Russian Edition of My Book, The Bible's Most Fascinating People

The Russian Edition of my book, The Bible's Most Fascinating People, is now available apparently. I googled myself: my name plus .ru; a search for my name plus .jp came up empty, so the Japanese edition is apparently still not available.

You can see it here:

Russian Bookseller Translated by Google

Successful Launch of Soyuz to ISS

The launch this morning of the Soyuz, taking 3 astronauts to the International Space Station, went without a hitch. Come Friday, they will dock with the station, increasing its crew size from three to six.

Space Station Crew Size Doubles This Week

SpaceDaily.com reports:

A Belgian, a Canadian and a Russian blast off for the International Space Station on Wednesday as Russia steps up its rocket launches to support a doubling of the station's crew.

The astronauts will lift off aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket at 4:34 pm (1034 GMT) from Russia's historic Baikonur cosmodrome on the Kazakh steppe.

They will hurtle into low Earth orbit and then make a gradual ascent to the station over two days, docking on Friday.

The voyage marks a doubling of the station's permanent crew from three to six and with it a rise in the frequency of manned flights aboard the Soyuz, a Soviet-designed rocket that originated in the late 1960s.

Belgian Frank de Winne, Canadian Robert Thirsk and Russian Roman Romanenko will join Russian Gennady Padalka, US astronaut Michael Barratt and Japan's Koichi Wakata aboard the station.

Until now, the crew of the International Space Station was limited to only three. Now, thanks to recent construction and the new waste processor coming online, the station population can finaly grow to six.

Happy Birthday Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle, the author who created Sherlock Holms, was born 150 years ago today, on May 22, 1859.

Quote for the Day

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.

- Neil Gaiman

New Star Trek Movie Sent to ISS

According to UniverseToday.com, Paramount sent a copy of the latest Star Trek movie to NASA, which then uploaded it to the International Space Station for the astronauts there to enjoy.

The Onion's Take on the New Star Trek Movie

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Salmonella Vaccine Coming?

According to MSNBC, thanks to experiments on the International Space Station:

A series of experiments conducted aboard the International Space Station may soon lead to a vaccine against food poisoning from salmonella bacteria.

Researchers are analyzing a batch of the bacteria brought back by the shuttle Discovery crew last month. Earlier studies showed salmonella can become more virulent in weightlessness; further investigations proved its virulence can be controlled, toggled on and off like a switch.

Now two groups are working to develop compounds for a salmonella vaccine, said space station program scientist Julie Robinson.

The article goes on to point out:

The salmonella investigations are the most mature of dozens of experiments that have been conducted aboard the space station, which so far has led to 162 publications in science research journals, Robinson said.

In case you were wondering what the space station was good for.

Amazon Kindle

About a month ago, for my birthday, my wife gave me an Amazon Kindle.

Its magical qualities were apparent almost immdediately, and after having used it on a daily basis ever since, I am now convinced that it is an example of Arthur C. Clarke's Third law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

If you enjoy reading books, then you will love the Kindle. The e-ink screen is easy on the eyes and the Kindle itself feels perfect in my hand, being the size and weight of a paperback book. It downloads new books in less than a minute--even a book as large as The Brother's Karamazov or The Count of Monte Cristo. It's internal memory has enough space to hold 1500 books; so far, I've only got about 79 on it. They take up much less physical space than they otherwise would.

I also have the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times delivered wirelessly every morning. No more lost newspapers, stolen newspapers or soggy newspapers. I actually prefer reading them on the Kindle to reading them in newsprint. The only downside is the lack of comics; but thankfully, the comics are available on the web at places like comics.com, so I can still keep up on my favorites.

If you get a Kindle as a gift, you'll be very happy with it if you like to read.

Upcoming Launch of Falcon 1

According to a press release from SpaceX, they are planning on launching their next flight of Falcon 1 on April 20, 2009:

Hawthorne, CA (March 30, 2009) – Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) announces that the launch window for ATSB's RazakSAT on Falcon 1 Flight 5, is currently scheduled to open Monday, April 20th at 4:00 p.m. (PDT) / 7:00 p.m. (EDT).
SpaceX's Falcon 1 launch site is located approximately 2500 miles southwest of Hawaii on Omelek Island, part of the Reagan Test Site (RTS) at United States Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Central Pacific. Due to the location of the launch site, the Kwajalein local date at the opening of the launch window will be April 21st.

RazakSAT was designed and built by Astronautic Technology (M) Sdn Bhd (ATSB), a pioneer and leader in the design and manufacture of satellites in Malaysia. The satellite will be launched aboard the Falcon 1, a two-stage, liquid oxygen/rocket-grade kerosene vehicle, designed from the ground up by SpaceX.
Falcon 1 will place RazakSAT, equipped with a high resolution Medium-Sized Aperture Camera (MAC), into a near equatorial orbit. The payload is expected to provide high resolution images of Malaysia that can be applied to land management, resource development and conservation, forestry and fish migration.

SpaceX will provide live coverage of the Falcon 1 Flight 5/RazakSAT mission via webcast at: www.SpaceX.com. The webcast will begin 20 minutes prior to launch and will include mission briefings, live feeds and launch coverage from the launch site. Post-launch, video footage and photos will be available for download on the Web site.

ISS Video

Video from MSNBC of the International Space Station flying around the Earth:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The International Space Station is the largest human-built object ever put into space. It is 240 feet long by 336 feet wide. It currently has 26,500 cubic feet of living space, about as much as a four bedroom house. It weighs more than 600,000 pounds. It orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes or so at an altitude of about 190 miles. It has been continuously inhabited since November 2, 2000 with a crew of 3. Beginning the end of May, it will have a permanent crew of 6.

Kepler Scheduled for Launch

Tonight, Friday March 6, 2009 at 7:49 PM (PDT), a Delta II 7925 is scheduled to launch a space telescope named after Johannes Kepler into solar orbit: it will swing around the sun once every 372.5 days. With a mass of 2290 pounds, the telescope has a 55 inch diameter mirror, making it the largest telescope beyond Earth orbit. With 42 1024x2200 CCDs, it is also the largest camera ever put into space. Its primary mission is designed to last three and a half years, though that could be extended for longer.

And what is the purpose of the Kepler telescope? To discover Earth-like planets around nearby stars.

As of February 2009, three hundred forty-two planets have been found orbiting other stars. Most of these planets are massive gas giants. The majority of these planets were found by means of radial velocity observations, which means they have been detected by the gravitational effect that they have on the stars around which they orbit. That is, just as an Olympic athlete spinning around and around in preparation for releasing the hammer in the hammer throw wobbles back and forth, moved from a center location by the weight of the object he is about to hurl, so a star is pulled back and forth by the planets that orbit it. That wobble, at least for the larger planets the size of Uranus and bigger, can be detected by current instruments.

But finding planets like Earth, until the launch of Kepler, has been impossible. Kepler changes that by giving us an instrument with the ability to locate planets around stars that are like the Earth. A small percentage of the large planets that have been found by our instruments were discovered not by the radial velocity observations, but by the transit method. If a planet crosses in front of a star’s disk, then the observed brightness of the star drops by a small amount. The amount by which the star dims depends on its size and on the size of the planet. Our instruments on the ground can detect such drops in brightness if the planet is a large one. The Kepler instrument is sensitive enough to detect such crossings by planets like Earth.

For an Earth-like planet orbiting its star at the same distance as the Earth orbits from the sun, the probability of Kepler catching it passing in front of its parent star is only about 1 in 210. That is, out of 210 stars that have planets, only one of them will have them going around it at an angle that will take it in front of its star from our perspective. Of course, if Kepler catches one planet going around a star, the chances are good it will find some others because planets in a given system tend to orbit in similar planes. For instance, if an alien Kepler-like mission were looking at our solar system and saw the Earth pass in front of the sun, there is a twelve percent chance that such a mission would also detect Venus.

The Kepler Mission is designed to simultaneously observe 100,000 stars like the sun in a small patch of the sky near the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. If you go outside at midnight in late July and look straight overhead, then hold your hand out at arm’s length, your hand would nearly cover the amount of the sky that Kepler will be studying for three and a half years. Kepler will measure variations in the brightness of 100,000 stars in that region every 30 minutes. These stars that Kepler will study are between 600 and 3000 light years away (stars further than 3000 light years away are too faint for Kepler to observe planetary transits). The 1 in 210 probability of finding an Earth-like planet means that if 100% of stars observed in that tiny patch of the sky all had Earth-like terrestrial planets, Kepler would find about 480 of them.

To put this in greater perspective, the Milky Way Galaxy, the galaxy in which we and these 100,000 stars that will be observed all live together, make up only a tiny fraction of the stars that exist in our galaxy. The Milky Way Galaxy has around four hundred billion stars in it. Kepler will be examining but a tiny fraction of one percent of the stars (specifically, about 0.000025 percent) of our own galaxy. There are more than a hundred billion of other galaxies just in the observable universe—and each of those holds multiple hundreds of billions of stars. Chances are, there are a lot of places very much like Earth out there.

Kepler begins the first opportunity in human history to actually find some of them.

Happy Square Root Day!

March 3, 2009 is square root day.

CNET points out:

Tuesday is Square Root Day, a rare holiday that occurs when the day and the month are both the square root of the last two digits of the current year. Numerically, March 3, 2009, can be expressed as 3/3/09, or mathematically as √9 = 3, or 3² = 3 × 3 = 9.

Regrow Teeth?

MSNBC.com reports:

WASHINGTON - Ever wonder why sharks get several rows of teeth and people only get one? Some geneticists did, and their discovery could spur work to help adults one day grow new teeth when their own wear out.

A single gene appears to be in charge, preventing additional tooth formation in species destined for a limited set. When the scientists bred mice that lacked that gene, the rodents developed extra teeth next to their first molars — backups like sharks and other non-mammals grow, University of Rochester scientists reported Thursday.

If wondering about shark teeth seems rather wonky, consider this: Tooth loss from gum disease is a major problem, here and abroad, and dentures or dental implants are far from perfect treatments. If scientists knew exactly what triggers a new tooth to grow in the first place, it's possible they could switch that early-in-life process on again during adulthood to regenerate teeth.

Quote for the Day

Writing well means never having to say, 'I guess you had to be there.'

- Jef Mallett

Happy 200th Birthday, Abraham Lincoln!

Abraham Lincoln was born two hundred years ago today, on February 12, 1809.

Lincoln was elected the sixteenth president of the United States on November 6, 1860. His opponents in the race were Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat, John C. Breckinridge, a Southern Democrat, and John Bell, of the Constitutional Union Party. He won despite not even being on the ballot in nine southern states.

Abraham Lincoln is the only person whose rise to the presidency was met with violence and civil unrest. As it became clear that Abraham Lincoln would be elected president, several southern states announced their intention to leave the Union. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina declared its secession. By February 1, 1861, six other states had followed, proclaiming themselves a new nation: the Confederate States of America. Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as president on March 4, 1861 (the date of the inauguration was not changed to January 20 until the time of Franklin Roosevelt when the twentieth amendment to the constitution was ratified on January 23, 1933.) In April 1861, after American troops were fired upon at Fort Sumter and force to surrender, President Lincoln called upon the governors of every state to send detachments to recapture the forts, protect the capital, and to “preserve the Union.” North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas then seceded, along with most of Virginia (a few counties refused to join the rest of the state in seceding and became the new state of West Virginia in 1863).

Abraham Lincoln’s time as President was consumed by defeating the secessionist Confederate States during the Civil War, the greatest crisis that the United States has ever faced. During the course of the war he introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery. In 1863 he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It freed the slaves in all the territories of the United States that were not, at that time, under Union control. It thus made the abolition of slavery in the rebellious states an official goal of the war. Lincoln then promoted the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery altogether. It was ratified shortly after his assassination in 1865.

Lincoln’s rhetoric both before and during the Civil War resulted in a shift in American values. Before him, most politicians had stressed the sanctity of the Constitution. Lincoln shifted the emphasis to the Declaration of Independence as the foundation of American political values: an emphasis on freedom and equality for all, in contrast to the Constitution’s tolerance of slavery. His position gained strength over time, because it highlighted the moral basis of the American conception of government in distinction to the legalisms of the Constitution. He argued in his Gettysburg address that the United States was born, not in 1789 when the Constitution was ratified, but rather in 1776 when the United States declared its independence.

Lincoln did more during his administration to centralize the American government than any president before him. In writings before his administration, it was common to hear the phrase, “The United States are...” After his administration, it has always been, “The United States is...” During the Civil War he proclaimed a blockade, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and he spent money without congressional authorization. He also imprisoned eighteen thousand suspected Confederate sympathizers without trial. Lincoln was vilified by his political opponents as a despot.

Prior to Lincoln’s presidency, the Thanksgiving holiday had been but a regional celebration in New England. In 1863 Lincoln declared the final Thursday in November to be a day of Thanksgiving and the holiday has been celebrated every year since then.

It was during Lincoln’s administration, in 1864, that the phrase “In God We Trust” first appeared on an American coin: specifically, the two cent piece. It appeared but intermittently on U.S. coins after that until 1938 when that the phrase became a legal requirement on all coins. “In God We Trust” first appeared on paper money in 1957.

Abraham Lincoln was the first president to be assassinated. His assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was a well-known actor. He was also a spy for the Confederacy. He had originally intended to kidnap Lincoln and hold him in exchange for the release of Confederate prisoners. But when he heard President Lincoln promote voting rights for the freed slaves, Booth decided to assassinate him instead. Booth shot Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865 while Lincoln watched a production of the play, Our American Cousin. Lincoln was in a coma for nine hours after being shot and never regained consciousness. He died at 7:22 AM on April 15, 1865.

Questions about UNRWA

UNRWA is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

Yaakov Kirschen, the cartoonist who does Dry Bones, an English language Israeli comic strip has a blog. He writes in his Dry Bones Blog:

U.S. Representative Steven R. Rothman of New Jersey has proposed Congressional legislation to "Ensure Terrorists are Not Employed by or Receive Benefits from UNRWA". The following paragraph is from the text of the proposed bill:

"UNRWA has employed staffers affiliated with terrorism, including Said Sayyam, the Hamas Minister of Interior and Civil Affairs, who was a teacher in UNRWA schools in Gaza from 1980 to 2003; Awad al-Qiq, the headmaster of an UNRWA school in the Gaza Strip who also led Islamic Jihad's engineering unit that built bombs and Qassam rockets; Nahed Rashid Ahmed Atallah, a prior senior UNRWA employee from 1990 to 1993 who was responsible for the dissemination of assistance to refugees while he was also an operative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; and Nidal Abd al-Fattah Abdallah Nazzal, a Hamas activist employed as an ambulance driver by UNRWA, who confessed in 2002 to transporting weapons and explosives to terrorists in an UNRWA ambulance;"

At the same time, by way of Jihad Watch, I found an interesting video about UNRWA's work among the Palestinians:



Wikipedia reports:

On January 7, 2009 reports issued by UNRWA officials accused the Israeli army of killing up to forty people on January 6, 2009, by shelling an UNWRA school in Jabalya, Gaza. This accusation caused harsh criticism of Israel from all over the world. However, it later came to light that the Israeli army did not attack the school, and that no one inside the school was killed. The UN retracted its accusation on February 2, 2009. Inaccurate, and arguably incendiary, claims of this nature have led to a distrust of UNRWA and their motives by the Israeli public.

Quote for the Day

The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

— Carl Sagan

Smallest Exo-Planet So Far Discovered

Wired Magazine reports:

The smallest exoplanet ever seen is less than twice the size of Earth, and orbits a star similar to our sun 390 light years away. Astronomers recently spotted this world, the most Earth-like planet yet discovered, with the COROT satellite.

"For the first time, we have unambiguously detected a planet that is 'rocky' in the same sense as our own Earth,” said Malcolm Fridlund, ESA COROT project scientist.

For all its similarity to our own globe, though, it is still a far cry away from a habitable Earth-twin. For one thing, it is so hot — between 1,830 and 2,730 degrees Fahrenheit — that scientists think it might be covered in lava. It orbits extremely close to its sun and whips around the star once every 20 hours.

Nonetheless, the discovery takes us one step closer to finding another world that could host life. The newly found planet, dubbed COROT-Exo-7b, is distinct from most of the roughly 330 exoplanets so far discovered, which are by and large gas giants like Jupiter. This planet, however, is a terrestrial world like Earth, and seems to have a density similar to that of our own planet.

Attitudes Toward Israel

Denis MacEoin in the Jerusalem Post writes in an opinion piece Marching for Hamas:

In a bizarre reversal of all their commitment to human rights and the struggle of men and women for independence and self-determination, the European Left has chosen again and again to side with the bullies and to condemn a small nation struggling to survive in a hostile neighborhood. It is all self-contradictory: The Left supports gay rights, yet attacks the only country in the Middle East where gay rights are enshrined in law. Hamas makes death the punishment for being gay, but "we are all Hamas now." Iran hangs gays, but it is praised as an agent of anti-imperialism, and allowed to get on with its job of stoning women and executing dissidents and members of religious minorities. If UK Premier Gordon Brown swore to wipe France from the face of the earth, he would become a pariah among nations. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens to do that to Israel and is invited to speak to the UN General Assembly

Israel guarantees civil liberties to all its citizens, Jew or Arab alike, but it is dubbed "an apartheid state"; Hamas, ever the bully, kills its opponents and denies the rest the most basic rights, but we march on behalf of Hamas. The Left prefers the bully because the bully represents a finger in the face of the establishment? Almost no one on the Left has any understanding of militant Islam. Their politics is a politics of gesture, where wearing a keffiyeh is cool but understanding its symbolism is too much effort even for intellectuals.

I'd recommend you read the entire article. Denis MacEoin is the incoming editor of the international journal Middle East Quarterly and the author of a blog entitled A Liberal Defence of Israel.