Category Archives: Science

Shuttle Columbia Lost over Central Texas

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I woke up around 8:30 Pacific Time today, and flipped on the television to watch my usual lineup of Looney Tunes cartoons to start my Saturday, but flipped through a news report that began with the words “unable to survive an accident at that altitude” while displaying a picture of the Space Shuttle. I had a deja vu feeling, the same feeling I had when being awoken to the news of the Challenger explosion 17 years ago.

The limited facts that seem to be known for sure is that Columbia broke up at an altitude of 200K feet while travelling at over 12,000 miles per hour over central Texas.

Aboard were Commander Rick D. Husband, Pilot William C. McCool, Payload Commander Michael P. Anderson, Mission Specialists David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark and Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut. My condolences and the condolences of all the world go out to the brave crew and their families.

King Tut’s Tomb

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Today marks the 80th anniversary of the the opening of King Tutankhamen’s tomb by Carter and Canarvan in the Valley of the Kings.

I’ve been interested in Egyptology as an amateur for quite some time. Egyptian culture thrived for millenia before the Roman period, and produced a rich variety of art, literature and architecture. Recently I have been reading The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen, which is Howard Carter’s recollections of the excavation effort.

Surprisingly, many of his research notes have never been published, but there is now an effort to make them available
via the web.
Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation.
includes scans of his field cards (used to identify objects) and may photographs.

Welcome Back!

A long lost booster section from Apollo 12 has apparently reentered Earth orbit, for the time being at least. NASA’s Near Earth Object Program has found that a mysterious object labelled J002E3 was likely recaptured into Earth orbit in April of this year, and originally left Earth orbit in March of 1971. Their conclusions:

The timing of the object’s escape is consistent with our theory that this object is the Apollo 12 S-IVB third stage, which was left in a distant Earth orbit after it was launched on November 14, 1969 and passed the Moon four days later. We theorize that the spent rocket orbited the Earth chaotically for 15 months before finding the exit pathway through the L1 portal. The excellent match between the intrinsic brightness of J002E3 and that expected for a rocket stage of the S-IVB’s size also supports this theory. The other four S-IVB stages still flying (those from Apollos 8 through 11) have been dismissed as suspects because they entered solar orbit much earlier than March 1971.

The ultimate fate of the object appears to be again to leave Earth orbit through a Lagrange point in June of 2003, perhaps to loop around the solar system for thirty more years before paying us a visit.
Cool.

AES Broken?

I subscribe to Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter, because I have mostly passing interest in things having to do with cryptography. Today’s included a rather startling revelation:
AES may have been broken.
Bruce’s description of the work is intriguing, but it is far from clear whether this break is of more than strictly theoretical interest. Bruce says:

So, here’s the current scorecard. Courtois and Pieprzyk claim a 2^100-ish attack against AES. They claim a 2^200-ish attack against Serpent. This is an enormously big deal.

Assuming that it’s real.

No doubt more revelations to come in the future. I’m not throwing away my 3DES code just yet. :

Nice Biology Site

I read talk.origins quite a bit. It is mostly a grand waste of time, but I like to read about the topic of evolution and its anti-thesis, creationism. Every once in a while you find a discussion or link that is truly interesting. Today a nice link to www.actionbioscience.org was posted. It is a very nice website which includes links to many find introductory essays on a wide variety of topics including evolution. Enjoy!

Primality Testing is in P

RSA encryption relies on being able to find large primes. For quite some time, the Miller-Rabin test has been known to be able to determine whether a given number is prime with as great a likelihood as you wish (say, with likelihood of error much lower than the chances that your computer made a mistake). Thus the claim was that primality testing was very likely in P, although no algorithm for primality testing in P was known. Until now.
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VLF Radio

An interesting portion of the radio spectrum lies below the normal AM broadcast band. Amateurs are allowed to operate weak transmitters in the region of 160-190khz.
Such amateurs call themselves lowfers, and experimenters are doing interesting work in
propagation, antenna design, modulation and demodulation techniques, and signal detection. The Long Wave Club of America is an interesting place to start.
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Takes a licking…

Just like the Energizer Bunny, many of our early space probes seem to be ticking along way past their original lifetime estimates. According to

an article in Scientific American
, the Deep Space Network recently reaquired the Pioneer 10 spacecraft which had not been contacted in nearly eight months. Not bad for a spacecraft that was launched on March 2, 1972.
But the professionals aren’t the only one’s who can make probes which last and last and last.
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Rare Earth

One of the most important and interesting question that science can ask is whether or not life exists elsewhere in the universe. The recent book Rare Earth by Brownlee and Ward hypothesizes that multicellular life is quite rare in the universe, so rare in fact that it is likely that we are the only intelligent civilization in the galaxy. Other’s of course have alternative views.
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