The Windkey and the Lamplighter

Before:

Gilchrist, Texas before Hurricane Ike, from Google Maps via WunderBlog

Gilchrist, Texas after Hurricane Ike, National Geodetic Survey via WunderBlog.

Google Map of Gilchrist, Texas

This is Gilchrist, Texas. (hat tip to Wunder Blog for the pictures) Or, at least, it was. Now, it’s completely gone. No structures, no wreckage, no anything. Swept into the sea.

Putting aside the completely wrecked bridge, look at the places that used to be beachfront walkways. Where those houses were is *underwater*. I guess this is the risk you take when you build on a sandbar, but I can’t imagine losing my home in that way. I hope most of those people evacuated, and that they were summer homes with relatively little property left in them, but I bet some of them didn’t and some of them weren’t. I like the Jeff Masters’ idea of buying that land (where there is land, anyway) from the homeowners and making it a park (a la the Fire Island National Seashore). I think that’s a much safer way to help these people who’ve lost their property—without setting up the bad incentives which will cause it to be repeated in the next hurricane.

I wonder how much it would cost to buy all of NOLA and turn it into a park…

This is where I’d fall. Very wet. (Click on the image to find out where you’d go.)

Thanks to BadAstronomy for the pointer!

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature is neat. (Thanks to my favorite Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, for the link to the volcano pictures, which got the RSS feed into my newsreader!)

But even better than volcanoes is volcanoes on Io:

The rest of the Jupiter pictures are also fantastic.

There’s been too much complaining on this blog recently, at least from me. But I have good news! Finally, I can indulge my desire to watch Martian weather.

The Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera isn’t a scientific instrument—no pointing control, no focus adjustment, only “basic exposure controls”—but it was included on Mars Express to monitor the ejection of the Beagle 2 lander in December 2003. The camera performed well—the lander didn’t. In 2007, ESA turned the camera back on to capture low-resolution images of Mars, including some neat crescent shots and global images that the scientific instruments and other satellites aren’t positioned to capture. They did tests and focusing all throughout 2007, and the “Mars Webcam”, as it’s been nicknamed, went live today.

This is way cool. Also, it’s a live satellite that can be used to train ops engineers:
“VMC activites are unique in that the camera is operated by the Flight Control Team, and not a team of scientists. This gives operations engineers, particularly junior members, a chance to learn and practice command generation, planning, and other skills normally done at the Science Operations Centre.”

This is going right up with the VolcanoCam(1) on my list of things to go in my virtual windowframe(2).

(1) OMG, the VolcanoCam is now in HD! I love the USDA Forest Service.
(2)And thanks to Ryan Hoagland for putting up a website that I could link to when I wanted to explain what I meant by virtual window. Wherever and whomever you are, Ryan, you rock.

Emily at the Planetary Society has the news:
Water ice on Mars!

They’re pretty sure it’s ice, and they’re pretty sure it’s water—carbon dioxide ice would have melted more quickly at the temperatures they’ve been observing.

This is very cool. Ice on Mars!

In most of the Denver area, there are no diners. There are Einstein’s Bagels, Village Inns, Dennys’, IHOPs, and so on. There are no chains smaller than large regional. There are few independent restaurants. As we drove last week from Denver to Kremmling, we saw many Starbucks and few local coffee shops. Boston is similar: lots of chains, though a few local businesses thrive. In New York, independent shops and restaurants are very common. There are certainly chains too, but enough independent restaurants that most people do business with them regularly. Why?

Most readers know that I’ve been looking for good diners in Boston for a long time. The Deluxe Town is nice, but its menu is thirty pages too short to really count. Now I think I’ve figured it out: big chains have figured out marketing and memetics enough to capture lots of market. But they can only be so dense before they overload people. A Starbucks every few blocks is one thing; heavier concentrations draw complaints. If there’s a McDonald’s on this block and a Burger King next block, people will be turned off to see a McDonald’s on the next block further. As a result, there’s a maximum concentration of each big chain.

Further, there’s only enough national population to support a certain number of national chains. When each of those are at their maximum sustainable density, but there’s still enough population to support more business, then something like the thriving diner culture I’m looking for comes into being. In New York, under the further influence of particular immigrant communities, that became diner culture itself. New York City is the densest population center in North America. The diner culture grew there and has spilled over into the surrounding suburbs.

As the number of supportable big chains increases, and as big chains diversify (each with a burger place, coffee/milkshake place, burrito place, etc.), they’ll find ways to pack more densely and attack the remaining diner space. They’ll also find ways to support more national chains. I don’t hold out much hope that the diners I love will come to Boston. But at the other end of the spectrum, Kremmling had no visible chain businesses. With only a thousand people, franchising doesn’t make sense: people do their own thing. The local coffee shop looked pretty good.

This is the funniest thing I’ve read today. A space geek and a skeptic attended a conspiracy-theorist’s press conference, and wrote about it.

That’s not the funny part. (Though it is funny.)
The funny part is him talking about the hate-mail he got afterward from *other* conspiracy theorists.

Another writer speculated that because I referred to movies and videogames in my article, I must be under 40 years old. Well, you see, I used to refer to vaudeville stars and Victrola artists in all my writings, but then I realized that this did not make me, you know, groovy, as the Generation Y kids say these days. So I started adopting references to contemporary movies and video games to seem more “with it” and “hip,” by jiminy.

and

Some of the messages accused me of being pompous and assuming that I’m superior to them. To which my response is: I do feel superior… to them. I mean, there are lots of people I don’t feel superior to: my mom, Stephen Hawking, my parents’ dog (smart dog—she just knows stuff), and, well, a whole bunch of people. But if you believe that Nazis and Freemasons run the space program and have been covering up extraterrestrial structures on the Moon, or if you believe vastly complicated conspiracy theories that are based upon no evidence that would pass peer review by a panel of fifth-graders, then, yes, I have my doubts about your intelligence, or at least your reasoning abilities. And I wouldn’t trust you with my car keys.

Anyway, rather than me reposting large chunks of his article here, or sending them to a friend in IM while trying not to laugh out loud in my office and upset my officemate, y’all should just go read his article. Have fun, and don’t give the monkey your car keys.

Over at Starts with a Bang! they have a fun game:
Look at the pictures, and decide whether it is of Arizona or Mars.
Click here for the pictures, scroll down for the answers
I got all but three—this is hard!

Thanks to Carnival of Space #48

Libby Lewis filed a report with NPR this morning describing the 15% drop in median home price across the U.S.  She further said that the Real Estate industry said that this was due principally to a drop in the price of higher prices homes.  This comment went unremarked.I don’t see how this can be. Changes in price in the upper half don’t affect the median value at all. The situation is a little more involved when the population sizes change from month to month—but not enough to justify the statement that falling prices at the upper end of the scale drove a change in the median reported.

My migraine (and other headache-suffering) friends and I have long noticed a correlation between eating spicy foods and a cessation or reduction in pain symptoms, especially headache pain. Now, Science (specifically, scienceblog) says that not only are we right about that, but those same pain receptors may be involved in learning and memory.

“activation of TPRV1 receptors can trigger long-term depression, a phenomenon that creates lasting changes in the connections between neurons…believed to be the cellular basis for memory making.”

So (maybe) eating spicy foods will cure your headaches and improve your grades? I think I will have to watch the Brown University Research Team to see where their research leads, but it sounds good so far. Pass the pepper, please.