So Tweet and So Cold.

@JohnnyCash: Hello from Reno. Shot man…just to watch him die, actually. Weird, I know.
@ACamus: Beach lovely this time of year. Also, killed Arab. Oops.

Or something like that. Apparently, a new study suggests that — uh, oh — using Twitter may stunt one’s moral development. “A study suggests rapid-fire news updates and instant social interaction are too fast for the ‘moral compass’ of the brain to process. The danger is that heavy Twitters and Facebook users could become ‘indifferent to human suffering’ because they never get time to reflect and fully experience emotions about other people’s feelings.“

Hmm. I can’t say I’ve found Twitter to be particularly useful yet — to be honest, it all seems rather gimmicky to me, I worry about its Idiocracy-like implications. (Why 140 characters? Why not 10?), and, frankly, I often find that neither my life nor anyone else’s (nor, for that matter, that of anyone’s else’s adorable little children) is all that fascinating from moment to moment. (“Got up. Tired. It’s raining. Maybe I’ll eat some Grape Nuts.“) But I don’t think I can pin any personal reservoir of misanthropy on it either. (For that, I blame FOX News.)

Force Multiplier.

“It all started with a band of rebels who wanted to help a farmboy follow his dream. Three decades later, the Star Wars empire has grown into one the most fertile incubators of talent in the worlds of movies (Lucasfilm), visual effects (Industrial Light & Magic), sound (Skywalker Sound), and videogames (Lucasarts).” By way of my sis-in-law Lotta, How Star Wars Changed the World. Some of the links are tenuous (Barry Levinson?), others aren’t all that flattering (Chris Columbus)…still, worth a look-see.

My Own Worst Enemy.

“With Perlow’s Mail Goggles, users can specify which hours they would like to enable the feature. If a user tries to send an e-mail during the self-selected time — say, midnight to 3 a.m. — a screen pops up forcing the user to solve a series of simple math problems before the message can be sent.” Thinking outside the box for new and useful apps, Gmail engineers try to tackle the thorny problem of drailing (drunk e-mailing.) “Perlow created the function last fall when he found himself sending messages to an ex-girlfriend — late at night — asking to get back together.” I feel you, brother.

At the Mountains of Madness.

“‘We now know that not only are the mountains the size of the European Alps, but they also have similar peaks and valleys,’ says Fausto Ferraccioli, a geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey. ‘This adds even more mystery about how the vast East Antarctic ice sheet formed.’” Arctic Dreams, Antarctic nightmares…Also by way of a GSSM friend (who noted the Lovecraft angle), researchers explore the origins of the Gamburtsev mountain range, beneath the Antarctic ice. Don’t we have enough problems right now without intrepid scientists accidentally awakening the Old Ones at Kadath in the Cold Waste?

Americans, Living Large.

“Numbers posted by the National Center for Health Statistics show that more than 34 percent of Americans are obese, compared to 32.7 percent who are overweight…In the 1988-1994 surveys, 33 percent of Americans were overweight, 22.9 percent were obese and 2.9 percent were morbidly obese. The numbers have edged up steadily since.” In dire news on the national health front, we Americans are fatter than ever. Perhaps it’s time to dole out Wii Fits as part of the stimulus package? The health care savings might actually make it worthwhile.

The Great Churning.

“‘There is ‘something new and interesting going on in the universe,’ said Alan Kogut of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.” Aspiring Jor-Els: Best get to work on those interstellar child-bearing rockets. Scientists detect a distant — and very loud — roar on the other side of the universe. “‘The universe really threw us a curve,’ Kogut said. ‘Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted.’” (Sssh, listen…there went Earth-2.)

Rocket’s Red Glare, Meet Bombs Bursting in Air.

“‘An automated rendezvous does all sorts of things for your missile accuracy and anti-satellite programs,’ said John Sheldon, a visiting professor of advanced air and space studies at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. ‘The manned effort is about prestige, but it’s also a good way of testing technologies that have defense applications.‘” In order to keep pace with the increasingly proficient Chinese space program, President-elect Obama may be considering retying NASA to the Pentagon, “because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency’s planned launch vehicle, which isn’t slated to fly until 2015…Obama has said the Pentagon’s space program — which spent about $22 billion in fiscal year 2008, almost a third more than NASA’s budget — could be tapped to speed the civilian agency toward its goals as the recession pressures federal spending.”

Hmm. On one hand, I would think making NASA yet another fiefdom of the Pentagon would greatly facilitate its ability to lock down the funding it needs for various exploratory endeavors, recession or no. And if the types of conveyance vehicles NASA needs are basically sitting around gathering dust in some Pentagon-owned warehouse next to the ark of the covenant, well then it only makes sense to combine the two programs. No need to reinvent the, uh, rocket.

On the other hand, putting the brass in charge is probably going to have deleterious effects on the types of projects NASA pursues in the future. And, in a perfect world, there’s something to be said for having a civilian space program completely outside the purview of the military. In fact, now that i think about it, won’t combining the Pentagon and NASA space programs cut back on the types of international cooperation that have guided our efforts in space in recent years? Given the current economic climate, I guess this is the best way for NASA to continue pursuing its goals in the short term. Still, there could well be trouble ahead.

A Measure of Darkness.

“‘We’ve discovered this incredible dark energy, we don’t understand what the hell it is,’ said Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University. ‘It’s extremely small, extremely weak, and it’s so close to being zero, it’s just a total mystery why it should have this small value and not be zero.” While they’re still not entirely sure what in fact they’re looking at, Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicists announce they’ve found another way to measure and quantify “dark energy”, a.k.a. the repulsive “cosmological constant” force causing the universe to expand rather than contract. “This is a much-needed confirmation that the earlier work was correct, the astronomers said, comparing it to football referees examining a controversial play with multiple camera angles.“

As an added bonus, the results announced today also seem to confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity. “‘It’s never been proved right on the scale of the observable universe,’ Spergel said.”

The Absence that Binds. | Follow the Bouncing Ball.

“Although we think of black holes as somehow threatening, in the sense that if you get too close to one you are in trouble, they may have had a role in helping galaxies to form — not just our own, but all galaxies.” German astronomers believe they have discovered a black hole right in the center of our Milky Way. “According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit.”

And, if that wasn’t heady enough news to wrap one’s mind around, see also this article on loop quantum cosmology (LQC) and “The Big Bounce.” “LQC has been tantalising physicists since 2003 with the idea that our universe could conceivably have emerged from the collapse of a previous universe. Now the theory is poised to make predictions we can actually test. If they are verified, the big bang will give way to a big bounce and we will finally know the quantum structure of space-time. Instead of a universe that emerged from a point of infinite density, we will have one that recycles, possibly through an eternal series of expansions and contractions, with no beginning and no end.” (Both links via Dangerous Meta.)

Ashes of the Phoenix.

“The last Twitter post said it all: “01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000.”” Or, in other words, Ground Control to Phoenix Lander: You’ve really made the grade. Having seemingly succumbed to the Martian winter at last, the Mars Phoenix Lander is pronounced deceased by NASA. “NASA official Doug McCuistion counseled people to view Phoenix’s end as ‘an Irish wake rather than a funeral. It’s certainly been a grand adventure.’…While some followers said farewell to Phoenix in computer language today, others kept it simple. ‘Good bye Phoenix, I love you :(,’ said user patach.“