November 24, 2011

Decided to have a traditional Thanksgiving celebration this year. I invited the neighbors over, then after dinner killed them all off.

Happy Thanksgiving!

November 22, 2011

A very sad anniversary:

November 18, 2011

Cartoon from Pat Bagley:

Right on the money, so to speak.

November 12, 2011

The Hubble Space Telescope, despite being in the last phase of its tenure in orbit, continues to offer new glimpses into the universe. Now the telescope has peered deep into space and 10 billion years into the past and delivered new images of 18 dwarf galaxies that are, to the excitement of scientists, creating stars at an extremely rapid rate. In fact, the galaxies are churning out stars at such a rate that the number of stars in them would double in just 10 million years. To form stars so rapidly you must have an enormous amount of gas condensing in the cores of these galaxies. By comparison, our galaxy, the much older and larger Milky Way, has taken a thousand times longer to double its star count. The observations were part of the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS), an ambitious three-year project that studies the most distant galaxies in the universe. CANDELS is using Hubble to image a much larger region of space than was observed before, and is going extremely deep into the infrared end of the light spectrum to pick up the faintest specks of light. The new discovery came when CANDELS found a population of small "dwarf" galaxies that were unusually bright in one particular wavelength. They have turned up in the Hubble images because the radiation from young, hot stars has caused the oxygen in the gas surrounding them to light up like a fluorescent sign. Galaxies with rapidly forming stars characteristically feature huge quantities of oxygen, an element astronomers were not expecting to find. Many current models suggest dwarf galaxies form stars more slowly, over billions of years, to gradually build up to what we see today. However, the implications of these observations is that galaxies form the bulk of their stars extremely rapidly in a burst of star formation. This turns our picture of star formation on its head. Astronomers are able to make detailed analyses of dwarf galaxies because there are other, much closer, examples orbiting the Milky Way, which can be used for comparison. On top of that, there was the significant fact that so many dwarf galaxies were discovered apparently behaving the same way at the same time indicating that this must be a very common process. It's not yet clear exactly how old these dwarf galaxies are, though they must be significantly younger than the Milky Way. Similarly, astronomers cannot be sure how many generations of stars have appeared previously in those galaxies, since the new wave of star births is outshining any older siblings they have. The big mystery is why this population of young galaxies was creating stars at such a high rate. Alas, the Hubble may not be around to unravel that one. The aging telescope has now been in orbit around the Earth since 1990, and received one last upgrade - which included the Wide Field Camera 3 used by CANDELS - in 2009.

November 9, 2011

According to a Commerce Department report, Exploring the Digital Nation — Computer and Internet Use at Home, 82.3% of Utah homes are connected to the internet, the highest percentage in the country. 79.7 percent are connected via high-speed broadband, and another 2.6 percent have dial-up service. Nationally, 68 percent of homes have broadband connections and another 3 percent have dial-up. No. 2 behind Utah is New Hampshire, where 77.8 percent of homes have broadband and 3.2 percent have dial-up. Lowest in the nation is Mississippi, where 51.7 percent have broadband and 6 percent have dial-up. There are three components to its No. 1 ranking. Utah has the nation’s youngest average age, and youth demand and use the Internet more than older people. Utah’s population is concentrated almost exclusively in the urban strip along the Wasatch Front where the Internet is easily accessible. The report indicates that 70 percent of the nation’s urban population has broadband service, while only 57 percent of rural residents do. And Utah has a high-tech tradition that may have made Internet use more common ealier than other states. The University of Utah was part of a small four-university computer network with UCLA, Stanford, and the University of California-Santa Barbara that was the early precursor to the Internet. The study also indicates that the most important reasons homes are without the Internet include: lack of need or interest (47%), lack of affordability (24%), and an inadequate computer (15%). Utah also has the highest rate in the nation of homes with computers — 86.7 percent. Mississippi was the lowest at 67.5 percent. It said computers are still the principal way to access the Internet although access by devices such as cellphones and tablets is growing rapidly.