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Do planetologists use the term "geology" when they're talking about another planet?

Technically, no, the proper term for the study of Mars planetary formation, mineral chemistry etc is areology.

It etymologically ought to be areology, but it turns out that having a different word for the geology of each planet was too cumbersome, so they are all lumped together as "Planetary geology."

  https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/research/research-topics-list/planetary-sciences/planetary-geology-and-geophysics

  http://planetary-science.org/planetary-science-3/planetary-geology/

and geologists routinely use the term "Martian geology" and "geology of Mars"

  https://mars.nasa.gov/programmissions/science/goal3/

  http://planetary-science.org/mars-research/surface-geology-of-mars/

  https://www.exploratorium.edu/video/martian-geology-101

  https://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/geol212/lectures/01.html

My first thought was just how impractical maintaining something like that across distance will be. When someone runs a truck into a pier and shifts that tube a few inches, when a small quake shifts two tubes by a few inches ... I sure as hell don't want to be barreling toward the inflection point at that speed.

https://www.exploratorium.edu/...

The Exploratorium in San Francisco, one of the finest science museums in the world, runs adults-only programs every Thursday night, with 50% off admission too.

I've never understood the appeal of museums. They are the most boring place in the world to be dragged to. It's not like you can learn anything or interact with anything there. It's like people are afraid to admit they are boring because they are afraid to appear uncultured. Does anyone honestly enjoy museums?

It depends on the museum.

For example, the Exploratorium on Pier 15 in San Francisco is super interactive. And the Computer History Museum in San Jose is also very good. For the more "boring" museums, it really depends on who you go to the museum with. If you're not enthusiastic about a particular museum, you need to accompany someone who is enthusiastic about that museum. That person can be your guide. And if you're lucky enough, some of that enthusiasm can rub off on you a little. Just be careful thought, pick someone you like who is genuinely enthusiastic about that museum, not someone who only sees their interest in a museum as some kind of status symbol for them self. That can happen too.

That being said, if the choice is between drinking at a crowded night club, or drinking at a museum, I'd pick drinking at a museum always. Museum parties usually have more space, by that same token they're also less crowded, and they're usually less noisy than bars or night clubs. Also, museums already tend to be in prime real estate areas and city centers, so if they didn't have adult-only parties during those hours, all that infrastructure and all that space would go to waste during those times outside of their regular visiting hours.

Also, if it's between drinking at the museum and drinking at the zoo, I'd pick drinking at the museum any time. At least at the museums, the stuffed animals are not likely to escape their enclosures and kill the drunk assholes that try to provoke them thus ruining the experience for everyone else.

It's not like you can learn anything or interact with anything [at museums].

That's certainly not true for a museum like the Exploratorium (that also has adults-only nights).

For anyone interested in the history of the fax, see Series 3 episode 1 of "The Secret Life of Machines":

http://www.exploratorium.edu/r...

A little off-topic, but I spoke to Tim Hunkin about the "health and safety" issues when making the series. He basically said "there were none". The UK's Channel4 didn't seem to have anything in place back then, so Tim and Rex did what they pleased. He also commented that they'd never get away with it these days!

The babylonians and God's favourite people thought that pi=3. Hey, it's good enough for government work, and probably for fighting zombies.

Why are those procedures in place? It's public data, why can't the public see it as soon as NASA gets it?

The public does see it as soon as NASA gets it. All images are uploaded to marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/ as soon as they are received.

The Exploratorium also has a feed of the raw images as soon as they come down: http://www.exploratorium.edu/m...

Just from the depths of my armchair: perhaps because the data comes in formats that are completely useless to the public, and it takes time for NASA to decompress/deconvert/decrypt/convolve/whatever them?

The raw images are uploaded within a day of when they get received. As you note, these are raw images, and there's some processing needed to make pretty images suitable for public release: flat-field corrections, photometric and geometric corrections, as well as turning the individual frames into mosaics and color-corrected images, which takes more time. (There are also sometimes some dropped packets, and if you get the images right from the raw downlink, they won't have retransmitted the dropped bits yet.)

However, you don't have to wait for NASA to do all of that: there are some amateur groups that do image processing on the raw images, and do a pretty good job of making high-quality images, too.

Maybe they can do their own analysis with the data in a raw-ish format, but to give us the real numbers and sort out the metadata flags that say "This sensor is currently busted" takes more time?

Yes; all that gets uploaded onto the planetary data system (pds.nasa.gov/), including all the metadata, but that does take a while, since this is fully calibrated data.

I would second that.

To that I would also add another older series, "The Secret Life of Machines." This quirky series, with plenty of crude and funny animations, explained the basics and history of everyday technologies such as refrigerators, video recorders, fax machines, telephones, radio, etc. The Exploratorium website, amazingly enough, has the videos available for streaming or download for free. The creator, host, and animator, Tim Hunkin, continues to be an unreformed tinkerer, builder, and inventor to this day.

There's a fantastic talk from the San Francisco Exploratorium's Mars event this summer, where an anthropologist talks about exactly this issue... "learning how to see like a rover." She talks about the decision making process behind everything the mars rovers do... and ultimately how the people on the human team on earth end up anthropomorphising the robots. The best part is, it goes both ways: they assign human characteristics to the rovers, but when talking about what they want the rovers to do, they take on robot characteristics themselves. There's even a can't-miss set of instructions of the "rover dance" that people use when they're trying to show various parts of the rover and how it works and feels. http://www.exploratorium.edu/tv/?project=2&program=1386&type=clip (the first minute or two intro is quite slow, but the talk itself is great) Really fascinating. But the key takeaway is that we can strongly connect to robots that are visually non-human. After all, we all felt worried for R2-D2 when he got "eaten" in the swamps of Dagobah. The latest research in this area confirms that trying to mimic humans makes us uncomfortable. But a robot that looks like a robot is easily accepted.

I can name a few museums or "centers" that are very geek driven. One of the best of them is the Exploratorium, which is a must visit location for any geek. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is another major geek-out site that is well worth the trip. Visiting any number of planetariums are also places that you will generally not regret ever visiting.

That said, I think this museum is likely to become a rival to these other major geek museums and education centers.

anytime really dna can be extracted from bones see- http://www.exploratorium.edu/evidence/lowbandwidth/INT_ancient_dna.html

If there is a theme park for weird science, I'd say it would have to be the Exploratorium. If you happen to ever get to the San Francisco area in your travels, it is most definitely a geek out site to visit and check out... especially with your kids if you have them with you but going by yourself is also worth the time as well.

They could also use some benefactors and philanthropists to help them out, but to me it is what a museum really ought to be instead of a bunch of stuffy static exhibits.

The Ontario Science Centre in the mid-1970s was wicked cool. The glimpses into the future were all there for you to touch and play with. (The Philips Coffee Machine was one of my favorites). Sadly, science museums have devolved into environmentalism and global warming preaching which by comparison is about as much fun as watching the organic, free-range, fair-trade grass grow.

Check out the Miraikan in Tokyo, or the Exploratorium in San Francisco to see a Science Museum that doesn't hit you over the head with environmentalism. Just say away from the California Acadmy of Sciences in San Francisco since just about every exhibit in that museum talks about how whatever that exhibit is about is dying because of climate change.

Sure. Geiger counters are obvious of course, but they only detect ionizing radiation. When I was at the Exploratorium I used to carry a tiny fluorescent bulb, which would glow in the strong RF fields created by some exhibits

Not sure what the LOD is, though it must not be that high...actually the railing around the exhibit shown on the linked page was mandated by OSHA (apparently it is normal for them to carry EMF detectors during inspections).

The "bowling ball and a feather falling in a vacuum" question decidedly takes the back seat compared to the lack of intuition some people exhibit.

Indeed. I once heard of a science exhibit which was showing multiple shadows cast by colored lights, with the shadows being different colors (the classic color combination demo, like this).

People were asked about their comprehension after going through the exhibit. The interviewers were puzzled at first at the fuzzy responses about the shadows' colors. They eventually figured out that many people don't have a basic understanding of how shadows come about .

That there's some lack of intuition for ya.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/ Located in San Francisco, near the Presidio, which is a bit east of the entrance to the Golden Gate bridge. I haven't been there in years, but it's a wonderful, creative science learning space, aimed somewhat at children.

Without gravity, we'd die. That's only part of what kills me about the whole manned space settlement concept. I love reading sci-fi where we live on lot's of planets and in space stations, but the fact is we're made of meat grown in a biological soup unique to Earth.

Not sure how this received +5, Insightful. Yes, we need gravity, but we do not need Earth's gravity to survive. If a person is comfortable with the idea of never returning to earth they can live just fine with less gravity. How much less is up to debate and difficult to test since space provides zero gravity and earth provides 1g and that's all we've had to test with for extended periods of time. How much gravity do humans need was asked before, and it seems we could get by with somewhere around 40%.

So living on lots of planets is very plausible, as long as they provide a reasonable amount of gravity. Fortunately most planets do provide a reasonable amount of gravity: out of the 9 planets in our solar system, 7 provide sufficient gravity.

Static magnetic fields definitely /do/ affect CRT displays, and it doesn't require that strong of a field, either.
Any regular old bar magnet will cause significant distortion (picture, color); actually this is one of the best ways of visualizing magnetic fields for students. Though it requires an old TV no one cares about it's a bit more exciting than iron filings or "black sand."
The Exploratorium in San Francisco has an exhibit demonstrating this.

Get to know your fax machine! Classic geek examination of this device, from the TV series "The Secret Life of Machines".

http://www.secretlifeofmachines.com/secret_life_of_the_fax_machine.shtml

Watch the video: http://qt.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM/SLOM_0301-The_FAX_Machine.m4v

One of my all time favourite shows! You can download (legally) every episode here: http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM/index.html

if you get to san francisco, go to the exploratorium and check out the coriolis fountain it's one of the best exhibits there (although my favorite is the bubble chamber).

while browsing for those links I also found Exploratorium (Perplexus looks good)

while browsing for those links I also found Exploratorium (Perplexus looks good)

If you're going to be in California:

For kids and adults -- the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose -- http://www.thetech.org/

A little farther north -- The Computer History Museum in Mountain View (it's only a couple hundred yards off 101, so it's the easiest of all to hit) -- http://www.computerhistory.org/

Somewhat farther north in San Carlos, again just a hair off 101 -- The Hiller Aviation Museum -- http://www.hiller.org/

In San Francisco -- The Exploratorium -- http://www.exploratorium.edu/ -- possibly the most fascinating place you'll ever see -- lots of hands-on science.

That's four within about a 50 mile stretch.

Remember:

When you go to New York, people ask, "What plays did you see?"

When you go to San Francisco, they ask, "Where did you eat?"

Exploratorium in San Francisco
Balboa Park in San Diego
Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago
Kennedy Space Center in Florida

This is a Nirvana for up and coming science geeks. http://www.exploratorium.edu/mind/

This results in tons and tons of words sounding exactly the same, and the only way to know them apart is by context.

There called "homonyms". Owe, halve ewe never scene them?

And then there is this: http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/ladle from Anguish Languish: http://www.justanyone.com/allanguish.html

To save you some digging, here are the direct links for buying each of the volumes directly from the Exploratorium itself (these show up when you search that website) -- http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,622.html and http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,775.html and http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,760.html and for all three as a [discounted] full set (for $350) -- http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,19.html These may be overkill for your immediate needs, but if you are ever tasked with starting your own hands-on science museum, the Exploratorium folks have very kindly documented their approach.

To save you some digging, here are the direct links for buying each of the volumes directly from the Exploratorium itself (these show up when you search that website) -- http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,622.html and http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,775.html and http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,760.html and for all three as a [discounted] full set (for $350) -- http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,19.html These may be overkill for your immediate needs, but if you are ever tasked with starting your own hands-on science museum, the Exploratorium folks have very kindly documented their approach.

To save you some digging, here are the direct links for buying each of the volumes directly from the Exploratorium itself (these show up when you search that website) -- http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,622.html and http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,775.html and http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,760.html and for all three as a [discounted] full set (for $350) -- http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,19.html These may be overkill for your immediate needs, but if you are ever tasked with starting your own hands-on science museum, the Exploratorium folks have very kindly documented their approach.

To save you some digging, here are the direct links for buying each of the volumes directly from the Exploratorium itself (these show up when you search that website) -- http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,622.html and http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,775.html and http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,760.html and for all three as a [discounted] full set (for $350) -- http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,19.html These may be overkill for your immediate needs, but if you are ever tasked with starting your own hands-on science museum, the Exploratorium folks have very kindly documented their approach.

The San Francisco Exploratorium, an interactive, hands-on science museum, published a three-volume set of instructions for creating useful and educational (and sturdy) projects for children and adults to manipulate and study, although these are now hard to find, and expensive. Search the used books website http://www.abebooks.com/ for "Exploratorium Cookbook" (and grab any copies you can) and see also the Exploratorium website at http://www.exploratorium.edu/ . See also the very recently published book "Laboratory Experiments in College Physics" by C. Bernard and C. Epp, published in December 2008 (ISBN 978-0471002512) available on http://www.amazon.com./

Conclusion:
Good public transportation exists in some places and not in others.

(fwiw I still think bicycles are the best invention since the wheel. Still the most efficient form of transportation yet to be invented and/or discovered.)

PVs are no god-send, but they are better than oil and coal in that area.

Run your numbers again. You are incorrect.

Wind farms are neither disruptive nor noisy, provided you put them in the right place and build them right. Even older ones are silent when about half a mile away. Considering that they're built in the middle of nowhere, either on pastures, the ocean or mountain/hill passes, that's not an issue. How do I know? I bike past them about once a month. The real issue though is that when something does go wrong, it results in some spectacular failures.

You've obviously never been around the large-scale ones in western Texas.

I'm wondering though - who is the idiot who put a tidal generator into a lake?

Great Lakes plans have been developed. South Korea also tried it with the creation of Shihwa Lake - though admittedly that's more of putting a huge freaking dam on an ocean inlet, rather than a "true" lake.

And an earthquake that raises or lowers the ocean floor by more than a few feet is more than just "simple tectonic activity"... It's tectonic activity that will ruin the entire area.

Perhaps you would do better to relearn stuff you should have been aware of in second grade. The earth regularly changes - when it moves smoothly, you don't notice too much (until you find something like this, and you don't usually see the "day to day" effects because the soil and even some of the bedrock may slide along on top of the plate itself. However, the effects of all of the boundaries (as well as "hot spot" eruptions) mean that the plates sink and rise quite regularly, and wobble as well, and changes in the water line based on this are not unusual at all.

Biomass energy is not generated from edible food. Or at least, those who suggest it ought to be shot (see corn ethanol).

Agreed.

Biomass energy is generally generated by decomposition of fecal matter and refuse plant matter - think corn stalks.

The "refuse plant matter" and "fecal matter" you refer to, however, normally make their way back into the food system as compost and manure (they're what makes farmers' fields steam in the morning during the pre-planting season). Without these, we'd quickly deplete the soil on many farms and we'd have a major problem, which makes them far less of a "great source" of energy than you're giving them credit for. About the best idea is the collection of waste heat in the composting process, but so far with the exception of some amazingly energy-rich poo (such as elephant dung) the numbers don't work out. The capture of methane in the decomposition process has also been attempted, but overall results haven't been truly encouraging on that front either.

And I don't know anybody who creates animal feed from wood chips.... unless they're criminals.

However, you would get more energy back from wood chips if you simply would burn them, say in a stove or wood heater, rather than wasting time, effort, and chemicals trying to make ethanol from them.

I have to say, I've noticed that those who complain the most about being buried by unfair modding seem to be little more than barely literate trolls who communicate their lack of knowledge through caps, insults and repetitions of long-debunked myths. In other words, they are for whom moderation was introduced.

I have to say, I've noticed that there is an overwhelming political bias on Slashdot, and that the inevitable result of not bowing down to the left-wing sacred cows is that the moderation system gets abused, with people modding "-1 Troll" simply because they disagree with what is being said, especially if it's phrased intelligently and gets in the way of their foaming-mouthed "Chimpy McHalliBusHitler" ranting.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/snacks/magshield/index.html

...and also one that's fun to play with (needs java).

our location in the universe (which it has been shown is the center given the concentric circles of variation within the CMB radiation)

Look here or here for easy-to-understand explanations.

Many of us don't think the gee-whizz eye-candy coolness factor of watching someone bounce round the moon on TV is actually worth the enormous opportunity cost of what could have been done with that money if it wasn't wasted on manned missions. The Shuttle's landing tomorrow morning after a ten day mission that cost $1.3 billion. Consider that the incredibly successful Mars Exploration Rovers cost less than half that over the entire four years and counting mission, and have made fantastic breakthrough scientific discoveries as well as producing some amazing eye-candy.

(And incidentally those are all "amateur" images produced from the raw data stream, thanks to JPL/Cornell/Steve Squyres' wonderful policy to release it as it arrives.)

Every time I drive by SLAC on 280, I am reminded that the facility sits almost on top of one of the world's most violent and active fault systems. SLAC is only 3000 feet away from the San Andreas fault at its closest point and about 7000 feet at its farthest. If you go to this site, you can zoom in where Sand Hill Road intersects 280 and plainly see both SLAC and the fault line.

To see what happened to another linear structure as a result of an earthquake on the San Andreas, go here.

So, when SLAC becomes SNLAC, will there be collateral damage beyond losing a gazillion dollar investment and shutting down indefinitely numerous research projects and in-progress dissertations? Will there also be an environmental impact as the coolant lines break and containers of who-knows-what exotic materials spill their contents?

I wonder whose bright idea was it to build a huge linear accelerator almost on top of a known fault system in the first place?

Case in point: The decline in educational content on channels such as Discovery and TLC.

Best of all about this is that it demonstrates once again that UNmanned spaceflight has just as many technology spin-offs as the manned variety... and if you get 5$% of the results for 1% of the outlay and almost infinitely less risk to human life, there's just no point sending humans.

Youngsters these days...know-it-alls...youth is indeed wasted on the young! :-)

Here's one of a myriad of examples of significant differences between human, mouse and monkey brains.
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v4/n9/full/nn0901-860.html

It is indeed correct to call 'bullshit', when extrapolating ANYTHING from one species to another without evidence! BASIC SCIENCE!!!!

Consider something far, far less complex than neurons, neural nets, etc., i.e. blood across species:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood
Yours is red (iron base) in the arteries...in some species, it is blue (copper base)! (And Spock may have been a genetic mutant leading to Sulphemoglobinemia!) :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfhemoglobinemia
http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg16121747.600-the-last-word.html

And then of course, there is nearly colourless penguin blood! ;-)
http://www.exploratorium.edu/imaging_station/gallery.php?Asset=Magellan%20Penguin%20blood&Group=&Category=Blood%20Cells&Section=Introduction

So, to say that ANYTHING is similiar across species without evidence (i.e. SCIENCE!), is bullshit.

I'm not a solar physicist, and to the best of my knowledge, it doesn't significantly directly affect weather, unless you count the Aurora Borealis. In fact, they're not even sure sunspot numbers are a good predictor of solar activity.

What solar activity does, however, is things like screw up GPS and other systems that depend on radio signals, kill satellites, and damage the power grid. It can also affect flights that go over the poles, as they try to avoid those routes during high activity.

Well, according to modern cosmology, there ISN'T a center of the universe. A good explanation and cool little flash demonstration are here: http://www.exploratorium.edu/hubble/tools/center.h tml

I should note that this doesn't mean the universe is infinite, as the universe can have a finite size without having a center. For an analogy, think of the surface of a sphere - it has a finite area, but no point on the surface is the "center."

As a counterexample, note that we're able to receive the signals generated by Voyager 1 and 2, from about 100 AU's or about 2% of a light year, which use transmitters sending about 20 watts and of which our Earth-bound antennas only receive a fraction of a milliwatt. We'll probably lose them around year 2020 when their slowly fading RTG power supplies drop the power level below the minimum needed for operation, but that's not because we can't receive their signal so long as they work well enough to send it.

While the majority of radiation being emitted by the earth is indeed thermal infrared as the night side cools, that's in a completely different spectrum from the long-wave radiation emitted by 50 and 60Hz AC power lines, or some of the high-frequency bands such as the 1.42 to 1.64 GHz range known as the "water hole", which turns out to be nearly ideal for interstellar transmissions due to minimal noise from the 3K background radiation:

http://www.exploratorium.edu/learning_studio/news/ october97/mainstory5_oct97.html

You're way off base. All of the people in my department at work run Linux, so clearly Linux is already dominating the desktop. The fact that my department is made up of entirely Linux sysadmins should not take anything away from this single statistically relevant sample. Of course, we all run Red Hat because Gentoo is for masochists and Ubuntu has a stupid name. Sure, Microsoft's brainwashing^Wmarketing may lead you to believe that Vista is all the rage, but everyone knows it's a memory hog that barely runs on most supercomputers. Especially now with Linux being pre-installed on so many desktops, Microsoft is bound to go bankrupt any day now.

Also, did you know that the longest recorded frog jump was 33 feet 5.5 inches? Amazing!

Car science - making better engines, car safety, ergonomics... Cooking science - why dough rises, what's happening with milk and sugar... ( http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/ )

I have some more details about what will be found at the bottom of Victoria crater. It's technically called a fulgamite (not a fulgarite). Fulgamites are superficially glassified, whereas fulgarites are underground tubes of glassification.

The formations in Victoria crater (and in thousands of other craters and canyons) a glassified mounds of debris. In CJ Ransom's experiments where a plasma gun is shot at various types of soil, the charged probe gathers material from the area surrounding the dark mode release of electrical energy and shoots it into the air. The shallow crater that forms gradually grows larger as more and more material is sucked in to the center of the plasma vortex.

If the energy is high enough, the material will be swept into the center of the vortex and then re-deposited below the discharge zone, where the heat would tend to glassify the surface, leaving it partially solidified. That's why the formations on Mars don't move around in the "wind" -- they're covered with a crust of tiny ceramic beads that have been fused together.

These sand dunes will look very similar to those observed at Endurance Crater ...

Endurance Crater "Dune" Field

One interesting aspect to these "sand dunes" inside the craters on Mars is that they all -- without fail -- exhibit identical morphology, from the polygonal formations to the trailing tendrils that look like they rise right out of the ground, rather than resting on top of it. Not one NASA commentator has remarked on that fact, despite being presented with, literally, thousands of examples from orbit and from Spirit and Opportunity.

There is a similar structure in the Argyre Planitia crater -- a giant, glassified, polygonal mound with ribbon-like structures, frozen in place:

Argyre Planitia

Argyre Planitia is 900 kilometers in diameter.

Once NASA discovers that these formations are hard rather than soft, they will likely call them "pachydermal weathering". But, in the process of coming to this conclusion, they will completely ignore the fact we can also generate these structures in the laboratory using a plasma gun. My guess is that they will also likely gloss over the morphology of the glassified "dunes", which Wallace Thornhill discusses on his www.holoscience.com site towards the bottom of this page.

As I've stated before, if NASA wants to prove to itself that water activity is responsible for these structures, it might have some success. However, there is no doubt that they are demonstrating a preference for one interpretation over electrical interpretations as the electrical interpretation would undermine their contention that impact craters are the results of explosions resulting from physical collisions. To accept that electrical plasmas are involved would force them to accept that bodies in space can acquire and trade charge -- a fact which they should have learned from the Deep Impact mission, which Wallace Thornhill also accurately predicted in great detail.