Yesterday’s announcement has been expected for the past few months, ever since problems with a second reaction wheel were first detected, but that doesn’t make it any less unfortunate. It was well known that Kepler‘s days were numbered and the recent safe mode event taking place under such circumstances should have probably made everyone realize that we were truly looking at a matter of days, but I think most were still hoping that it’ll somehow continue to function and bring us new and interesting discoveries for at least a while longer, if not even until a successor will be launched to take its place.
Now that two of its four reaction wheels have failed, the spacecraft will need to resort to thrusters to stabilize itself, which in turn require fuel, making the solution temporary at best. According to the team, the fuel reserves could still power the thrusters for months, but in order to buy even more time to look for a solution, they have decided to switch the spacecraft to a fuel-saving behavior, allowing certain variations in position and obviously making any data collection completely impossible in order to ensure that the fuel will last for years, during which time they might either stumble upon some method to properly mitigate the effects of the existing problems or, failing that, find some other way in which Kepler may continue to be of use, possibly for other projects.
At the same time, the mission itself, which is funded all the way to 2016, will certainly not end here. It may have recently produced our best find yet, but it was known from the beginning that many, if not most, discoveries will be made after the spacecraft will cease to function and that is very likely to be the case, seeing as the team stated that they still have some two years of data not yet completely analyzed, not to mention that confirming planets requires even further observations once the candidates are clearly identified in the data from Kepler. After all, the number of confirmed planets currently stands at less than 5% of the number of planet candidates while it was estimated that a minimum of 80%, and probably 90% or more, of the identified planet candidates will be confirmed as planets once properly analyzed.
It needs to be remembered that we’re talking about a relatively low-cost mission, the spacecraft therefore never having been likely to continue operating long past the end of its primary mission, which was in November, and that there have been issues to mitigate even before that, in order to keep it operational even this long. But this is what science is facing these days, when it seems that preserving an outdated, failed and terribly harmful economic system is far more important, so all I can do is thank the team and all the others who were and will continue to be involved in the effort for their hard work and dedication and look towards the future, waiting for the next discoveries and developments.
This will be a real rush job and in fact I originally had another quick rant in mind, but I noticed an article last night that should probably be read and taken into consideration by more people. Not that the matter of certain major environmental organizations having certain financial interests that, on closer inspection, don’t quite seem consistent with their stated goals is unknown, of course, but it needs to be better understood and put in the proper perspective.
One obvious danger is to blow it out of proportion and consider that all such cases prove that those organizations are in fact merely taking advantage of the increasing support enjoyed by environmentalism in order to reach certain nefarious goals that obviously have nothing to do with it. There are plenty of conspiracy theorists that have long accused some of these organizations, and I remember The Nature Conservancy, WWF and I believe also Oceana being specifically mentioned in various such rants, so there’s definitely too much of that going around to add to it even more, but at the same time giving them the full benefit of the doubt and ignoring the matter entirely, as plenty of environmentalists seem to do, is a major problem in itself.
The fact of the matter is that, considering how the world currently works and the fact that they can’t afford to wait for us to fix society before doing something for the environment, these organizations need money to operate, and the major ones need quite a lot of it. As such, on top of donations, they will try to fund themselves to some extent, which means that they will be investing and looking to earn a good profit in order to continue to do their job. Under these circumstances, while it’d obviously be ideal if such organizations would have no dealings with the corporations that harm the environment, the question becomes who profits more as a result of such investments, because there may well be cases when such a move will improve their chances to do good significantly more than it’ll improve the dirty corporation’s chances to harm.
Still, the article in question reveals a worse problem than the fact that the investments exist, and that’s the lack of transparency turning into highly suspicious secrecy when it’s specified that certain organizations have also refused to answer when specifically asked about their investments. If any independent group or organization is to be able to analyze whether the environment, the organizations or the corporations in question benefit the most as a result of such investments, then all the relevant information needs to be public all the time and the organizations in question must also be completely willing to answer any specific questions that may be asked of them as a result. Of course, it would help if they’d know that they won’t be seen as traitors of the cause for the very existence of these dealings, irrelevant of the findings of any independent analysis, but once they decide to take such a course of action, that’s a risk they’ll have to take, because when they also try to keep it a secret then it’s obvious that something’s wrong.
I do believe that I’ll end up writing two personal posts this week, unless something really kicks me into action, so let’s just assume I already went over the part where I feel sorry for myself and say I can’t get anything done and keep this short and to the point, shall we?
There was a brief storm Saturday evening and that resulted in dad’s LAN port apparently getting burned out. There were probably only five or six lightning strikes, the first three or four seemed a safe distance away and the one that seemed too close for comfort was followed too quickly by the damaging one for me to react. When I noticed only a couple of seconds between lightning and thunder, I meant to unplug the “in” cable from the switch, but I was writing the previous post at the time and wanted to at least finish the sentence I was in the middle of at that particular moment and the next, and last, strike came before I could do that. The storm simply died out after that, but the damage was done.
It didn’t seem nearly as bad as it was some three years ago and apparently no other equipment was affected, as I still had Internet access, my computer didn’t register anything and, while the LEDs on the switch acted somewhat oddly until I reset it, no other ports got burned out. However, dad’s computer turned off, obviously to protect the other components, and the LAN chipset was no longer seen by the system after it was turned back on. Thankfully, everything else seems to be in order, at least for the time being, and we already had a LAN card lying around since he wrongly thought that something similar had happened to his old computer, quite a few years ago, so I could simply put that in and fix the issue, and also use the opportunity to install my old IDE HDD in there too, so he’ll have a backup now as well.
On an entirely different note, since our government is determined to change the Constitution and people may offer their input until, I believe, May 15, I kept thinking that I should do something somewhat more official than just occasionally rant to one or two people about how I’d want it to be changed and send a rough overview of some of the proposals to a member of the Parliament that I follow and who asked for such suggestions when the public consultations started. Since I didn’t so far and now the deadline is quickly approaching, if I’m not wrong about it and it even passed already, it seems quite unlikely that I’ll manage, but I said we should assume that I already went over the part where I say I can’t get anything done, right?
I did already send a proposal to change article 35, which has to do with the environment, to an NGO that asked for such proposals for “a greener Constitution” until May 8 in order to send them in an aggregate and properly edited form by the deadline, so it can’t be said that I didn’t do anything, but now I’m working through the rest and find it about as disheartening as I thought it’d be, which is why I didn’t do it earlier. Still, I should at least manage to go through the parts not covered by that overview I had sent before to that member of the Parliament, and seeing as that had to do with political and administrative matters and the changes listed there were pretty much the exact opposite of what the government wants, submitting proper proposals for them will likely serve no purpose anyway. Of course, none of it is likely to serve any purpose, but getting involved should be a requirement for obtaining the right to complain of the outcome, right?
Remember WikiLeaks? Remember the banking blockade they’ve been under since late 2010? Well, it would appear that they have finally managed to find a judge with enough of a backbone to neither bow down to the pressure nor accept the bribes of the powers that be, as Valitor, formerly known as Visa Iceland, has been ordered on April 24 to resume processing on-line donations to WikiLeaks within two weeks. Of course, if the interests behind the blockade are powerful enough, I imagine this may yet be overturned and the fine of $6830 per day paid until it happens, but it’s definitely a good start and a signal to all the companies that take part in the blockade that the tide is turning. At the same time, there’s the obvious possibility that this was simply allowed to happen just because so much time passed and the matter was almost forgotten, so legally maintaining the blockade was probably starting to be more trouble than it was worth, seeing as the support WikiLeaks still enjoys is only a tiny fraction of what it used to be and any donations they may receive are also likely to be rather insignificant, but that doesn’t make it any less of an opportunity.
It’s obvious that the whole thing is no longer a story for the media, and likely not for the vast majority of the people who were once interested in it either, myself included, as I only happened to find out about this from the Access newsletter. I somehow highly doubt I’m in the minority when I say that, in part due to the attitude and views noticed in many of their posts, in part due to their apparent inability to accomplish anything else, whether for themselves or for Bradley Manning, and in part due to the conflict between my growing dislike of Julian Assange and the fact that they don’t seem to have somebody else to pick up the banner and therefore supporting him is still necessary for the cause of whistleblowing in general and of WikiLeaks and Manning in particular, I had simply pulled away from the entire mess quite some time ago. However, it may well be time for all of us who have done so to look into the matter again, because there may be an important opportunity here and it should not be wasted.
I have recently found myself going down what for me is a highly unusual YouTube rabbit hole, namely looking for older Romanian songs, or occasionally newer songs by old Romanian bands and singers. I now seem to be out of that mood again and back to occasionally glancing with growing apprehension at the one hundred or so names on my list of bands, the vast majority of which fitting with various degrees of certainty into the female-fronted symphonic metal genre, that I think I should look into more closely at some point, but it started from looking for various older Romanian love songs that I probably hadn’t heard since the ’90s. I gave up on that after being repeatedly disappointed by the poor quality of the lyrics when compared to what I’m used to now, but then I ended up at Pasarea Colibri and Phoenix, so I was quite surprised when I happened to see that a free concert in the memory of Florian Pittis, the main act of which obviously being Pasarea Colibri, will take place in a nearby park.
The concert was scheduled for Sunday at 7 PM, so it was quite clear that I’ll be out later than I’ve ever been since I got thrown back here, but since having any interest in listening to anything in Romanian is so highly unusual for me and the type of music was highly unlikely to attract a troublesome crowd, I thought I’d take advantage of the opportunity and can’t say I regret anything about that, despite only getting back at 11:20 PM. The last, and I think only, time I’ve been to a concert was around the year 2000, or probably even earlier, when dad took me to some crap organized by a radio station, and the warm, relaxed and friendly atmosphere present Sunday was entirely unlike anything I remember from back then. I mean, if I was there alone, well after dark, and still felt reasonably comfortable among the several thousand people who attended, it definitely must have been a nice crowd.
Moving on to the unpleasant part of this post, if it ever rose above that level in recent months, my confidence in my computer’s stability is definitely back at zero as of yesterday, when I suddenly found myself staring at a blue screen while just listening to music and reading a thread on a forum. Seems to quite clearly be a software issue, as apparently error code 4A almost always is, and the listed culprit was BitDefender, but a few quick searches revealed that, while this error was usually caused by faulty or outdated hardware drivers before, various antivirus products, including even Kaspersky, have been causing it with increasing frequency in recent months. So I sent a support request and all I can still do now is wait for a reply and see if it happens again… But I somehow doubt they’ll do much to fix what’s probably an unusual issue with the 2011 version of their program, which is the last usable one, before they took away pretty much all customization options, when they’ve been working on BitDefender 2014 for months now.
