M104 Hubble Remix...

Courtesy of Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD), this spectacular “remix” of previous Hubble photos of the galaxy known as Messier 104 (M104). This image (click to enlarge) was created by applying new image processing technology to old photos (like the ones at left, below), extracting much more useful information in the process.

The new image processing technology is an elaboration of wavelet processing, a technique that's been around for over ten years, but is still being improved. You can read all about the new stuff here. Be sure to scroll all the way down to the bottom for a really nice demonstration of the power of this new technique...

Puzzler...

All but one of you got the correct answer to last week's puzzler: the reason why one lighting technology is more pleasing to the eye than another is the smoothness of the intensity of light it emits over the visible spectrum. Incandescent bulbs have a very smooth spectrum curve, with the very best of them (high-temperature halogen) emitting a spectrum that closely resembles that of the sun.

The two technologies that offer the best hope for energy saving (compact fluorescent and white LED) have emission spectrums that are very “peaky”. For example, a white LED typically emits 90% or more of its light in either two or three very narrow bandwidths. If an object that is illuminated by such a lamp happens to be colored such that it doesn't match the colors emitted by the lamp, then it will appear to be a different color than it would have in sunlight (or incandescent light). If you've ever seen the peculiar way things look under low-pressure sodium street lamps (the yellow ones), then you've seen an extreme example of this. CFLs and LEDs aren't quite that bad, but to anyone who appreciates colors they can be very annoying. Perhaps even worse is a different phenomenon, often called “harshness”. This has to do with the opposite situation: when an object illuminated by CFL or LED light happens to be a color that matches the peak emission. Such an object has a peculiarly high intensity, almost as though it were glowing on its own. In reality, the object is reflecting more light than it would under sunlight of the same average brightness – another effect of the “peaky” emission spectrum – and our perceptual system interprets this as that almost-self-glowing effect.

Manufacturers of CFLs and LEDs are working to improve this discontinuous spectrum problem. In the case of CFLs, that means better phosphors and compromises on efficiency. There are multiple technologies being used and developed for LEDs, and I think in the long term the best LEDs are likely to be superior to the best CFLs (this is not true today, however).

This week's puzzler is back to history. As usual, no fair googling before you answer!

America has had a series of violent episodes in its schools, and many Americans believe the incidents are escalating both in severity and in frequency. That's actually a challenging thing to determine, as our population has increased rapidly throughout our history, and the number of schools (and the number of children in those schools) has varied greatly. This complicates analysis and comparison. But at least one data point is very easy: the worst incident of school violence in American history left 38 students dead. What year did this incident occur in?

Another Conversion...

David Mamet, playwright and former liberal, writes about his “conversion” to conservatism:

I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

The whole thing is quite an interesting read for any non-liberal wondering just how anyone could possibly think like a liberal. But the authority on this topic, is, of course, Neo-Neocon.

Monica Lin Brown...

Monica Lin Brown is a real American hero:

A 19-year-old medic from Texas will become the first woman in Afghanistan and only the second female soldier since World War II to receive the Silver Star, the nation's third-highest medal for valor.

Army Spc. Monica Lin Brown saved the lives of fellow soldiers after a roadside bomb tore through a convoy of Humvees in the eastern Paktia province in April 2007, the military said.

After the explosion, which wounded five soldiers in her unit, Brown ran through insurgent gunfire and used her body to shield wounded comrades as mortars fell less than 100 yards away, the military said.

"I did not really think about anything except for getting the guys to a safer location and getting them taken care of and getting them out of there," [said Brown.]

The honor, courage, dedication, and willing sacrifice of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq is a never-ending source of inspiration for me. For each Spc. Brown who is publicly recognized, there untold numbers of similar and smaller acts of valor and kindness by our troops over there.

The lamestream media rarely reports such good news, but there are plenty of places on the web (milblogs, Centcom, and military-focused sites) that do. Reading about our troops in those places will inspire you – and make you angry at the one-sided, America-is-always-wrong reporting in the lamestream media...

Spitzer...

Several of you have written to ask why I haven't commented on the Spitzer imbroglio. One email declared, a little testily, that if I would just read the lamestream media I'd find out all about this outrageous story.

Well, I'm not ignorant of it at all. In fact, my own impression was that the story was considerably over-reported in both the lamestream media (who really ought to be ashamed that they haven't taken on Spitzer far prior to this affair) and in the blogosphere, so there was little need for me to add my two cents worth (but then, that's never stopped me before!). Also, my personal reaction is complicated, and a little difficult to speak to.

My overriding reaction is to be saddened by the whole tawdry affair. To have New York and the entire country dragged through Spitzer's tittilating sex life is not my idea of American politics. And a recurring sad theme is the impact of all this on his wife and children.

But many other sub-themes are at play here as well:

• The businessman in me wants blood. Not in particular because of Spitzer's dalliance; that's just a means to an end. My inner businessman wants blood because Spitzer has been, for years, a sanctimonious self-serving bully, perfectly willing to shake down honest corporate managers for his own purposes (justice not amongst them). This is a not-to-be-missed opportunity to take the evil bully down.
  


• My libertarian leanings have me pondering why prostitution is still illegal in most of the U.S. It's a fairly pure case of government interfering in commerce between two consenting adults, and it's very well established that the criminalization of prostitution is (a) not reducing the incidence, and (b) not helping the prostitutes. Furthermore, as Michael Barone eloquently points out, for the most part, in most places (and certainly in New York), prostitution is generally not prosecuted as a crime. This selective prosecution opens the door for abuse – no matter what I think of Eliot Spitzer (and what I think is most definitely not positive!), I wouldn't wish him to be prosecuted for a crime that other citizens wouldn't be.
  
  
• As an always-curious American male, I'd really, really like to know just what in the hell makes a hooker worth $5,500 an hour?!? I'll bet more than a few women would like to know that, too. And why on earth did Spitzer feel the need to import a hooker from New York to hooker central (aka Washington, D.C.)?
  
  
• My inner judge is frustrated that Spitzer is going down for something insignificant and essentially meaningless, when he has committed many real crimes that have destroyed the lives and fortunes of honest American citizens. Instead, he has mostly been lauded in the lamestream media for his hard-charging attacks on successful American businesses for, well, being successful American businesses.
  
  
• My inner criminal prosecutor wants to know why Spitzer prosecuted some prostitution organizations, while simultaneously frequenting another. Was there some quid pro quo here? Perhaps a rate reduction from his favored supplier in exchange for taking out the competition? Also, did Spitzer (a very wealthy man) pay full boat for services rendered? Or did he enjoy a discount in return for laying off the prosecution?
  
  
• There is an enjoyable aspect of watching Spitzer wriggle: the irony of him being caught by law enforcement using a technique that Spitzer himself pioneered – the search for “structuring” (the arrangement of financial affairs in pursuit of a criminal enterprise).
  
  
• Watching Spitzer's wife stand beside him at his public apology was agonizing, raising painful thoughts of how their children would have to deal with. It also provoked a ponder. Could I imagine my own wife, in similar circumstances, doing the same thing? No. In fact, in similar circumstances I would never have the opportunity to apologize, because I would be dead. Most likely, I'd have been tortured for days in secret until I expired, after which my body would be chopped into bite-sized pieces and fed to the coyotes. By my wife. With a smile. We've seen the supportive political wife so many times in recent years – what is it with these people? It seems like they live in a completely different world than most Americans I know...

As I write this, the press is reporting that Spitzer will most likely resign today. I certainly hope so...

Global Warming News...

This past week saw an interesting story emerge, one related to global warming. The elements of the story include a suppressed skeptic, a global warming supporter converted to skepticism, and some interesting revelations about the models which still provide the only “evidence” of global warming. The lamestream media (or at least, outlying parts of it) are starting to pick up on some of this, perhaps smelling a sensational story.

The starting point: a NASA scientist named Ferenc M. Miskolczi. Way back in 2006, Mr. Miskolczi began to ponder why the climate models were still using methods designed to work around the lack of computer power when modern computers gave them all the power they needed to do it right. This sort of simplification of models is very common when modeling complex natural phenomenon, as the amount of data and computation can easily completely overwhelm any computer.

But the climate models then (and still today!) used some simplifications that were, to put it mildly, suspect. Mr. Miskolczi focused on one particular such simplification: the models' assumption that the Earth's atmosphere had an infinite “optical thickness”, which basically is an assumption that the optical characteristics of the atmosphere are the same at every altitude. In fact, the Earth's atmosphere grows less dense with altitude (an approximately exponential decline), and by the time you reach 100 km (about 60 miles) in altitude there is almost no atmosphere at all – and the optical characteristics of the atmosphere change accordingly. It isn't constant at all. Mr. Miskolczi wondered what effect on the models would be obtained by replacing that simplification with reality – something modern computers are fully capable of doing.

The results were very interesting, to say the least. Keep in mind that Mr. Miskolczi's changes are still a model, not empirical evidence. All he did was to remove a simplification to make the existing models adhere more closely to reality. But when he did that, poof! Global warming disappeared, just like that. I just made a huge simplification of his study, but that's the essence of it in layman's language.

Of course with such startling and important results, Mr. Miskolczi immediately tried to publish his study. NASA (whose chief climatology scientist is James Hanson, whom I've posted about several times) refused. After finally giving up on getting his work published through his employer, Mr. Miskolczi resigned in protest – and published his study independently. You can read the whole thing here. Here's the abstract:

In this work the theoretical relationship between the clear-sky outgoing infrared radiation and the surface upward radiative flux is explored by using a realistic finite semi-transparent atmospheric model. We show that the fundamental relationship between the optical depth and source function contains real boundary condition parameters. We also show that the radiative equilibrium is controlled by a special atmospheric transfer function and requires the continuity of the temperature at the ground surface. The long standing misinterpretation of the classic semi-infinite Eddington solution has been resolved. Compared to the semi-infinite model the finite semi-transparent model predicts much smaller ground surface temperature and a larger surface air temperature. The new equation proves that the classic solution significantly overestimates the sensitivity of greenhouse forcing to optical depth perturbations. In Earth-type atmospheres sustained planetary greenhouse effect with a stable ground surface temperature can only exist at a particular planetary average flux optical depth of 1.841 . Simulation results show that the Earth maintains a controlled greenhouse effect with a global average optical depth kept close to this critical value. The broadband radiative transfer in the clear Martian atmosphere follows different principle resulting in different analytical relationships among the fluxes. Applying the virial theorem to the radiative balance equation we present a coherent picture of the planetary greenhouse effect.

And here's a snippet from a representative page:
I can't begin to understand and review this myself – but I don't need to, as other climatologists are beginning to do so. One of those scientists is Miklós Zágoni, a physicist, climate advisor, and strong supporter of anthropomorphic global warming and of the Kyoto Protocol as a mitigation for it. At least, he was a strong supporter – until he read and understood Mr. Miskolczi's study, and recognized what a devastating blow it was to the models that the entire global warming hypothesis was built upon. Scientific proponents becoming skeptics are a strong signal that something's fishy with the original theory...

Here's some further reading on the above story (and its principals): here, here, here, here, and here.

On a related note, the lamestream media appears to be picking up on the idea that perhaps the fact that millions upon millions of dollars of research grants are at stake has something to do with the motivation of global warming proponents. Ya think? The preceding link is to a New York Times article whose author seems to be a bit bemused that global warming proponents would accuse the skeptics of being motivated by the money … as well he should be!

The past couple of months has seen more positive portrayal of global warming (anthropogenic or not) skeptics in the media than I've seen since the Goracle started his agitprop. I hope this will lead to some balance in the research funding, and (consequently) in the quality of the science emerging from it...

Desert Wildflower Mysteries...

These photos are of some beauties that I was unable to identify. If anyone knows what these are, please leave a comment with the information...

Assortments...

I took these photos at various places on the desert floor yesterday. They each show multiple species, which I won't elaborate on here (as I did in other posts). Multi-species displays like these are common, everywhere we walked; they're really the norm. The single-species displays are much less common...

Desert Sand Verbena...

When most people talk about the desert wildflowers, the Desert Sand Verbena (Abronia villosa), or just Sand Verbena, is what they're thinking of. I like the Sand Verbena, but it's far from my favorite wildflower – and I actually prefer it when individual plants are on display, rather than the verbena carpets that appear in some areas – such as further north, especially around Borrego Springs, where many acres of desert floor are covered with verbena after a good rain. Down in the southern part of the park it's not quite so abundant, but there's plenty of it nonetheless. We found the best displays about a mile and a half east of S-2 on South Carrizo Creek Road (4WD), in an area with a relatively large, flat expanse of sandy wash.

As its name implies, the Sand Verbena likes to live on sand. Because shoulders of paved roads in the desert are often made of sand, it is frequently found there. Any sandy desert wash is also prime territory for it. The Sand Verbena's leaves are covered with fine, short, and very sticky hairs. In the photo above, you can see the individual sand grains sticking tightly to the hairs. There must be some advantage conveyed by the sand, or evolution wouldn't have favored it (producing the sticky stuff must incur a cost). Perhaps the sand helps weigh the leaf down, making it better able to survive windy periods? Or perhaps the sand helps keep the plant cool?

Parish's Poppy...

The little Parish's Poppy (Eschscholzia parishii) is one of the most cheerful flowers you'll find out on the desert. It's sometimes called Parish's Gold Poppy or just Gold Poppy, for obvious reasons. We found at least a few of these almost everywhere we stopped on the desert floor, but they were by far the best near the bottom of the little hidden canyon I've described in an earlier post, just south of the much better known Box Canyon. There we found scattered clumps of the Parish's Poppy, with their unstoppably cheerful blooms shining on sand washes, alongside rocks, and even out of the cracks in a boulder.

They are also fairly common on the Carrizo Badlands Overlook and on the plains just to the south of it. There we most commonly found them alongside a rock or in a patch of sand amongst the gravel...

Desert Lupine...

The Carrizo Badlands Overlook (and its immediate surrounds) is the place to go for the beautiful Desert Lupine (Lupinus sparsiflorus). On the hilltop right at the overlook, and on the east side of the road on both sides of it, these lupine grow by the tens of thousands.

Yesterday it was a bit early in the season to catch the lupine. Relatively few plants are in bloom (but even then there were thousands of them), but their color is particularly fresh and vibrant. If you visit a stand over the course of a few weeks, you'll see the colors change subtley over time as the sun fades them – they get less saturated, more purely blue, and less even.

As we walked around on the overlook, we could see that there were 10 or 20 lupine plants too young to bloom for each one that was in bloom. The plants are easy to spot because of their characteristic palmate leaves and their deep green color. My guess is that in a couple of weeks there will be a sea of lupine there (and I will be back to visit them!).

In past years that were good for wildflowers, the overlook area provided by far the most sumptuous displays in the southern Anza Borrego (at least, that I ever saw). The lupine were the centerpiece, but there are also several hillsides there that can be saturated with the yellows, whites, and blues of other desert wildflowers. If for some sad reason I was restricted to visiting only one site in the southern Anza Borrego, the Carrizo Badlands Overlook would be it...

Fish-Hook Cactus...

The fish-hook or strawberry cactus (Mammillaria dioica) is my favorite of all the cacti in the Anza Borrego. My best explanation for this: they're cute! They are small (under a foot tall and just two or three inches in diameter), furry-looking (until you get close enough to see the stout, sharp spines!), and colorful. They seem to like best areas that are protected by immediately adjacent rocks and boulders, and this leads to some very picturesque settings for them.

They're also mainly confined to specific areas. On our trip yesterday, we only saw them in one place – a small canyon just east of S-2 and just south of Box Canyon. There's a short, unmarked dirt road (perhaps 100 yards long, safe for 2WD) that leads to a small clearing and a place to park. The only sign is a small, brown sign declaring this a wilderness area. If you didn't know the canyon was there, you'd think there was nothing to see – most of the “good stuff” is just around the corner. There is a vague trail that runs up the canyon floor, but it really doesn't matter where you walk.

The sand and gravel wash at the very bottom form a distinct micro-environment, with its own flora. If you look carefully as you walk, you'll be able to identify other such micro-environments as well. Nearly every plant has some special place that it likes to grow. For instance, the large barrel cacti seem to like steep, stony slopes the best. The teddy bear cholla grows most often on slightly exposed, slightly higher places. You'll find Chuparosa in sandy washes. In a place like this little canyon there may be dozens of such micro-environments, each with its characteristic set of species...

Here's my photos from yesterday. As always, click on these images to see a larger version:

Desert Dandelion...

We saw the desert dandelion (Malacothrix californica) in many places yesterday, sometimes in profusion (especially near the Carrizo Badlands Overlook) and sometimes just a few plants. It's another member of the sunflower family (Asteraceae).

The common names for this plant are interesting. The common English name that most of us know is, of course, “dandelion” – which is a corruption of the French dent de lion, or “lion's tooth”, referring to the deeply toothed leaves. The French common name, on the other hand (according to Wikipedia), is “pissenlit”, which means “urinate in bed”, referring to the plant's diuretic properties. Read the Wikipedia entry for even more...

Desert Chicory...

The desert chicory (Rafinesquia neomexicana) is a member of the sunflower family (Asteraceae), and is quite common in many places in the Anza Borrego desert. We saw them yesterday on every stop we made down on the desert floor, including in the lower reaches of the Oriflamme Canyon.

Sometimes you can find a splash of white across the desert floor, comprised of hundreds of desert chicory blooms. But my favorite display of them is when a solitary plant shows its cheerful little blossom in some out-of-the-way, unlikely, hostile-looking place. The desert chicory strikes me as a plucky little fighter that's happy to go live where most other plants fail...

Creosote Bush...

The creosote bush (Larrea tridentata) is not a plant that excites most people. It's the most common shrub in our desert, generally looks pretty ratty, has small and inconspicuous flowers that don't smell good, and little tiny green leaves that leave an oily smear on your fingers or clothes if you brush up against it. If you crush the leaves, it smells vaguely of creosote. I'd read that if you create some humid air around its leaves by cupping your hands around a twig and blowing into them, you'll smell the wonderful aroma of rain on the desert. I tried it, and I think people are smoking something they shouldn't oughtta be – smells like a combination of stale breath and creosote to me.

But there really are some interesting things about the creosote bush. For starters, the individual plants live a very long time for a shrub: 100 to 200 years, possibly more. They produce lots and lots of seeds, but the germination rate is very low. Most of the individual plants are actually clones. It works like this: a single ancestral plant germinates from windblown or bird-carried seed, far from any other creosote bushes. That plant grows for a hundred years or so, gradually increasing in diameter, with the younger shoots on the outside.

Eventually the inner, older shoots die off, leaving a ring-shaped shrub. These are rare, but they do exist – I've seen four or five over the years. These rings gradually increase in size by the same mechanism, until (I've read) they are something like 20 to 50 feet in diameter. The biggest one I've ever seen was only about 6 feet in diameter, with about a 4 foot in diameter “dead zone” in the middle.

The scarcest resource for these plants is water; the creosote bush grows an extensive network of fine roots close to the surface to capture as much water as it can. If there is a ring of creosote plants that are (say) 20 feet in diameter, there's much more opportunity to capture water outside the ring than there is inside the ring – so more new shoots propagate in that direction. As the ring gets bigger and bigger, over thousands and even tens of thousands of years, they tend to leave fairly regularly-spaced individuals in the middle, with the spacing determined by the available rainfall. All of these individual plants are genetic clones, and taken together, there are some colonies that are on the order of 10,000 to 15,000 years old – and over a mile in diameter!

Another interesting fact about the creosote bush is probably mainly driven by how common it is, and how many flowers it has. There are at least 22 species of bees that specialize in feeding from the nectar and pollen of the creosote bush. These bees won't visit the flowers of any other plant. I can't identify any of them, but there's a very good chance that the bee I captured in the photo above is one of those 22 species...