A better analog might be, suppose someone said in testimony

I buried all my documents in a box out in the desert.

Could they then be compelled to provide the location if police searches turned up a blank? Seems like they could.

Of course, if you are willing to go to jail and wait it out, the "compulsion" is never forever, Seems like that might depend on just what's in those documents.

You do not have to participate in the opening of your safe. A locksmith or torch can do that without you.

Your encrypted documents, on the other hand, may not be crackable without your help.

Note that courts seem to feel that Iris-scans, fingerprints, etc., are not "testimony," and so are not protected. That's something to keep in mind if you wanted to purely rely on biometric keys for your encryption.

IANAL, and this is not legal advice.

Building three unfathomably massive anti-tornado walls would count as the infrastructure project of the decade, if not the century. It would be also be exceedingly expensive.

If it is not exceedingly expensive, it's not the infrastructure project of the century.

Franson's theory cannot be right, as it disagrees with the solar system tests of General Relativity

His Equation 18 predicts a change in the gravitational red shift by a factor of 9 alpha / 64 for photons, where alpha is the fine structure constant (~ 1/137), so the correction is ~ 1.08 x 10^-2. The gravitational red shift has been tested, by GPS and also by Gravity Probe A, with an accuracy of a few parts in 10^-4 (see Figure 3 in that reference). This excludes the Franson correction, and so his theory cannot be correct. Since the Shapiro delay also depends on the gravitational redshift, Franson's theory thus predicts a 1% change in that too, which is also much too large to be consistent with experiment (see Figure 5), again excluding the Franson theory.

So the theory is wrong, and the other problems I have with the paper are irrelevant.

When 1987A happened, it is fair to say that an enormous amount of attention was placed on those neutrinos - >> 1 paper per neutrino. The report of an earlier neutrino burst from the Mt Blanc LSD was discussed at length - see Arnett 1987 Table 1 for the time line.

The facts are these - the optical supernova could not be accurately timed, it wasn't bright at Feb 23.10 and it was at 2 / 23.443. The Mt Blanc LSD burst was at 2 / 23.12, while the other two detectors had a mutual burst at 2 / 23.316. Note that both neutrino bursts occurred before the optical SN was detected, and also that none of the other detected picked up the Mt Blanc LSD burst.

All of this has been known a long time, and numerous theories have been introduced to explain it.

- formation of a nlack hole (from the neutron star)
- formation of a quark star (from the neutron star)
- the Mt Blanc data were unrelated to the SN (that appears to be Arnett's viewpoint).

So, this is another explanation, and not a super compelling one to me. It will clearly never be proven from the SN 1987A data - the next such close supernova should have a lot of neutrino data, and maybe will resolve the issue.

"The Europa probe is likely ..."

That should be

"The Europa clipper probe is likely ..."

Stone Aerospace has some elaborate plans:

"When we speak of the Europa mission at our shop we are talking about going for the gold ring: landing on the surface of Europa; sending a nuclear-powered cryobot carrier vehicle through the ice crust; discharging a nuclear-powered 'fast mover' autonomous underwater carrier vehicle that has planet-scale range, and selectively launching a series of miniaturized, highly intelligent AUVs [Autonomous Underwater Vehicles] to go into the more dangerous areas (e.g. around black smokers, up into ice cracks, into corrosive chemical plumes) to search for and collect biological samples and bring them back to the mother ship,"

but I don't know anything about their comms plans. A german group plans to have a submersible return to the surface and then broadcast everything back.

I would strongly prefer to have a transmitter on the surface (sending either back to Earth, or to an orbiter somewhere), and use acoustic signaling, just as you would do with a deep submersible here on Earth. Problems with the "go back to the hole" plan include

- a failure on the return trip means no data comes back at all
- a good fraction of the under-ice mission time would be spent going back to the hole, or making a new one, rather than further exploration.
- if the submersible gets into trouble, or has to make a decision as to what would be best to sample/explore/go to next, Earth cannot help.

Of course, we know nothing of the acoustic noise level in Europa, so this might require a precursor seismology mission just make sure it would work.

That's not what NASA Planetary Protection thinks and, at least for US space probes, that's what counts.

Lots. Europa is in the elite Category III / IV of planetary protection, along with Mars and Enceladus,

“where there is a significant chance that contamination carried by a spacecraft could jeopardize future exploration.” We define “significant chance” as “the presence of niches (places where terrestrial microorganisms could proliferate) and the likelihood of transfer to those places."

The Europa probe is likely to get a little less scrubbing, significantly less than an Europan orbiter, but more than the Juno spacecraft, as, although it will be in a Jovian orbit going near Europa, it can be placed in a "safe" orbit away from Europa at the end of the mission. But, Europa orbiters and landers will get the full treatment.

By the way, even if Mars landers had some bugs, they were sterilized, which undoubtedly greatly reduced the total bio-loading, Just because you didn't wash your hands once before dinner doesn't mean you should stop washing them altogether subsequently.

A first mission would have a spacecraft orbit just 16 miles over the moon's surface, analyzing the material ejected from the moon, measuring salinity, and sniffing out its chemical makeup.

Actually, the first mission dedicated to Europa will be the Europa clipper, focused on Europa, but not in Europa orbit. The radiation near Europa is so intense (even for machines) that dipping in and out of the field in an inclined Jovian orbit will save about a billion dollars over going into a Europan orbit.

I expect better from someone in his position.

Yeah, but when you lead with a press conference, and then have to back-pedal, you are going to take a hit, and they have.

This is not a treaty, it is an "agreement," which would rely on "Fast Track Authority" to get through Congress, as a simple bill requiring a 50% majority, non-filibusterable and not subject to amendment. The FTA rules are structured to not allow any meaningful debate in Congress.

As it happens, FTA has expired, and a simple way to kill this BS would be to kill the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities Act of 2014 now in Congress to revive it.

You haven't been paying attention much, have you?

It is not particularly surprising, but it is, however, news. That unfortunately we have come to expect sleazy results from these "Trade Agreements" (which are not really about trade, and should properly be Treaties) does not mean that we can ignore yet another example of sleaze.