An Asteroid with Rings

Astronomers find first asteroid with rings

This is an artist's interpretation of the ring system around asteroid Chariklo

The remote asteroid Chariklo orbits between Saturn and Uranus in the outer solar system. Chariklo is fairly small -- 250 kilometers (150 miles) in diameter. It is classified as a "centaur," an object that has an unstable orbit and crosses giant planets' orbits. Mythological centaurs had both human and horse features, while centaurs in the solar system may have both comet and asteroid characteristics.

Researchers published a study in the journal Nature showing evidence of rings around it.

Lead author Felipe Braga-Ribas of the Observatorio Nacional/MCTI in Rio de Janeiro said the discovery came as a complete surprise. "We weren't looking for a ring and didn't think small bodies like Chariklo had them at all," he said in a statement.

The asteroid is only the fifth solar system object whose rings have been detected. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune also have rings. Telescopes at seven different locations, including the European Southern Observatory's La Silla site in Chile, saw a star seem to disappear for a few seconds on June 3, 2013. This happened because the star's light was obscured by Chariklo.

The star's brightness also diminished a few seconds before and after that main blocking of light. Astronomers discovered that rings were responsible, and calculated their size, shape and orientation.

The two rings orbiting the asteroid are relatively narrow: 7 kilometers and 3 kilometers across. They are separated by a gap of 9 kilometers. Scientists are informally calling these rings Oiapoque and Chui, after rivers near the northern and southern ends of Brazil.

The gravitational interactions from small moons may be keeping the orbiting material in ring form, scientists said. "So, as well as the rings, it's likely that Chariklo has at least one small moon still waiting to be discovered," Braga-Ribas said in a statement.

How these rings came to be is mysterious. One idea is that a collision created a disc of debris, the European Southern Observatory said. "This discovery suggests that the event(s) responsible for the origin of the rings is relatively recent, or that a fortuitous balance of forces have combined to help sustain them," said Ed Beshore, deputy principal investigator for NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, which aims to visit a near-Earth asteroid and bring a sample back to Earth. Beshore was not involved with this study.

Scientists planning OSIRIS-REx, targeting an asteroid called Bennu, are finding challenges with the dynamics of small celestial bodies, Beshore said. The Nature study reinforces the idea that asteroids, comets and other relatively small bodies are "no longer second-class citizens in our solar system," he said. "Indeed, they may harbor important clues about the origins and mechanisms that helped create our planet Earth, and the processes that supported the rise of life here," he said.

 

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN updated 4:59 PM EDT, Wed March 26, 2014

The coming job apocalypse

By Harold Meyerson; March 16, 2014 in the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-technology-and-trade-policy-is-pointing-america-toward-a-job-apocalypse/2014/03/26/ba331784-b513-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html?hpid=z4

"As a general rule, more Americans work than do the citizens of other advanced economies. Since the late 1970s, when the number of women in the workforce ballooned, the share of Americans who either had jobs or were trying to get one was greater than the share of comparable Europeans.

"But that general rule may be changing. The percentage of working-age adults in the U.S. labor force began to decline in 2000, when it reached a peak of 67 percent. As of last month, it was down to 63 percent, which is lower than the level in the United Kingdom. Not since the late 1970s has Britain had a higher share of workforce participants than the United States.

"Part of this decline is because of the retirement of aging boomers, but that explanation goes only so far. It doesn’t explain, for instance, why the workforce participation of Americans ages 25 to 34 has declined from 83.3 percent to 81.8 percent since 2007, as the Financial Times reported this week. Worse yet, the number of hours that working Americans are on the job is in decline, too. In the past six months, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the average workweek has shrunk from 34.5 hours to 34.2 hours — even as the official unemployment rate has dropped.

"Anti-Obama partisans blame the president and his policies for the dwindling workforce, but the decline began in the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency and continued through much of the presidency of George W. Bush. Clearly, either bipartisan public policy or something more fundamental than public policy is to blame.

"The bipartisan public policy that should raise the most suspicion is trade policy, which fostered the offshoring of more than 2 million manufacturing jobs after Congress normalized trade relations with China in 2000. But an even more fundamental factor in the declining share of working Americans is the technological automation that has eliminated millions of jobs and is poised to eliminate millions more.

"In a paper they wrote last year, Carl Benedikt Frey of Oxford University’s Program on the Impacts of Future Technology, and Michael A. Osborn, an Oxford engineering professor, broke down the U.S. economy into 702 distinct occupations and classified those occupations by the probability of their computerization over the next few decades. They concluded that 47 percent of U.S. workers have a high probability of seeing their jobs automated over the next 20 years, including in transportation (where the driverless car has become a reality), manufacturing and retail sales. They offer no particular policy suggestions to remedy this cataclysm, save that “high-skill and high-wage” jobs are the least likely to be swept away and that workers, accordingly, need “to acquire creative and social skills” that computers are unlikely to master until a more distant time.

"Frey and Osborne acknowledge that there is a lot of speculation encoded in their equations. But even if they’re half right, or just a third right, that would mean that 23.5 percent or 15.7 percent, respectively, of U.S. workers face a future of employment extermination. I doubt that the mass acquisition of creative and social skills is sufficient to meet this challenge. The way to deal with such a job apocalypse would begin with the very measures that we have failed to enact to combat the cyclical downturn that began in 2008: a massive government program to build and repair our infrastructure and to provide the preschool education and elder care that the nation needs, which would increase consumption and economic activity generally."

Bocce - popular sport - really?

Is bocce ball D.C.’s most social sport?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/is-bocce-ball-dcs-most-social-sport/2014/03/13/a19e4acc-aab9-11e3-af5f-4c56b834c4bf_story.html 


Tennis and golf get all the credit for being the sports you can enjoy your whole life. But bocce ball — another popular game among the retirement set — is carving out a niche of its own in the Washington area.
The local community of bocce players is growing, and the boom is being led by players in their 20s and 30s. Bocce ball involves two teams taking turns to roll a set of colorful balls close to a target ball.

 

“This idea that bocce is just this old Italian man’s sport, that’s definitely something we wanted to break out of,” said Sarah DeLucas, 34, who runs the DC Bocce League. “Anyone can play bocce. It doesn’t matter what your athletic skill level is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. Age doesn’t matter. You can’t just look at someone and say, ‘That person is going to be an awesome bocce player.’ Anyone can be good at bocce.”
or DeLucas, it all started 10 years ago.
She and a group of friends, then in their early 20s, were hanging out one night when the topic of bocce came up. One of DeLucas’s friends had been raised playing the game, and convinced the rest of the gFroup it was worth trying.
“So we all just gave each other titles,” DeLucas says. “It was like, ‘okay, you’re the president. You’re the vice president.’ It was kind of like creating The Baby-sitters Club.”
But what began as an inside joke has turned into a phenomenon. Running DC Bocce is now a full-time job for DeLucas. About 8,000 players sign up to play with the league each year. (Registration for outdoor bocce is open through April 4.)
DC Bocce also offers a bar league and a “glo bocce” league, which involves bocce balls that light up. The outdoor league includes some games on makeshift courts — a stretch of grass in the outfield of a Little League diamond, for instance — but also offers access to some of the otherwise hidden bocce courts cropping up around Washington.
You don’t have to be in a league to enjoy the District’s best known public bocce court, in Garfield Park near Capitol Hill. DC Bocce frequently uses that court and also offers access to some private courts.

“I find bocce completely relaxing,” Silk said. “It’s a sport you can play with a glass of wine or beer in your hand. I’ve played softball on the National Mall. I’ve played in kickball games. Those can still be a high-stress environment. But bocce itself has always lent itself to drinking and betting and socializing. It’s perfect.”

Earths Land Mammel by Weight Perspective

um, wow.   Conservation anyone?

from http://xkcd.com/1338/  - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

 

Nerdy Muppet Cookies

http://geekdad.com/2014/03/nerdy-nummies-muppet-cookies/

Funny - has Swedish Chef n Miss Piggy

Olympics Bid - DC 2024

http://essex.patch.com/groups/sports/p/dc-2024-leaders-named-for-summer-olympics-bid

The U.S. Olympic Committee will select which American city will go into the running in 2015.

Then that city will compete with other nations' top choices before the International Olympic Committee, which would pick the 2024 host city in 2017.

January 2014 Fourth Warmest Ever

Globally, Earth had its fourth warmest January this year since modern temperature record-keeping began in 1880, according to a report released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In January, the global average temperature – the combined temperature of both land and ocean surfaces – was 54.8°F, or about 1.17°F above the 20th century average of 53.6°F.

At the same time, if you ask anyone living in the eastern half of the United States, they’re likely to tell you this winter has been brutal. This was particularly true in January, when temperatures dipped below -40°F in International Falls, Minn., and many parts of the Deep South reached the single digits.
In a warming world, how can it be so bitterly cold?

Deke Arndt, a scientist at the National Climatic Data Center explains, “We see more evidence that we will continue to have cold air outbreaks as the climate continues to warm. Cold air outbreaks, like the type we saw in January, over time, have become statistically more uncommon.”

Even though it was generally colder than average east of the Continental Divide and in parts of Siberia, it was warmer than average elsewhere.

Take Alaska for example. The Last Frontier is normally frigid this time of year, but looking at the map it’s clear that temperatures were well above average for January.

January's average monthly high temperature for Fairbanks, Alaska is 1.1°F. But the average January high temperature in Fairbanks this year was much higher, at 16.4°F. At one point, the afternoon high temperature in Fairbanks hit 45°F, which was a tie for its sixth warmest January day on record.

Some GPM Telemetry

Here is the telemetry showing that most of the deployments have been successfully fired. Is that cool or what?