WWdN: In Exile

oh my!

Scientists have named an asteroid in honor of my friend and fellow Enterprise navigator dude, George Takei!

An asteroid between Mars and Jupiter has been renamed 7307 Takei in honor of the actor, best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu in the original "Star Trek" series and movies.

The celestial rock, discovered by two Japanese astronomers in 1994, was formerly known as 1994 GT9. It joins the 4659 Roddenberry (named for the show's creator, Gene Roddenberry) and the 68410 Nichols (for co-star Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura). Other main-belt asteroids have been named for science fiction luminaries Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

 

Just so nobody thinks this is one of those scams where you give some shady guy in an alley a double sawbuck and you get a sixth generation photocopy certificate in return:

The renaming of 7307 Takei was approved by the International Astronomical Union's Committee on Small Body Nomenclature. About 14,000 asteroid names have been approved by the panel, while about 165,000 asteroids have been identified and numbered, union spokesman Lars Lindberg Christensen said.

Unlike the myriad Web sites that offer to sell naming rights to stars, the IAU committee-approved names are actually used by astronomers, said Tom Burbine, the Mount Holyoke College astronomy professor who proposed the name swap.

"This is the name that will be used for all eternity," he said.

That's so totally awesome. If you've ever had the pleasure of meeting George, you know that he's one of the kindest and most joyful people in the universe, and I know this actually means something to him. I can just hear him saying, "Oh my!" When he got the news.

our lives, controlled from some guy's couch

And now, your daily dose of That Just Blew My Fucking Mind:

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

It's sort of like that scene in Animal House when Pinto looks at his thumb and declares that if there's an entire universe in there, that means that we're inside someone else's thumb, man!

this was his mind's final, desperate attempt to comfort itself

Comments like this are why I love Slashdot.

(Yes, it's a little Owl Creek Bridge, but it's still thought-provoking enough to get a +1 from me, especially since I've been talking about the Multiverse quite a bit with a wide range of people, lately. Puzzling out stuff like this is good for your brains, people, and if you do it right, it's a hell of a lot of fun. Discuss.)

Geek in Review: Reach Out to the Stars

This week's Geek in Review is all about my love of science, especially astronomy, beginning with my first memory, looking at the moon when I was two or three years-old:

We lived in the Northwestern San Fernando valley, in a converted chicken coop on my grandparents’ property, which was one of many one-acre farms that shared space with weird-o hippie communes from the late sixties through the mid-seventies.

My dad was excited as he took me and my mom out of the house to stand beneath the walnut tree. Once outside, he didn’t even need to tell us why. There, rising over the pasture behind our house, was the biggest moon I’ve ever seen in my life. It was yellow and full and covered the entire horizon, like a drawing from a science fiction pulp novel. It was nighttime, but the glow of the moon lit up the ground in front of us as far as I could see, turning the leafless trees at the back fence into bony hands, reaching into the sky.

I stood between them in my OshKosh B’Gosh overalls, mom holding my left hand and dad holding my right, and stared at it while it slowly climbed into the sky. Though I was too young to understand the concept of beauty, I was still impressed; it was the biggest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

My dad picked me up and held me close to him. “That’s the moon,” he said. I can still hear the awe in his voice. In that moment, my life long love affair with space and science began.

By happy coincidence, I traded some e-mails with Phil Plait, better known as The Bad Astronomer, while I wrote my column, and I asked him if he could explain why the moon appeared to cover the entire horizon in my memory. He said:

You are a victim of The Moon Illusion!

You caught me in an expansive mood; I'm full of coffee and I just wrote 11,000+ words about black holes for my next book. So hang on.

The illusion is just that: an illusion. It can be really amazing, but in reality, even in your head, the Moon only looks two or three times bigger. This can be amplified by memory; some people swear they remember the Moon eating up the whole sky as you do (remember it, I mean, not that you eat the whole sky).

The illusion is a combination of two things. the first is the Ponzo illusion, where your brain interprets things as being bigger if it thinks they are farther away.

Second, the sky is not exactly hemisphere-shaped to our brains, it actually looks like an inverted bowl. Think of it this way: clouds overhead are maybe two miles up, but clouds near the horizon are a hundred miles away. So the sky looks bowl-shaped.

So when the Moon is on the horizon, your brain thinks it's farther away than when it's overhead. The Ponzo illusion kicks in, and your brain gets fooled into thinking the Moon is HUGE. As it gets higher, the illusion vanishes. If you actually observe the Moon with binoculars or with a 'scope, you can see it is no bigger on the horizon. In fact, it should look smaller because it's a few thousand miles farther away than when it's overhead.

It has nothing to do with foreground objects, atmospheric refraction or anything like that. it's a plain old illusion. I wrote a whole chapter about this in my first book, matter of fact. It was tough to research since people argue so vehemently over this topic. Fun though.

Phil's comments, and my ability to ask him for them, are yet another reason why we are so lucky to be alive at this moment. At what other time could I so simply and easily ask an astronomer such a noob question, and get an answer back so quickly?

This was one of those columns that easily could have turned into 5000 words, and I'm not entirely happy with the way I cut it down to keep it readable. I love science so much, and I am so fascinated by astronomy, that once I get going, it's hard for me to keep things brief. I didn't even get into Hyperspace (fish scientists FTW!) and all the stuff I learned about black holes and quantum physics when I was in my early twenties. I totally suck at math, and I've never taken anything higher than Algebra 2, so the fact that I can get even an elementary understanding of these subjects speaks volumes about the people who've written books about them.

If you're of a scientific mind, and you can communicate scientific ideas to guys like me, please keep on doing it. We're assaulted by pseudo- and anti-science on an almost daily basis, it seems, and enlightening the ignorant is the only way we're ever going to get off this planet before we destroy it.

a sad day for science geeks

I read last night that Don Herbert, who was known to generations of protogeeks as Mr. Wizard, passed away yesterday. He was nearly 90 years old.

I remember watching Mr. Wizard's World, You Can't Do That On Television and The Third Eye on Nickelodeon when my parents first got cable television, and I was so excited that there were three shows that appealed to the three strongest (at the time) aspects of my personality.

But learning about science though experiments that seemed kind of dangerous was my favorite. I loved Mr. Wizard's World so much, I even made an effort to understand their funny accents and mysterious metric system, so I knew what the kid was talking about when he said, "Um, aboot four meters?"

Mr. Wizard was the original Bill Nye The Science Guy, and Mr. Wizard's World was the original Beakman's World, so if you damn kids today have no idea who I'm talking about, at least you know what I'm talking about. Now get off my lawn.

Update: Reader rasa nails it: "He was the Mr. Rogers for us geeks, that's for sure. A sad day indeed."

it's just a jump to the left . . .

Have you seen those shows on Discovery about how Star Trek inspired scientists to create everything from the cell phone to the MRI? They're really cool, and totally worth tracking down.

When I worked on the show, I met lots of people who had been inspired by the original series in one way or another and followed that inspiration into a career. You know what's cool? Meeting so many astronauts and planetary scientists that it stopped being such an epic big deal, and I could relax enough to actually talk with them about their missions.

I recalled those days when I saw the following story at Netscape this morning:

NASA announces status of Warp Drive

"Warp Drives", "Hyperspace Drives", or any other term for Faster-than-light travel is at the level of speculation, with some facets edging into the realm of science. We are at the point where we know what we do know and know what we don’t, but do not know for sure if faster than light travel is possible.

The bad news is that the bulk of scientific knowledge that we have accumulated to date concludes that faster than light travel is impossible. This is an artifact of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Yes, there are some other perspectives; tachyons, wormholes, inflationary universe, spacetime warping, quantum paradoxes...ideas that are in credible scientific literature, but it is still too soon to know if such ideas are viable.

There's an awesome little graphic of the Enterprise, accompanied by a discussion of why Chuck Yeager could break the sound barrier, but space ships may not be able to break the light barrier.

The positive impact Star Trek had on the world from civil rights to science during its first run in the late 60s was a frequent topic of discussion at conventions and in interviews when I was a teenager, and even during those die.die.die days, I always felt lucky and proud to be associated with the show because of its legacy. It's really cool to read a story like this one, and realize that the legacy continues.

by jove . . .

The Pale Blue Dot never fails to bring tears to my eyes, and over the course of my life I've always been fascinated and moved by photos from outer space.

My earliest memory of extraterrestrial photography was a set of glossy photos that Voyager took of Jupiter, (on its way out of the solar system to V'gerland, natch.) The photos were given to my great grandparents, when they opened a checking account at a long-forgotten local bank in Northridge, specifically to provide their great grandchildren with the packet of photos.

So with that bit of backstory, you may understand why I was pretty damn excited to look at this little-yet-magnificent picture of Jupiter, taken by the Cassini:

It's not a great picture of Jupiter, but that's not the point. The point is that the photograph was taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Saturn, approximately 1.8 billion km from Jupiter. A similar picture of Earth would only light up a single pixel in Cassini's camera.

I love it. It's like humans can look at that picture and say, "Hey! Look what we did!"

(via Netscape)

3.14159265

Once again, it's π day, and the best way to celebrate π day is with this brilliant video from my pal Chris Hardwick:


And if that's not enough for you, please enjoy this classic WWdN π day rerun:

This morning over breakfast, I said to my wife, "Happy π day!"

"Happy pie day? What the hell are you talking about?"

"No, not 'pie'," I said. "'π'."

"Not 'pie,' but 'pie.'" She was clearly not amused. "Isn't it a little early to be drinking?"

"Anne, look at the date on the calendar."

"Yes it's march 14th, and you're going to watch WrestleMania dos equis* with your brother." She frowned. "Are you trying to tell me that you're taking a pie to Jeremy's house? Because if you expect me to make you a pie . . ."

"No, I don't expect you to make me a pie." I said, well into that area where you've explained the joke so much, it's never going to be funny.

"Today is March fourteenth. That makes it 3.14 on the calendar. 3.14 is also known as π."

She blinked a few times.

"Oh. It's π day."

"Yes!" I said. "And at 1:59 pm, it will be even more π day. Isn't that cool!?"

She took a long, thoughtful drink from her coffee mug, carefully set it down and said, "You are such a nerd."

*It's actually Wrestlemania XX, as in Wrestlemania Twenty, but we've been cracking ourselves up by calling it Wrestlemania dos equis all week.

Happy March 14, everyone. May you know the area of every circle you encounter today.

The Prometheus Plume

"Two sulfurous eruptions are visible on Jupiter's volcanic moon Io in this color composite image from the robotic Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. At the image top, over Io's limb, a bluish plume rises about 140 kilometers above the surface of a volcanic caldera known as Pillan Patera."

Link to full size image.

(via warren ellis)

it's quite simple, really

"That's here. That's home. That's us."
    -Carl Sagan

Everything we need to know about the climate change "debate" is contained in these two stories:

1. Humans blamed for climate change

Global climate change is "very likely" to have a human cause, an influential group of scientists has concluded.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said temperatures were probably going to increase by 1.8-4C (3.2-7.2F) by the end of the century.

It also projected that sea levels were most likely to rise by 28-43cm, and global warming was likely to influence the intensity of tropical storms.

. . . the panel concluded that it was at least 90% certain that human emissions of greenhouse gases rather than natural variations are warming the planet's surface.

2. Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

It really shouldn't be politicized, and it's incredibly frustrating to me -- as someone who really likes this planet and would like to pass it along to his grandchildren in good shape -- that it has been politicized. It's doubly frustrating that something which should really just be a scientific question has been muddled by politicians and industry; and don't be confused by the illusion of debate, because in the scientific community there isn't one.

I would think jamming more money into the pockets of oil industry executives would be secondary to keeping the environment clean and healthy for ourselves and future generations. I can't believe that isn't a simple idea everyone can agree upon, and I'm quite frankly disgusted whenever I hear someone in my generation arrogantly say, "Why should I care? I'm not going to be here in fifty or one hundred years, anyway."

They should care, because even if they're not around, a whole lot of people will be, including two people who I love very much.