits that we see when planets are fortuitously aligned with our line of sight. A transit lets us measure both the position and the velocity of a planet at that moment in time. So by repeating this measurement over and over, we can see if the planet's position or velocity is changing. If it is, then that means something is tugging at it, which could be a moon or an unseen perturbing planet. LB: I'm guessing you can tell the difference? DK: Oh yeah. There are two dovetailing measurements, transit-timing variation (TTV) and transit-duration variation (TDV). TTV just measures the instant that a transit occurs, which means it's very sensitive to the position of the transiting planet in its orbit. TDV, on the other hand, measures the length of the transit, which can give you the planet's velocity. If the planet is moving faster, its transit duration will be shorter, and vice versa. For moons, the velocity shift is always out of phase with the position shift. So we look for that phase shift by measuring both TTV and TDV. It's just like a swinging pendulum: When the pendulum hits its lowest point, it's moving at its maximum velocity, and when it swings to the top, its highest position, it has a momentary velocity of zero. If we detect that pendulum-like short-period phase shift for a transiting planet, we know it's definitely caused by a moon and not something else. LB: How did you come up with this idea? DK: I had this idea in 2008, when I was working out models for the shapes of the light curves we might see from Kepler. I was studying this very carefully, thinking about the different properties we could measure for a transit and how reliable they were. And I realized you could see TTV without knowing necessarily what was causing it. I started imagining the Earth going around the Sun as if it were a transiting planet seen from far away, and it struck me that our Moon would have a big effect there, that the Moon's orbit would periodically pull our planet around and change its velocity, therefore changing the transit's duration. That led to the two papers I wrote where I proposed how to find exomoons. LB: How important is Kepler for looking for exomoons? DK: Kepler is the most precise instrument we have for this at the moment. I worked on a feasibility study for Kepler, to see how well it could do, how small of a moon we could detect. And we found that in the best-case scenario we can detect habitable-zone Earth-like moons down to about a fifth of the Earth's mass. A more realistic scenario might be targeting exomoons of about one Earth-mass. In that case, there are about 25,000 stars in Kepler's field of view that are bright enough to give us sufficient signal-to-noise so that we can look for such objects. If these sorts of large, Earth-like moons exist, we should be able to find some of them in the next year or two with Kepler. LB: How do you assemble a target list for this? What assumptions do you make? DK: We have to think very carefully about selecting targets. There are two competing tensions: Whether or not a moon could be present in the first place, and how easy a moon would be to detect. In terms of detecting a moon, you want shorter orbital periods that give you more transits per unit time, which allows you to see more events and build up better statistics. You also want puffy, low-density planets, planets that cast a big shadow but aren't too heavy. That combination would give you a big transit and also a bigger signal from any accompanying moon. But in terms of a moon's probability of existence, short-period planets aren't where you'd prefer to look. For example, "hot Jupiters" are just no good; we wouldn't expect moons to be around them for dynamical reasons. It's like Mercury or Venus in our own solar system—we think they were too close to the Sun and its gravitational influence to keep any moons they may have had. Planets with longer-period orbits, wider separations from their stars, should have better chances of harboring moons. We already know from radial-velocity searches that there are plenty of Jupiter- or Saturn-mass planets in the habitable zones of stars. These sorts of planets are out there. We just need to look at the ones that transit and try to find some moons. For the new Kepler data release, the sweet spot would be big, low-density planets around lower-mass stars, K- or M-dwarfs, that have already displayed several transits. You'd get the enhanced perturbation from a big moon and you'd be getting enough data to feasibly work with, but since the stars don't have much mass, their gravitational influence is less, and the moons are less likely to have been ripped away before you can detect them. That's where we might find an exomoon in the near term. It's looking good. There's a new interesting paper from Eric Ford, where he and his team have been doing transit-timing on all the new Kepler candidates. And they found that at least 12 percent of all planetary candidates for which transit-timing could reliably be detected are actually showing TTV. Which means that these candidates are being perturbed by something. Whether that's another planet, or a moon, we have to do more work to be sure. LB: You're making it sound easy. It's not, right? DK: There are lots of things that make this difficult. We prefer single, isolated candidates rather than ones in multi-planet systems, like the packed planets in Kepler-11, for example. The planet-planet gravitational interactions there make subsequent analysis harder, because you have to delete all those timing changes in search of any from a moon. We try to avoid candidates with eccentric orbits, because that can indicate disastrous early history filled with planet-scattering events that moons might not survive. Then there are variations in the co-planarity of the planet-moon system—how much they orbit in the same, shared plane can complicate your analysis. Some configurations will make it easier to discern the moon's gravitational tug, and others will hide it. Analyzing these things takes time. A single candidate can take a month or more. We have to clean the data of spurious signals from cosmic-ray hits on Kepler's detectors and process it a few times to make sure the signals are robust. Then we generate a synthetic data set that doesn't have a moon in it, for example, and make sure we recover a null result. We have to do a lot of self-checking before we're sure anything we're seeing is real. LB: Okay. So let's say you find a potentially habitable exomoon or two in the Kepler data. What then? DK: Well, for most of the Earth-size planets we'll find in Kepler's field, it will be hard to really pin down their mass with radial-velocity measurements because their stars are so faint. It's not impossible but it's hard. And without their mass you don't know their density, which means we don't really know what these planets are made of. Moons, by contrast, automatically give you their mass and thus their density because they are detected through dynamic gravitational effects. So it's straightforward to say whether a moon is rocky or icy or gassy, whatever. That's important for quantifying habitability. And what it means is, we might learn more about small rocky bodies from studying Kepler's exomoons than from studying its exoplanets. Unfortunately, as I said, almost all of Kepler's stars are quite faint, so it probably won't be feasible to look for atmospheric biosignatures like oxygen or methane or anything like that for Kepler's planets or moons. But if Kepler shows that plenty of moons are out there, the next-generation of transit surveys would be expected to find a certain fraction of moons orbiting transiting planets around nearby, bright stars. If a nearby exomoon has an orbital separation from its planet like the Earth and its Moon, it would be feasible to follow-up and look for biosignatures in that case using something like the James Webb Space Telescope. LB: Right. Getting back to how you came up with this idea, imagining our solar system seen from afar, what planet-moon systems here could an alien astronomer see? DK: The big two are the Earth-Moon system and Neptune's moon, Triton. For something like the Galilean moons of Jupiter, and even Saturn's moon Titan, the mass ratios are too small for us to currently detect, even when you add all the moons together. Kepler does have the photometric precision to detect Saturn's rings, though, and I think we'll find some ringed worlds with Kepler soon. But for the sorts of moons Jupiter and Saturn have, which are formed from the gaseous disk around their planets early in our solar system's history, that process seems to yield unfavorable planet-moon mass ratios. Earth's moon is different. It's irregular. It formed from a Mars-sized impactor throwing debris around the primordial Earth. Triton is probably the remnant of a binary object that wandered too close to Neptune, where one of the objects got captured and the other got ejected from the solar system. For irregular cases like these, there's not really a mass limit, and you can imagine all sorts of odd configurations happening. The question is, are these moon-forming events rare or are they common? If they are common, I'm very hopeful that we'll find several exomoons with Kepler. But if it happens that the vast majority of moons form like the Galilean moons did, I think we'll need to wait for the next generation of space-based telescopes to find them. The real point is, we still don't know how common rocky planets are in the habitable zone, let alone moons. It could conceivably be that there are more Earth-like moons in the universe than there are Earth-like planets, which, if true, gives a pretty different picture of what life might typically be like across the universe. This is so fascinating because no one has ever done it before. If we find an exomoon, that would open up an entirely new field of astronomy, just like the first detection of an exoplanet did. |
| Boing Boing Giveaway #whatsinthebox Posted: 08 Feb 2011 08:42 AM PST  Inside this box lies hundreds of dollars worth of stuff: gadgets, CES swag, gris-gris. It belongs to one of our followers on the social networks, but I'm not sure who. Trusting chance, I'll mail it off tomorrow evening after selecting one at random. If you want a shot at getting it, do any of the following: Follow us on Twitter  Or on Facebook Then retweet this post with the #whatsinthebox hashtag, or comment below to tell us why you absolutely must know what is in the box.. The recipient will be selected from the hashtag search and commenters here. Tweet |
| Masked monkeys wait on tables at Japanese restaurant Posted: 08 Feb 2011 04:05 AM PST At the Kayabuki restaurant in Utsunomiya, Japan, there are two costumed monkeys who are employed as waiters. Yacchan and Fukuchan wear wigs and masks and wait on tables in a restaurant that reviewers widely discount as having bad food and bad service (from the humans, not the monkeys). The video here is from a March 2010 visit to the restaurant. Kayabuki in Utsunomiya - Where Waiters Are Monkeys (via Neatorama) |
| A new view of the galaxy: Exclusive Kepler data visualization by Jer Thorp Posted: 08 Feb 2011 09:19 AM PST Note from Lee: Video is best viewed in HD, full-screen mode. Following up on yesterday's post about Dan Fabrycky's festive rendition of Kepler's candidate multi-planet systems, I'm proud to unveil an exclusive new visualization of Kepler's candidate planets, courtesy of the multitalented Jer Thorp, who has an excellent blog at blprnt.blg. Jer is a native of Vancouver, Canada, but he currently makes his home in New York City, where he is the New York Times' Data Artist in Residence and a visiting professor at New York University. He's also a contributing editor at Wired UK. Shortly after the Kepler data release, Jer and I started talking about how he could dynamically visualize both the magnitude and the nuance of the discoveries. This is what we came up with. What you're looking at is every Kepler candidate, arranged as if orbiting a single star. In the real world, this would result in a catastrophic gravitational destruction derby, but in our virtual world it simply normalizes the candidates and allows a proper sense of scale to be perceived. Each candidate's estimated size, orbital speed, and orbital separation is accurately depicted, and each world is color-coded according to its estimated effective temperature, with red being relatively hot and deep blue/violet being relatively cold. Mercury, Mars, Earth, and Jupiter are added for context; the high-value Kepler candidates KOI 326.01 and 314.02 are also highlighted. The color scale is calibrated so that Earth is a pale blue dot. This is the color it would display across the gulfs of interstellar space, a hue that suggests blue oxygen-rich skies and deep liquid-water oceans. Two concentric rings plot distances of 0.5 and 1 astronomical units from the central star, and a pale blue line delineates Earth's location on two self-organizing charts. In the video posted above, the first chart in the sequence plots semi-major axis (i.e., average orbital separation) versus effective temperature, while the second plots semi-major axis versus planetary size.
Important data trends prominently emerge from this visualization. The abundance of smaller candidates and relative sparsity of larger ones clearly indicates that there are many tiny, meek worlds for every giant planet. But curiously there is a relatively stark drop-off in the frequency of Kepler candidates at or below approximately Earth-size. My gut says this is probably an observational bias that later data releases will smooth out, but perhaps it's not, and Mother Nature actually prefers slightly chubbier planetary progeny, with Earth being a slender outlier.
Similarly, Kepler's nascent sensitivity to smaller planets with larger orbital separations is also suggested from the pile up of small, hot, fast-moving planets in very short-period orbits. The tight clustering of worlds large and small, cold and hot, all well within the orbit of Mercury testifies to the fact that most of Kepler's haul thus far comes from small, cool stars. Only later data releases will probe the habitable zones of larger, hotter stars like our Sun. Hopefully, the best is yet to come. The visualization also highlights some things that are just plain weird. For instance, several other apparently promising candidates accompany both KOI 326.01 and 314.02 in terms of estimated habitability. Why weren't they assigned higher values based on Greg Laughlin's equation? I'm guessing part of the answer is that they orbit very distant and dim stars that offer extremely marginal chances of follow-up observations, something that Laughlin's formula substantially penalizes. The rest can be explained by the fact that any candidate large enough to be easily noticeable in this visualization is several times the size of the Earth, and hence of dubious habitability. The prevalence of apparently promising pale blue dots is an artifact of just how great the disparity is between the largest and smallest candidates. Speaking of which, the largest candidate, an enormous pale blue orb, strikes me as extremely strange. It's several times larger than our solar system's heavyweight champion, Jupiter, yet it's also relatively distant from its star, and estimated to be rather cool. If I recall correctly, planets puffed-up to such large sizes get that way through being extremely hot and close to their stars. Perhaps this candidate will turn out to be something distinctly unplanetary, like a brown dwarf. What do you see in this visualization? Do any clarifying insights or unsolved puzzles leap out at you? How do you think it could be improved? Let me know in the comments, and stay tuned—there may be an updated, interactive version of this coming soon. |
| Rhode Island town ready to keep hundreds of "undocumented stop signs" Posted: 08 Feb 2011 04:27 AM PST Some anonymous guerrilla urban planner has planted nearly 600 "undocumented stop signs" in the town of Cranston, RI. A special town government committee has elected to keep all but 21 stop signs and 2 yield signs -- apparently, the unknown freelancer put her or his stop signs in places that really needed them. The town council still needs to approve the committee's findings. UPDATE: City to Legitimize Mystery Stop Signs, Report Says (Image: Stop Sign, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 54409200@N04's photostream) |
In response to the news of City donations to the party, John Cryer, a member of the Treasury select committee, said: "With over half of Conservative party funds coming from the City, it's no wonder this Tory-led government is letting the banks off the hook. George Osborne is giving the banks a tax cut compared to last year and is refusing to adopt Labour's plan to repeat last year's £3.5bn bank bonus tax as well as the bank levy. Even with yesterday's panic announcement the Tory-led government is taking less from the banks than the Labour government did last year. And there is still no sign of a deal on increased bank lending, greater transparency and restraint on bonuses. People will now suspect that the real reason why George Osborne has been so soft is that he cannot afford to upset his paymasters." 
Because many of these systems are new, there is often a limited number of places to buy a card and/or add value, especially outside the city center. This presents a great opportunity for NFC-equipped smart phones which, in addition to being able to read cards, also have the capability to emulate a card. No matter how far to the edge of an agency's service area you are, it should be possible to download the ORCA or Clipper app and hop the next bus, streetcar, train, or boat. Apps could link with existing payment infrastructure such as Google Checkout for quick payments without additional setup, and for international travelers looking to get around, apps could support multiple languages and automatic currency conversion. 
There were originally 110 guest rooms, but Stoops says every bit of space in the building is now used as a living area.
Atomic Lab Set. shown at the American Toy Fair in New York, has cloud chamber that makes visible the paths taken by speeding alpha particles, a Geiger counter, and a screen that shows the break-up of radio-active material. A. C. Gilbert Co., of New Haven, Conn. 
A similar ordinance was proposed last June, but the city council rejected it 5-4, with the majority saying it was not willing to authorize the signs in bulk without gathering further information. Three city workers were then assigned to drive around and look at 2,595 signs and checking each one against a map to determine which were the 1,903 that had been officially approved. The mayor's office presented its report in November. Assuming the three sign-checkers started this project in July and finished at the end of October, that's about seven signs per day per person. It's tempting to say that this is not a very impressive rate, but I imagine they were all going a little crazy by sign number two-thousand... | You are subscribed to email updates from Boing Boing To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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