Franken, news, the Moon, ...

1. Minnesota candidate for Senate, Stuart Smalley, tonight on the Late Show with David Letterman: "Republicans run for office claiming that government doesn't work, and then they get elected and they prove it."

2. That's what we call the news.

3. Today (3/28) I saw a really interesting talk about the Moon. Specifically, about Transient Lunar Phenomena, or TLPs –

Ever since the invention of the telescope, and even for a while before then, some people who have stared at the Moon for long enough have occasionally seen flashes of light. The TLPs haven't occurred just anywhere – it looks like only about 10% or less of the Moon's surface has experienced these flashes. In recent years, there has been increasing evidence that at least some of these TLPs might be related to outgassing events.

See, the Moon has a (very thin) atmosphere that probably consists largely of gas that sometimes bubbles up from its deep interior. Sometimes when this gas bubbles out, it might flash brightly enough that Earthbound observers notice it as a TLP.

A team from Columbia, led by Arlin Crotts and Cameron Hummels, is building a dedicated lunar monitor that will live at Cerro Telolo and will photograph the Moon every 0.1 seconds ad infinitum (while the Moon is visible in its field of view). Within a year or a few years they will have an unbiased data set that is of superior sensitivity to the entire prior history of human observations of the Moon.