Christopher McKitterick's Blog, page 35

Astro-Porn of the Day: Perseid meteor as seen from space

Check this out! Astronaut Ron Garan was taking pictures of Earth from the window of the International Space Station when he got this shot of a meteor burning up in our atmosphere.


Click the image to see the Discover story

Whatta catch! How cool would it be to look down to see a falling star?

My total Perseid meteor count over three days was about 8 - not bad, considering the full Moon washed out most of them, and one was an amazing blue fireball.

How many did you see?

Next year, we'll only have a crescent Moon, so even us Earth-bound watchers will see more.

Chris

Perseids and hot rods

Just got home from watching the Perseid meteor shower from a building roof - saw a WOWZA blue fireball as soon as we got into position, then several more. A lovely way to spend the birthday eve of an astronomy-loving friend who just turned 30.

Earlier today, worked on the hot-rod Newport: pulled a valve cover, installed a driveshaft into the oil pump, and spun the pump with a drill while turning over the engine with a long ratchet - victory! The rocker-shafts are oiling properly (couldn't tell before). Also set up new (but 1966-Chrysler-font-matching) gauges to monitor oil pressure and water temperature, plus removed the old and installed the new sending units for said gauges. Cleaned up and painted the new radiator, and worked out a mounting strategy. Installed spark plugs. Installed distributor drive gear and distributor. Installed heater-core hose pipes. And mocked up the temporary exhaust so I can haul the full exhaust system to a local muffler shop for proper welded installation. Progress!

Tomorow: lunch with another friend and more Newport-building. Want to get it finished and streetable before the Greaserama auto show at the end of the month!

Chris

Happiness.

One definition of joy: a warm summer evening with friends that includes a chorus of cicadas, hot links grilled on a fire in the back yard, cool beer, some sparring, racing around a track, a few Perseid meteors, and swimming in Clinton lake beneath the waxing gibbous Moon and distant lightning with coyotes or foxes singing in the nearby forest.



Now THIS feels like vacation.

Chris

Astro-Porn of the Day: stars and fireflies. Also: Perseids this Friday!

Some loveliness appropriate to the time of year with a Kansas feel. The arcs are star-trails from a camera left on for three hours - you can feel the spin of the Earth. And those little green streaks? Firefly butts!


Click the image to see the APOD story.

And this Friday night (late) is the peak of the Perseid meteor shower:


Click the image to see the NASA story.

The only drawback this year is that we'll have a lot of Moon during the time the meteors are streaking through our atmosphere, so you'll only be able to see the brightest ones. Still, if you're looking for an excuse to camp beneath the stars this Friday night, there you go.

Chris

Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses how religions destroy civilizations.

This is a terrific talk, in which Tyson discusses the danger of "revelation replacing exploration." He uses the example of how the world of Islam went from being the intellectual center of the world in science and discovery during its "Age of Enlightenment," the 300-year period from 800 AD through 1100 AD to where it is today, when the Middle East has given us nearly no Nobel Prize winners and is full of strife and poverty. Why? Because they turned away from scientific exploration and embraced religion. Why would they give up the wonders they had developed? Because religious leaders like Imam Hamid al-Ghazali declared that "mathematics is the work of the devil." These people invented math, but the dangerous religious meme of anti-intellectualism destroyed their Age of Enlightenment and helped collapse their civilization.

Then Tyson turns the mirror on the US, where the same thing is spreading like a disease across our landscape. Good lord (so to speak), this is scary, something we've been watching march toward us for years (click here to watch if it doesn't appear below):



You don't need to be a genius astrophysicist to see where we're headed.

If you're religious, please talk to your fellow faithful about this danger. Keep the conversation going to drown out those who use the name of religion to oppose real education or devalue understanding. "Intelligent design" and anti-evolutionism, prayer in schools and religious arguments against legal rights - these things are exactly the same kinds of dangers to our future that Hamid al-Ghazali was to the great Islamic culture of the 12th Century. Use Tyson's example and ask your fundamentalist friends if the Islmaic world is better off since it turned away from science and growth, since it replaced exploration with religion. Ask if we would be better off if we did the same thing to ourselves. Especially express this to the most reasonable-sounding among them, because the radicals will play to their fears and faith and win in the end.

Those who worry about Islamic fundamentalism are right to worry, because such radicalism is the root of much terror and oppression and war in the world today. But I'm more worried about Christian fundamentalism, because those are the folks who are the primary threat to Western world, especially in my own country.

Why? Not just because of people like Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. I fear we are treading the same path that the Islamic world stumbled down after al-Ghazali and his ilk.

Tyson nails on the head the number-one threat to humankind. Anything else, I believe we can deal with. Global warming? With enough research and creative energy, humans can find a solution. Vanishing easy sources of energy? Again, we'll find a solution if we have the intellectual and technological infrastructure to keep looking. Disease? Killer asteroids? Zombie apocalypse? I believe we can save the human species from any of these threats.

But only if our civilization promotes learning, investigation, and new ideas. Only if math, science, and creative pursuits are valued and respected will we remain capable of taking care of ourselves. If the West follows the Middle East into poverty and internescine strife, if we promote obsolete religious notions over scientific progress, if we look backward instead of forward - if we seek to be saved from outside rather than seek solutions ourselves, we're doomed as a species. Because we must find solutions to problems that will destroy the human species - and soon. If science and progress is considered a threat and a danger, we will not survive.

Science is not the enemy of religion; that is a meaningless distinction. Fundamentalist religion is the enemy of civilization, the enemy of the human species.

Chris

Cool thoughts on aliens by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Here's a great video by Neil DeGrasse Tyson covering a couple of super-cool notions that combine what most excite me about astrophysics and life. This is the essence of science fiction for me!

First up, he talks about how we are starstuff, made of the most common elements in the universe. The first part of that statement is pretty basic to everyone who's ever taken a basic astronomy course: All the elements in our bodies were first manufactured in the heart of long-dead stars, starts that went supernova billions of years ago, casting their guts into space, where their matter coalesced into our Sun and the Earth and all the other matter in the Solar System. The notion I hadn't really considered before is that our form of life - carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen - is likely the most common form of life in the universe, because those are the most common elements (excepting helium, which is non-reactive, so useless to life except for using to float around). We're not likely to encounter much advanced life based on, say, lead or arsenic. Much useful idea-fodder there for SF writers.

The other cool SFnal material - perhaps even more relevant for writers thinking about aliens - is that we are only 1% or so different from chimpanzees, and that's what makes all the difference between maybe being able to do sign language and building the Hubble Space Telescope. If we encounter aliens who are only 1% different from us in intelligence, they might naturally intuit the greatest mysteries on the frontiers of science, their toddlers might be able to do astrophysics in their heads like Stephen Hawking, whom they might put in front of their anthropologists who'd say, "Aw, isn't that cute! My little BillyE59X just did that in school today and I put his homework on the fridge" - the way we do display our kids' pasta art.

If we meet superior aliens, would they stop to have a conversation with us? Well, do you stop to have a conversation with a worm? A bird? Well, maybe you do, but you don't expect the bird to hold up its side of the conversation.

Good stuff. Check it out:



I've been watching videos by him for the past couple of hours, since getting home from running errands after my Dad left to return to Minneapolis (great visit by the way! We went to see Cowboys and Aliens and the Douglas County Fair demolition derby, among other things). TONS of wonderfully insightful yet simple and accessible thoughts, much as Carl Sagan was the voice of reason and wonder from my youth. How did I miss knowing about Tyson for so long? I guess this is the sort of thing one gives up by not having cable.

In short: Neil DeGrasse Tyson is awesome. The universe is awesome. Everything is awesome!

Chris

Astro-Porn of the Day: FLOWING WATER ON MARS!

Holy schmoly! NASA images show signs of water flowing on Mars... NOW! See this animated .gif and watch it yourself:


Click the image to see the NASA article.

See how the hillside goes from dusty to dark-streaked? The good folks at the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission identify this as from water flowing out of the hillside.

WHOAH! Thanks for the heads-up, normalcyispasse .

Chris

Summer grading = DONE!

Woohoo! And just in time, too: My Dad is coming for a few-day visit this evening, and tomorrow is the Douglas County demolition derby. FREEDOM! SUMMER CRAZINESS IS OVER! This means I get to work on my hot-rod Newport full-time for... a week or so! Then time to start prepping for fall classes.

What do you think: Should I totally ignore my KU email for the next week or two? Treat it like a real vacation?

Making writers into ROCK STARS.

WHO WANTS TO BE MY MUTHAF*%$IN' LITERARY ENEMY? Let's do it like the writer-heroes of old.


Click the badass photo of Ernest Hemingway to see the Terrible Minds article.

And who has a suggestion about I can most appropriately rock-star myself? I ain't afraid of THE MAN.

(Hilarious article, by the way. I feel a book-burning coming on...)

Chris

Fukushima disaster's radioactivity 30x worse than Hiroshima bomb.

According to this Japanese researcher, the amount of radioactive pollution from the Fukushima catastrophe is 30 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb, and even worse, the radioactivity is about 100 times longer-lingering than the fallout from that bomb. He estimates it'll cost many trillions of yen to clean up, and the efforts that organizations - including his - are making now to do so are illegal due to esoteric bureaucracy. But what really gets him furious is the Japanese government's apparent negligence in allowing children to go to school and play in severely contaminated areas.

Thanks, TEPCO, for making such reliable and safe reactors.


(Click the CC button to read an English translation.)

I can't even imagine what this is doing to the Japanese people, their culture and national identity.

Chris