Low Cost Healthcare

Here we have a third party attempt to inject a simple program on health insurance into the debate.  It seems to be largely modeled after the Canadian experience which has worked well enough for forty years.

Critically, they have understood it is necessary to pass administration downstream to the states.  This is totally necessary.  At the end of the day you have a single payer system however long it takes.  You have lost competition in one sense that must be found in another sense.  This way the fifty plus states and territories are competing with each other to optimize the system.  The first constraint comes from the least prosperous who must pay attention to costs and management.  That disciplines less troubled states to keep the pressure on.

Even more important is that this removes political responsibility from the federal level down to the State level.  I suspect that the actors in Washington have no appreciation for the grief they are opening the door to if they set up a government monopoly out of Washington.  This way the problem completely leaves their world.

The present regime has handed pricing control to an insurance monopoly who continues to drive pricing and costs all of which must accrue to their advantage.  That is why we are subjected to their bleating whenever it looks like we are close to having a working system.

I think that no one fully understands this.  The present regime has abandoned pricing to the insurance companies who are only competing for market share of the consumer’s wallets. They have only used whatever pricing power that they have to optimize their profits.  Their share of the pie is effectively fixed as a percentage so in their world they must expand the pie.  A thousand dollar charge out for a procedure is better for them than one hundred dollars for that reason.

Obviously they do best if they service a third of the population who can pay any price structure they can get away with.  Service costs avoided from the other two thirds passes instead on to the bottom line.  The Government gets the bill for the third of the population who cannot afford any level of insurance at the inflated pricing structure.  The other third simply are not covered.  This system has produced the highest per capita cost for health care in the developed world.

Remember then if you are paying health insurance your dollar represents the $0.75 needed to provide every American as good if not better health care.  Not only are you out of pocket the $0.25, but that one other citizen has not been served and your taxes are paying for yet another citizen.  You likely earned $1.50 in order to pay that $1.00.  Your $0.50 went to pay for someone else’s health care.

That this is wrong should be obvious.  That the business itself is operating with no risk whatsoever should also be obvious.  That this is possible only in a monopoly situation is a reasonable deduction.  It is bankrupting governments by bankrupting the taxpayer. It presently is the only financial system that seems to go on untouched by a severe recession.  Simply put, financial engineers have utterly gamed the medical payments system until it is staggering under its own weight.  As the decline continues, way more people will lose coverage than are acquiring coverage.  I do not know were this disaster will end up, but state level single pay systems are likely to start popping up.

Remember one thing.  The same product suppliers who sell you drugs and other medical supplies are selling exactly the same products in Canada, Mexico and throughout Europe at sharply lower prices and much, much cheaper in China and India.  I also see no creditable evidence that an average doctor is doing better financially in the USA than his counterparts elsewhere.  We are not talking about the stars here. We are talking about that chap in a small town somewhere who has trouble collecting his billings. The single payer system eliminates the cost of collection and unpaid billings for these folks.

When I was growing up, an old country doctor with an excellent reputation passed on.  He lived modestly and the bulk of his estate was in the form of uncollected bills. The single payer system that was then put in place ended that level of financial abuse. These chaps did their work as before, except that they then got paid.

The Low Cost Solution to Providing Healthcare

by  The Association of Mature American  Published on January 25th, 2010

http://www.amac.us/

Now that the “People’s Revolt” has reached Massachusetts with the election of Scott Brown as Senator, a sensible Health Care alternative plan must be found. Please take a look at how AMAC’s plan compares to the other proposals.

The AMAC solution provides changes in our Health Care System that will result in all citizens being covered.  It lowers the cost of medical care and does so within the free enterprise system.  It will cost approximately one-fifth (1/5th) of the cost of the plans presently being proposed in Congress.

There are five points to the plan.

First, the plan is administered by the states using their already existing Departments of Insurance.  No need to create eighty plus new government bureaucracies, as proposed in House and Senate bills.  The already existing National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) will create uniform regulations to govern health insurance programs. Exceptions would be allowed in certain states.

Second, coverage will be required for all, phased in over a four year period.  Individuals would receive tax incentives to help pay the cost.  Those eligible for group insurance would be required to join the plan and employers would pay a portion of the premium.  Tax credits would be given to employers according to a schedule.  A “basic” low cost plan would be available for low income households.

Third, pre-existing medical conditions would be covered.  Insurance plans could not stop payments because of use of the plans.

Fourth, costs would be reduced by:  Reforming medical malpractice lawsuits, establishing peer approved practice protocols to reduce unnecessary tests, allowing incentives to be paid to those who uncover Medicare and Medicaid fraud, encouraging hospitals to review management of their operations and finances (share cost saving ideas) and encouraging competition between providers of medical devices.  Further cost reductions can be achieved by providing incentives for the free market to expand its role.  For example, open low cost medical clinics (for minor illnesses) in stores like Wal-Mart, Sears, and drug stores.  This has already been started by some stores that offer very low prices for generic drugs.

Fifth, achieve massive savings from the Federal government by reducing its size.  As a start, six to eight of the Departments of the U.S. Government will be eliminated and merged into existing Departments.  The funds saved would be put into a separate account to be used to help defray the costs of health care. 

Likewise all government programs would be reviewed with an eye to eliminate or greatly reduce costs during this time of economic crisis.  If we are to provide quality health care for all our citizens, we have got to start making serious decisions.

http://www.amac.us/pdf/health_grid.pdf

Zapping Mosquitoes

It appears someone is beginning to take the human war on mosquitoes seriously.  The fact that it was so readily cobbled together is rather good news. It suggests that the next order of magnitude is possible and that works for me. 

The needs of the modern consumer are simple.  He wants to sit in his back yard in a fairly open place on a summer evening and relax with a beverage in hand.  It takes little to make him happy.

Lasers can protect a large cube around that consumer as a minimal design plan. 

Everyone else in the world wants the same protection, but right now a simple fifteen by fifteen by ten cube will satisfy plenty of paying customers who want their patios back for the whole summer.

Establish that market and the crest will follow naturally as need and funding dictates.

Using Lasers to Zap Mosquitoes

February 12, 2010, 9:16 AM

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

TED / James Duncan DavidAt the annual TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., Nathan Myhrvold presented a laser, built using common consumer electronic parts, that shoots down mosquitoes.

Can consumer electronics be used to combat malaria?

Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s former chief technology officer, thinks so. His company, Intellectual Ventures, has assembled commonly available technology — parts used in printers, digital cameras and projectors — to make rapid lasers to shoot down mosquitoes in mid-flight. If bed nets are the low-tech solution to combat the deadly disease — caused by a parasite transmitted when certain mosquitoes bite people — the laser is a high-tech one.

He gave the first public demonstration of the laser, which was cobbled together from parts found on eBay, at the annual TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., which features lectures and demonstrations by experts in a wide range of fields, including technology, politics and entertainment.

After hundreds of mosquitoes (which were kept in the hotel bathroom until showtime) were released into a glass tank, a laser tracked their movements and slowly shot them down, leaving their carcasses scattered on the bottom of the tank. While the demonstration was slowed down for public viewing, Mr. Myhrvold said that normally the lasers could shoot down anywhere between 50 to 100 mosquitoes per second.

Mr. Myhrvold played a slow-motion recorded video that showed what happened to a representative mosquito. As the insect flew, a sudden light beam struck it, disintegrating parts of its body into a plume of smoke. It fell, even as its wings continued to beat.

Mr. Myhrvold said the software detects the speed and size of the image before deciding whether to shoot. It would reject a butterfly or a human, for example, and more powerful laser blasts could be used for locusts. In regions afflicted by malaria, the lasers could be used to create protective fences around clinics, homes, or even agricultural fields as a substitute for pesticides.

The idea was born from a 2008 brainstorming session held on strategies for killing malaria-bearing mosquitoes, a particular interest of Mr. Myhrvold’s friend and former boss, Bill Gates, who has made the illness one of priorities of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (to the point that Mr. Gates released mosquitoes into the audience at last year’s conference).

The idea of lasers — a miniature “Star Wars” weapons system — was thrown into the mix. “Everyone was like, ‘C’mon, be serious,’” Mr. Myhrvold said in an interview after the demonstration. After doing a little bit of research, he said, his team concluded that “this is feasible. We can actually do it. So we did.”

The breakthrough relied on understanding how the technology that guides the precision of laser printing could be combined with the image-detecting charge-coupled devices, or C.C.D.’s, used in digital cameras and powerful image processing software. Mr. Myhrvold said he thinks there is particular potential in the Blu-ray laser technology, because blue lasers are more powerful than red ones and there are a lot of them being made cheaply now.

He estimates that the devices could potentially cost as little $50, depending on the volume of demand. However, his company would not manufacture them. Rather, it built the technology mostly as a proof of concept. (Among other things, his company is also working on cooking technology.) Other companies would have to take the laser technologies to market, so the timeline for seeing the lasers in common use is uncertain.

The laser detection is so precise that it can specify the species, and even the gender, of the mosquito being targeted. “The women are bigger. They beat at a lower frequencies,” Mr. Myhrvold said. Since it is only the female mosquitoes who bite humans, for the sake of efficiency, his system would leave the males alone.

Thoughts on the Antichrist

One of the hardest things for a citizen to understand is the objective nature of the culture he is a part of.  We in the West are as guilty of this as anyone anywhere. Outsiders observe the externalities of the culture but are rarely made intimate to the internal workings.  From that conflicts will naturally emerge that are mostly innocent.

We in the West live in a Christian culture that continues to be in formed by centuries of thinking on moral issues and related custom.  The only significant change that has occurred in the past century is that a lesser proportion of the population accepts the divinity of Christ.  Yet in terms of custom and moral codes that is irrelevant.  A divine is unnecessary to establish a natural code of conduct for our society as any Jesuit will be happy to prove.

Even communism simply adopted the code in place while attempting to make the State the divinity.  It was at its heart, a Christian heresy.

The Orient is informed by the teachings of Buddha in particular and this framework was arguably the foundation for the original teachings of Christ.  Again the divine aspect of these teachers are accepted less in our secular world while the moral teachings continue to inform social behavior.

The sole significant exception is Islam.  Its code of conduct is informed as a codification and exultation of barbarism at the heart of its scriptures.  It is no accident that the devout Taliban imposed abject slavery on all women within their society.  Our difficulty is that we cannot comprehend the warping of one’s mind that this achieves.

Recall the bright young boys in the Hitler youth who freely sacrificed their lives in the dying year of the Second War never breaking faith with their fuehrer. We know that if you are properly indoctrinated as a child that this is the natural outcome.  The majority will never rise above this.

I want my readers to understand a fundamental fact of Islam.  It eschews a moral code.  It is not a moral code at all.  It is indoctrination to submit to the authority of the prophet and his earthly minions.  Logical questioning is redirected to outright hatred of those who are infidels.  The recipient of this indoctrination may have faith in God but that was always secondary to the doctrine of submission. 

Yet the prophet in his actions is a consummate barbarian warlord whose excesses were awful and do not properly inform a civilized society.  He is the seventh century version of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, all of whom were informed by his methods.  We have yet to fully recover form the systems established by these three.

Hitler’s religion had to be extracted root and bough at the point of a gun.  Then it essentially withered in the face of economic prosperity and is today almost extinct.

Stalin’s religion collapsed economically and its remnants are presently withering in North Korea and Cuba.

Mao’s religion has expired in the face of rising overwhelming prosperity and is today an uncomfortable and brittle overlay on a society that is restoring traditional Confuciusist ethics or alternately similar doctrines including Christianity and Buddhism.

The Islamic religion merely has longevity as its raison d’être.  It is a doctrine that is a state based system as well as a presumed religion as are the other three.  Our error in the West is to write our expectations of our religious framework onto the forms of Islam.

We cannot imagine that adherents of this doctrine want to kill us and enslave our wives and children and think that this is right because we disagree with them and their right to do so.  Few may in fact be so vile, yet those that are find support in their scriptures for exactly this behavior and no one opposes them.  Once the rock starts rolling downhill, no Muslim will or can stand in its way.

The religion continues to shield abusive behavior among immigrants to the West and to indoctrinate their children with what is in our understanding immoral behavior and attitudes.

The hardest thing that Americans needed to overcome was their heritage of racism.  It is still not complete because it is difficult.  A parent has grown up believing and maintaining a set of racist beliefs.  It is in his daily language. This his child naturally adopts and unless social pressure is brought to bear, the parent will not correct his child when he parrots his parent.  Is it any wonder that these attitudes still linger?

All ethnic groups have a bit of that and parents must be careful in correcting the natural simplistic logic of these beliefs.  It is one thing to be proud of you heritage, it is quite another to hate the people living in the village down the road.

Understanding that the underlying barbarous doctrine of Islam is part of a child’s early education also informs us of what must happen to resolve these conflicts.

The victims are powerless to halt the process but the west is far from powerless.  It merely needs the will.  Explaining this need is difficult not because of the need but our own willingness to forgive.

The underlying doctrine of Christianity is remarkably simple.  It is that you must respect your neighbor to even showing love.  Many find this hard to choke down but that is what we teach our children.  It is sufficient that this is the expected conduct, even when the actions of a neighbor force a more severe response.

The opposite of this doctrine is also very simple.  You shall hate your neighbor.  That is the doctrine of barbarism and all the aforementioned ideologies. It is, to attach a mystic symbolism, the doctrine of the Antichrist.  For that reason, devotees of Islam imbibe a poisonous brew of hatred of Jews and Christians from childhood on.  Apologists attempt to cloud this reality but that is a lie from a culture that accepts that it is morally acceptable to lie to a non believer in order to get under his guard.

The great challenge faced down by the modern west has been this ideology of hatred however packaged.  In western mystical terms hatred is the true doctrine of the Antichrist.  Wherever such hatred is exposed we must confront it and root it out. 

We have had victory over both Nazism and Communism.  We have largely freed their victims.  The cost of Nazism and Fascism was the death of millions.  The cost of Communism was two generations of enslavement for tens of millions.

Islam has enslaved its populations for centuries.  Their doctrines continue to economically strangle their societies.  Yet the doctrine remains so seductive that victims continue to be entrapped by it while living in the west.  It is not changing unless it is confronted with its shame and made to adopt western liberal policies and the language of hatred is expunged from their scriptures in the same way we do not tolerate the promotion of Mein Kampf.

We today have a chronic war against radical Islam that they can sustain if nothing changes for thousands of years.  There will always be ignorant horny young boys to recruit and brainwash and send into the fight.

It can all end by confronting the Islamic States with simple demands and ensuring their imposition.

            That religious instruction be removed from the formal education process.

That the incitement of hatred be removed from all scriptural and Islamic literature.

That all children participate in the education process.

That all religions have unfettered right to teach their doctrines.

It is time to stop treating Islam like it is a religion only.  It is also a State building ideology that also promotes hatred and war.  There may be a peaceful religious life way to be discovered and honored within Islam, but it will not emerge under the flags of hate.

Inside the Climate Bunker

The disintegration of IPCC ‘s vaunted authority  and the reputation of its leader is spelled out starkly here.

I simply do not see how they can plan to rebuild.  Their product is scientific credibility and they have been caught playing fast and loose to support an agenda.  Greenpeace does it better and no one actually believes a word they say for good reason.

India has outright bolted and most other countries are surely embarrassed. More shoes are going to fall.

The problem lies in the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize for its flawed efforts.  The illustrious committee has been quick to support what may be best described as politically correct and fashionable causes.  They often get it right.  Yet at time as they must, they get it horribly wrong also.

When an award is granted for a science, it has been long since subjected to peer review.  I suppose the IPCC was thought to be so acclaimed.  Today its advocacy has been publically exposed.  I wonder how you go about retracting a Peace Prize.

In fact, I wish the committee would abandon the annual presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize simply because there are few enough worthy candidates to support an annual presentation.   If instead nominees were reviewed and placed on a short list and not awarded the prize as insufficiently timely, then the benefit of promoting peace could be sustained.  It might even encourage a few to honor a treaty or two for a few years

Inside the Climate Bunker

How global-warming deniers are running circles around the U.N.'s top climate body.

BY CHRISTINA LARSON | FEBRUARY 9, 2010

Three years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.'s climate science panel. Now the IPCC head is under fire from critics for a catalogue of recent embarrassments: his initial kneejerk defense of the "Climategate" emails (Pachauri first questioned the motives of those who had hacked into the University of East Anglia's email system, then said there was "virtually no possibility" that IPCC findings were impacted), the fight he picked with the Indian environmental minister when the latter questioned certain data on glacier melt within India (Pachauri called  the government report's "voodoo science"), and the steamy soft-core novel, Return to Almora, he released last month (somewhere between memoir and fantasy, it features the sexual exploits of a 60-something globetrotting climate expert, and has scandalized an Indian public not accustomed to its masturbating scenes and erotic explicitness).

Few stars have risen and fallen so quickly as Pachauri's, who has gone from being an international climate hero to subject of increasing ridicule at home and abroad. Pachauri, an economist and former railroad engineer from a small town in the Himalayan foothills of north India, assumed his position at the helm of the IPCC in 2002. At the time, he had the enthusiastic backing of the Bush administration, which had grown tired of fielding industry complaints about his predecessor Robert Watson and hoped (wrongly, it turned out) that Pachauri would prove less vocal in his calls for carbon-reduction efforts.

But even as his credentials and honors stacked up -- from the government of France anointing him an "Officier de la legion d'honneur" to GQ India naming him 2009's "Global Indian of the Year" (FP even named him a "top global thinker" last year) -- Pachauri couldn't quite discipline his tongue. Or perhaps he didn't care what impression his verbal zingers left. In 2008, he told the Chicago Tribune: "I tell people I was born a Hindu who believes in reincarnation. It will take me the next six lives to neutralize my carbon footprint. There's no way I can do it in one lifetime."

But he attracted the most attention for barbs directed at his critics, calling those who've questioned IPCC reports "flat-earthers" -- "they are indulging in is skulduggery of the worst kind," he told the Financial Times-- and generally bristling at the prospect of unwanted scrutiny, without providing clear answers to valid questions about his stewardship.  ("My conscience is clear," he announced to the New York Times this week.) But while Pachauri's larger-than-life persona and propensity for conducting himself as though beyond reproach catches attention, these characteristics don't in and of themselves defame the organization he heads -- as much as global-warming deniers are happy to seize upon any opportunity to poke holes in climate science in general.

There is, however, at least one item in the recent round of Pachauri-bashing that does the U.N. panel no credit: a glaring error in an IPCC report about the date by which Himalayan glaciers are likely to have disappeared entirely. The underlying technical report of the panel's 2007 climate assessment  erroneously stated that by 2035 the glaciers would be gone entirely, when scientific consensus places the date much later (studies cited by the BBC project a date closer to 2350 -- more than 300 years later).

The 2035 date was an alarming, attention-grabbing finding -- and many journalists, including Stephan Faris last year in Foreign Policy, cited it as evidence that global warming is an urgent crisis. But, after the Indian government released its own report with conflicting glacier-melt data last fall, glacier scientists went back to the IPCC report and began to raise questions about the 2035 date. The chatter among experts was picked up in Science magazine last year, before spilling into the mainstream media, which has already been primed by the "Climategate" saga and a disappointing outcome in Copenhagen to turn climate-science disputes into heightened political narratives. (The initial error may have come because the IPCC cited a decade-old interview in The New Scientist which quoted a scientist mentioning the date 2035, as opposed to sourcing peer-reviewed scientific literature.)

With all the attention, one might think the IPCC would by now have a precise and consistent explanation -- or point to an ongoing investigation -- for how this error crept in. Alas.

It is telling that when I wanted to inquire about just how such an eye-popping error had made its way into the report, I was able to speak with the very the scientist responsible for coordinating that section, as opposed to a well-rehearsed communications officer. (Media savvy does not come naturally to the IPCC, a two-decade-old body charged with identifying points of scientific consensus among the growing body of expert literature on climate change. And even as the weight of the world rests on its shoulders, the panel still relies largely on unpaid scientists who volunteer their time.)

That scientist, Christopher Field, is director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology. His own work focuses on the carbon cycle, and he cochairs the working group responsible for the section of the IPCC assessment that deals with impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, including glacier melt.

If anyone has the wherewithal to identify precisely how the error survived the panel's extensive review process -- which involved soliciting more than 2,500 reviewers and experts, and more than 9,000 review comments -- it would be him.

Here is what he told me:

"That statement [about Himalayan glacier melting by 2035] is in the literature that the report cites, but it's not a statement consistent with other scientific information available ... It should not have made it into final report."

In other words, an outlier source was picked up by the chapter's authors. But what of the vaunted review process? With all the input and reactions from some so many scientific experts, did no one flag that item as questionable?

"No ... In principle, [our process] should have turned over every rock and leaf in the forest."

Interestingly, the error did come to light last fall, nearly two years after the report's initial publication, when competing glacier-melt data was released by India's ministry of environment and forests. That discrepancy quickly focused the attention of international glaciologists on both sets of data, and questions about the particulars of IPCC glacier data soon surfaced. (This, of course, raises the question of whether the IPCC's process for soliciting peer comments is targeting the right people.)

So when it became clear that a storm was brewing, how did the IPCC respond? Sloooowly.

The first rule of political damage control is to admit mistakes quickly and control the narrative, but the IPCC is still not accustomed to operating in the news cycle as opposed to on a more academic timetable. Field says that the brewing controversy was clearly on the IPCC's radar screen by Jan. 1, but that it then took until Jan. 20 for the panel to meet and put a press statement online.

"The IPCC is kind of slow responding," Field says. "It took two weeks to analyze the situation and get the statement on the website."

And now that the IPCC has acknowledged an error, what comes next?

"The IPCC does not have a formal error correction policy in place ... Historically the approach is to address [any errors] in the next assessment [due out in 2014], but in the current environment, where there is now a lot of connection to the news cycle, waiting for next assessment is not good option." He adds that it is a "high priority" to develop one.

David Victor of Stanford's School of International Relations and Pacific Studies says: "They [the IPCC] have kind of a bunker mentality -- it's not excusable but understandable."

In the time since the U.N. created the IPCC in 1988, global interest in climate change has risen dramatically, and so, too, the spotlight on and expectations for the scientific panel.  "The stakes and the pressure have both gotten higher," says Andrew Revkin, the longtime New York Times climate reporter and author of theDotEarth blog. "The IPCC was an experiment from the get-go -- there's never been anything like it ... it's still more of a 20th-century process than a 21st^-century process."

The ambition and global importance of the IPCC is growing, while its methods and resources are struggling to keep up. Confusion, not orchestrated bias or, as some have asserted, greed, seems the most likely cause of recent slipups. But with the fate of the planet in the balance, that's not good enough.

New Views of Pluto

This is an interesting observation of changes taking place on Pluto.  We learn that as far as she is away from the sun, it appears to still possibly be affected.

I wonder how much elemental carbon exists on the surface.  I anticipate a great deal.

In the meantime this is not a barren moon.  We have an atmosphere showing some unexpected behavior however thin it may be.

New Views of Pluto Reveal Weird Bright Spot 

By Clara Moskowitz

SPACE.com Staff Writer

posted: 04 February 2010

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto-hubble-telescope-views-100204.html

http://i.space.com/images/pluto-hubble-100204-01.jpg

The Hubble Space Telescope has returned the most detailed images of Pluto ever taken.

The new photos reveal the strange mini-world in near true-life color, close to what the dwarf planet would look like to an observer traveling toward it in a spacecraft, scientists said. The surface appears reddish, yellowish, grayish in places, with a mysterious bright spot that is particularly puzzling to scientists.

Some of the colors revealed in the new pictures of Pluto are thought to result from ultraviolet radiation from the sun interacting with methane in the tenuous atmosphere of the dwarf planet. The bright spot apparent near the equator has been found in other observations to be unusually rich in carbon monoxide frost.

"This is our best candidate, that it's carbon related," Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo. said during a Thursday teleconference.

The new images should provide "a real treasure trove of information in understanding the nature of Pluto and how it evolved and changes with time," Buie said.

Pluto is a world on the fringe of the solar system with three small moons called Charon, Nix and Hydra. It was discovered in 1930 by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, and was long considered a full-fledged planet. But in 2006, after much debate in the astronomical community, Pluto was downgraded to "dwarf planet" status, along with other cosmic bodies such as Ceres and Eris.

Scientist Mike Brown, professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., who as discoverer of Eris was partly responsible for this demotion, says not to feel too bad for Pluto.

"Pluto is a fascinating world and it doesn't really care what we call it," Brown said. "I think this is an exciting thing to see and an exciting thing to try to understand how the entire solar system works."

Pluto is the destination for NASA's New Horizons probe, a spacecraft currently on a course to fly by Pluto and its moons in 2015.

"It's about halfway there already and when its gets there we're going to get all sorts of great pictures and great data," Buie said. "But these [Hubble] maps have been used already to help plan the encounter.

When compared to older data from 1994, the new photos – taken by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys – reveal a surprising amount of change in the appearance of Pluto. Over that period, Pluto has gotten redder, while its northern polar region has gotten brighter and its southern hemisphere has gotten darker.

One reason for the variability, scientists say, is Pluto's highly eccentric – or oblong – orbit, which causes strong variations in temperature. Pluto takes 248 years to make a full orbit around the sun.

"Right now it's close to being springtime on Pluto," Brown said. "In the fall things will freeze out. It's just a ridiculously extreme place to be."

Since the dwarf planet is so small and so far away, it has been difficult to gather detailed data before. When New Horizons arrives, that probe should reveal even higher quality data. But until then, Hubble's vision is by far the best view we've ever gotten.

"This has taken four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to accomplish," says Buie, who developed a special computer program to sharpen the Hubble data.

The findings are detailed in the March 2010 issue of the Astronomical Journal.

 Hubble Catches Pluto Changing With The Years

by Staff Writers

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 5, 2010

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Hubble_Catches_Pluto_Changing_With_The_Years_999.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/images-lg/pluto-hubble-2010-lg.jpg

This is the most detailed view to date of the entire surface of the dwarf planet Pluto, as constructed from multiple NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken from 2002 to 2003. The center disk (180 degrees) has a mysterious bright spot that is unusually rich in carbon monoxide frost. Pluto is so small and distant that the task of resolving the surface is as challenging as trying to see the markings on a soccer ball 40 miles away. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute). Photo No. STScI-PR10-06a More images and captions at Hubble

___________

NASA today released the most detailed set of images ever taken of the distant dwarf planet Pluto. The images taken by NASA's Hubble SpaceTelescope show an icy and dark molasses-colored, mottled world that is undergoing seasonal changes in its surface color and brightness. Pluto has become significantly redder, while its illuminated northern hemisphere is getting brighter.

These changes are most likely consequences of surface ices sublimating on the sunlit pole and then refreezing on the other pole as the dwarf planet heads into the next phase of its 248-year-long seasonal cycle. The dramatic change in color apparently took place in a two-year period, from 2000 to 2002.

The Hubble images will remain our sharpest view of Pluto until NASA's New Horizons probe is within six months of its Pluto flyby. The Hubble pictures are proving invaluable for picking out the planet's most interesting-looking hemisphere for the New Horizons spacecraft to swoop over when it flies by Pluto in 2015.

Though Pluto is arguably one of the public's favorite planetary objects, it is also the hardest of which to get a detailed portrait because the world is small and very far away. Hubble resolves surface variations a few hundred miles across, which are too coarse for understanding surface geology.

But in terms of surface color and brightness Hubble reveals a complex-looking and variegated world with white, dark-orange and charcoal-black terrain. The overall color is believed to be a result of ultraviolet radiation from the distant sun breaking up methane that is present on Pluto's surface, leaving behind a dark and red carbon-rich residue.

When Hubble pictures taken in 1994 are compared with a new set of images taken in 2002 to 2003, astronomers see evidence that the northern polar region has gotten brighter, while the southern hemisphere has gotten darker. These changes hint at very complex processes affecting the visible surface, and the new data will be used in continued research.

The images are allowing planetary astronomers to better interpret more than three decades of Pluto observations from other telescopes, says principal investigator Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

"The Hubble observations are the key to tying together these other diverse constraints on Pluto and showing how it all makes sense by providing a context based on weather and seasonal changes, which opens other new lines of investigation."

The Hubble pictures underscore that Pluto is not simply a ball of ice and rock but a dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes. These are driven by seasonal changes that are as much propelled by the planet's 248-year elliptical orbit as its axial tilt, unlike Earth where the tilt alone drives seasons.

The seasons are very asymmetric because of Pluto's elliptical orbit. Spring transitions to polar summer quickly in the northern hemisphere because Pluto is moving faster along its orbit when it is closer to the sun.

Ground-based observations, taken in 1988 and 2002, show that the mass of the atmosphere doubled over that time. This may be due to warming and sublimating nitrogen ice. The new Hubble images from 2002 to 2003 are giving astronomers essential clues about how the seasons on Pluto work and about the fate of its atmosphere.

The images, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys, are invaluable to planning the details of the New Horizons flyby in 2015. New Horizons will pass by Pluto so quickly that only one hemisphere will be photographed in the highest possible detail.

Particularly noticeable in the Hubble image is a bright spot that has been independently noted to be unusually rich in carbon monoxide frost. It is a prime target for New Horizons. "Everybody is puzzled by this feature," says Buie.

New Horizons will get an excellent look at the boundary between this bright feature and a nearby region covered in pitch-black surface material.

"The Hubble images will also help New Horizons scientists better calculate the exposure time for each Pluto snapshot, which is important for taking the most detailed pictures possible," says Buie. With no chance for re-exposures, accurate models for the surface of Pluto are essential in preventing pictures that are either under- or overexposed.

The Hubble images are a few pixels wide. But through a technique called dithering, multiple, slightly offset pictures can be combined through computer-image processing to synthesize a higher-resolution view than could be seen in a single exposure.

"This has taken four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to accomplish," says Buie, who developed special algorithms to sharpen the Hubble data.

The Hubble research results appear in the March 2010 issue of the Astronomical Journal. Buie's science team members are William Grundy of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., and Eliot Young, Leslie Young, and Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Buie plans to use Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3 to make further Pluto observations prior to the arrival of New Horizons.