2020 Hindsight

Mars.tv is the aggregator to follow

Just stumbled upon Mars.tv, a site that's following all of the Mars missions (still nothing from Beagle).

Also, since the Mars Exploration Rover (landing due Saturday) is happening out of Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, another news source is the Pasadena Star News (which is also covering the Rose Parade. Alas, this respiratory crud prevented me from going to Rose float judging this morning.)

Went to a dessert thingie a coupla weeks ago; one of fellow attendees is the guy in charge of the very-low-frequency radar that's riding on Mars Express (the orbiting spacecraft that's coupled with the Beagle); I think he was on NPR, will try to find the link. Intersting tidbit re: that interview. he spoke in highly-qualified scientist speak: "If we're lucky, we'll be able to get readings down to 2 or 3 km below the surface of the planet." (italics were edited out; those NPR guys edited out all the qualifiers. Also I have to go back and double check the actual depth)

Mission status for MER-Spirit as of 29 December: one of final course-corrections went flawlessly.

Other Beagle scuttlebut (I just report what I hear from Doc M and those who know more than I do): Beagle was built on a shoestring. There are no backup systems aboard. So any single point of failure would doom it. Like old Christmas lights, if one goes out, the rest go out. In contrast, The Mars Rovers have backup systems built into them.

Speaking of built into them, I was poking around through old pictures, and saw the ones that I took of the Mars Rovers being built (scroll down a bit). Yes, on a JPL family-day tour, I got to see them being worked on in the clean room. And yes, it dawned on me that those... those... robots were headed to our planetary neighbor. Now that MER-1 Spirit is about to land, it's a kick to think that I saw it when.

Space.com: Top 10 astronomy images of the year

E-voting firm acknowledges hacker break-in

The company: VoteHere Inc of Bellevue, WA.

The intruder accessed internal documents and may have copied sensitive software blueprints that the company planned eventually to disclose publicly.

Chief executive Jim Adler said VoteHere was confident it knew the identity of its hacker and had already turned over "megabytes of evidence" to the FBI and Secret Service. It also repaired the hole in its computer network the intruder used to gain entry in October over the Internet, he said.

This is interesting:

Adler would not identify the company's chief suspect but said he thinks the person was linked to the debate over the security of electronic voting. The same individual may be tied to the theft in March of internal documents from Diebold Election Systems of Canton, Ohio.

"We caught the intruder, identified him by name. We know where he lives," Adler said. "We think this is political. There have been break-ins around election companies over the last several months, and we think this is related."

UPDATE: Bev Harris at BlackBoxVoting (Dec 31 story; no permalinks, so you'll have to scroll or something later on) says something doesn't ring true (Diebold wasn't a hack; one instance was access to public FTP site, the other was a leak from an internal person).

I've had dealings with both the Diebold memo leaker and this supposed "VoteHere" hacker. The second person is NOT the same as the first. I am dead-certain of this. [Read More, including her accounts of dealings with the "hacker"]

As Sam says, "Well, I'm back"

Back from Christmas escapades. White Christmas (night) in the San Bernardino mountains. Have fotos of the place where the burn jumped the rim of the world highway. Burn smell very strong, even under a coupla inches of snow. Amazing, at Green Valley Lake, it was all untouched. Still lots and lots of dead trees up there. More fuel.

Caught respiratory crud on the weekend, am only beginning to dig out from under stuff. Hooray for Apple's Mail spam filters. Oh, say, is this New Year's Eve? I guess I've got some year-end tasks to attend to now that I have a slight bit of energy.

If I don't get to posting anything else here today, you all have a Happy New Year. Drink. Or drive, but don't do both.

Real Live Preacher: The Christmas Story Uncut

He doled it out in 8 parts over the course of this month. With part 8 posted, he posts the entire story, uncut.

Merry Christmas!

Planes, trains (and automobiles)

I was in the air when the quake happened. For all I know, I was flying over the site where it happened, flying from Southern to Northern California. Didn't learn of it until late last night. Good to see Doc blogging it.

Yesterday I visited the California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento. Beautiful old trains. Facts that present themselves anew: A trip from the east coast to the west coast used to take months, but once the transcontinental line was complete, took 7 days and 7 nights and brought on a revolution. The "revolution: but of course!" reaction I have now wasn't so self-evident to me as a kid in school. I wonder at all the other facts and revelations they tried to jam into my too-young-to-comprehend head. I revisit them (or they revisit me) from time to time. What else will I re-learn, this time with the jaw-dropping awe that didn't get me when I was a third or sixth grader?

Big articulated engines, up close and personal. The exhibit for the train station, with the office of the railroad dispatcher, gave me pause: the telegraph equipment transported me back to the telegraph set given to me by my grandpa (Dad's dad, not the grandpa I've described elsewhere on this site) when I came across it in his little cellar at the time I was learning about Morse Code in Girl Scouts. The display had the exact same equipment, with the exact same tobacco can modifications. I probably played around with it a little and then lost interest. I want to track it down.

Other highlights: a pullman sleeper car with the motion feel of night travel, a dining car with examples from numerous railroad china patterns, a peek into the private car owned by Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, Gold Coast. And toy trains.

Just saw this SacBee story on a new train museum-- the Train Technology museum. The museum'll get one or two new buildings in which they'll house their railroad technolgy museum. Sacramento is train history: The opening ceremonies of transcontinental railway happened *right there* where the railyard and museum stands. (speaking of SacBee, when I saw a newsstand box on teh street, I thought, Oh, right! Sac Bee! That's Dan Weintraub's paper--a perfect example of how blogging skews a person's perceptions)

Art and Fear

Saw a reference to this from Scott Rosenberg, went to the original to read excerpts from a book called Art & Fear:Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by

David Bayles & Ted Orland. Looks fascinating.

Those who would make art might begin by reflecting on the fate of those who preceded them: most who began, quit. To survive as an artist requires confronting these troubles. Basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue - or more precisely, have learned how to not quit.

and (saw this excerpted at Rosenberg, too)

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Longest day, shortest night

Life
No, no, it's the way around: Winter solstice: shortest day, longest night. But I'm being an elf (of the santa's workshop variety, not of the Cate Blanchett Orlando Bloom Liv Tyler J. R. R. Tolkein variety). Lots to do to prepare for the holidays. So, tho the day is short and the night long, I've been toiling away this short day and will continue to do so during this long night.

California Voter Foundation report on Diebold evote machines

JD Lasica got a letter from a friend who attended the California Voter Foundation report about the widespread use of uncertified software on voting machines in all 17 California counties.

(Another perspective on yesterday's post on the same topic. See also this Mercury News story)

It was an astonishing piece of information -- no one knew how widespread the problem was of Diebold installing uncertified software in voting systems as was discovered in Alameda County. It turns out all of Diebold's California clients are using some version of Diebold software or firmware that is not certified by the state. [Read More]

Beagle 2's separation a success

The European Space Agency has an image of Beagle 2 after separation. Beagle 2 has no propulsion power of its own, so it had to be on the right trajectory before separation.

International Herald Tribune:

Europe’s first attempt to land an unmanned probe on Mars entered its final phase on Friday when a disc-shaped landing craft named Beagle 2 separated from the Mars Express spacecraft and began a series of maneuvers to orbit the red planet before bouncing onto the surface early on Christmas Day.