ACS on Hubble badly injured, may be dead?

A famous champion is badly injured on both sides and may need to be put down.

I'm not talking about Barbaro the racehorse, but about the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. ACS suffered a (smoking) short circuit on Jan 27 that fried the Side B electronics.

Like other NASA instruments, ACS has redundant Side A and Side B electronics. ACS was using side B due to an earlier fault on Side A. Side B is now most probably dead. Side A may be usable, but probably only in limited modes that exclude the Wide Field Camera (WFC) responsible for the pretty pictures you've enjoyed from ACS & Hubble.

Of course, this happened the day after astronomers submitted 498 proposals to use ACS this year. Everyone's scrambling to rewrite, or create new proposals, now that ACS is dead or severely limited. I'm pondering writing a quickie Nicmos proposal -- it's an old instrument with a small field of view, and the observations wouldn't be very efficient -- but it may now be one of the better uses of HST.

NAPW

Angry Black Bitch (here, here and here) and Bitch PhD have been reporting on the Summit of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

What strikes me is the framing of mothers as "legitimate" vs "illegitimate reproducers". That society pressures "legitimate" mothers to make babies -- and throws nifty tax breaks & health insurance to those "legitimate" children.

While we non-legitimate producers -- dykes, women of color, single moms -- are strongly discouraged from concieving, and denied basic health care if we do. Even (rich, white, powerful family) Mary Cheney -- how dare she choose to make a baby in her own perverted womb!

So many discussions of reproductive choice get framed in narrow, heterosexual, often white terms. It's frustrating, as a lesbian, to fight for my het & bi sisters' rights to legal, public, easy access to birth control and abortion -- when so few pro-choice women turn around to fight for the rights of lesbians to adopt & maintain custody, and get health insurance & healthcare.

NAPW seems to be refreshingly different in recognizing, from the get-go, that the big picture is the fight for the ability of women to control, sustain, and make decisions about their own bodies and their own families.

Cuz physics gals need to laugh, too

An Oldie but Goodie: "Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass."

It's an exquisitely bitter lab report I find myself quoting, in the course of my scientific investigations, on a semi-weekly basis. My favorite line is "Figure 1: check this shit out."

The comet!

I'm observing in the southern hemisphere, which allowed me to see Comet McNaught (2006 P1). It's in the evening sky after sunset, near Venus. Very long (>1 degree) double tail, and the brightest nucleus of any comet I've ever seen.

Phil's top 10 astro images of 2006

The Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, posted what he considers the top 10 astro photos of 2006. To quote Keanu: "Whoa."

Does iffy (but press-worthy) science pay?

Astronomers get far more press, per capita, than our bio & chem colleagues; Marla Geha points out that the 1E4 astronomers worldwide get roughly the same press coverage as the few 1E5 chemists and biologists. Presumably this is because astronomy excites & captures people's imaginations. It also helps that startling results can often be explained in a few words ("We've found 200 planets orbiting other stars"; "We see a meter-thick ice layer on much of Mars"; "We've seen back to only 300 Million years after the Big Bang".)

It's worth taking a moment to appreciate that public support. Since my research has no practical use, the reason I get paid to do it is, simply, that the public thinks astronomy is cool.

Unfortunately, reporters often lack the expertise to question the press releases they're fed. As a result, gee-wiz but technically faulty results find their way into newspapers, APOD, and popular science magazines. Since the press and the public have short attention spans, these results don't get retracted.

Thus, occasional papers report very surprising results, and get loads of publicity -- but it's pretty clear to colleagues that there may be a more mundane explanation, or the result's total crap (systematic effects, miscalibration, etc.) Did the authors mean well, but fail to follow Feynmann's famous dictate, that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool? Or do they bargain cynically that a splashy-but-crap Nature paper is worth more than a cautious-but-prosaic ApJ? And if so, are they right?

Invaders from SPAAACE!

"Is that a leafblower, or our desktop?" Ears ringing, the wif and I travelled to Fry's Electronics to buy a new CPU fan and power supply. We also picked up a $80 printer/ scanner/ copier/ latte-maker -- who could resist?

The Fry's is themed "Space Invaders!" You enter beneath a crashed UFO, then walk past the laser-beam-shattered remains of a Jeep. You peruse printers under the gaze and tentacles of the Martian octopus. And of course, you comparison-shop for washer/dryers, or maybe just nap in a massage-chair, under the thorax of a giant space-ant.

Good prices, actual components (resistors! CPU fans in odd sizes! power supplies from 0.2 --1 kWatt!), and an evening's entertainment. Sure beats the pants off Best Buy.