Illuminating Reality

What the hell is that?  It looks like a comet, doesn’t it?  But it’s not.  Spectral analysis of the tail shows that it’s not gas and orbital analysis says it’s connected to the Flora family of near Earth asteroids.  What you’re looking at here is most likely a very recent asteroid impact with the debris trailing off, driven by the solar wind.  Initially the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) sky survey discovered the unusual site and then Hubble was pointed at it to reveal the detail you see above.

This is pretty amazing and the very first time we have witnessed an asteroid collision!

Read more at the Hubble website…

When I was in 1/10th SFG(A) back in the 90s, we had a month dedicated every year to teaching, developing and practicing winter warfare skills and techniques.  This was important because all three battalions of our Special Forces Group was regionally aligned to operate in all of Europe and that meant we had to be prepared to operate in mountainous regions such as the Alps or the Fjords of Scandinavia.   For that reason we had to learn not only how to survive in snowy conditions but also how to fight and win.  Much of this training was just down right fun, be it learning how to cross country ski or travel via snow mobiles, but there was also a very important tactical component to it that required training and practice to develop.

Since the GWOT began, all of the SF Groups have been very busy operating in Afghanistan and Iraq – a region that only 5th Group is regionally aligned and trained for.  This has required every team that rotates through the region to learn new skills, culture and languages that they normally aren’t trained for, and this has been going on for over eight years now.  Unfortunately, many of those regional specialty skills are quite perishable, especially language skills.  So it made me happy to see members of my old SF Group out in the snowy Rocky Mountains training hard in winter warfare between rotations.  Even though these winter skills apply to certain parts of Afghanistan and northern Iraq, it’s very easy to see how over the years they could be ignored in favor of focusing Central Asia-oriented skills.

Read more at the USASOC PA blog…

So “Avatar” has been out for a few weeks now and I’m sure many of you have seen it.  If you haven’t, I highly suggest checking it out – especially in 3D.  Director James Cameron envisioned a lush world populated with rich texture and detail and used an army of visual effects artist to create it.  The story isn’t something new, but the experience of “Avatar” is.

There is however one key plot point that I’d like to talk about and a related evolutionary story, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, you may want to wait to read this.

Potential spoilers below…

Read more…

Well, now that the underwear bomber has been tied to Islamic terrorists in Yemen, all eyes in the West seem to be once again paying attention to the situation in Yemen.  This hasn’t really happened since since the Cole bombing in 2000 in the port city of Aden or in 2002 when the first known offensive Predator interdiction took place.  But there’s a problem here that I’m afraid many are missing.

Yemen in many ways is like Afghanistan or nearby Somalia, with a very weak central government and a handful of powerful insurgent groups to challenge it.  Not all of these groups are religious extremists- many are just tribal groups vying for power in a fractured country.  Regardless, they all threaten a monetarily poor and politically weak government that doesn’t have a whole lot of friends around the world.  The government’s inability to control the outlying countryside has even led to Saudi forces launching air strikes inside of Yemen against cross border insurgent groups.

So I suspect the Yemeni government is seeing the latest attention pointed their way as a chance to bring in some much needed funding as well as allies.  All they really have to do is convince Western powers that these groups that threaten them are all linked to al-Qaeda, are a threat to the West and can be neutralized with large sums of money, equipment and training.  So if you can’t see where I’m going with this, the danger is that we end up getting suckered into a situation where someone is playing “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”  Granted, I don’t think we have much of a choice seeing how threats like al-Qaeda will always seek safe haven in lawless areas, but we would be wise not to get sucked into a situation that could backfire on us.

Critical Thinking in many ways forms the backbone of Science because it uses logic and reason to come to conclusions devoid of emotional influences.  Personally I have a hard time seeing how people can see this as a problem because quite simply “it works”, yet I’m often dismayed by a substantial portion of the public specifically because they do not embrace Critical Thinking.  Perhaps this is because it (and Science for that matter) gets only cursory exposure in our basic education system, but I suspect the main culprit is parents and the way they raise their children.  Political and Religious ideologues completely ignore Critical Thinking, instead valuing what I like to call “Emotional Thinking.”  No doubt there’s a time and a place for emotions, but when it comes to understanding reality or seeking truth, emotions can be horribly unreliable.

The author of a previous video on Open Mindedness has posted a new video about Critical Thinking that’s an excellent primer on the concept and shows why it’s not only effective but something we should all strive to do.

I’ve often said that technology is the great anachronism.  What I mean by that is that technology identifies a period in time better than anything else.  Anything that has a “style” attached to it, be it clothing, architecture or even language, would seem an obvious choice for an anachronism, but those things have a tendency to change and return in various forms, being cyclical in nature.  Technology on the other hand rarely, if ever, takes a step back.  When we look at a picture of an artist in his home with an early Macintosh, we can pretty much assume it’s from the mid-80s just the same way we can look at a picture of a person talking on brick of a car phone with the curled cord going into the console and say “early 90s.”

Personally, I think it’s when a technology that has become such a staple of modern life becomes obsolete, that’s when we really notice what I’m talking about.  For example,  from 2000 to 2010, several stalwart technologies we’d all grown up around more or less disappeared.  Who uses phone books now?  When was the last time you bought a CD in a store?  Or had a land line installed in your home?  Or best of all, used a phone booth on the streets, let alone see one in operation?

The Huffington Post has a great gallery of technology that became obsolete in this decade…

This is a bit old but quite good footage worth talking about…

The Yarmouk Traffic Circle was a particularly bad location in Mosul when I was there in 2004-2005, often the site of some bad ambushes by the bad guys as well as IEDs.  In this video, special operations aviation is doing gun and rocket runs on targets in the area.   You’ll notice that they have a pattern to their runs:  miniguns, cannon, then rockets.

The DAP is the brainchild of famed Nightstalker Cliff Walcott, who died in Operation Gothic Serpent in Somalia.  Up until that point, the only attack helicopters used by the 160 Special Operations Aviation Regiment were AH-6 Littlebirds, armed with 7.62mm miniguns and 2.75″ rockets.  While agile and capable, the AH-6s don’t have the range nor the payload for sustained fire support missions, so operations that required heavier support relied on coordinating with conventional AH-64 Apache elements.  The compartmentalized nature of special operations often made this difficult, so it was determined that an “intermediate level” attack capability for the 160th was required.  The DAP was born out of this requirement by taking an MH-60, special operations variant of the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, and fitting it for attack purposes.

MH-60s normally mount 7.62mm miniguns on door mounts to provide defensive fire when ferrying troops to and from targets.  Because the DAPs mission is purely offensive, the miniguns are locked forward firing and hard points are mounted to the fuselage allowing a wide variety of munitions.  The most common configuration is large 2.75″ rocket pods (larger than the ones carried by the AH-6) and a 30mm chain gun (the same used on the Apache gunship).  This is what is seen in the video with the forward mounted miniguns roaring onto the target followed by the 30mm chaingun and rockets.  DAPs can also mount Hellfire laser guided missiles for longer range precision standoff capability as well as Stinger missiles for anti-aircraft needs.

There’s a similar video out there of DAPs doing runs near the MAF (Mosul Airfield) at “Gilligan’s Island.”  There aren’t any active targets in that video – it’s more a series of practice runs or a “show of force” on the south side of the runway in a wide open area bad guys liked to setup mortars in.

Did you know that gravity is a bit of a mystery to scientists?  Given that we have space probes orbiting Saturn and Mars right now, you’d think it would be well understood, but the reality is it’s the most mysterious of the Four Fundamental Forces of Nature.   Mathematically it’s well understood and can be calculated with great precision, yet it’s so weak compared to the other forces, all of which are roughly comparable to each other.  How weak? Try – 10⁴⁰ weaker than the electromagnetic force, in other words:

0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000001 times as strong

Don’t believe me? Ever notice that you can pick up a paper clip with a refrigerator magnet, which is pretty weak, with relative ease?  The gravity from the entire mass of the Earth is being defeated by that little magnet, which seems so unintuitive and bizarre, doesn’t it?

The Four Fundamental Forces of Nature, according to the Standard Model, are Electromagnetism,  Strong Nuclear Force, Weak Nuclear Force and Gravity.  This isn’t speculation either – the Standard Model is one of the greatest achievements in Science, forming the backbone of modern physics and it works exceptionally well.

These forces interact with matter via carrier particles (aka bosons) and have a finite range to their interaction – except gravity.  To this day there is no known force carrier particle for gravity (they’ve been theoretically dubbed “gravitons”); it can’t be absorbed or shielded like the other forces; it has an unlimited range and it’s behavior is always attractive in nature; it’s somehow tied to the mass of objects in that it interacts with every particle that has mass.

Understanding gravity has been a long and storied endeavor, but it was Sir Issac Newton who made the first significant breakthrough when he published his Principa Mathematica in the 17th Century, wherein he described his universal law of gravitation.  His simple equation was highly accurate at calculating the motion of everything from objects falling out of a tree to the orbit of planets.  His work survived for two hundred years as the dominant theory of gravity until Einstein came along in 1905 and fundamentally changed the way we think of gravity.

Part of the problem was that there was no known mechanism for gravity.  It’s effects could be calculated, but it wasn’t clear how, for example, the Sun reach out to the Earth, across 93 million miles of empty space and tugged on it.  Einstein wondered if the Sun disappeared, how would the Earth know?  In other words, how did the force actually work to travel that distance?  Part of the problem it turns out was that we were thinking of Gravity in the same way we thought of the other known force at the time: electromagnetism.  Einstein radically overturned Newton by defining gravity not as a typical force but as curvature of space itself.  When Einstein published his Theory of Relativity ushered in a new age of physics, solving many of the outstanding problems of Newton’s theory – mainly that because gravity distorts space, the Sun reaches out to the Earth through that distortion to pull the Earth inward.

Einstein’s theory was confirmed  in many areas such as resolving the long standing anomaly with Mercury’s orbit that Newton’s theory couldn’t account for as well as the observed phenomenon of light being refracted by the mass of the Sun during a total eclipse.  Like any good theory, Einstein’s work makes lots of testable predictions that have been observed over the years, but around the same time he was getting lots of attention in the world, the world of atoms was slowly being revealed and it required a new kind of physics to describe.

Quantum Mechanics is to sub-atomic particles what General Relativity is to the orbit of planets.  It’s the physics that accurately models the way atoms and sub-atomic particles interact and has been tested to a high degree of accuracy as well.  There is a really big problem though: Quantum Mechanics does not jibe well with General Relativity.  Physicists tried using Einstein’s equations to model the interactions of molecules and atoms to find that as you get down to those very small scales, everything starts to fall apart and you get gravitational values of infinity (psst, that’s a sign there’s a problem with your theory).

So General Relativity is shown repeatedly to be correct on large scales and Quantum Mechanics is shown to be accurate the same way at the sub-atomic scale – what gives?  Gravity is messing things up in a big way or should I say our incomplete understanding of gravity is messing things up.  Finding an accurate quantum-scale model of gravity has been an elusive quest for physicists.  Some of the ongoing attempts include Loop Quantum Gravity*and String Theory, both of which are so theoretical that they currently can’t be tested in the first place.

This is why the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)  is particularly exciting to physicists.  It’s hoped that when it’s operating at full power, the LHC will be able to expose the innards of the sub-atomic world at an energy scale never before witnessed.  This could be the very device that detects gravitons, the theoretical force carrier for gravity or the Higgs boson which is theorized to give particles mass (remember, gravity is related to mass).  Exciting stuff!

So gravity remains a mystery for now; something we understand well enough to calculate its behavior extremely accurately, but mysterious enough that its mechanism remains elusive.

* Read Lee Smolin’s “Three Roads to Quantum Gravity” for an introduction to the theory…have aspirin handy.

Before there was Paul Blart, there was Gecko45…

This is a collection of the wisdom posted on the internet by a guy calling himself Gecko45. It all started back at the end of the halcyon summer of 2001, and his posts have created a certain urban legend that many refer to as the Mall Ninja. Hang out at any gun shop, gun show or shooting match and you’ll see one of these guys; you might even see a group of them since they are known to associate in the wild.

The Mall Ninja is easily distinguished by an abundance of “tactical” gear, such as fatigues, a thigh holster (with, of course, a Glock), combat boots, bandolier and other accouterments that you’d usually only see on a SWAT operative. Median age is usually 19-25, and they tend to boast about their various exploits with certain Special Forces units, all of which they’re too young and idiotic to have joined (real Special Forces types don’t brag). They typically have opinions on everything, regardless of expertise, they are uniformly poor shots, and they tend to exhibit a frightening lack of safety training.

For further enjoyment, enter the  Shrine of the Mall Ninja…

One hundred fifty years ago today, Charles Darwin published one of the most important publications in all of Science – “On the Origin of Species.”  Darwin had been developing his scientific theory of evolution by natural selection for a number of years based on evidence gathered from around the world, particularly his excursion in the Galapagos Islands.  If his theory was correct, it would challenge the very fabric of our understanding of life on Earth, something that he wisely didn’t take too lightly in the 17th Century.

In the decades that followed, Darwin was attacked and ridiculed particularly by the Church of England, but in the scientific community he was supported and eventually lauded for his work.  But for the man himself, who was once firmly entrenched in a religious life, the results of his work led him to more secular beliefs which deeply conflicted with those of his wife.  It’s ironic that in many ways Darwin was exploring biology to help confirm his religious beliefs yet in the end the results he could not deny ended up pushing him to adopt agnosticism.

So as much as “On the Origin of Species” is a scientific triumph, a scientific theory that has become the foundation of modern Biology and been confirmed by many independent fields (genetics, for example), it is also seen as a key publication in the eyes of the atheists, agnostics and secular humanists.  They see it as the first major attempt to push back against theology in the post-Enlightenment era.

I think Richard Dawkins summed up the importance of Darwin’s book when he wrote, “Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over 300,000 million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.”