A radar image snapped last week by the Cassini probe of the surface of Titan revealed an unexpected result, shown above, in the form of a large crater. This one is about a dozen miles wide and appears to be quite fresh. It’s not surprising to see craters on moons in general, especially in the vicinity of Saturn. The planet’s exquisite rings attest to the violent nature of the system. But finding a large impact marker on Titan is unusual because of the unique properties of Saturn’s largest moon and that got me to think’n.

Unlike every other moon we know of, Titan has a dense atmosphere, and unlike any planets we know of in the solar system, it has a defined terrestrial surface with material cycling through all three phases, solid, liquid, and gas in the way water does here at home (It happens to be methane and other hydrocarbons at a couple of hundred degrees below zero). The surface pressure is 50% higher than earth’s, far closer than any world we know of, so in all these respects Titan is the most earth-like object in the solar system. But the little moon’s gravity is only about one-seventh earth normal and the atmosphere extends outward much farther than our own. You know what that all means?

Only large objects make it to the surface, otherwise they burn up. But more importantly, Titan would be the most fun skydive in all the solar system! I am a skydiver, or at least I used to do it a lot, and the thought of that combo of thick atmosphere and low gravity would be a dream free-fall. A human body at Titan terminal velocity could almost land safely on the surface without a parachute, especially in one of its many lakes. I actually wrote up a sci-fi short story based around the idea but I could never get it to work. Maybe I’ll post parts of it here one day.

Summer in the southwest is a dreadful time. Temperatures regularly exceed 110 degrees in populated urban areas. Cars bake, tires and dashboards deform, roads buckle and sidewalks literally becomes hot enough to cook on. But this summer in my current home state of Texas was worse than usual:

For as long as people have been taking weather measurements in Texas, there has never been a summer hotter than the summer of 2011. As wunderground’s weather historian Christopher C. Burt documents in his latest blog post, seventeen major cities in Texas recorded their hottest summer on record in 2011. Most of these stations had records extending back more than 100 years, and several of the records were smashed by an amazing 3.4°F–at Lubbock and at Wichita Falls. Neighboring states also experienced unprecedented heat, with Oklahoma recording America’s hottest month by any state in recorded history during July, and Shreveport, Louisiana breaking its record for hottest month by 3°F in August. Mr. Burt commented to me: ” I do not believe I have ever seen a site with a long period of record, like Shreveport, where records go back to 1874, break its warmest single month on record by an astonishing 3°. This is unheard of. Usually when a site breaks its single month temperature record, we are talking about tenths of a degree, rarely a whole degree, let alone 3 degrees! Hard to believe, frankly.” Texas has also had its worst fire season on record, with over 3.5 million acres burned this year, and it’s driest 1-year period in recorded history.

At least we had an intervention by nature this time, an unusually early cool front came thru and knocked us out of the triple digits. None too soon, the last two weeks were the worst of the worst. Inevitably some mindless sheeple will pretend climatologists and meteorologists are saying this is an out and out example of global warming. They’ll do that in part to pave the way for their own misinformation sure to come in the winter ahead when they will intentionally conflate record snowfall with record cold. But it’s a good point to ponder: is it an example of global warming?

For climatologists, the key is the term global. If the heat in Texas and nearby counties moves the global temperature average up by an arbitrary amount, let’s say one-tenth of one degree, then I’d say by definition its global warming. But that’s not likely to happen. To have that big of an effect, we need an impact like the Russian heat wave of 2010, where temperatures regularly soared 10 to 20 degrees above the average over an area the size of the US for weeks on end.

Texas is merely a datum in a big picture. What matters is the long-term trendline and the theoretical forcing agents driving it. In this case, the trend is not your friend.

Imagine the scene after 9-11, or even during more localized disasters, if our emergency government services were run exclusively by for profit companies like America’s private healthcare system. The image above lends a comical edge to the idea (Take a hard look at the smirking sling operator if you haven’t already), but it’s deadly serious. And in the home state of anti-government zealot Rick Perry, who is currently off campaigning and not taking care of business, a full blown emergency is exactly what may be developing.

There are wildfires ravaging central Texas as I write this, some mere miles away. It started yesterday, when Tropical Storm Lee dodged Texas but dragged in stout prairie winds that are now sweeping over the dry, baked landscape. A spark from a cigarette, a coal from a Labor Day barbecue, that’s all it took. Already this morning thousands have evacuated several towns and developments just a few miles east of Austin. Here’s a recap:

The fire subsequently spread to four other subdivisions, forcing hundreds to evacuate their homes. By 11pm Sunday, the fire had hopped the Colorado river in two places and was reported to measure 16 miles long by four miles wide (more than 14,000 acres), destroying 300 homes and causing partial road closures on Highways 21 and 71.

As of this morning local news outlets are reporting the fires are still uncontained and could grow. Emergency responders are battling the blazes left and right, county and city services are engaged. I’m on unofficial call to join any of my friends or family living in the Central Texas hill country to help them water down property or dig firebreaks should the flames move closer. Rain would sure help, but if the winds would just die down the fire department could probably get a handle on it quick. The one thing I’m not hearing from anyone around here this morning are rhetorical demands for “government to stay out of it”.

Update below, sent by a friend from Lake Travis near the Perdenales, also featured on Drudge he says:

 

 

NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.

Maybe God just doesn’t like Rick Perry, or maybe he’s just a hopelessly ineffective prayer. Months ago Rick Perry issued a proclamationto pray for an end to the drought plaguing Texas. Nothing happened of course, no rain anyway, it simply got much worse. Perry followed this up with the great Texas prayathon and rain dance a few weeks ago. Still nothing. A mild cold front came through last night, not one drop of rain. Now, smack dab in the middle of hurricane season, while neighboring Louisiana is drenched by Tropical Storm Lee, wildfires fueled by drought and high wind grew so dangerous that an entire town near Austin had to be evacuated. An entire county may follow suit today:

An amalgam of three fires in Bastrop, dubbed the Bastrop County Complex Fire, has destroyed more than 400 homes, according to an official with the Bastrop County Sheriff’s Office. Included are several homes of Sheriff’s Office employees who continue to work. The fire has spanned 16,000 acres and is around 16 miles long, according to the Texas Forest Service.

I’ve heard there are such things as prayer coaches. Maybe our governor needs one. Even if they don’t work it’s hard to imagine how Perry could do much worse. His glaring spiritual failure has become so great that, inevitably, sooner or later, we’ll be subjected to Act Two: The Rationalization.

Perhaps the always reliable revisionism and misdirection, as in “we never prayed for rain, we prayed for America!”. Or maybe Perry will play the humble card, AKA the witnessing, about he learned not to presume and beg the Almighty because … [insert Biblical parable]. A real possibility is the self-righteous projection, ‘how dare you make political hay’ out of Rick Perry’s mendacious political stunts. I might wager it’ll be some odious accusation about how the state and/or nation deserves this for not doing what some obscure kook claims Republican Jesus commands. Maybe we didn’t pray hard enough. But a smart gambler would go long on the whole suite and ride the wingnut spread to glorious victory. It can’t lose.

Rarely will your eyes behold such forthright honesty flowing from the pen of the opposition than this masterpiece by former GOP staffer Mike Lofgren. There are no punches pulled, it’s all there; the mendacity, the complicit media, the hype and hypocrisy, ugly scapegoating and faux patriotism, oodles of religious opportunism married to craven greed. The entire wingnut apparatus focused, each oily piece turning like cogs in a vast machine, to relieve the middle-class of every last benefit and dime for no other reason than further enriching the already grotesquely wealthy. It was written several weeks ago and posted yesterday, but Lofgren should be required Labor Day reading:

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren’t after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté. They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be “forced” to make “hard choices” – and that doesn’t mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.

No Labor Day platitudes, no cheer-leading or warm fuzzies congratulating ourselves for the accomplishments of others. Just a concise dissection of the insidious tactics employed by the modern right with the single-minded ruthlessness of a hungry crocodile. There’s little to quibble with and much to applaud. I can only offer one refinement to this sentiment:

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what?

That’s a good point, but the GOP also has a less difficult marketing job. It’s just easier to create simplistic, jingoistic bumper-sticker-sized soundbytes when 1) you’re willing to lie your ass off anytime, anywhere, about anything, 2) you’re playing to a simplistic, jingoistic voter base, and 3) well, Kevin Drum explains:

In modern America, conservatives are largely given a pass for saying crazy things. They’re just not taken seriously, in a boys-will-be-boys kind of way. It’s almost like everyone accepts this kind of stuff as a kind of religious liturgy, repeated regularly with no real meaning behind it.

The acerbic Paul Krugman, so shrill, so uncouth, so very impolite to point out the serial misadventures of conservative economic policy, delved into a related theme in his latest column: The GOP has become the anti-science party. The consequences for this will-full idiocy go way beyond evolution and climate change:

Pay no attention to “fancy theories” that conflict with “common sense”, the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyse things like financial crises and recessions? Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges – environmental, economic, and more – that’s a terrifying prospect.

Ignoring empirical evidence is not a good way to solve problems. We didn’t wish our way to victory in World War 2 nor pray ourselves to the moon. But it’s a great way to get thousands of adoring fans and small dollar contributions from the victimized sheeple that make up today’s conservative base.

Back when I first starting researching new space, there was one company a bit in the shadows. Just finding an official spokesman for the firm beyond the usual press release mass emailer was difficult. Word was it was deliberate. For some reason, Blue Origin, created by Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos, had acquired a reputation for secrecy. There were unsubstantiated rumors going around that they’d lost an unmanned test vehicle early on.

Deserved or not at the time, it appears the company has become more transparent. Blue Origin has a test facility near Van Horne, Texas. Which I assure you is quite remote — I used to have to drive through the region on the way to a rock-climbing area called Hueco Tanks many years and pounds ago. It appears Blue Origin had a test vehicle fail near the Van Horne facility last week, and to their credit they’ve been pretty upfront about it:

After the crash was reported Friday afternoon on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site, Mr. Bezos acknowledged the failure on the Web site of his space company, Blue Origin. The vehicle reached an altitude of 45,000 feet and a speed of 1.2 times the speed of sound before a “flight instability” occurred. “Not the outcome any of us wanted,” Mr. Bezos wrote, “but we’re signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job. We’re already working on our next development vehicle.”

The vehicle was reportedly part of the New Shepard project, a propulsion system to compete in the upcoming commercial suborbital spaceflight field which takes off and lands vertically (The picture was made available by the company). I am working every double-secret-on-probation source to get more detail on this. Maybe there’ll be some news mid-week.

This is just sickening. I feel like making up pamphlets and handing them out whenever some dimwit whips out the old zombie lie about how “we have the best healthcare system” in the world:

The 24-year-old nephew of musician Bootsy Collins has died at the University Hospital in Cincinnati after a tooth infection spread to his brain. Kyle Willis, an unemployed single father of a 6-year-old girl, first went to a hospital complaining of a painful toothache two weeks ago. Willis had no health insurance and couldn’t afford the $27 antibiotic he was prescribed.

No one should ever die in the United States of America for lack of mainstream antibiotics. They’ve been around for almost one-hundred years and cost pennies a dose to produce. If any one reading this ever ends up in the same boat, I will find you $27 to get a script like that filled.

That’s what it feels like in the Lone Star State. Governor Rick Perry’s rain dance event, the one that brought out all the classy folks including a dominionist lunatic who thinks the Statue of Liberty is a demoness, has utterly failed.  There’s a tropical storm on the verge of hurricane strength just a few hundred miles away, but it’s heading east. I guess the people in Louisiana outprayed Perry’s team.

What does that mean for Texas? I just got back from a local lake in the hill country outside of Austin, Lake Travis, where we went wakeboarding early this morning. That lake looks like a medium-sized river snaking through an arid limestone canyon. Thick, viscous mud dominates the shoreline, most boat ramps are so far out of the water they’re useless. Luckily, a buddy has his own dock. And while we found smooth glass to carve, especially up in the mouth of the Perdenales River for those who are familiar, the water was as narrow as a healthy creek and the shade of chocolate milk. If I’d seen a film crew from Hillbilly Hand Fish’in they would have fit right in. 

 

Via Bad Astronomy. If you think your connection has the grapes, click image to grossly engorge.