I called my mother the other day and caught her in the middle of watching Starship Troopers. I could just as easily say I'm wondering why my mother would be watching something like Starship Troopers. But let's not get existential. I mentioned to her that some people complained that the Heinlein source material was antisemitic, or at least that is what I remembered. We both agreed that clearly there is nothing about the movie that struck us that way unless Denise Richards is Jewish which would be an embarrassment to Jews everywhere.
I googled this and couldn't find a lot. One was a comment on a far-right wackjob site that I'm not going to link to (apparently, liberals want you to believe that it's racist. He's totally right too. It's all part of my brilliant liberal conspiracy to take over the country and kill Jesus by convincing dittoheads that Paul Verhoeven films suck. Bwah ha ha. Except for Showgirls which is totally awesome. I'm erect, why aren't you erect?)
The evidence in the Wikipedia article is pretty flimsy. They just say basically that "bugs" sounds an awful lot like "Jews" (really? How are you pronouncing that?) And Verhoeven's uniforms looked kinda Nazi-ish but Verhoeven says he didn't even finish the book-it was boring and depressing. Hah! I love you Paul Verhoeven. All is forgiven.
I read Stranger in a Strange Land and HATED it violently so I will not be reading anymore Heinlein but it's interesting how jingoistic Starship supposedly is while Stranger is so hippy dippy-and sexist. I've heard The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is interesting but a really tedious read. Everyone speaks in some kind of patois that is difficult to pick up on. No thanks.
So, I dunno on all that. Onto other matters. Namely, my co-worker Herb came into my office today and was admiring my periodic table. He mentioned that thorium is being looked at as a reactor fuel that is better and more stable than uranium. We wondered why, if that's so, it hadn't been considered before.
I wondered if it was rare but that's not the case. Apparently, it's been known for a while that thorium is a good alternative and will produce less waste. The reason it's not being used is mainly to do with the existing infrastructure, which is set up to use uranium. The decision to use uranium was originally driven by Cold War expediencies. India and Australia have huge thorium reserves.
In which I engage in shallow discussions about books, movies, science, history and whatever else I'm thinking at that moment. And have beers with Captain Howdy.
Showing posts with label random literary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label random literary. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Monday, June 6, 2011
A non-Orwellian life
I just started subscribing to the NY Review of Books-which is excellent by the way but comes out every 2 weeks so it's difficult to keep up with.
I read a few things I wanted to jot down:
In 1936, he moved into a small grocery to live the life of a simple man, a notion he was smitten with. The grocery barely made money. The attached cottage's kitchen flooded when it rained and it stank from blocked drains. Amazingly, he was living here when he married his first wife Eileen who was the love of his life (she died suddenly in 1945.) The grocery went out of business by the end of the year but Orwell didn't care as by this time he wanted to go fight in the Spanish Civil War. His experiences there were recounted in Homage to Catalonia.
Speaking of, here is a great passage from that about how he saw a man jump out of the enemy trenches running while holding his pants up. Orwell was unable to fire:
I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at "Fascists"; but a man who is holding up his trousers isnt' a "Fascist," he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at him.
Orwell came to hate imperialism after time spent in his youth in Burma. He also contracted the Tuberculosis there that would eventually kill him at only 46 in 1950. He described himself as a Tory Anarchist. I must steal this title and find a way to use it.
In 1947, Orwell went on a boating trip with his son, niece and nephew to his farm in the Outer Hebrides. In the region of a notorious whirlpool near Corryvreck, the boat was sucked in. The author of the article said the area was only passable during low tide so Orwell either was ignorant of this or didn't check the tide chart. He also didn't secure the motor to the boat so it was blown away. Miraculously, they were able to get to shore on a small island where they were later rescued by a passing lobster boat (also something of a miracle for that time of day and year) although the boat capsized and they had to swim. The funny part of the story (other than the bit about the motor) is Orwell recorded this story in in his journal but barely mentioned almost drowning and wrote a long passage about the species of puffin on the island. He simply didn't have much of a reaction and scouted out fresh water for the party. Conclusion: not useful at sea but terrific in a crisis.
He really loved nature. In an essay on the Spanish Inquisition, he detoured to discuss the hedgehog who visited his bathroom every day. There's something so charming in his lack of guile. While he was serving in the Spanish War, he wrote to a friend to ask how his cottage, goat and vegetables were doing. About his goat, Muriel:
Something about the author of 1984 discussing his goat's mating habits and rhubarb crop just amuses me to no end.
Even when he was in the hospital on his death bed, he was making plans to return to his cottage with a pig and was working out the logistics of impregnating her ("I suppose one could buy a gravid sow in the Autumn to litter about March, but one would have to make very sure that she really was in pig the first time.")
I read a few things I wanted to jot down:
- There is a book on Barack Obama's mother that sounded surprisingly interesting (A Singular Woman by Janny Scott) given that political biographies are usually too sanitized. She spent many years teaching English in Jakarta and learning the Indonesian culture. She married an Indonesian after Barack's dad. She also worked for the Ford Foundation investigating and advising how and where to spend grant money by working with local cultures.
- There are two Bronzino (1503-1572) exhibits being stage currently, one in his native Florence and one at the Met. He painted in the service of Cosimo de Medici for most of his career until he lost favor due to some political gerrymandering with Rome.
- Doctors are one of Cuba's primary source of income (this was hinted at in Martin Cruz Smith's Havana Bay.) There are medical missions in countries from Venezuela and Bolivia to South Africa.
- Unrelated to the NYROB, NPR just ran a story about how the death rate from AIDS in South Africa is so high, they are having to re-use graves.
- There is also a new book out about the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White (Triumvirate by Mosette Broderick.) I'm not inclined to read a nearly 600 page book about an architectural firm but the story was interesting. Stanford White is perhaps better known these days as the guy who was shot by Evelyn Nesbitt's jealous husband as immortalized in Ragtime. Charles McKim designed Penn Station in 1910. They didn't realize how beautifully designed and built it was until they were demolishing it in the 1960's for Madison Square Garden. Demolished 50 years later. Such waste. Here is a story about Penn Station with some great pictures.
In 1936, he moved into a small grocery to live the life of a simple man, a notion he was smitten with. The grocery barely made money. The attached cottage's kitchen flooded when it rained and it stank from blocked drains. Amazingly, he was living here when he married his first wife Eileen who was the love of his life (she died suddenly in 1945.) The grocery went out of business by the end of the year but Orwell didn't care as by this time he wanted to go fight in the Spanish Civil War. His experiences there were recounted in Homage to Catalonia.
Speaking of, here is a great passage from that about how he saw a man jump out of the enemy trenches running while holding his pants up. Orwell was unable to fire:
I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at "Fascists"; but a man who is holding up his trousers isnt' a "Fascist," he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at him.
Orwell came to hate imperialism after time spent in his youth in Burma. He also contracted the Tuberculosis there that would eventually kill him at only 46 in 1950. He described himself as a Tory Anarchist. I must steal this title and find a way to use it.
In 1947, Orwell went on a boating trip with his son, niece and nephew to his farm in the Outer Hebrides. In the region of a notorious whirlpool near Corryvreck, the boat was sucked in. The author of the article said the area was only passable during low tide so Orwell either was ignorant of this or didn't check the tide chart. He also didn't secure the motor to the boat so it was blown away. Miraculously, they were able to get to shore on a small island where they were later rescued by a passing lobster boat (also something of a miracle for that time of day and year) although the boat capsized and they had to swim. The funny part of the story (other than the bit about the motor) is Orwell recorded this story in in his journal but barely mentioned almost drowning and wrote a long passage about the species of puffin on the island. He simply didn't have much of a reaction and scouted out fresh water for the party. Conclusion: not useful at sea but terrific in a crisis.
He really loved nature. In an essay on the Spanish Inquisition, he detoured to discuss the hedgehog who visited his bathroom every day. There's something so charming in his lack of guile. While he was serving in the Spanish War, he wrote to a friend to ask how his cottage, goat and vegetables were doing. About his goat, Muriel:
I hope Muriel's mating went through. it is a most unedifying spectacle by the way, if you happened to watch it. .. Did my rhubarb come up I wonder? I had a lot & then last year the frost buggared it up.
Something about the author of 1984 discussing his goat's mating habits and rhubarb crop just amuses me to no end.
Even when he was in the hospital on his death bed, he was making plans to return to his cottage with a pig and was working out the logistics of impregnating her ("I suppose one could buy a gravid sow in the Autumn to litter about March, but one would have to make very sure that she really was in pig the first time.")
Friday, May 27, 2011
From the Iron Age to a clock that eats time
Some various stuff I learned from podcasts this week--
On the BBC's "In Our Time", Melvyn and guests discussed the beginning of the Iron Age in Europe and what it meant. It's difficult to pin these types of dates down (this is especially true for the Bronze Age) as they aren't homogenous even within Europe. It began between ~1200 and 1000 BC in Europe (around a century earlier in the Near East.) It followed a period called the Bronze Age Collapse, which was caused by the collapse of some Near Eastern kingdoms like the Hittites and the disruption of Egyptian rule in places like Syria. The importance of trade routes from the making of bronze was that a big source of tin was Afghanistan although it also came from sources closer to home, like the Czech Republic. The trade routes were already in place from such other precious goods as jade. Jadeite hand axes have been found all the way to Scotland. Here is a longer story about why the switch from bronze to iron made sense. Other than the problem of tin supply, bronze is hard to work with. And here is an article on why dates are hard to pin down and sometimes the Iron Age is broken into First and Second.
Guardian Science Weekly had a story about a new clock on display at the British Museum called the Chronophage, or Time-Eater as you can tell from the etymology. It was created by a British engineer and inventor named John Taylor who had previously designed heat elements in electric tea kettles (apparently ~75% of such kettles in England contain his handiwork.) He was inspired by the work of 18th century British clockmaker John Harrison who was bedeviled by how to make a clock without gears that needed oiling. The oils available at the time were limited and costly and/or inappropriate. Goose grease, for instance, freezes rock solid when it gets cold.
Taylor's clock was inspired by the escapement (the source of the ticking sound) in an old clock of Harrison's. Taylor meant it both as an homage to Harrison and to remind people that their time is ticking away. Here is a video of the sister clock at Corpus Library, Cambridge. Here is what just the escapement looks like:
You can clearly hear it plugging away in the video although the grasshopper on this one (this is the Science Museum version) looks a little less scary. And also looks more like a fly.
Finally, I listened to an episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge called "Nature Stories" and the whole episode was good. A scientist called David Rothenberg recorded himself playing the clarinet in a duet with some humpback whales who responded to the music. They can respond to new sounds much more agilely than birds. I also didn't know that only male whales sing, although it's no longer clear that it's for mating purposes as was first thought.
Next was an artist called Jennifer Angus who collects insects to use in her artwork, large scale mural-like installations. Some people are disgusted, some are disgusted and intrigued and at least one said it was wrong of her to cause the insects to die for her art. She says she sees them as ambassadors for their species. One thing the audio program couldn't do was show me what her art looked like so here's a link to the Google image search and an example:
Nature writer Anne Fadiman talked about how she and her brother enjoyed collecting and killing butterflies as children. She said it didn't dawn on her immediately she was killing them (or rather, the implications of killing them) but she said they were horrified when it dawned on them. She said it must be what hunters feel like, to own a piece of nature.
Finally, Christopher Benfrey, an English professor, wrote a book about how New England went hummingbird crazy in the 19th century. This includes writers from Emily Dickinson to Mark Twain. There was also a painter named Martin Johnson Heade (pronounced "heed") who painted them. They said his paintings were really color saturated, almost impressionistic. I was curious:
Wow! You can see this in person at the National Gallery in Washington.
He says that Emily Dickinson often mentioned hummingbirds in her letters and how reading was akin to their actions except the reader "sips words." The interviewer asked if that wasn't appropriate since her poetry had a hummingbird-like quality.
On the BBC's "In Our Time", Melvyn and guests discussed the beginning of the Iron Age in Europe and what it meant. It's difficult to pin these types of dates down (this is especially true for the Bronze Age) as they aren't homogenous even within Europe. It began between ~1200 and 1000 BC in Europe (around a century earlier in the Near East.) It followed a period called the Bronze Age Collapse, which was caused by the collapse of some Near Eastern kingdoms like the Hittites and the disruption of Egyptian rule in places like Syria. The importance of trade routes from the making of bronze was that a big source of tin was Afghanistan although it also came from sources closer to home, like the Czech Republic. The trade routes were already in place from such other precious goods as jade. Jadeite hand axes have been found all the way to Scotland. Here is a longer story about why the switch from bronze to iron made sense. Other than the problem of tin supply, bronze is hard to work with. And here is an article on why dates are hard to pin down and sometimes the Iron Age is broken into First and Second.
Guardian Science Weekly had a story about a new clock on display at the British Museum called the Chronophage, or Time-Eater as you can tell from the etymology. It was created by a British engineer and inventor named John Taylor who had previously designed heat elements in electric tea kettles (apparently ~75% of such kettles in England contain his handiwork.) He was inspired by the work of 18th century British clockmaker John Harrison who was bedeviled by how to make a clock without gears that needed oiling. The oils available at the time were limited and costly and/or inappropriate. Goose grease, for instance, freezes rock solid when it gets cold.
Taylor's clock was inspired by the escapement (the source of the ticking sound) in an old clock of Harrison's. Taylor meant it both as an homage to Harrison and to remind people that their time is ticking away. Here is a video of the sister clock at Corpus Library, Cambridge. Here is what just the escapement looks like:
You can clearly hear it plugging away in the video although the grasshopper on this one (this is the Science Museum version) looks a little less scary. And also looks more like a fly.
Finally, I listened to an episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge called "Nature Stories" and the whole episode was good. A scientist called David Rothenberg recorded himself playing the clarinet in a duet with some humpback whales who responded to the music. They can respond to new sounds much more agilely than birds. I also didn't know that only male whales sing, although it's no longer clear that it's for mating purposes as was first thought.
Next was an artist called Jennifer Angus who collects insects to use in her artwork, large scale mural-like installations. Some people are disgusted, some are disgusted and intrigued and at least one said it was wrong of her to cause the insects to die for her art. She says she sees them as ambassadors for their species. One thing the audio program couldn't do was show me what her art looked like so here's a link to the Google image search and an example:
Nature writer Anne Fadiman talked about how she and her brother enjoyed collecting and killing butterflies as children. She said it didn't dawn on her immediately she was killing them (or rather, the implications of killing them) but she said they were horrified when it dawned on them. She said it must be what hunters feel like, to own a piece of nature.
Finally, Christopher Benfrey, an English professor, wrote a book about how New England went hummingbird crazy in the 19th century. This includes writers from Emily Dickinson to Mark Twain. There was also a painter named Martin Johnson Heade (pronounced "heed") who painted them. They said his paintings were really color saturated, almost impressionistic. I was curious:
Wow! You can see this in person at the National Gallery in Washington.
He says that Emily Dickinson often mentioned hummingbirds in her letters and how reading was akin to their actions except the reader "sips words." The interviewer asked if that wasn't appropriate since her poetry had a hummingbird-like quality.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Epistemophilia: take a ride on heavy metal
Nope not the movie (although I learned recently that squabbling over the music rights kept it out of the DVD market for 14 years.) I was listening to a Brain Stuff podcast on how smoking affects the fetus and they mentioned that smoke contained the heavy metals cadmium and arsenic and I thought--wait, arsenic isn't even a metal. It's a metalloid. And cadmium is kind of in the middle of the transition metals at #48. It's below tin at #50. How are these heavy? And it occurred to me that although I had heard the term many times, I didn't really know what the definition was. I had assumed it was anything of a certain atomic weight-like at the bottom right of the table. Wrong.
(and obviously bismuth is fairly heavy and isn't toxic...)
It turns out there isn't a very good or standard definition. In medical terms, a "heavy metal" is any poisonous metal regardless of its atomic weight. This means that beryllium at #4 is a heavy metal. And, yes, it means arsenic is included even though it's only kinda sorta a metal.
I was only vaguely aware of cadmium being poisonous. It's a common impurity in zinc ores. And excess cadmium can cause something called itai-itai disease (which means "ouch ouch" in Japanese) which causes your bones to soften and kidney failure. It was first discovered, appropriately, in Japan on the island of Honshu. The outbreak was caused by miners polluting local water supplies. This went on from around 1912 until 1946 when measures were started to eliminate the pollution (it also killed all the fish.) Cadmium was not seriously suspected as the cause of the disease until the mid 1950's. The victims eventually sued and won but it wasn't until the early 70's.
I also listened to a Do Nothing But Read about Gothic horror. Usually I like this podcast but I got agitated when one of the podcasters mentioned that Bram Stoker wasn't able to copyright Dracula so everyone stole the character without impunity. The story of the original Nosferatu movie is fairly well known though and contradicts that. Stoker's widow sued for copyright infringement. And eventually won. The prints were all to have been destroyed but some weren't luckily as it's very influential. It also introduced the idea of vampires being killed by sunlight (not Stoker) which writers have been using ever since. Up until Stephenie Meyer that is.
(Florence Stoker wasn't a bad lady. Dracula was just her only source of income.)
Ok, did some more googling. The podcast got it sort of right. Stoker failed to follow proper copyright law and it was never copyrighted in the States. However, in the UK and other countries per the Berne Convention, it was considered to be copyrighted. Most countries, including the US, are signatories on the Berne Convention. The US did not join, however, until 1989.
The good news is that Universal negotiated with and paid Florence Stoker for the rights to Dracula when they made the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi, even though they didn't have to.
So, I heard two podcasts that I feared contained bad data but they didn't. Sweet.
(and obviously bismuth is fairly heavy and isn't toxic...)
It turns out there isn't a very good or standard definition. In medical terms, a "heavy metal" is any poisonous metal regardless of its atomic weight. This means that beryllium at #4 is a heavy metal. And, yes, it means arsenic is included even though it's only kinda sorta a metal.
I was only vaguely aware of cadmium being poisonous. It's a common impurity in zinc ores. And excess cadmium can cause something called itai-itai disease (which means "ouch ouch" in Japanese) which causes your bones to soften and kidney failure. It was first discovered, appropriately, in Japan on the island of Honshu. The outbreak was caused by miners polluting local water supplies. This went on from around 1912 until 1946 when measures were started to eliminate the pollution (it also killed all the fish.) Cadmium was not seriously suspected as the cause of the disease until the mid 1950's. The victims eventually sued and won but it wasn't until the early 70's.
I also listened to a Do Nothing But Read about Gothic horror. Usually I like this podcast but I got agitated when one of the podcasters mentioned that Bram Stoker wasn't able to copyright Dracula so everyone stole the character without impunity. The story of the original Nosferatu movie is fairly well known though and contradicts that. Stoker's widow sued for copyright infringement. And eventually won. The prints were all to have been destroyed but some weren't luckily as it's very influential. It also introduced the idea of vampires being killed by sunlight (not Stoker) which writers have been using ever since. Up until Stephenie Meyer that is.
(Florence Stoker wasn't a bad lady. Dracula was just her only source of income.)
Ok, did some more googling. The podcast got it sort of right. Stoker failed to follow proper copyright law and it was never copyrighted in the States. However, in the UK and other countries per the Berne Convention, it was considered to be copyrighted. Most countries, including the US, are signatories on the Berne Convention. The US did not join, however, until 1989.
The good news is that Universal negotiated with and paid Florence Stoker for the rights to Dracula when they made the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi, even though they didn't have to.
So, I heard two podcasts that I feared contained bad data but they didn't. Sweet.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Epistemophilia: useful idiots and a buggering Amis
I listened to Part II of a BBC documentary on useful idiots, which is what Lenin supposedly called people in the West who unquestioningly supported his regime and parroted his propaganda. Part II dealt with more recent examples of the phenomenon. People in the British and US governments upheld the Pinochet regime in Chile and apartheid in South Africa because they were supposed bastions of anti-communism. They also interviewed a journalist who had written about China under Mao. He said anyone who lived in Hong Kong during the early 1960's would have known how severe the famine caused by Mao was because bodies would regularly float downstream to Hong Kong. He said that he and select other journalists were invited to tour China during the Cultural Revolution and were taken to schools and shown smiling children in classrooms. The only problem was there WERE no children going to school during this period in China. He reminded himself then of the bodies in Hong Kong. He said Mao probably killed or directly caused the deaths of 40 million people. That defies imagination. Who could top that number? Stalin, maybe?
They also interviewed some journalists from Focus, an Iranian English language news agency. They had until recently been given free reign but during the elections last year, the government cracked down on what and how they could report. One reporter quit and then during the protests he called his old office and asked if they were covering the protests. For that, he was sentenced to 117 days in prison. Over 100 of those were spent in solitary. He was subjected to torture and was forced to apologize to the Supreme Leader. While he was there, he was interviewed by a reporter from Focus. The BBC reporter was clearly offended by the notion of a journalist interviewing another journalist in a prison where they were being tortured and not reporting it.
I wonder was there any real value we gained by supporting Chile and South Africa. The Soviets were a general threat to us (and the rest of the world) certainly-we're only now learning how close we came to war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's easy to look back and blame but I wonder if there was any genuine good that came out of turning a blind eye to a bad thing or was this just more venal stupidity bereft of benefit like the McCarthy hearings? Then again, look at that story about Iran again. Democratic values are useless if they are only sustained by supporting bullshit like that. You end up like the deluded Richard Nixon, criticizing Carter's treatment of the Shah who had been a "real friend" to the US. A real friend to us he may have been but to his own people, not so much. And look how much both the US and Iran has suffered because of our support for him.
It's so hard to get to the real truth of world issues. Science is much easier. Sometimes. I guess the question of whether a Goldilocks planet was really found orbiting Gliese 581g continues and will for some time as more data is analyzed.
Speaking of Stalin, here's a happier story from the BBC about Russia's women fighter pilots during WWII. The Germans called them night witches and spread rumors that they had been injected with some drug that allowed them to see better at night. One German pilot who was shot down by one supposedly refused to fly again when he found out a woman had shot him down.
On The Guardian Books, they discussed authors who make appearances in their own works. Examples were Milan Kundera, Will Self and Martin Amis. The last one was funny because Kingsley Amis said this was a way of "buggering the audience." I knew vaguely that Kingsley was critical of Martin's work but some didn't realize the extent of it till I googled. The quote is funny but really, poor Martin.
They also interviewed some journalists from Focus, an Iranian English language news agency. They had until recently been given free reign but during the elections last year, the government cracked down on what and how they could report. One reporter quit and then during the protests he called his old office and asked if they were covering the protests. For that, he was sentenced to 117 days in prison. Over 100 of those were spent in solitary. He was subjected to torture and was forced to apologize to the Supreme Leader. While he was there, he was interviewed by a reporter from Focus. The BBC reporter was clearly offended by the notion of a journalist interviewing another journalist in a prison where they were being tortured and not reporting it.
I wonder was there any real value we gained by supporting Chile and South Africa. The Soviets were a general threat to us (and the rest of the world) certainly-we're only now learning how close we came to war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's easy to look back and blame but I wonder if there was any genuine good that came out of turning a blind eye to a bad thing or was this just more venal stupidity bereft of benefit like the McCarthy hearings? Then again, look at that story about Iran again. Democratic values are useless if they are only sustained by supporting bullshit like that. You end up like the deluded Richard Nixon, criticizing Carter's treatment of the Shah who had been a "real friend" to the US. A real friend to us he may have been but to his own people, not so much. And look how much both the US and Iran has suffered because of our support for him.
It's so hard to get to the real truth of world issues. Science is much easier. Sometimes. I guess the question of whether a Goldilocks planet was really found orbiting Gliese 581g continues and will for some time as more data is analyzed.
Speaking of Stalin, here's a happier story from the BBC about Russia's women fighter pilots during WWII. The Germans called them night witches and spread rumors that they had been injected with some drug that allowed them to see better at night. One German pilot who was shot down by one supposedly refused to fly again when he found out a woman had shot him down.
On The Guardian Books, they discussed authors who make appearances in their own works. Examples were Milan Kundera, Will Self and Martin Amis. The last one was funny because Kingsley Amis said this was a way of "buggering the audience." I knew vaguely that Kingsley was critical of Martin's work but some didn't realize the extent of it till I googled. The quote is funny but really, poor Martin.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Epistemophilia: Gliese 581 and how to read T. S. Elliot
I have heard two stories on Gliese 581g lately and it's funny-in a disconcerting way-how much the two scientists I heard disagree. This is of course the Goldilocks planet that was recently discovered orbiting the red dwarf Gliese 581. One of the discoverers was on Science Friday and he said he didn't like to speak in absolutes but he was 99% sure the planet harbored life (not, needless to say, meaning intelligent life or even the multi-cellular variety.) The planet is tidally locked to its star so if life exists, it probably does so on the twilight boundary lines. The main reason for his optimism is because the planet exists in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist.
Meanwhile, Pamela Gay on Astronomy Cast didn't think it was as likely. If it's in the proximity of a red dwarf, for starters it would have to have a magnetic field to protect it from xrays and flares and sufficient gravity to hold onto an atmosphere. The tidal locking also would cause large convective cells which means strong winds. The extremes of temperature between the day and night sides would further be inhibiting. I guess red dwarfs in their youths go through a period of massive flare activity which could wipe out life on an orbiting planet.
I get confused by the variety and disparity of dwarf stars. A red dwarf is type of main sequence star which means it's in the happy fusion stage of its existence. They are the mostly commonly observed star type. Proxima Centauri and Betelgeuse are red dwarfs. Main sequence stars are plotted on a graph of color versus brighness called the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram with blue at one end and red at the other. I wish they would name white dwarfs something else as they, as supernova remnants, are a different stellar kettle of fish. Our sun, btw, is also considered a dwarf of the yellow variety.
Here is a mnemonic to help remember stellar types: Oh be a fine girl, kiss 'em. A red dwarf would be on the coolest, or "E", end of the scale.
One other thing--I've heard Gliese 581 pronounced at least two ways. Wikipedia says it's "Gleesa" with a shwa on the end. Germanic pronunciation is victorious again.
(All of this typing may be for naught. A team in Switzerland just announced that they can't find that the planet actually exists.)
I listened to an interview between The Guardian and Tom McCarthy, who was on the Booker short list for his novel C. It sounds experimental and was described as conceptual, a term which ruffled him greatly as aren't all novels concepts? I suppose dude but to me this means the concept is paramount, possibly to the detriment of character and plot but maybe you are good enough at sleight of hand that we don't notice. I think the bizarrely overrated and pseudo-clever Don DeLillo might have ruined me for anything experimental or post-modern. I might have to read books about plucky girls who find love in the unlikeliest of places just to purge my fear of stumbling upon another shitty, smug vomitus like White Noise.
I ramble. What I found most interesting is McCarthy said reading Eliot's "The Wasteland" was like flipping the dial and tuning into different radio stations. Which kind of fits in with his own novel's reflection on the early days of the wireless. He also said Joyce's Ulysses should be read for the threads of connectivity in it and not for the plot. He pointed out both of these works were written in 1922 which is the final year of his novel. I thought this might be an important safety tip for whenever I might eventually tackle Joyce.
(holy shit, it's almost 800 pages. Well, this will be an important safety tip for whenever I want to convince someone I've read Ulysses.)
Meanwhile, Pamela Gay on Astronomy Cast didn't think it was as likely. If it's in the proximity of a red dwarf, for starters it would have to have a magnetic field to protect it from xrays and flares and sufficient gravity to hold onto an atmosphere. The tidal locking also would cause large convective cells which means strong winds. The extremes of temperature between the day and night sides would further be inhibiting. I guess red dwarfs in their youths go through a period of massive flare activity which could wipe out life on an orbiting planet.
I get confused by the variety and disparity of dwarf stars. A red dwarf is type of main sequence star which means it's in the happy fusion stage of its existence. They are the mostly commonly observed star type. Proxima Centauri and Betelgeuse are red dwarfs. Main sequence stars are plotted on a graph of color versus brighness called the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram with blue at one end and red at the other. I wish they would name white dwarfs something else as they, as supernova remnants, are a different stellar kettle of fish. Our sun, btw, is also considered a dwarf of the yellow variety.
Here is a mnemonic to help remember stellar types: Oh be a fine girl, kiss 'em. A red dwarf would be on the coolest, or "E", end of the scale.
One other thing--I've heard Gliese 581 pronounced at least two ways. Wikipedia says it's "Gleesa" with a shwa on the end. Germanic pronunciation is victorious again.
(All of this typing may be for naught. A team in Switzerland just announced that they can't find that the planet actually exists.)
I listened to an interview between The Guardian and Tom McCarthy, who was on the Booker short list for his novel C. It sounds experimental and was described as conceptual, a term which ruffled him greatly as aren't all novels concepts? I suppose dude but to me this means the concept is paramount, possibly to the detriment of character and plot but maybe you are good enough at sleight of hand that we don't notice. I think the bizarrely overrated and pseudo-clever Don DeLillo might have ruined me for anything experimental or post-modern. I might have to read books about plucky girls who find love in the unlikeliest of places just to purge my fear of stumbling upon another shitty, smug vomitus like White Noise.
I ramble. What I found most interesting is McCarthy said reading Eliot's "The Wasteland" was like flipping the dial and tuning into different radio stations. Which kind of fits in with his own novel's reflection on the early days of the wireless. He also said Joyce's Ulysses should be read for the threads of connectivity in it and not for the plot. He pointed out both of these works were written in 1922 which is the final year of his novel. I thought this might be an important safety tip for whenever I might eventually tackle Joyce.
(holy shit, it's almost 800 pages. Well, this will be an important safety tip for whenever I want to convince someone I've read Ulysses.)
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