Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

Click the image below to see in high res.

Image taken Saturday afternoon June 19 2010. NASA Aqua satellite at 500 meter resolution.

It sure seems to be getting bigger…

Dan

Update: The pic below was Orange Beach last weekend. Image from Karen Parden.

Click the image above for full resolution.

A HUGE bow to Dr. Michael Tobis of Only In It For The Gold. He found this video and posted it.
I am posting it too and EVERY person who blogs about science should post it as well. (Maybe I can start something here!)

I have several heroes (Everyone should have heroes). Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman and Neil DeGrasse Tyson are all near the top. Sagan and Feynman are no longer with us, but Tyson is thank goodness. He has stepped into Sagan’s shoes as the nations scientist. He fills them well.

Very well.

In case you do not know who Tyson is (which means your scientific literacy is lacking but perhaps not horribly so) then go here.

NASA MODIS image taken today June 2, 2010. Click for much larger resolution. The arrows are mine.

The latest pass from the NASA Terra Satellite shows the oil slick has spread across a huge area of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. Every new image shows it spreading. Late word is that the slick is now only 9 miles from Pensacola Beach and this image bears that out.

Here is a close up of the image above:

Here is our in house model run over the Gulf for Friday. The arrows are the surface wind vectors. As you can see below, it looks like the oil will continue to be pushed northward. The actual track will be to the right of those arrows due to local currents and the Coriolis affect.

MM5 model showing clouds and wind. Valid Friday evening. Precip. is turned off so you can see the winds and the location of the oil as of Wednesday.

The summer tourism season is what keeps the small beach resorts going all year on the Coast. This is going to be a disaster for them.

NOAA has a forecast out for Friday at Noon. See below.

NOAA forecast of the oil slick for Noon Friday. Click for full resolution.

The red areas in the image above are areas where oil on the beach is expected. The black line is the likely extent of some oil.

I’ll post more info as I get it.

Dan

Some amazing video from NASA today. It was from a camera on the solid rocket booster during the launch of Atlantis last week. I think the second clip here is the best. Watch the clock and notice how quickly the sky changes from the bright blue of a spring day in Florida to the black of space.

Less than two minutes.

The layer of air surrounding our planet is frightfully thin. Yet, it’s all that protects us from the harsh radiation and vacuum that is our universe.

Ok, I know I shot myself in the foot with that title.

Geek books! Run!

Well, this post is for my steady readers then

I’m finishing two of the best popular science (aka science for the masses) books I have read in quite awhile. I actually love reading these type of books, because a really good expert can make me understand something you already know in a much better way. Both of these books have done that and more.

The first one is by Dr. James Hansen. The title is “Storms Of My Grandchildren”

In case you do not know, he is the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences. NASA GISS is where NASA put the scientists who are too smart for NASA. That’s saying something.

It was James Hansen who told the world in the late 1980′s that climate change would overcome the natural day to day, and month to month fluctuations of our atmosphere,  and become very noticeable by the early 21st century.

He was dead on.

His book is a mix of very well explained climate science and the insider view of dealing with politicians from both sides of the political spectrum. The science interests me much more than the politics, but I am sure many others will feel just the opposite.

I always enjoy reading Hansen’s published papers. He has a distinctive down home style that one does not often see in the peer reviewed literature. Many papers are written such that only those who are working on a particular specific problem can casually read. Not Hansen’s. Anyone with a background in the field can see what he is getting at right away. I guess I’m saying that he doesn’t write between the lines!

It’s available for Kindle and iPad as well.

The other book is by my new favorite living Physicist. Brian Cox of the UK. I wrote a post about his fabulous series on the BBC last month called “Wonders of the Solar System“. It was, in my humble opinion, the first show on science that has  surpassed Car Sagan’s COSMOS.

His book is WHY E=M C (Square).

If you think relativity is to complex to understand, then try this book. Nothing more difficult than 8th grade algebra.

Really.

REALLY!

Here is a little teaser.

Let’s say you left Earth in a spacecraft and accelerated constantly at one g (One g is the gravity you feel on Earth) for ten years then turned around and decelerated at one g for ten years, and then came home to Earth the same way.  How long would you be gone?

40 years right??

To you yes.

When you got back to Earth it would be 59,000 years later here.

Humans one day WILL travel to the future. There is just no going back!

Brian Cox covers everything from Relativity to Feynman diagrams. If you couldn’t get through Stephen Hawking’s Brief History Of Time, then you should really try this. (I know physicists who could not get through Hawking’s book!)

You can read this book on your iPhone/iPad or Kindle too.

Later,
Dan