An ISS image of Dubai’s excesses

Space Gizmo points to an image taken by an astronaut aboard the ISS of Dubai last month:

You can clearly make out two of the three artificial archipelagoes- Palm Jumeirah and The World.  As well, in the lower right is Burj Khalifa with it’s long shadow, which is easier to make out in the larger version of the image.

World’s tallest artificial shadow

SpaceWeather.com posts a picture taken by Brian Whittaker of the shadow cast by Burj Dubai, the tallest skyscraper in the world, which opens today.

Update: Apparently, the tower was renamed from برج دبي (Burj Dubai) to برج خليفة (Burj Khalifa) as a gesture to Dubai’s main creditor:

Happy New Year

With 2010 already an hour old here in Wisconsin, I wish you all a Happy New Decade.

The scale of the universe, continued

Phil Plait pointed to another great illustration of the immensity of the universe, this time coming from the Hayden Planetarium, which is part of the American Museum of Natural History, which starts at the Tibetan plateau and accelerates out to the cosmic microwave background before returning to Earth:

Now, while this is the best comprehensive video illustration of the scale of the universe that I have seen, it’s worth noting while everything is scaled accurately, the actual scales involved and their relationship to each other, are truly incomprehensible by a human mind.  The fact that the “camera” starts moving faster than the speed of light shortly after showing the orbit of the moon should drive that point home.

Israel’s new organ donor law

According to the BBC, Israel recently enacted a law that gives priority status to patients seeking an organ transplant if they themselves are organ donors.  The main aim of the legislation is to increase donation rates, as there are shortages of available organs.

The article, being from the BBC, also cites a proposal for a new organ transplant policy in Britain—presumed consent, whereby one would have to actively declare that they do not wish to have their organs used for transplantation after they die as opposed to the current British policy, which is the reverse—one has to actively register to be an organ donor.

Personally, I’d like to see a combination of the two policies—those who oppose the prospect of donating their organs after they have died should revoke consent with the knowledge that if they themselves need an organ, they may end up lower on the list to get a transplant.  If someone has a hang up about having the organs be used after they are no longer useful to their original owner to save someone else’s life, they should understand if they don’t get priority access to someone else’s organs when they are sick.

A worthwhile Bloggingheads discussion

In the most recent Bloggingheads.tv diavlog, Razib Khan interviews David Sloan Wilson about his area of expertise, multi-level selection theory.

The Big Picture’s HST Advent Calendar

It’s the first day of December and thus a time to drag out the Advent calendars.  The Boston Globe’s Big Picture site decided to repeat a concept from last year’s Christmas season: an Advent calendar that present an image from the Hubble Space Telescope each day until Christmas.  So, be sure to keep tabs on this page during the holiday season as the Big Picture fills in the pictures once a day until Christmas.

The scale of the universe

Not to long ago, I pointed to a rather effective illustration of the scale of the microscopic from cells to atom courtesy of the University of Utah.  In my opinion, though, it is the scales of the large that are truly mind blowing, but unlike the scales of the small, there isn’t one illustration that really gets the point across, but that doesn’t mean there is a scarcity of effective illustrations.

To start off, here’s something I made myself to show the size relationship between the eight planets of our solar system:

I find it humbling to see that Jupiter has a permanent storm that is as wide north to south as the Earth is and even wider from east to west.  Imagining the immensity of the Earth is a task in itself.  Seeing the Earth as a relatively small planet really drives home how limited our viewpoint is.

But what takes it to the next level is not the size of objects on the grand scale, but the distances between them.

Determinism and Choice

I was watching an interesting panel discussion from the World Science Festival 2009 called Time Since Einstein that Sean Carroll, a participant in the discussion, pointed to.  However, during the discussion (in segment 2 of 5), the moderator, who was not a physicist asked the following question:

If there is a future, physically speaking, do you believe that that means that it’s also determined and there’s kind of no point in doing one thing or the other, that it’s all been figured out?  Can there be a non-deterministic future that exists independent of this flow of time?

The second question was the one that was answered, but the content of the first question is what interests me.  The moderator seems to be indicating that if the future is determined, that there’s “no point in doing one thing or the other, that it’s all been figured out”, which betrays an erroneous concept of the relationship between determinism and choice.

Egypt claims the first non-Latin web domain

Yesterday at the Internet Governance Forum, which is being held in Egypt, Tarek Kamel announced that Egypt would put forth the first domain name to take advantage of the recent ICANN revision that allowed for non-Latin scripts to be used in Internet domain names.  The domain, .مصر, which is Latinized as .masr, essentially means .Egypt in English.

It will be interesting to see how the roll out of non-Latin domain names will affect the makeup of the Internet.  In theory, it makes sense to allow people to type in their own languages and scripts to use the Internet.  I know that I would find it annoying to type in things like ووو.گوگا.کم every time I wanted to visit a website, so it’s not hard to see that something like www.google.com would be tricky to someone who could write in Urdu but not English.

Of course one of the fears relating to this expansion of domain possibilities is that with an increased character set to work with, spoofers could fool users into going goهgle.com or 丫ahoo.com instead of google.com or yahoo.com.  And it gets even trickier when dealing with Cyrillic and Greek characters, some of which are indistinguishable from Latin ones.

Another issue is that diversifying the characters allowed to be in a web address makes the web more inaccessible, as someone who can’t type in Arabic wouldn’t be able to access a .مصر website very easily.  However, I don’t think that will be a major problem, as web pages that seek to be registered with non-Latin domain names probably are not seeking to cater to an English speaking audience (or an audience whose language uses a Latin script) at all, thus not being of much interest to those who can’t access it.

I suspect that for multilingual websites, a domain using Latin script will still be the best option, but the diversification of available scripts for domain names will make the web more accessible in areas where the dominant language doesn’t have an alphabet starting with ABC.