Recieved an interesting email on from the ECOLOG mailing list today. This is not from somebody at NASA, this is not an official position, but it’s certainly an interesting theory (ahem):

Evolution isn’t merely a hypothesis or a theory with NASA. It isn’t even a
“fact”. Rather, it’s become NASA’s blueprint for the next half-century of
exploration. In the oddest of all developments, NASA, a standard governmental
agency, is transforming itself into perhaps the most philosophical organization that
has ever existed, perhaps more so than any historical university or church.

NASA understands what it’s doing — but it’s very likely that most of the
American population doesn’t. Several big events are perhaps only a few years
away, including possibly for the first time the novel creation of life in the
laboratory from inanimate chemicals. NASA, for a very long time, has played down
the evolutionary biology aspects of what it was doing, but all of that has
changed in the past few years, and the search for the origins of life throughout
the universe now dominates NASA’s mission statement.

The rest of the email can be read here.

Well damn.

From Tim, a hell of a good link…

Pictures (and a movie!) of the northern lights from space.

There are no words to describe how cool some things are.

If this doesn’t amaze you in some way you suck. the spirit martian lander/rover is sending back the highest resolution pictures ever taken of the surface of another planter. They’re in colour folks.

NASA seems to be publishing them in a few different ways, but the best seems to be this chronologically arranged list of everything that they get.

Lookit that. It’s another damned planet.

A week ago NASA’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer satellite was flying over Baghdad (I don’t know off hand if ASTER is frequently over the mideast or if it has been tasked by the military). It took this image of Baghdad:

Click here for a larger (400k) JPEG version or follow this link to the full sized (2.5MB) JPEG.

From JPL’s ASTER website:

“The plumes, which originate along major roads and canals, are believed to be burning pools of oil from pipelines. The plumes, which blanket large sections of the city of approximately 5 million, are creating an environmental health hazard for residents of the city and surrounding regions.”

This seems like a good example of the many deadly outcomes of war that can’t be easily reported on because the deaths don’t easily abide by the Who What When Where journalistic format. How many will die because of these clouds? How long will it take to happen? Will it be possible, when the deaths do occur, to tease out to what extent those deaths were the result of inhalation of burning petroleum during Gulf War 2 vs. some other environmental source? Who knows, but people will die from it. You and I will never know who they are.

I hope Saddam and Bush share a 1st class compartment on the train to hell. Except of course, that Saddam probably shares with Bush the characteristic of being only the most visible man of a whole awful system, and there really aren’t enough 1st class compartments for all of the people who would have to fit in that train.