esiegel | January 29, 2010Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider! -George Carlin
Over at The Onion, I found this article about science on television, and I laughed too hard to not reproduce it here. (Link to original.)
Science Channel Refuses To Dumb Down Science Any Further
SILVER SPRING, MD--Frustrated by continued demands from viewers for more awesome and extreme programming, Science Channel president Clark Bunting told reporters Tuesday that his cable network was "completely incapable" of watering down science any further than it already had.
"Look, we've…
esiegel | January 28, 2010We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time. -T.S. Eliot
Yesterday, President Obama delivered his first State of the Union Address, and talked about a number of things that ranged from inspiring to disappointing. But one thing that didn't make it into the address was the rumor that NASA's Constellation program (including the Ares Rocket designed to launch crews) will lose their government funding.
(Please note: what follows is my opinion, and I take responsibility for it.) If this actually…
esiegel | January 27, 2010Blue flower, red thorns! Blue flower, red thorns! Blue flower, red thorns! Oh, this would be so much easier if I wasn't color-blind! -Donkey, from Shrek
Earlier this week, I introduced you to the Red Controversy, the observations recorded around 2000 years ago in Europe asserting that the star, Sirius, appeared red.
Now, taking a look at Sirius today, it is clearly not red:
And, based on what we know about stars, they don't change color on timescales that quickly. Many of you put forth some very good ideas, and I thank you for the comments. In fact, the most common one was the very first…
esiegel | January 25, 2010Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.
-Jules Feiffer
Last semester, I was teaching my introduction to astronomy class, and part of the coursework was that each student had to choose a unique research topic and write a research paper based on that topic. Topics varied from cosmology to relativity to the space program to individual planets, but one choice captivated me so much that I bring my version of it to you now.
Astronomy was, arguably, the very first science…
esiegel | January 24, 2010There are plenty of examples in the music world where a cover of a song is strikingly different from the original and still interesting. Take the song You Spin Me Round, which cracked the top 5 all over Europe and North America when Dead or Alive released it. (Click for video.) 15 years later, Dope released a cover of the song in a completely different style, with an incredibly different feel. Take a listen:
It's a pretty good cover. It's interesting to listen to, it's decidedly different from the original, and it's still instantly recognizable. But by time I get to the end of the…
esiegel | January 22, 2010To most outsiders, modern mathematics is unknown territory. Its borders are protected by dense thickets of technical terms; its landscapes are a mass of indecipherable equations and incomprehensible concepts. Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas. -Ivars Peterson
Those of you who know me well know that I have little love for math for its own sake, but that I prize it as an incredible tool to help us understand and quantify physical systems. This has incredible applications, from figuring out what trajectory will succeed in a game of…
esiegel | January 20, 2010I'm always happy to receive questions from those of you interested enough to ask them, and every once in a while one of them feels just right to write up an article about it. Today's comes from Brad Walker, who asks about the inside of gas giants. Specifically,
The question pertains to the insides of gas giants like Jupiter... My question is, supposing Jupiter is made of Metallic Hydrogen, and it was dragged close enough to the sun that its atmosphere evaporated, what would be left? How would it go from a very strange non-terrestrial core to a rocky body like CoRoT-7b? Why wouldn't the…
esiegel | January 18, 2010There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened. -Douglas Adams
We started off our series on The Greatest Story Ever Told by talking about inflation, or a period when the Universe was expanding exponentially. We see plenty of evidence that inflation happened from looking at the geometry of the Universe (it looks like it was stretched flat),
at the fact that the…
esiegel | January 17, 2010Yes, these three ingredients mixed together amused me more than anything else that happened this week. Don't know what I'm talking about?
American Idol -- kicking off Season 9 -- gave us Pants on the Ground, a song written and performed by a 62 year old man who's sick and tired of seeing these young punks with their pants hanging down where no pants were designed to hang.
Neil Young is one of the all-time great singer/songwriters, as he's taken on everyone from Nixon to Herbert Walker Bush, and has written some of my favorite songs.
But it's the forgotten late-night talk show host, Jimmy…
esiegel | January 15, 2010This is what science is all about; getting thrown a curveball by Nature and plunging in to find out what's going on. -Andy Albrecht
Imagine waking up in the morning and heading out into the sand dunes. They never look exactly the same from day to day. But each day that you go out, they'll look somewhat like this.
You consider yourself smart and well-informed, and you have a sense of adventure. So each morning, you venture out a little farther into the dunes. You find a variety of different features, but everything pretty much just looks like, well, sand dunes. One day, however, all of that…
esiegel | January 13, 2010Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -Aldous Huxley
People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs. -Anonymous
Over at The World's Fair, the question of belief in science arose with the provocative question, "Do you believe in the Big Bang?" I thought about it for a few seconds. What popped into my head?
The thought that, 13.7 billion years ago, all of the matter and energy within our observable Universe was concentrated into a space no bigger than the size of a single proton. That the incredibly high densities and temperatures in this…
esiegel | January 12, 2010There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth... not going all the way, and not starting. -Siddhārtha Gautama, a.k.a. Buddha
Last week, I started a new series on The Greatest Story Ever Told, about the origin and evolution of the Universe. In it, I asserted that inflation is the very first thing we can definitively say anything sensible about, and that it happened before the big bang. This runs contrary to a lot of statements out there by a lot of reputable people, including this "timeline" image from Discover Magazine:
Everything else aside, it's very important to remember…
esiegel | January 8, 2010Darn it! I'm sick and tired of being a scarecrow! Charles Atlas says he can give me a real body. All right! I'll gamble a stamp and get his free book!
-Countless Magazine and Comic Book Ads
Last weekend, Abbie over at ERV proclaimed herself the fittest person on Scienceblogs, and one of my readers thought I might have something to say about that. I sure do; I'm going to tell you what -- as a complete and total amateur -- fitness means to me.
Fitness, for me, is about meeting your goals for your body and your life. What does that mean for you? Do you want to be able to run a marathon (or a…
esiegel | January 8, 2010The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.
-Freeman Dyson
When we look out at our Universe today, we see all sorts of beautiful things throughout space, from galaxies and clusters, distributed roughly evenly throughout space:
to the cosmic microwave background (also known as the last scattering surface), radiating at the same temperature in all directions.
We also see, when we try to measure the shape of the Universe, that there are three major possibilities: it could be flat…
esiegel | January 6, 2010The Sun stood still and the Moon stayed -- and hastened not to go down about a whole day! -Joshua 10:12-13
Did you have a good New Year's Eve? Did you enjoy not just the fireworks and champagne, but also the Blue Moon (2nd full Moon of the month) that was out that night?
Were you in a fortunate enough part of the world that you not only saw the full Moon, but also managed to see the partial lunar eclipse that happened?
How this happened is pretty simple: the full Moon is always on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. When the side of the Moon that's lit up faces Earth, we see it as…
esiegel | January 4, 2010Cheers to a New Year and another chance for us to get it right. -Oprah
Welcome to 2010, everybody! I know that many of you have been following my writing for some time, and many of you have just started recently, so I'd like to start the New Year off right, and (re)introduce myself and this blog to you. With lots of pretty pictures.
My name's Ethan, and I love the Universe. I love looking up, out, and beyond what's here on Earth, into the great abyss of deep space, and trying to figure out what's out there.
Not just what's out there, but how it got to be there, where it came from, where it'…
esiegel | January 2, 2010Things slow down when it snows everywhere. They did when I lived in New York, Chicago, and Madison, WI, and for good reason. There are a few basic rules about driving in snow that everybody adheres to, including being knowledgeable about what your vehicle can and cannot handle. It's a pain, but it could be a lot worse. When people make mistakes, scenes like this are the worst you're likely to find.
For the past couple of winters, I've lived in Portland, OR. The climate is generally warmer, and so snow is rare. We get snow maybe once a year. As a result, I was completely unprepared for the…
esiegel | December 31, 2009Blue Moon
You knew just what I was there for
You heard me saying a prayer for
Someone I really could care for... -Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart
Tonight is the last night of 2009, there's a full Moon, there's a sliver of a partial lunar eclipse, and it's the second full Moon this month.
Q: Does having two full Moons in a month make it a Blue Moon?
A: In our modern times, yes, that's what we use that colloquialism to mean. The phrase "Blue Moon" is much older than that, dating back to at least 1528, where a pamphlet attacking the dogmatism of the church states:
Yf they say the mone is…
esiegel | December 30, 2009Oh the weather outside is frightful,
But the fire is so delightful,
And since we've no place to go,
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! -Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne
Yesterday in the late afternoon (and yes, it's dark by late afternoon here in Portland, OR), I looked out the window and saw a rare sight for this part of the world.
That's right, it snowed here! So, what did we do? We went out and played in it, like children, because it's fun.
It was a good snow. For me, that means it wasn't too powdery, and didn't fall apart when you tried to make snowballs out of it. (Clearly.) In fact, it…
esiegel | December 28, 2009Watch me as I gravitate (hahahahaha). -Gorillaz
Gravity -- unbelievably -- is the weakest force of all. But if you get enough mass together, gravity will overwhelm even the strongest outside influence. A simple case-in-point? You take a rock that's massive enough, and gravity will crush it into a spherical shape,
like it was nothing more than a drop of water.
And here we live on the surface of one of the smaller gravity balls in our Solar System. XKCD has a wonderful illustration of this today (and click for full-size).
The more massive and more compact your planet is, the harder it is to…