Asteroids: Should we really be concerned?

Please take a look at the following simulation.  Play it in HD so you can see the full effect.

This animation shows the number of known asteroids in the solar system that have been detected, along with their corresponding orbits.  The simulation starts in 1980 and moves to current day.

Watching Earth, you may notice that it looks like we already should have gotten hit many times over the past 30 years, however, this is a 2-D representation.  The asteroids that look like they are hitting the Earth are actually passing in front of, or behind our planet.

I'll let you make up your own mind...

The Engineer's Dream Lives: Copenhagen Suborbitals

Look at this picture.  What do you see?  I see a rocket, a water launch pad and a submarine.  Obviously, the submarine is towing a rocket and launch pad out to sea for liftoff.  Who would be undertaking this endeavor?  North Korea?  Iran?  Some other sovereign nation?  Maybe a company?  A large defense contractor somewhere in the world?

The answer is none of the above...all of what you see has been 100% built by hobbyests.  While you and I tinker with our cars in the garage, or add on to our houses, these guys were building a freaking space rocket.

Oh, and that submarine?  They built that too...that was last year's project...and its been to the bottom of the sea off the coast of Sweden quite a few times...they named it "The Nautilus" ofcourse...

It really is impossible not to be impressed by what engineers, on their own, with no management, company or government backing can do.  A typical defense contractor would probably charge billions to make all this...they built this test rocket with $70k.

In 6 days they will be launching a test dummy into suborbital space, hopefully a human in 3 years...the same feat Burt Rutan pulled off a couple of years ago...Keep in mind, Rutan's Scaled Composites is a company, which has received significant funding from the US gov that enabled it to exist in the first place.

These guys work in a shed.  On their own time.  Why?  Because they freaking can!

A lesson all too lost in today's companies where powerpoint engineering is the rule, and actually doing, or making something, anything is deemed too big a risk.

These guys are an inspiration to engineers everywhere.  Will the rocket blow up?  Scrub launch?  Ditch in the ocean?  Be 100% successful? We'll find out in about 6 days...stay tuned...

More info on Copenhagen Suborbitals here.

Guest Post: Wilbur and Orville's Mom

Introducing fellow science diplomat Natalie Straup.  As we add more writers to this blog I will continue to update a list of diplomats on the right side of the page.  For a quick intro, Natalie is master's level mechanical engineer working for a major defense contractor.  Her post does a great job telling a mostly forgotten story of science and technology.



           The Wright Brothers


On this 90^th anniversary of the 19^th Amendment, let’s take a minute to talk about women in science and technology.  I must admit, I don’t give this topic much thought on a day-to-day basis.  However, I was talking to a co-worker about his recent summer vacation to the Outer Banks a few days ago when an ordinary discussion suddenly got interesting.  In particular, he was rehashing his trip to Kitty Hawk, the site of the Wright Brothers’ historic first flight.  He asked me if I knew that the Wrights’ mother, Susan, had been their go-to source for mechanical advice.   Back up a second – the Wrights’ mom?  What? 



      Susan Wright

After a little digging around, I found out that Susan was a remarkable woman.  It’s hard to imagine anyone, let alone a woman raising children over a hundred years ago, making her own appliances.  Without her guidance, it’s possible the Wright Brothers might never have employed the scientific methods that ultimately led to their success.  It’s equally remarkable that I’ve never heard this aspect of the story before.  There are several organizations for women in science and aerospace.  Our schools and colleges are scrambling to find ways to inspire tomorrow’s female engineers.  Even NASA and Mary J. Blige are teaming up to encourage women to pursue the sciences.  This is not a new concept – it’s been going on for decades.  So why aren’t we more successful at it?

Perhaps we’ve been holding up the wrong role models.  Amelia Earhart, for all her accomplishments, is best known for being the first woman to achieve what men had already done.  While that is certainly admirable, it’s not exactly awe-inspiring for anyone to follow in another’s footsteps.  Think about the top women role models we have today.  Not many that immediately come to mind are known for the ground-breaking work they’ve done to advance the fields of science and mathematics.  Sally Ride?  Humankind had already been to space.  Even the famed California Governor and First Lady’s Conference on Women has just one scientist speaking this year, among several journalists and actresses who will be taking the floor.

This is not to say that we lack examples of extraordinary women in technical fields.  Marie Curie is but one example.  If we truly want to get girls excited about science, however, we are going to have to do more to recognize the ground-breakers in our midst – whether they shine in their own spotlight (in Mrs. Curie’s case, she glowed) or they are the driving force behind those who do, like Susan Wright.

So go call your mother and tell her thanks.

More on Susan Wright

The Greatest Dispute in Science, Part 2: The Fibonacci Sequence

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the ancient mathematician's obsession with finding perfection in the form of a circle.

As it turns out, Pi is not the only important ratio ancient humans discovered.  There is another called Phi.  This number is approximated at 1:1.618, and much like its cousin Pi, its an irrational number with an infinite number of decimal points.  One of the important take aways from the history if Pi is that nature doesn't really provide us any evidence of a perfect circle.

This is why Phi is a much spookier number:  Nature does show us this ratio, and not just in one place, but in many places...large and small.  You find this ratio in the sunflower pictured above.  You can find it any tree near your house.  We can find in the limbs and lungs of our bodies.  We can also find it in spiral galaxies.  In fact, this one single ratio, this one number, appears to be everywhere almost as a cosmic signpost.

The Phi ratio is slightly harder to understand than Pi.  The following movie should get up you speed quickly with what Phi means.  Once you understand the ratio, we can talk about its implications more.



Now, no matter what you may think of the mystery apparent here, there is no doubt the ratio is real.  Its occurrences in nature are real as well.  It was here long before humans were; we didn't invent it, we discovered it.

Lets look at this a little closer from our  Chaos vs. Order standpoint.  It has been often said that the fibonacci number connects everything in the universe.  Unfortunately, when you really look at it closely, this is not really true.  The astute eye will notice a commonality in every instance of this number in nature.  Can you spot it?  Its natural growth.  Exponential natural growth to be exact.  We find this ratio only in instances where there has been evidence of some kind of natural growth.

Even so, while it is misleading to say this number exists everywhere and in everything in the Universe, the fact that is seen is just about all natural growth is astounding.  A galaxy 100's of millions of light years away grows at this rate.  The ratio of your forearm to overall arm?  There it is again.  The ratio between a tree's trunk and branch section?  There it is again.  Its also in your DNA.

The next video might point out the "Dan Brown" reality of the fibonacci number a bit better:



Where else might it exist?  There is a new branch of economics called "Elliot Wave" which tends to show strong past stock market correlation with the fibonnaci:



So what does it all mean?  Science really doesn't have an answer as to why this one ratio seems to govern all natural growth, aside from the fact that it tends to be the most efficient form of growth.  In this respect it appears nature tends to favor efficiency over chaos and randomness.

We'll rack one up for order.  Chaos 1 - Order 1

As an added bonus, even a well known rock band wrote a song all around the fibonacci sequence.  Once you understand it, it becomes quite a feat of composition:

The Science of Baseball

Single A baseball is about to end for the Grasshoppers this season.  To celebrate the awesomeness of minor league baseball, lets do a baseball related story.



All sports generally involve nothing more the physics.  For most sports, an athlete's job is simply to excel at physically using the laws of physics to control the motion of two simple things:  their bodies, and some sort of ball.  Football, Basketball, Hockey, Soccer...they all fall under this definition.  Even NASCAR meets this definition if you consider the "car" as being a "ball" that the athlete is still physically manipulating.

Some sports are simpler:  the basic sports.  Running and swimming are two examples of the simplest of sports...in these cases there is no ball for them to manipulate at all...they entirely revolve around the use of the athlete's body and nothing more.

Baseball and Cricket are different.  In a real, scientific sense, these two sports are simply more advanced than the others.  Why?  Contact between the bat and the ball.  The pitcher does his best to manipulate the ball, but he doesn't score any points by this act.  The batter is doing his best to manipulate his bat in order to hit the ball in the best way possible.  The skill or craft of the pitcher is entirely different than the skill or craft of the batter.  Where they meet is pure physics.

There are two things all baseball managers have a to be good at, statistics and physics.  Most managers probably need a masters level knowledge of statistics to maximize his team's change of winning an entirely different, and extremely complex situation every game played.

For the fun of it...lets look at an article in Discover about what science can absolutely tell us about Baseball:

1.  Most base-runners continue to take the wrong path running from home to first.
2.  Statistically, little brothers are strongly shown to take bigger risks than their older brothers.
3.  When home town advantage matters, it tends to matter due to jet lag.
4.  Being a night-owl or early riser can make a big impact on a pitcher's EPA depending on city.
5.  At the MLB level, its physically impossible for anyone to "see the pitch"...its really a guessing game.
6.  Batters may actually see a bigger ball (mentally, not physically) when on a streak.
7.  Want to see the benches emptied?  Go to a game on the hottest day of the year.
8.  Baseball favors lefties over righties overall.
9.  Conventional wisdom that youth pitchers shouldn't throw curve balls is wrong.

Check out the article here.

Relativity - A Primer

Einstein's first paper on relativity came to some rather mind blowing conclusions:

1.  Time actually slows down the faster you are moving (what?)

2.  The speed of light (C) is always the same relative to you...without regard to your own speed (your just crazy now...)

The fact is that the only reason these conclusions are so mind blowing, is that we, as humans, are very limited in the ways in which we can "see" stuff.  The old saying is that seeing is believing...but we all know this is not true.  If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to see it, it did indeed fall (as can be easily verified by visiting the site after the tree has fallen).  This is true in all realms of science.  Humans can only "hear" a small frequency range of sounds.  That means there are all kinds of sounds happening around us at any given time that we are oblivious to.  But there is a chance those same sounds might be driving your dog insane.  Our vision is even further constrained to visible light in the fact that we can't actually "see" most of the light in the universe (while other species and sensors we have built can).

The same can be said for relativity.  The only reason the above two concepts do not make any logical sense to us is that we, as humans, have no experiences traveling at super fast speeds, and we have no concept of living on, or around super (and I mean really really large) masses.  The Earth is big, but its a grain of sand compared to other objects in the Universe.  But if we did live truly in the fast lane, on a space ship flying at the speed of light, or if we lived on the surface of a super massive object (like a collapsed cold star)...these ideas would be as normal to us as apples falling to the ground or the colors of the rainbow.

Below is an excellent primer on the ideas of Einstein's theory of special relativity.  I promise when we are done, you will be able to easily understand what relativity is and how it works...just like Einstien...and you'll likely have even more admiration for the man for the creative capability to imagine these natural concepts which elude our every day lives...

Rare Southern-US Aurora Possible Tonight

Turns out our sun "burped" pretty big yesterday.  This solar wave of energy should be hitting our atmosphere today (Aug 3).  Look up tonight, people in locations as far south as Virginia may get to see a very rare occurrence of aurora.

Watch the sun's "burp" here.