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Election Security Risks?
Platohagel: If an election were to take place, and computers are used to tabulate votes, could these computers be broke into to increase fake votes for a candidate? It has been with some consternation that security concerns around a voting process in the United States had been voiced at some length, and some libelled had…
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Justice and Moral Excellence
Socrates: Ah, my dear friend Platohagel, the written word holds great power. Let us weave our dialogues into the fabric of wisdom, capturing the essence of our discussions for those who seek enlightenment. Platohagel: Yes it would be nice to weave our dialogues. Socrates: Indeed, Platohagel, the art of weaving our dialogues into written form…
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Geodynamics
Mean Gravity Field Image credit: Unless otherwise noted, images are provided by University of Texas Center for Space Research and NASA On planet Earth, we tend to think of the gravitational effect as being the same no matter where we are on the planet. We certainly don’t see variations anywhere near as dramatic as those…
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Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna
View of amplified effects of a + polarized gravitational wave (stylized) on eLISA laser beams / arms paths. Detector noise curves for LISA and eLISA as a function of frequency. They lie in between the bands for ground-based detectors like Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) and pulsar timing arrays such as the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA).…
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It’s Final Endgame for GRAIL’s Twin Spacecraft
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6uPddiIbpc?version=3&f=user_uploads&c=google-webdrive-0&app=youtube_gdata&w=560&h=315%5D The mountain where the two spacecraft will make contact is located near a crater named Goldschmidt. Both spacecraft have been flying in formation around the moon since Jan. 1, 2012. They were named by elementary school students in Bozeman, Mont., who won a contest. The first probe to reach the moon, Ebb, also…
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GRAIL’s Gravity Tour of the Moon
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/grail/20121205/GRAILtour20121205-640.swfEmbedded video from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology This movie shows the variations in the lunar gravity field as measured by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) during the primary mapping mission from March to May 2012. Dialogos of Eide
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Gravimetry
Gravity map of the Southern Ocean around the Antarctic continentThis gravity field was computed from sea-surface height measurements collected by the US Navy GEOSAT altimeter between March, 1985, and January, 1990. The high density GEOSAT Geodetic Mission data that lie south of 30 deg. S were declassified by the Navy in May of 1992 and…
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Grail At the Moon
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmJxR6axyAM%5D Grail Recovery and Interior Labratory NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL)-A spacecraft successfully completed its planned main engine burn at 2 p.m. PST (5 p.m. EST) today. As of 3 p.m. PST (6 p.m. EST), GRAIL-A is in a 56-mile (90-kilometer) by 5,197-mile (8,363-kilometer) orbit around the moon that takes approximately 11.5…
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Space Geodesy
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFUJoxKgfGU%5D Project manager Stephen Merkowitz talks about his work with NASA’s Space Geodesy Project, including a brief overview of the four fundamental techniques of space geodesy: GPS, VLBI, SLR, and DORIS. Learn more about space geodesy at: http://space-geodesy.nasa.gov/ This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?11031 Space Geodesy provides positioning, navigation,…
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Core Optics
A pair of polished Advanced LIGO end mirrors (ETM’s) Core optics are the 40-kg masses that form the heart of a LIGO detector. A core optic is manufactured from fused silica, polished to a few nanometers of smoothness and coated with dozens of layers of optical coatings. The result is a tuning of the balance…
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Geodesy and geophysics
Mean Gravity Field Anomalies by definition would require that we understand something about our selves that we did not know before, in that the whole history of you, is a large synopsis of everything that thinks and breath? Imagine indeed that such a vast resource could defined you as in some book to know that…
