Kepler-22b is a newly confirmed exoplanet, orbiting a Sun-like star 600 light years away from Earth. The exoplanet sits in the “habitable zone”—a range of orbits around a star that are, based on what we know about life on Earth, most likely to provide the right conditions for life to happen.

That is pretty damn cool. But it does not mean there must be life on Kepler-22b. As Phil Plait explains on the Bad Astronomy blog, there’s a lot we don’t know about this exoplanet yet, and “within the habitable zone” is not a guarantee of habitability. Case in point: Our solar system. Earth is within the Sun’s habitable zone. But so are Mars and Venus, and you may have noticed that they are not especially teeming with life.

Kepler detects planets when they transit their star, passing directly in front of the star, blocking its light a little bit. The bigger the planet, the more light it blocks. The astronomers going over the data determined that Kepler-22b is about 2.4 times bigger than the Earth. The problem is, that and its distance from its star are all we know. We don’t know if it’s a rocky world, a gaseous one, or what. It may not even have an atmosphere!

Another good post to read on this subject is Matthew Francis’ explanation of “habitability” on the Galileo’s Pendulum blog. Even the statement, “Kepler 22-b is within the habitable zone,” comes along with a lot of assumptions that may or may not turn out to be true.

The following factors are needed to calculate whether a planet is in the habitable zone: The temperature of the host star: the hotter the star, the more it emits light of all wavelengths … The size of the host star: a large star emits more light from its surface simply because there is more surface area … The albedo of the planet: how much light gets reflected back into space … Hand in hand with albedo comes the composition of the planet’s atmosphere—if it has one.

When we say Kepler-22b is in the habitable zone, we’re assuming that it has the same atmospheric composition and albedo as Earth. We don’t know that. And it’s a big leap, bearing in mind (again) that there’s not even another planet in our own solar system that shares those characteristics.

I swear, I’m not a fun-hater. Kepler-22b is awesome. Just keep it in context and know that there’s still a lot we don’t know about this thing.

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Potentially habitable exoplanet: The fine print

As head of the Senate’s privacy panel, Senator Al Franken has spearheaded the investigation into Carrier IQ’s potential violations of multiple federal statutes. Now, he’s requested AT&T, Sprint, HTC, and Samsung explain themselves as to what data, exactly, they’ve gathered using the program. They’ve until December 14th to respond. [Electronista] More »

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Senator Franken Continues Taking Names in Carrier IQ Inquest—Ass Kicking to Begin Shortly [Carrier Iq]

We’ve all — and by ‘we’ I mean my more inebriated co-bloggers at last year’s Christmas party — would like to avoid being photographed while relaxing in public. So this beer holder developed by the Argentine ad agency Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi could come in handy. When a sensor built into this beer chiller detects a flash, it emits its own flash in order to overexpose any photograph:

The agency says the device, which has so far only been planted in regional bars, is a real product that has been field tested and actually works. “We placed several beer coolers in different bars in the North of Argentina,” says Maxi Itzkoff, executive creative director at Del Campo. “People took lots of photos that ended up being blurry beyond recognition and then uploaded them to social media anyway.”

Link -via Glenn Reynolds

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A Beer Holder That Blocks Incriminating Facebook Photos

Most people who make a lot of rice swear by rice cookers, but food blogger Darya Pino (and me, actually) have had mixed experiences. So, instead of relying on inconsistent rice-cooker results, Pino set out to find how to cook perfect rice without a rice cooker. More »

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Cook Perfect Rice Without a Rice Cooker (and Store It for Quick Reheating) [Food]

Microsoft today released Service Pack 2 for its Exchange mail, calendaring, and contacts server. In addition to the usual bug fixes and stability improvements, the service pack introduces new support for “hybrid deployments”: Exchange 2010 installations that are partially on-premises, partially in the cloud.

Hybrid deployments were first introduced with the RTM release of Exchange 2010. They allow companies to migrate from on-premises Exchange installations to cloud-based ones in a piecemeal fashion. In a hybrid deployment, mailboxes, calendars, and contacts can reside locally or in the cloud; Exchange will ensure that messages are routed appropriately and shared data is available to users of both systems.

Service Pack 2 introduces a new configuration wizard to ease the configuration and creation of these hybrid deployments. The wizard enables the relevant hybrid features, such as mailbox migration between cloud and on-premises installation, and performs the necessary configuration to connect the local Exchange to the cloud one.

Such features are all part of a broader Microsoft strategy to get customers migrated into the cloud. As ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley reported last month, Microsoft is building the tools to help customers both build private clouds, with improved virtualization and management facilities, and migrate from private installations to public clouds.

These developments are in turn making sense of Steve Ballmer’s oft-repeated claim that Microsoft is “all-in” on the cloud. Cloud offerings such as Office 365 and Azure are not some mere afterthought: they’re central parts of Microsoft’s platform offering, and it wants to make it as easy as possible for customers to migrate to them.

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Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 streamlines cloud migrations

The iLIDmk1 is the first Kickstarter (and, as of this weekend, Kickstarted) project by a Darren Inglis and Simon Dunn-Vaughan, a couple of Aussies who were looking to reduce their “everyday carry“—despite the fact that their product is, indeed, yet another iPhone case, which would ostensibly add to the contents of your pockets (à la George Costanza).

The twist? The iLIDmk1 allows an otherwise overburdened fellow to shed the weight of his wallet: it’s a hybrid iPhone case and wallet, which holds a couple pieces of plastic, some folded slips cotton and a small piece of metal—a.k.a. credit cards, cash and a key. In the interest of forgoing leather trifolds and keyrings, Darren and Simon have devised a polycarbonate iPhone case with a hinged compartment, measuring in at a mere 17mm thick and 30g.

Designed for a payload of two cards, key, cash and the ability to serve as a kickstand. The iLID-mk1 met with international interest after being featured in Macworld on the strength of rapid prototypes.

Bearing the MK-1 embossed on the front as a nod to the Apollo missions and aerospace pioneers such as Chuck Yeager.

See the pitch in full on their Kickstarter page and pre-order one for $30.00 ($9.95 off the $39.95 MSRP at launch).

Still, I’m sure there are some people who have reservations about a sort of 2-in-1 solution for all of their valuables… any thoughts?

(more…)

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A Step Towards Mobile Payment & Keycard for the iPhone, Sort Of

SharkLaser writes “Mozilla’s future looks uncertain. Last week Chrome overtook Firefox’s position as the second most popular browser, the new versioning scheme is alienating some Firefox users, and now the advertising deal between Mozilla and Google, the one that almost fully funds Mozilla’s operations, is coming to an end. One of Firefox’s key managers, Mike Shaver, also left the company in September. ‘In 2010, 84% of Mozilla’s $123 million in revenue came directly from Google. That’s roughly $100 million in funds that will vanish or be drastically cut if the deal is either not renewed or is renegotiated on terms that are less favorable to Mozilla. When the original three-year partnership deal was signed in 2008, Chrome was still on the drawing boards. Today, it is Google’s most prominent software product, and it is rapidly replacing Firefox as the alternative browser on every platform.’ Recently Mozilla has been trying to get closer with Microsoft by making a Firefox version that defaults to Bing. If Google is indeed cutting funding from Mozilla or tries to negotiate less favorable terms, it could mean Mozilla’s future funding coming from Microsoft and Bing.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Will Firefox Lose Google Funding?

Take the Stroop Test: Look at the 1st set of words and say aloud the color of the letters that spell out each word. Now look at the 2nd set of words and say aloud the color of the letters that spell out each word. It takes longer for most people to complete the 2nd task, because the words spell out a different color than the actual color of the words. (This image is from Wikipedia.)

I’ve known about the Stroop Test for long time, and I expect many people are familiar with it. But here’s an interesting use of the Stroop Test that I learned about last night while reading an interesting book called Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney: “the Stroop task became a tool for American intelligence officials during the cold war. A covert agent could claim not to speak Russian, but he’d take longer to answer correctly when looking at Russian words for colors.”

Wikipedia has an article about a related test called the emotional Stroop test: “depressed participants will be slower to say the color of depressing words rather than non-depressing words. Non-clinical subjects have also been shown to name the color of an emotional word (e.g., ‘war’, ‘cancer’, ‘kill’) slower than naming the color of a neutral word (e.g., ‘clock’, ‘lift’, ‘windy’).”

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How to find out if someone who claims not to speak Russian really can speak Russian

Anthony Bowyer-Lowe created Techno Is The Word, which generates techno loops based upon the text you feed it. [via Metafilter]

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Enter a word, get fresh techno