'Hardcore' is programming technology that hasn't even been invented yet.

Born in 1815, Ada was the sole legitimate child of the famed poet Lord Byron, though she would never have any sort of relationship with him.  Her mother, determined to purge any sign of dangerous poetical tendencies that the girl may have inherited from her father, was fanatical about her tutoring and ensured that her instruction in mathematics and the sciences began at an early age.  By the age of seventeen, Ada’s talent for mathematics had begun to make an appearance, and her passion for the field would remain with her for the rest of her relatively brief life.  It was around this time that she was introduced to the inventor Charles Babbage, and the two of them corresponded at length over various intellectual topics.  Ada was fascinated by Babbage’s two great works in progress, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine (an early model of the programmable computer).  Neither Engine would be completed within their lifetimes.

It's a Babbage!

Babbage generally did not write about his own inventions, and he lacked Ada’s ability to adequately express his vision.  He enlisted Ada to produce a translation of Luigi Menabra’s memoir on his Analytical Engine, suggesting that she augment the paper with a set of notes.  The resulting addition was longer than the translation itself, and included a description of an algorithm for use by the Engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers.  This algorithm is credited by some as the world’s first computer program.

There is some disagreement as to how much of the contribution was genuinely Ada’s and what belonged to Babbage, as well as whether the algorithm could correctly be considered the first program written for the Engine.  Nonetheless, there is little doubt about her talents as a mathematician.  And her contributions remain impressive given that they were made in an era when science and mathematics were still considered gentlemanly pursuits (and women were generally discouraged from participating).  Ada was also credited with greater vision than Babbage (who mostly viewed the Engine as a calculator), suggesting that such machines could one day perform far more general functions, and perhaps even create computerized music.

Ada Lovelace Day is all about celebrating women in science, technology and mathematics — swing on over to the website for more.

I was worried I’d miss out on the final launch of Atlantis – I had a company event to leave for at the same time as the scheduled launch yesterday morning, but thankfully the countdown proceeded with only a brief pause at thirty seconds, and then she rocketed skyward for the very last time.  She’ll rendezvous with the ISS to deliver supplies, and then, twelve days after liftoff, she’ll return to Earth for good.  And so will end the Shuttle program.

This isn’t the end of manned spaceflight for NASA, but it’s emotional nonetheless.  For the next several years, they will be dependent on the Russians to bring astronauts into orbit, until private companies such as SpaceX are able to pick up the slack.  And at the same time that the Shuttle program is retired, other important programs are perched precariously on Congress’ chopping block (perhaps most unbelievably the JWST — Hubble’s successor, and currently in its final stages of completion before launch in 2018).

The uncertainty is disheartening.  But fans of space exploration are familiar with facing the unknown.  What will come next?

Tonight, NASA will be sending their final transmission to the Mars rover Spirit, who hasn’t been heard from since March of last year.  Easily the popular favourite of the two Martian rovers, the aptly named robot lost use of a wheel in 2006 (requiring her to drive backwards across the rocky terrain while dragging the useless limb), and eventually became permanently stuck in the loose soil in 2009.  A long and heroic effort to extract her was unsuccessful, and unable to orient herself on a sunny slope in preparation for the Martian winter, she likely succumbed to the intense cold.

Originally designed for a three month mission, Spirit and her sister rover Opportunity have been exploring the surface of the red planet for over six years.  Opportunity is still active, and will be joined by the next-generation rover Curiousity in 2012.  I’m a big fan of the Martian rovers — as beautiful as images may be of Jupiter and Saturn, Titan and Enceladus, it’s the eerily Earth-like surface of Mars that never fails to give me chills.  I have to wonder if future human explorers will ever lay eyes on Spirit‘s final resting place.

There were a number of reasons that led me to choose my current place of residence.  Primary among them was the view of the Speed River and its thin strip of woodland habitat, where Osprey would come to fish and the songs of Red-winged Blackbirds and Yellow Warblers would sometimes trickle across the noisy street (important for someone accustomed to far more rural accommodations).  But another reason was its front-row seat to the late summer roosts at Silvercreek Park, and the spectacular natural display that accompanies it.

They begin to gather as early as July — blackbirds, grackles and starlings, though mostly the latter.  Sometimes several hours before dusk, hundreds of birds will appear on the hydro pylons, whistling and squabbling and socializing.  As summer wears on and the days grow shorter, the birds arrive later and later, taking available of as much foraging time as possible before returning to the evening roost.

By October, their numbers have climbed from hundreds into thousands.  They swarm about the pylons like insects, jostling for position on they hydro lines as each seeks to keep a well-defined buffer zone between themselves and their neighbours.  Large flocks rise up again and again and swirl in the skies above.  The noise becomes deafening.  Sometimes, a Cooper’s Hawk will cruise through, contributing to the mass unrest among the birds.

And then, quite suddenly, the entire flock will rise thunderously into the air.  The thousands of little black birds now become a single liquid organism, banking and flowing, splitting off and merging.  It’s an awe-inspiring and complicated pattern, and researchers have spent a lot of time attempting to model the behaviour.  As it turns out, you can closely simulate the dynamics of a starling flock by making each individual entitiy follow three simple rules:

1. Keep a minimum distance between yourself and your immediate neighbours (don’t run into anyone).
2. Match your speed to your immediate neighbours (keep up with everyone).
3. Constantly try to manoeuvre yourself into the perceived centre of the flock (protect yourself from predators).

It’s not clear why starlings perform these massive aerial displays outside of the breeding season.  The socializing that occurs at large roosts may be of immense benefit to individual birds — a bird that did not feed well that day could follow more successful birds out the next morning to a food source, and you are statistically less likely to be picked off by predators during the night when there are thousands of other potential targets all around you.  But the displays themselves (sometimes lasting until well after sundown) remain a mystery.  And when they are over, the entire flock spirals down into the trees, and all at once the roost becomes still and silent.  As if nothing had happened at all.

I don’t know why they do it, but I’m glad to able to witness this incredible phenomenon every evening.

This data shows that Kepler will be sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized planets, once her planet seeking begins in earnest.  Most of the over 350 known extrasolar planets are broiling gas giants, but little rocky planets like ours are predicted to be more numerous.  They’re out there, and Kepler will find them.

And once we do … then what?

We can use what we know about a star to determine where its habitable zone is — that Goldilocks region of not-too-hot and not-too-cold needed for liquid water to be present.  We can determine approximately how old the system is, and thus whether or not there’s been enough time for life to evolve.  And once we have a good candidate, we can do something like what LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) did last week when it turned its instruments to Earth:

LCROSS: Near-infrared spectrum of Earth (NASA).

LCROSS: UV/Visible spectrum of Earth (NASA).

Yes, it’s more graphs. No pretty animation to accompany them this time, but this is still pretty cool.  These are measurements taken by LCROSS’s spectrometers, showing the spectra of our planet’s reflected light.  There’s lots of methane (CH₄), and ozone (O₃), and carbon dioxide (CO₂), and other things you can find on plenty of lifeless planets.  But there’s also oxygen gas (O₂), which is something you generally don’t find unless there’s some process continually producing it.  Oxygen is unstable, and it gets eaten up pretty quickly by various chemical processes, but here on Earth we have organisms to replenish it. Which brings us to something else showing up in this spectral analysis — a signature that could be attributed to the large amount of vegetation that covers the Earth’s surface.

This is why science is just so damn cool.

Voyager I approaches Jupiter (NASA).

We’re accustomed to seeing photos of Jupiter as a beautiful but silent orb, and yet here it is, chaotic and tumultuous: a living planet, with gushing arteries of atmospheric clouds surrounding the swirling vortex of the Great Red Spot (a massive storm system several times larger than the Earth itself).

Voyager I and her sister ship, Voyager II, are still out there, thirty years later.  Still talking to us.  Still travelling.  What would you see, if you had an eternity to wander the vastness of space?

Photo: NASA

The Earth, as a tiny pale dot caught in a shaft of scattered sunlight as seen from the Voyager I spacecraft, at a distance of six billion kilometers away.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
– Carl Sagan, 1996

Here’s one of my favourites, from the 2008 conference:  Joshua Klein on the impressive intelligence of the common crow, and the inventive way in which he put that intelligence to good use for the benefit of both human and bird.

Photo: MBARI

Wow.  Now I know what my reef tank’s been missing.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) has just released images of this incredibly bizarre fish, which looks as though it were flown in from Yugopotamia.  And yes, that’s a transparent head.  This deep water species is able to swivel its barrel-shaped eyes upward and peer through that soft dome, giving it a nice wide field of view while remaining otherwise stationary.

Swing on over to the MBARI site for some video footage.

Homage to Archaeopteryx: perhaps the world's most famous fossil.

I’m watching an episode of House, where our delightfully snarky protagonist is having a conversation with Thirteen regarding his atheism:

“Where’s the fun in that?” asks Thirteen.  “A finite, un-mysterious universe…”

“It’s not about fun,” House replies.  “It’s about the truth.”

He’s right, of course.  A true skeptic is not concerned with the reality he wants; it’s the reality that presents itself that matters.  But Thirteen’s objection touches on a quality commonly ascribed to a world that operates only by natural law: a world without mysteries, without wonder, and whose most intricate mechanisms, once deciphered, render it dry and uninspiring.

2M1207b orbiting the brown dwarf 2M1207: one of the first candidate extrasolar planets to be directly observed. Photo: Wikipedia Commons

Yann Martel, in his Life of Pi, is highly dismissive of agnostics, deeming them unworthy of consideration.  “To choose doubt as a philosophy of life,” says Pi, the protagonist, “is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”  (I have issues with this very critical misunderstanding of what agnosticism is, but that is a rant for another day.)  However, the real argument that Martel is trying to put forth is one that allows us to consciously choose to accept a theistic world view, even when it does not follow from what we have observed.  When faced with two possible explanations where the correct one cannot be known, why should you not select the more fabulous of the two?  The allegory here, of course, is the quest for faith in the face of reason.  To equate faith with the better story, however, is a matter of perspective.

Engineering by AI: A tiny space antennae designed through genetic programming. Photo: NASA

The natural world provides us with explanations that none of us could have predicted, and that exhibit a complexity that we may never be able to get our heads around.  Religious explanations of our world — however they may contribute to spiritual wellbeing — are comparatively simple.  You can become lost in the task of contemplating the infinite (whether it be physical or metaphysical in nature), but reality holds far more mysteries than this.

The scientifically minded are portrayed as without awe or an open mind, who describe the world in a dry, unimaginative and precise vocabulary.  Which is odd, because none of us feel this way.  Nearly every day I’ll be watching a report or reading an article or catching up on my favourite science blog and find myself saying, “Now that’s cool!”  The simplistic explanations of theism and the supernatural that some would hoist on reality are at best not an explanation at all, and they deny the world its intricacy, its complexity and its elegance.  We have discovered things that turn common sense completely on its ear, that no one had the creativity to even imagine, and it is fascinating.  And we can discover these new things for all of eternity.

Elysia chlorotica, a sea slug that captures solar energy by stealing both chloroplasts and genes from the algae it eats. Photo: PNAS

So here’s to those who don’t halt at a proclamation, who move beyond to seek out reality and the wonder of the universe.  And to those whose discoveries will always give me another reason to pause and marvel at the miraculous thing that is our world.

Happy Darwin Day!