Monthly Archives: December 2006

Interpol and the Terran Empire

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My good friend Dr. Brad Sandor stumbled across this priceless comparison while looking for information on interpolation routines. He landed on the Wikipedia site for the international police agency Interpol, which also notes the uncanny resemblance of Interpol’s logo with that of the evil Terran Empire in the Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror” (and its sequels).

Emblem of Interpol
Here’s Interpol’s emblem.

Emblem of the Terran Empire
And here’s that of the Terran Empire.

It would be interesting to know if Star Trek borrowed the design from Interpol. The emblem of the United Federation of Planets is based on that of the United Nations:

Emblem of the United Federation of Planets

Emblem of the United Nations

Recent Water Flow on Mars?

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NASA announced today that the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has seen changes in gullies on the surface of Mars since the spacecraft went into orbit around the red planet. The most dramatic example, below, shows that an existing gully brightened significantly sometime between 2001 and 2005. The brightness does not directly show water, which would sublimate quickly in the low atmospheric pressure of Mars, and cannot stably exist as a liquid on the surface. However, it is suggestive that something flowed across the surface there recently, or perhaps that sub-surface water underneath the gully was evaporating through the grains in the Martian soil and altering the brightness in the process. Evaporating salty water would leave behind brighter salts, for example, that could explain the change in brightness. While I remain skeptical about life on Mars, recent or ancient, this is a dramatic observation that shows that the red planet is not geologically dormant. I gave a Cassini talk last night in which I said that Enceladus, the moon of Saturn, is only the third known geologically active body in the solar system (after the Earth and Io). It looks like I should add Mars to that list now. Well, maybe not. If this is driven by atmospheric winds or solar heating, it’s really a different beast. See the comments below on this.

Martian gully in 2001
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

Martian gully in 2005
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

Mars Announcement Tomorrow

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So, I know what the general content of the NASA announcement tomorrow about Mars is, but I’m sure I’m not supposed to divulge it, so we’ll wait for the details to come through the official channels. However, this announcement proves to be intriguing. Stay tuned.

Alien Cloudscape

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The orientation of this picture of Saturn’s clouds from Cassini evokes for me the planets the Enterprise orbits in so many episodes of Star Trek. Click on the picture for the link to the full resolution image and caption.

PIA 08828 image of Saturn
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

To the CU Volleyball Team

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A bit of a change of topic for this young blog, but I wanted to make a public congratulations and thanks to the University of Colorado volleyball team which finished its season two nights ago with a 3-1 loss to the defending national champion Washington Huskies in the 2nd round of the NCAA tournament. We’ve been following the team for several years, and this year’s team had a certain special something going for them. They pulled off the upset of the year (if not the decade) when, unranked and outgunned, they handed the top-ranked and previously undefeated Nebraska Cornhuskers their first (and so far only) defeat of the season. That match was quite possibly the most fun I’ve had at a sporting event of any kind, ever. I’ve grown quite fond of college volleyball in general and this CU team in particular over the past four years. The sport seems so civilized compared to football, and even basketball, and is elegantly athletic. The quality of play is impressive, and there is something very happy about the sport. Maybe it’s the breaks after each point that allow the scoring team to celebrate, or maybe all the jumping which seems to be inherently joyful. At any rate, I’m sorry to have seen the last game of the senior class of Amber and Ashley Nu’u, Austin Zimmerman, and Lara Bossow. They and their teammates played a tremendous season, so to the CU Volleyball Team of 2006, congratulations, and thanks for the season. It was fun for us in the stands too.

High Speed Rail

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If you’re going from New York to L.A., or even from Denver to Chicago, high speed trains are not a very attractive option (leaving aside for the moment that we don’t really have any in the U.S.). Air travel will remain the long distance mode of mass transit of choice in this country for quite some time. However, there are heavily populated areas in the U.S. that lend themselves to high speed rail as an efficient alternate form of mass public transportation. These areas resemble Europe geographically and in population density, where high speed trains are a marvel of efficiency and convenience. Florida is one such area. There are several major metropolitan centers and no geographical obstacles to a rail system. The Florida voters acted to force the state to begin just such a system. The Federal Railroad Administration of the U.S. Government rosily summarizes it on their web page:

On November 7, 2000, Florida voters approved an amendment to its Constitution directing the State to develop a high-speed ground transportation system, using effective and efficient technologies capable of operating at speeds in excess of 120 miles per hour; using dedicated rails or guideways separated from motor vehicular traffic; ultimately linking the five largest urban areas of the State, and beginning construction by November 1, 2003. In response, in 2001, the Florida Legislature enacted the Florida High Speed Rail Authority Act creating a nine-member Authority (FHSRA) charged with completing the preliminary engineering and preliminary environmental assessment of the intrastate high-speed rail system. The Act also requires that the first leg of the system be developed and operated between St. Petersburg, Tampa and Orlando with future service to Miami.

What this page fails to mention is that the State of Florida stalled for four years under the mis-leadership of the governor and the state legislature. The optimistically named Florida High Speed Rail Authority, which has received no state funding for the past two years, summarizes:

In early 2004, Governor Jeb Bush endorsed an effort to repeal the 2000 amendment that mandated the construction of the High Speed Rail System. In November 2004, an amendment to repeal the 2000 amendment was approved by the voters, resulting in removal of the constitutional mandate. Although the amendment has been repealed, the Florida High Speed Rail Authority Act is still in effect pending any action that the Florida Legislature may choose to take in the future. (To date, the Legislature has taken no action to change the plans for deployment of the high speed transportation system.)

Instead, the immediate future of passenger trains in Florida appears to be a 31 mile, ten-stop (read: slow) commuter train between DeBary and Orlando. The Federal Railroad Administration has designated 10 high speed corridors, and Wyoming, Colorado, and Arizona are exploring petitioning for a corridor between Casper Wyoming and Albuquerque. Fast trains in Europe are a great convenience, and yes, they must be subsidized by the government, but no more so than our highways and airline infrastructure are currently subsidized. And looking ahead to more expensive oil, it is much easier to run a train for long distances on electricity than a car or a plane.

Frightening Preview of Electronic Voting

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In Florida’s 13th Congressional District a scandal is slipping quietly by though it represents a frightening preview of what might happen in future elections as more and more counties adopt electronic voting. This is the district Katherine Harris represented until her failed bid for a Senate seat. In Sarasota there were more than 18,000 undervotes in the congressional race. That is, of all the votes cast there, 18,000 did not register for either candidate for the congressional seat. That is about 15% of all votes cast, and a significantly higher undervote rate than anywhere else in the district where it was 2-5%. The Republican candidate won the official count by 369 votes, and Sarasota is the county where Democrat Christine Jennings was strongest. I have seen no reason to suspect deliberate foul play, but the voting machines used there were clearly buggy. Voters reported that after casting a vote the summary screen did not display the congressional race. Jennings is suing for a new election. Today, the state is scheduled to start an audit of the voting procedures, but it is not clear whether or not the actual machines used for voting in the election will be the ones used in the audit. Said Jennings in her suit:

“The vote totals in the certification are wrong because they do not include thousands of legal votes that were cast in Sarasota County but not counted due to the pervasive malfunctioning of electronic voting machines.”

It is quite simple to have electronic voting machines also print a written record of the vote, though it appears that in this case even that would not have averted this problem. When I voted this year there was one electronic voting station and five paper voting stations at my precinct. I, and everyone around me, was opting for the paper ballot. Somehow the assurances of the election judge that “the electronic voting machine is now working” did not inspire much confidence.