The maps of 2008:  spontaneous mapping of live events like the terrorists attacks in Mumbai, the first Moon walk overlaid on a soccer field, and of course the presidential election result maps.

July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong and ‘Buzz’ Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon:

Map of the 2008 presidential election results by county:

Map of the 2008 presidential election results by county where the county size is based on population, highlighting the voting weight of populated vs. rural areas:

See more maps from Mr. Newman, a physicist at the University of Michigan.   Make your own on this NYT page.

SNL‘s Fred Armisen demonstrates their “Megapixel Giant Touchmap” (MegaMap), a parody of CNN’s ridiculous-yet-awesome “Magic Wall” (“Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall”).  The MegaMap demo starts about 1:30 into the video.

Via The Map Room

Green Wombat describes a balloon solar collector:

It sounds like something out of one of those do-it-your-self magazines: Stitch together two buck’s worth of thin-film plastic – the stuff potato chip bags are made of – stick in a photovoltaic cell, inflate with air and, voilà, you’ve got yourself a “solar balloon” that will generate a kilowatt of electricity. String together 10,000 balloons and you’ve got a solar power plant that can power a town. California startup Cool Earth Solar believes this high-low tech approach is what will make its solar power plants competitive with fossil fuels.

Instead of using expensive optics to concentrate sunlight on the solar cell, Cool Earth manipulates the air pressure inside the balloon to change the shape of the mirrored surface so that it focuses the maximum amount of sunlight on the solar cell, boosting electricity generation 300 to 400 times. By replacing expensive materials like steel with cheap-as-chips plastic and air, Cool Earth aims to dramatically lower the price of solar electricity.

A prototype power plant is being built in a field across the street from Cool Earth’s offices and Lamkin says a 1.5 megawatt plant will be constructed early next year in the Central Valley town of Tracy.

Lamkin estimates that a Cool Earth power plant can be up and running in six months, which should appeal to [California] utilities [...], which are under the gun to meet state mandates to obtain 20% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010.

“Our major structural element is air, which so far is free,” Lamkin says. “And the sun isn’t taxed either.”  Yet.

Careful, don’t temp Obama.

A micro nuclear reactor in your garden?

According to The Guardian, a U.S. company based in New Mexico, Hyperion Power Generation, has designed mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes. The company has already received firm orders and expects to deliver about 4,000 ‘individual’ plants between 2013 and 2023.

In the U.S., where people spent more energy than in other parts of the world, such a reactor should be able to deliver power to only 10,000 households, for a cost of $2,500 per home. But in developing nations, one HPM could provide enough power for 60,000 homes or more, for a cost of less than $400. This is quite reasonable if you agree with Hyperion, which states that the energy from its HPMs will cost about 10 cents/watt.

American Superconductor officially commissioned the world’s first high-temperature superconductor power-transmission cable system to be used in a commercial power grid. Superconductors can … conduct 150 times the electricity of similarly sized copper wires. However, because of technological difficulties, the commercial development of superconductor power-cable systems has been slow.

The system commissioned last week, part of the Long Island Power Authority’s grid and funded by the Department of Energy, consists of three cables operating at 138 kilovolts.

If you don’t know what an Instant Runoff election is, find out here. I think it’s a pretty cool idea.

According to the article, The American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is held its first annual Campaign Education Workshop on 10 May in Washington, D.C. The May workshop will offer more detail and specifics on how to run a campaign, including how to hire a staff, how to create a budget, how to craft media messages, and how campaigns differ from the school board to the congressional level, Robinson noted. If you’re interested in learning more about this unique opportunity, please visit the SEA Campaign Education Workshop page on the Web.  [a little late now though]

Congressman Vern Ehlers, former professor of Physics at Calvin College, says “What the country desperately needs is more scientists and engineers in public office at all levels.”

Now there are some new twists and turns—essentially, three very positive developments that would not have been generally anticipated a decade ago. First, silicon-based solar technology has decoupled from the semiconductor industry and is achieving steady cost reductions, so that those following PV discern a kind of Moore’s law at work. In 2005, production of silicon for solar cells already surpassed production of silicon for semiconductors.

Second, the industry has become so confident in that evolutionary path, policymakers and planners have started to set dates when they expect PV-generated electricity to be competitive with the major sources of electricity sold on the grid now. And third, while the incremental path promises a commercial breakthrough within ten years, it’s suddenly looking like second generation technology may be arriving after all—in which case wide commercialization of PV could occur much sooner.

 
[Above, maps showing average daily solar energy]

In recent years, global PV production has been increasing at a rate of 50 percent per year, so that accumulated global capacity doubles about every 18 months. The PV Moore’s law states that with every doubling of capacity, PV costs come down by 20 percent. In 2004, installing PV cost about $7 per watt, compared to $1/W for wind, which at that time was beginning to stand on its own feet commercially, Last, year, as recently noted in this blog, average global solar costs had come down to between $4 and $5 per watt, right in line with the PV Moore’s law. Extrapolate those gains out six or seven years, and PV costs will be below $2/W, making photovolatics competitive with 2004 wind.

Fairbourne is one of 31,000 scientists (9,021 PhDs) who agree that the human impact on global warming is overblown. Here’s the petition.

“Do we need to be wise stewards [of the Earth]? Absolutely,” Fairbourne said. “Do we have to pin everything that happens on global warming? No, we need to have cooler heads.”

Asked why there has been so much momentum toward connecting human activity and global warming, Fairbourne said, “They’re doing it for a lot of reasons; some may be scientific, but most of them are political. We need to be calm and look at scientific evidence and evaluate it.”

Fairbourne, a University of Utah graduate, said he has talked “to a number of meteorologists who have similar opinions” as his, adding that he is concerned about “the extremism that is attached to the global warming.”

According to the Daily Glean, zero local MSP meteorologists publicly adhere to the theory that human activity is the cause of “global warming.” If the “evidence” supports global warming, why do so many scientists disagree?

Star Tribune readers respond:

poll link

poll link

Well, today I asked Google to tell me if I was dreaming or this was a know condition. It turns out that what I saw was real and is scientifically called a “Circumhorizontal arc.” Here are some examples:

And one of the most dramatic over the Washtington-Idaho border two years ago:

Have you ever seen one of these?

It turns out that this rainbow cloud effect occurs when “the sun is high in the sky, at least 58° above the horizon, and can only occur in the presences of cirrus clouds. The phenomenon is quite rare because the ice crystals must be aligned horizontally to refract the high sun. The arc is formed as light rays enter the horizontally-oriented flat hexagonal crystals through a vertical side face and exit through the horizontal bottom face. It is the 90° inclination that produces the well-separated rainbow-like colours and, if the crystal alignment is just right, makes the entire cirrus cloud shine like a flaming rainbow.”

Here are several more examples:

Rainbow Cloud on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

rainbow cloud | KOMO-TV – Seattle, Washington | YouNewsTV

The Cloud Appreciation Society

What was that strange glowing cloud? | KOMO-TV – Seattle, Washington | News

Rainbow clouds

And here are a couple of related phenomena:

Polar stratospheric cloud

Sun dog

From New Scientist:

Noon, Saturday 3 June. Over the fields of northern Idaho [pictured in this post above], a rare and beautiful sight could be seen. Known as a circumhorizontal arc, it forms as sunlight is refracted through hexagonal ice crystals in cirrus clouds several kilometres above the ground. Sunlight enters a near-vertical face of each crystal and leaves from a horizontal face at the bottom. “Effectively the crystals act as a 90-degree prism for the passing rays,” says Evelyn Hesse of the light-scattering group at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK.

Circumhorizontal arcs occur when the sun is at more than 58 degrees above the horizon. “They are most unusual, and this is an impressive example,” Hesse says.

Pioneer Press: The substance is about 200 times as sweet as sugar, contains no calories and has some advantages to the food industry because it doesn’t degrade when heated or when mixed with other foods. Stevia is commonly used in Japan and parts of South America, but it’s rare in this country outside of health-food circles.

Cargill, based in Wayzata, MN, is the nation’s second largest private company, employs 158,000 employees worldwide and is involved in all sorts of agricultural operations: including grain, cotton, sugar, petroleum and financial trading; food processing; futures brokering; health and pharmaceutical products; agricultural services such as animal feed and crop protection; and industrial products including biofuels, oils and lubricants, starches, and salt.

The Wikipedia profile includes this note about Cargill’s political end economic views:

Cargill is an active proponent of free trade policies. It lobbied for China’s membership in WTO, as well as for increased trade with Cuba and Brazil. Cargill’s position is based on its strong support of neo-liberal economic principles. First, lesser trade barriers in countries where Cargill does business will lower prices on Cargill’s products, and likely increase their volume of business. Second, the decreases in the cost of food in developing countries theoretically result indirectly in higher income per capita but lower income for local farmers. Cargill benefits from increases in consumer income, because better-paid consumers become inclined to eat a diet higher in wheat, protein, vegetable oil, and processed foods. This improves opportunities for Cargill to sell its products. Cargill’s economists have reasoned that this is true of the lower income countries in particular. As a developing country grows from $1,000 to $6,000 in mean income per capita, Cargill expects the greatest profit growth from its businesses in that country.

Cargill has maintained a 100% rating on the Corporate Equality Index (CEI) released by the Human Rights Campaign since 2003.

Other random facts:

- It is responsible for 25 percent of all United States grain exports.
- It supplies approximately 22 percent of the United States domestic meat market.
- The company exports more product from Argentina than any other company.
- It is the largest poultry producer in Thailand.
- All of the eggs used in McDonald’s restaurants in the United States pass through Cargill’s plants.

Want to see the same images that scientists at NASA use for their research or perform your own research with those images? Or do you want to see the Earth from the same perspective that astronauts see as they descend to Earth? How about taking a 5 minute break and viewing a panorama of a different city? Install WWT and start your explorations.

The WorldWide Telescope is a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.

Review at Astronomy.com:

With WorldWide Telescope, users pan left, right, up, down, back, and forward seamlessly — down to the full resolution of the available data. Users can view the stars and planets at any time and date from any point on Earth, explore the sky in dozens of different wavelengths, zoom into images by the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, or see Mars from the Opportunity rover’s point of view.

“Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds and then cross fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” says Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the way we view the universe.”

Download now, download page.

Windows XP & Vista only