Month: July 2008

Jupiter

Jupiter is in the news again, this time because its “Baby Red Spot” – a storm less than 1 year old – appears to have been swallowed up by the massive storm known as the Great Red Spot. This is good occasion to share some of the best photographs of Jupiter and its larger system of rings and moons, as seen by various probes and telescopes over the past 30 years.

2012-10-29: Meanwhile, Jupiter has a hurricane 3x the size of earth that has been going on since observation began 400 years ago, and likely much longer.
2015-03-28: What keeps the Spot together physically?

I am speculating that the Red Spot is, from top to bottom, 50-70 kilometers tall. From side to side, it’s 26k kilometers. So it’s a pancake. Just like with a tube of toothpaste, if I squish the pancake with high pressure at its center, something is going to squirt out the sides and top and bottom. It’s known that the Great Red Spot has a high pressure at its center, but its gases don’t go squirting out horizontally from its sides because of the Coriolis force in those directions—instead they squirt out vertically from the top and bottom. So, what can prevent the gases from squirting out vertically? The only way that I know to prevent that is if the top of the Great Red Spot has a dense cold lid of atmosphere above it. It’s that extra density that pushes the gases in the Great Red Spot back down. And, below the Great Red Spot, there must be a warm buoyant floor of atmosphere, and that floor prevents the high pressure center from pushing the gases in the Great Red Spot downward and out its bottom. That’s the balance.

2018-01-31: Nice!

Launched in 2011, NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter arrived in mid-2016, and the spacecraft maneuvered into a 53 day orbit around the gas giant. The JunoCam imaging instrument, 1 of 9 scientific instruments on board, has been returning red, green, and blue filtered images of Jupiter to Earth, and NASA is encouraging anyone to download, process, and share them. Citizen scientists like Seán Doran and Gerald Eichstädt have been finessing these images,—enhancing the existing contrasts and boosting the colors to create really amazing views of our solar system’s largest planet. Cloudtops pop into view, swirls and structure and depth become more apparent, and the enormous roiling atmosphere seems almost within grasp.



2019-05-20: And now the red spot is changing:

Around the world, amateur astronomers are monitoring a strange phenomenon on the verge of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (GRS). The giant storm appears to be unraveling. “I haven’t seen this before in my 17-or-so years of imaging Jupiter

2022-07-25: JWST has a nice picture of Jupiter’s ring. This was news to me.

Astronomers know that Jupiter’s upper atmosphere is 100s of degrees hotter than the lower atmosphere, but they aren’t sure why. By detecting infrared light, JWST could see the heated upper atmosphere shining; it appears as a red ring around the planet. “We have this layer a few 100 kilometers above the cloud decks, and it’s glowing because it’s hot. We’ve never seen it like this before on a global scale. That’s an extraordinary thing to see.”
Also visible are Jupiter’s thin ring and its icy moon Europa shining brightly on the left. A small atmospheric disturbance, visible on the planet’s bottom edge, is caused by an interaction with the volcanic moon Io.

We knew the web was big

We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26M pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the 1B mark. Over the last 8 years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion unique URLs on the web at once!

IMP Gate

Stan has figured out a way to implement all logic functions without negation. 2-terminal devices are much easier to assembly on the nanoscale, using simple crossbars of metal, and/or self-assembly techniques. It is easy to implement all logic functions using only NAND or NOR gates, but not with just an AND or OR gate. He found the premise for this in a 160 year old philosophy book, and he calls the new gate IMP.

Earth Nervous System

He aims to develop a panoply of microscopic-scale nanotech devices that will be able to measure essentially anything – and at low cost to boot. Viruses, bacteria, the chemical composition of molecules, vibration, moisture levels, particular sounds – these are just some of the things that the super-cheap devices he envisions will be able to detect. “A very tiny laser would light up and we could look at the optical spectra of chemicals. Each one is like a fingerprint, with a unique spectral identity. That would be a single universal detector.” Though a laser capable of such a task would today cost around $100, they can eventually be produced for about 10 cents.

the planet-scale sensorweb is coming. baby steps towards the angelnet. An angelnet is any all-pervasive distributed processing supervision and safety infrastructure.

Perl App Engine

I’m happy to announce that the Google App Engine team has given me permission to talk about a 20% project inside Google to to add Perl support to App Engine. To be clear: I’m not a member of the App Engine team and the App Engine team is not promising to add Perl support. They’re just saying that I (along with other Perl hackers here at Google) are now allowed to work on this 20% project of ours out in the open where other Perl hackers can help us out, should you be so inclined.

what a waste of time.

Hong Kong vs. NYC

New York City is raw, and that’s certainly part of it’s overall charm, but city rawness comes with highly unpleasant smells, sights and sounds. Hong Kong is so wealthy, and it’s so manicured that the raw element is greatly decreased leaving a clean, efficient and tightly run city. Perhaps if I wasn’t so addicted to nature, I’d be more in love with New York City. But for me, I’d choose Hong Kong any day over New York City.