Of course, 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, and half-way through this important year, we’ve seen some amazing feats of science. We’ve been fixing telescopes in orbit, assembling space stations, peering deep into the cosmos with a vast suite of telescopes, we’ve acquired new and improved techniques to analyse data and we’re on course for even bigger discoveries in the run-up to 2010.
So this evening, I receive word from science comedian Brian Malow that he hosted a TIME.com video all about Galileo and the history of astronomy.
It’s superb!
If you wanted a one-stop overview of the spirit behind IYA2009, this is it. It’s witty, informative and above all, it’s entertaining — all the things this special year for science should be about.
Wow, look at that title for some keyword stuffing! Stuffing… get it?
Phoenix? Turkey? They're both birds, so it's close enough (M & Y PORTSMOUTH)
The Telegraph: bedrock of traditional journalism, pinnacle of UK news reporting– I’m sorry, I can’t finish that sentence, I’m too busy crying with laughter.
Seriously. I mean, seriously. Sure, everyone needs to remain competitive in this ultra-fast world of social media and transient online traffic, but there’s a lot to be said for keeping your integrity too. In this master stroke of continued patchy reporting from the UK’s Telegraph we have a serious ‘news’ report about a crop circle, that depicts the Phoenix flying from the ashes. Or is it a turkey?
What could this possibly mean? Oh yes, I might have guessed. Obviously it means the world is going to end on December 21st 2012. What a coincidence, those Mayan fellas have been saying the same thing all along. Now we have crop circles? And crop circle enthusiasts telling us it’s the end of the world? Holy crapcakes, doomsday really is coming. I’ve been such a fool.
The saving grace about this article is that it hasn’t been filed under ‘science’, unlike the “Mars Skull” hilarity a few weeks ago. But that’s the article’s only saving grace.
I’d understand if there was a little scepticism in the tone of the report, or perhaps a little light-hearted banter about aliens and their fetish for bending corn, but unfortunately this is an article that jumps to one huge conclusion:
Crop circles = Doomsday
It really is that simple. Reading signs in bent corn has been the fodder for doomsday theorists for as long as there have been doomsday theories and this report does nothing to challenge that. Is it really that hard to find a skeptic/scientist/logical thinker in Wiltshire these days?
I might be missing something here, but where’s the link between these crop circles and doomsday in 2012? That’s right, there isn’t one.
And I’m now certain that crop circle depicts a turkey…
Source: Telegraph.co.uk(YES, I know! The sodding TELEGRAPH!)
Here’s an idea to get more funding for NASA: destroy Mars before the China gets there first. What an epic feat of human ingenuity!
If you think about it, the proposal makes perfect sense. Build a vast militarized space agency network throughout the US; get the government to heavily invest in R&D; task scientists with a decade-long Mars Manhattan Project to come up with a plan of how to dissect the Red Planet gram-by-gram and then build the most awesome weapon the worl– the Universe has ever seen! Forget the playful Death Star, this thing will eat planets for breakfast!
I’m thinking either a massive laser or a huge burrowing fusion bomb… or trillions of regolith-munching nanobots. (I like the idea of nanobots.) Once this planet killer is built, it will be sent to Mars by 2020. This time, the deadline will be met, if NASA has infinite funds available for this audacious plan, they will build the Mars Marauder in a decade. This is how it works; flood the project with stupid amounts of cash and we will succeed. NASA will stimulate an entire industry, the US will be industrialized once more! Everyone will have a job, private contractors will be in a frenzy and Elon Musk won’t be able to sign SpaceX-NASA contracts fast enough!
Best of all, that worrisome Chinese space agency will give up their plans for space domination, we can relish in the joy that we’d won Space Race 2.0 before it even started! Why the hell haven’t we thought of this before?!
*STOP*
It’s OK, I haven’t gone all megalomaniac on you, I was just inspired by a comic on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. The premise is that NASA science proposals bore congressmen. However, throw in a bit of pizazz and they start to listen, hence my mini rampage just now. Actually, reading the Mars Marauder proposal, it kinda makes sense. Just swap out the planet-killing bit, and we’ll have a means to actually land scientists on Mars… the reason behind this excellent comic:
I’m no stranger to abusive emails, but I thought I’d share a run-in I had with a particularly angry reader during the week.
Now, why would I be receiving hate mail? You might think it has something to do with my campaign of 2012 smack-downs last year… perhaps it’s an angry author of a doomsday book? Or a prominent religious figure with an axe to grind? Perhaps it’s the guys who think the LHC is going to put a continental-sized divot into Europe?
No, no and nope (although the last one would have been fun, I haven’t heard from them for ages; it’s as if I’ve lost touch with an old friend).
Actually, this particular example of email rage came from a very rare subset of Internet critic, the determined-and-possibly-half-way-intelligent-troll. Not content with flinging abuse around in blog comment boxes, this type of individual will read something, and then come hell or high water, they will hunt the author down to give them a piece of their mind.
The reason why I think this guy is possibly-half-way-intelligent is because he can spell. And he doesn’t spout his alternative theory or type in all-caps. Plus, he uses few exclamation marks. His message was short, sweet and left me in no doubt of what he thought about me:
Subject: The sun is BORING!?
Next time you write about the sun, can you try not to sound like a 15 year old? And thanks for educating me on global warming, I’m sure the sun has a negligible effect on the Earth’s climate…
Actually, next time you write about the sun, DON’T.
–Aaron
Now Aaron, tell me how you really feel.
I hold my hands up in defence. Yes, I did say the Sun was being boring, but that’s not quite the same as me saying, “the Sun is boring!” now is it. I’m not going to throw down the ‘but I’m a solar physicist and I actually have a clue card’… oh, I think I just did.
Although I usually assign these kinds of messages to the trash (when I was in my 2012 prime, I was getting up to 10 of these types of email a day, only with f-bombs, and “!!!!!!1“s), I found this one curious.
It was obviously relating to the op-ed article I did for the Discovery Space Wide Angle this week, but this guy had to do his research to find Astroengine.com and consequently use my email form. Is this a new mainstream breed of critic that I haven’t been exposed to before? Do people really have this much time on their hands?
So my conclusion is, I don’t think he liked my opinion about global warming, or he really does think I write like a 15 year old. Well, it takes one to know one. When you grow up to be a 16 year old Aaron, read my articles again will you? And yes, I do forgive you, it’s okay, consider this strike one.
Sitting here at my laptop, like I do most of the time, I see the same stuff on my desk day and night. Occasionally I clean it, but most of the time it’s a mess of the highest order.
If I walked away from my desk, I probably wouldn’t remember what I have on it. I suppose it’s one of those “I remember it like the back of my hand” moments, when you really have no clue what the back of your hand actually looks like. It’s familiar, why would your brain need to remember it anyway?
So, the other day I gave this some serious thought: What item do I have in my life that I, a) can’t live without, b) I take totally for granted and c) I’ve had for a long time.
First thought was my Swiss Army knife. I’ve had that for many years, I take it for granted, but I could live without it. Second thought was my wallet; I take it for granted, but I’ve only had it for a couple of years and, to be honest, I leave it at home most of the time, stashing cash and credit cards into my back pocket. What about my laptop? Nope, I never take it for granted (after seeing the death of many a good computer). My cellphone? Nope, I get through so many phones it’s not funny.
So what else is there? Could I really coast around life without that vital item? Is there anything that fulfils a), b) and c)?
She's been a patient friend
Then I saw it.
The one thing that has sat on my desk for nearly two decades, ready for action, always reliable, necessary, but woefully taken for granted. My Casio fx-82D (FRACTION no less), my first, and only, scientific calculator…
I’m going to start this story with an interesting fact. To my recollection, I’ve only replaced the battery twice. I received my fx-82D some time between 1989 and 1992 for a birthday from my parents, and being a budding scientist I was overwhelmed (it is a scientific calculator after all). So nearly two decades later, to remember replacing the battery twice is astounding.
The first thing I ever typed into my Casio. Probably the last thing I typed in too.
It’s not as if I haven’t used it very much either. Not only do I have a problem with numbers, mental arithmetic comes hard, so I have to use trusty old Casio for pretty much everything.
I remember calculating my shopping budget in 1998 during my first week at university; I remember using it to calculate the number of holes there were in the ceiling tile above my head during a particularly boring religious education class in school (I remember being amazed that there were 40×64 = 2560 holes); then there’s the countless exams, thousands of hours sitting in the library studying for finals (instinctively I just used Casio to quickly calculate how many hours there were in a year, just in case the “thousands” of hours in the library didn’t sound reasonable) and huge amounts of time debugging calculations in thousands of lines of code during my PhD.
The fingerprints of ancient calculations
I may have achieved a lot in my academic life, but a huge portion of my success is down to the countless key strokes on my fx-82D.
She’s also been my partner in crime on a few occasions.
Did I really just say “she”?
There’s a funny story from my days in college when I was studying for my A Level in physics. For some strange reason, I couldn’t remember unit prefixes (such as the value of nano, micro and pico)…
In my defence, the bulky “graphical” calculators that were popping up in school pencil cases that my classmates were using had functions that could automatically abbreviate the exponential number into a unit. So I didn’t feel so bad scoring a mini conversion chart into the aluminium casing with my compass in the front of the calculator. To this day, you can read:
m-3 μ-6 η-9 ρ-12 f-15
She even has her rear tattooed with my name. Dedicated.
It almost looks like mini hieroglyphics. In truth, I don’t think I ever had to use it in an exam situation, but at least I know it’s there, just in case.
All in all my Casio fx-82D FRACTION has been my constant, reassuring mass of two-decade-old microchips, printed circuit boards and basic liquid crystal display. She’s developed with my in my personal mathematical development and calculated everything from shopping lists to complex partial differential equations. She’s shared my voyage of calculating the density of pubs per person in my university town, to arriving at a solution for the final temperature state of my simulated quiescent coronal loops just before I handed in my PhD thesis for review.
If the last two decades are anything to go by, I wonder just how much longer I’ll be using this calculator. Is it the item I hand down to my grandkids? Or, like the Hubble Space Telescope, eventually need too much refurbishment to continue being of much use and then decommissioned?
Did I really just compare my Casio to Hubble?
Long may she continue being that one item I can’t live without, I take for granted and long may she continue to calculate equations no matter how complex or routine.
You remember last month’s fuss over a certain component of the International Space Station, don’t you? You know, the NASA node-naming competition that a certain US comedian managed to dominate, ultimately winning the popular vote to name the node after himself? Come on, you must remember? The vote that NASA ultimately decided wasn’t very suitable and went with “Tranquillity” instead? Ah yes, that competition!
Although space scientists are not so keen on naming components of the space station after Colbert, zoologists don’t have the same concerns about naming something after a living person. Two entomologists, Quentin Wheeler at Arizona State University and Kelly Miller at the University of New Mexico, have named a Venezuelan diving beetle after him, the mighty Agaporomorphus colberti. This is in honour of Colbert’s 45th birthday on May 13th.
Although it is great to be named after a small creature that enjoys paddling in the depths of South American ponds, I wonder if it’s any match for being named after an orbiting running machine for astronauts? After reading the honours list in the beetle world, I think I’d still prefer to have the unique privilage of astronauts saying, “I’m off to the COLBERT to stave off any muscle wastage…”
The pair have named beetles to honor the late rock ‘n’ roll legend Roy Orbison and his widow Barbara (Orectochilus orbisonorum); for fictional “Star Wars” character Darth Vader (Agathidium vaderi); and for former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (Agathidium bushi, A. cheneyi and A. rumsfeldi).
Agathidium vaderi? No way! Can I get one as a pet?
Still, good for Wheeler and Kelly. They’ve drummed up some interest in diving beetles and created some popular media attention for their area of science.
What does this have to do with space? Not a lot, just thought Agaporomorphus colberti sounded cool.
It’s one of those occasions when you’re not sure whether you should laugh… or hold back your giggling because you realise you’re witnessing some very well produced train-wreck TV.
Oh yes, it can mean only one thing, Walter Wagner is back! But this time, the media came prepared.
Yes, it was the Jon Stewart Show, and yes it was satire, but this time the joke was on the crackpot notion that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could actually cause harm to the world.
Now, Wagner has been caught out and been made a fool of. Although I hate to see anyone in this situation, in this case, I think it is needed. Wagner only has himself to blame. He started these doomsday theories, now it’s up to mainstream comedy shows to debunk his authority on the subject.
Hold on, did he ever have an authority over physics? Oh yes, that’s right. No, he didn’t. He used the media as a tool to gain attention.
This just came in from the Telegraph, apparently Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has spotted a random skull on the Martian surface. This is obviously the only interpretation… as we know what an alien looks like, don’t we? Big head, big eyes, pasty grey skin. Something like this? Or, more likely, like this? Or this? Wow, it could be any one of them.
However, it’s not quite that exciting.
It’s a rock, as you may have already guessed. And no, the Telegraph isn’t taking it seriously either. (Although The Sun’s microreport could be taken either way.)
Although the newspaper’s article resembles a badly conditioned April Fools gag, there is one glaring error, well two actually. No, three.
Firstly, Spirit is not a camera – it’s a whole robot with a camera attached (called the Panoramic Camera, or Pancam for short). If it was just a camera, could you imagine the movie location costs?
Second, I’m not sure why this was filed in “Science News”. It obviously needs to be filed under “It’s a Slow News Day, We’ll Report Anything”.
And thirdly, I seriously doubt this image got “space-gazers talking”. When I last looked at one of Opportunity’s panoramic shots, I could see all kinds of strange things in the Mars dirt. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I’d love poking around the shapes and shadows, thinking I could see skulls, flying hubcaps and mysterious plant-like features. But I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I’m a “space-gazer”, but I’m not “talking”.
As it’s late, I’ve given up trying to find the source of the article (no links – come on Telegraph, if you’re gonna play blogging for the day, at least reference your lead!). Apparently some “UFO hunters” were being serious, but then joking, about this rock that looks like a skull. So, what the Telegraph is really trying to tell us is:
A stone. On Mars. Might look like a skull. Doesn’t really. Even ufologists don’t take it seriously. So it’s not really news. Move along.
I’m not suggesting the Telegraph isn’t a good newspaper, on the contrary, but really, what’s the point?
Why did I even bother to report on this? Oh yeah: It’s a stone that looks like a bunny skull. Now try explaining how a rabbit got up there…
Just when I was getting bored of the endless stream of 2012 doomsday hype (tripe), my interest was suddenly reinvigorated when I saw this advertisement:
2012 Calendar Magnet
$2.99 + shipping
Our calendar magnet is a real 2012 calendar. So you can have it on the refrigerator for 3 1/2 years! The calendar magnet is 4.25 inches wide and 5.5 inches long. It is also very clear and easy to read (looks better than the picture above, but is smaller). The shipping cost within the U.S. is $0.79 and for International orders $1.89.
No way. Oh yes. Yes, they did! The most well-known 2012 protagonist website is selling doomsday fridge magnets depicting an Earth plus comet barrelling towards it.
Why is the term “failed star” synonymous with brown dwarfs? On the one hand, brown dwarfs lack the mass to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores. On the other hand, who said brown dwarfs were trying to be stars? Who ever said that becoming a star was the pinnacle of stellar living? Perhaps brown dwarfs are perfectly happy the way they are. In a world of equality and political correctness, brown dwarfs could be viewed as “over-achieving Jupiters”, or gas supergiants… Continue reading “Brown Dwarfs: “Over-Achieving Jupiters” not “Failed Stars””
astroengine.com 
