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Winter Wonderland

December 20, 2009 by Nicole

If you are my friend on Twitter, you’ve probably been oversaturated with this already… but it FREAKIN SNOWED here in Charlottesville! We unofficially measured 20 inches outside of my apartment, and some people in the area measured even more. A snowstorm like this can be very dangerous as some lost power (most of us had brief outages, but Dominion stayed well on top of it) and others were stranded in their cars or had to abandon them on the road. As I most definitely do not have 4-wheel drive, I holed up in my house and tried working from home, which worked quite well on Friday, but I was distracted by the HOLYCRAPSNOW on Saturday.  I could act like a scientist (taking measurements) AND a kid (sledding!) and capture it on video which I’ve posted on Youtube:

(and pictures on Flickr.)

George Privon was tweeting away as well while also posting videos on his vimeo channel including a hilarious time-lapse shoveling one, and his best impression of Les Stroud, but with a better soundtrack. He also has some stunning photos on Flickr!

Posted in Charlottesville, snow, videos | 1 Comment »

Anthropogenic Global Warming and Skepticism

December 17, 2009 by Nicole

The blogosphere is amazing. Issues can flare up and come back down more quickly than I can get around to actually reading it happen.  Phew! And as so many things flare up and die down, sometimes it’s best to wait and see the reactions and counter-reactions unfold.

With “Climategate” and the Copenhagen Conference happening at the moment, global warming has been at the forefront of the news cycle and many people’s minds.  I noticed particularly in my occasional lurking about the JREF forums that AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) was being heavily discussed on the science boards.  I was a bit surprised to see that so many skeptics are also skeptical of AGW, although the science weighs pretty heavily in its favor.  Climate change is no doubt a huge and complex issue that can only be well understood by a studious few, but the same goes for many topics that skeptics tend to weigh in on, such as vaccinations, medicine, and evolution.  Of course, these are much broader and heavier topics than the paranormal claims that were investigated for decades by “traditional” organizations such as CSICOP (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.)  Is it possible that as the skeptical movement grows and diversifies that we are collectively taking on bigger and bigger fish, or even overstepping our capabilities?

In order to tackle these big issues, skeptics need to ally themselves with the experts in these fields.  The Science-Based Medicine blog is a great example of real-life medical doctors weighing in on alternative medicine and anti-vaccination issues.  Many of the skeptical podcasts interview experts in a wide variety of fields in order to broaden our education.  However, trusting the experts runs counter to one common rallying call of skepticism, which is to “do the research yourself.”  For me, scientific research means actually sitting in the lab/office and doing the work that goes in the peer-reviewed journals, though skeptical research often means sifting through web or print sources for the information. In that latter case, you need to trust your sources.  Learning how the scientific method works, how science and scientists really work, and learning who to trust is actually an important part of skepticism, especially if we are to overcome a perfectly natural tendency to reject something that is complex and inconvenient.

So that brings me to the fooferah I mentioned in the first paragraph, that being James Randi’s post on the Swift blog about AGW.  Honestly, I don’t want to comment much on it and let his words, as well as a very thoughtful follow-up, speak for themselves.  Randi is darn good at what he does, and his commentary doesn’t change that.  Also, his opinions are not necessarily the official stance of the JREF or of the skeptical movement in general. That’s part of what is so great about skeptics, we won’t fall in line behind our heroes if they say something that we don’t agree with.  Also, our heroes are willing to self-correct when necessary, and that is invaluable.

So, I’m not going to get up in arms that the godfather of skepticism showed some skepticism of AGW, or at least admitted ignorance on the topic.  But it does make me want to work that much harder to make sure that the methods, as well as the results, of science are more broadly and deeply understood.  And I hope that skeptics will continue to reach out to the experts when tackling the “big fish” topics.

That being said, any actual climate change scientists want to meet for coffee? I know I have a lot to learn…

Posted in Randi, climate change, science, skeptic | 2 Comments »

Prayer for Serenity

December 15, 2009 by Nicole

Whedon, grant me the Serenity
to leave the Alliance I cannot change;
courage to aim to misbehave;
and wisdom to fly like a leaf on the wind.

Gorram.

Oh, not THAT serenity prayer?

Thanks for the inspiration, Jackie!

Posted in random | 3 Comments »

A Very Brief History of Christmas

December 13, 2009 by Nicole

I love Christmastime.  I love the lights, the trees, the gift-giving, the hot chocolate by the fire… okay, I don’t have a fireplace anymore. For as much as I complain about cold and snow, less a problem now that I live in Virginia, I do love celebrating this particular holiday.

The day after Thanksgiving, I was already excited to start decorating. I’ve inherited my mother’s Dickens village, and I love putting it together every year, with all the little people in a quaint Victorian Christmas town.  When I mentioned this to one of my friends she replied, “But wait, aren’t you an atheist?”  I was a little confused and took a minute to think.  Oh right, Jesus is the reason for the season, isn’t he?

The things I like about Christmas aren’t related to the Christian story at all.  The winter solstice, or the shortest day of the year, in terms of daylight hours, was an important date in many ancient traditions.  This is now considered the first day of winter, but it also marks when the days will begin getting longer, a welcome event for farming communities and people who don’t like to come home from work when it’s dark.  It’s the day that the sun starts moving higher in the sky again, thus it is unconquered, or Sol Invictus.  Winter festivities around the world included Roman Saturnalia, full of gift-giving and merry-making (ancient eggnog anyone?), Roman new year celebrations , which helped to give us indoor greenery to celebrate life amongst the cold, and Scandinavia, which gave us the Yule log. Later, as Christianity became more established, they threw their holiday into the mix as to not be forgotten, and to reaffirm Jesus as the “unconquered son.”

Since Christmas was so heavily steeped in pagan tradition, it was rejected by the Puritans who settled the “New World.” Christmas had mixed popularity in colonial America but fell out of favor, along with other English customs like tea time and Doctor Who, after the Revolutionary War. In this era, Christmas continued to be celebrated in various forms in Europe where the Christmas tree and Santa Claus became part of the holiday.

Christmas as we know it was reinvented in 19th century America as a peaceful family holiday that focused on children. The practice of putting a Christmas tree in the house and giving presents to children from Santa were incorporated at this time, and the holiday grew up to be one of goodwill towards all mankind.  It was declared a national holiday in 1870.

So really, when you look at it, axial tilt is the REAL reason for the season, and we have a rich, complex history of traditions that have been invented and reinvented over the years to surround that. I think that as long as you don’t get wrapped up in cynical, crass commercialism, it can be the most wonderful time of year!

So I’ll happily have myself a godless little Christmas, but don’t get offended if I tell you “Happy Holidays.” I understand that some people celebrate Hanukkah instead of Christmas, or Kwanzaa or Festivus or the Solstice or even the Feast of the FSM, so “Happy Holidays” is perfectly appropriate, especially when I don’t know the person! I’m not attacking Christmas with that phrase.

Go ahead, fellow non-believers.  Turn up the holiday music, light your lights, put up your tree, and get something nice for your loved ones.  And, yes, flashing-light reindeer antlers are entirely appropriate.

Okay, who knocked over the kids? Must be the war on Christmas!

Posted in Christmas, atheist, history, holiday | Leave a Comment »

My very first Letter to the Editor

December 12, 2009 by Nicole

In response to a post on the Hook news blog, “Pelt Michaels? Climategate includes swipe at Pat.“  I hope I don’t sound like a total goober…

I’d like to briefly respond to the Hook news blog post by Lisa Provence titled “Pelt Michaels? Climategate includes swipe at Pat.”  It was incorrectly reported here that Dr. Phil Jones resigned from his post at the University of East Anglia, when he has only stepped aside from his post as director of the Climate Research Unit while there is an investigation into the matter. The information is available on the CRU website: http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/dec/CRUphiljones

I would also caution in using the word “skeptic” when describing Pat Michaels and others climate change contrarians. A skeptic, as recently defined by John Rennie of Scientific American, is one who favors “dispassionate, rational inquiry, a respect for scientific thought and a well-grounded doubt in ghosts, astrology, creationism and homeopathy.” (http://bit.ly/8bg9Fx) It is proper to view climate change science with a healthy dose of skepticism, but the scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming is overwhelming and comes from many different sources.  The so-called CRU “scandal” will not change the scientific results from sources all over the world, but instead highlight a serious problem with scientific communication to the public and public distrust of science.

Thank you!

Posted in Charlottesville, climate change, science, skeptic | 2 Comments »

Warp speed, Scotty

December 10, 2009 by Nicole

Last week I took a little break from work to participate in Virtual Drinking Skeptically, which is a fun video chat with cool skeptical people from all over the world.  Someone, and I’m sorry because I can’t remember who it was as I was still fiddling with the software and dealing with a slow network… brought up jets in galaxies that seem to be moving faster than the speed of light. I don’t think I did a very good job of explaining it, and I couldn’t find a terribly good illustration right away, so I’ll try again here!

Most galaxies have a supermassive black hole (that’s millions of times the mass of the sun) in the center, and if this black hole has gas and other material falling onto it, you get a bright, energetic active galactic nucleus (AGN).  Sometimes, this AGN gives off powerful radio radiation in the form of a jet of material that blasts away from the nucleus at nearly the speed of light.

Boom, baby. (Click to embiggenate. Courtesy NRAO/AUI)

In some of the jets, when you zoom in to the very small scales with a telescope like the Very Long Baseline Array, you can track “blobs” of luminous material as it moves away from the black hole at the center.  And in some of these cases, the blobs appear to be moving across the sky at a speed greater than the ultimate, cosmic speed limit… the speed of light!

3C279, how fast can you go? via NRAO/AUI.

To find out what’s really going on, you need to take the angle of the jet into account.  The jet of 3C279, and other such AGNs that appear to show superluminal motion, are lined almost along the line of sight between the AGN and Earth.

Let’s take an example where a blob of material moves at about 0.96 times the speed of light… fast, but not impossible for this blob of ionized material in a jet. It moves 25 light years (that’s a measure of distance, don’t forget!) in a span of 26 years along a path that is just a few degrees away from our line of sight. We take observations of this blob at the beginning of this track and again at the end of it, so we are seeing the light emitted from the blob at each of the plotted positions.

Ignoring my imprecise angles, you can make a right triangle where you break the distance it has traveled into its components along and perpendicular to our light of sight.

At the first position, the blob’s light is given off to be detected by a telescope on Earth. 26 years later, light is give off from a different position that is now 24 light years closer to Earth. Therefore, the light is received only two year after the observation of the first position!

To an earthling, it appears that they blob has moved horizontally 7 light years in just 2 years, making its motion 3.5 times the speed of light! But in reality, it was just going 0.96 times light speed.

Apparent superluminal motion is a fun little concept, and it is a great example of astronomical objects that show change well within a human lifetime. And it shows us that you don’t want to call Einstein wrong just at the first glance of the observations. Radio jets point at or away from us at all angles, so naturally we will see some show this phenomenon. (More than you would think because of relativistic beaming, but that’s another story.)

This also has nothing to do with the concept of the “edge of the visible universe” in which galaxies are receding away from us at faster than the speed of light, so we will never see them, because of the rapid expansion of spacetime. This also does not violate the cosmic speed limit since space itself is expanding and just dragging the galaxies along, and space is not subject to the same constraints as matter.

Lest you ever forget… the universe is a weird and awesome place…

If you’d like to use my diagrams, feel free, but do me a favor and link back here? Thanks!

Posted in astronomy, science, superluminal | 4 Comments »

Housecleaning…

November 30, 2009 by Nicole

Hey all! If you look up above at the URL, you may notice that I’ve put a real domain name on this thing! I never took the time to do a redesign like I wanted to and go and host on my own domain, so I just added the domain to this blog.  All the old links should work, but if you want to change them to the new URL, feel free! It’s like I have a real home on the intertoobz.  (Thanks to Some Canadian Skeptic for the idea.)

Also, welcome new readers! I was a little confused at the number of comments that were coming in from my 2012 movie post, until I discovered that wordpress.com had included that post on their homepage.  So, wow, and thanks to all of you for stopping by and leaving comments! Feel free to look around… it’s a little messy… kind of like my apartment. And go check out Tree Lobsters, since that’s the origin of that lovely image of the crab with the calendar, who really needs to skitter across the page and steal Jenny McCarthy’s Santa hat…

Click the image to embiggenify.

Finally, I’m calling an end to my NaNoFAILMo.  So I got a great start the first week, but then I discovered that if I was writing late at night, I could also be working. So it was a success in that I got more work hours out of my day for actual work, but the novel itself got forgotten. I also got inspired to roll out a few blog posts, so yay. And I proved to myself that I can write fiction prose that doesn’t sound entirely lame and corny.  I’d like to continue the story when I do have time/motivation again, so those of you (okay, one of you, hi Rachel!) who want to know how Eva’s story comes out, it’s still there floating around in my head in a nebulous form, and it will be told one day.

Speaking of books, Happy Birthday to the FDO. I’m wearing my Krakens shirt in honor of his dark overlordness.

Posted in nanowrimo, random | 2 Comments »

I survived 2012

November 29, 2009 by Nicole

This is a little overdue, but I need to report that I did sit through the 2 hour and 38 minute *facepalm* experience that was the movie 2012.  I was invited by Christian, and well, there’s no better way to see this movie than with people who will stay up til all hours of the morning humorously ripping it apart with you.  And, apparently he and Maria have a penchant for watching bad movies.  So we went to see it with a small gaggle of astronomers and skeptics from CVille (okay we all fit in my car), not knowing it was 158 minutes long.  Wow.

Of course, you can already read some fantastic reviews by Rebecca of Skepchick, Ian O’Neill over at Discovery, and at Christian’s The Man Version. To chime in with those: the CGI was pretty effing cool, the movie was LONG and the characters uninteresting, women were reduced to useless whiners, and the bad science was barely justified.  Here’s what sticks out in my head all these weeks later (needless to say, with spoilers):

Super-neutrinos. WHAAA? A solar flare (which has to do with the sun’s surface) is caused by a planetary alignment (must be a new property of gravity) sends off a wave of neutrinos (which come from the sun’s interior) but they aren’t BORING neutrinos that barely interact with matter but SUPER ones that pass unimpeded through the actors but heat up the Earth’s core or mantle or whatever layer was mentioned depending on who was talking.  It would be bad enough to base the movie on the silly pseudo-science surrounding the 2012 nonsense as it is, but they had to make up their own silly pseudo-science to make the plot attempt to stick.  At the very least, it gave those in our row a big laugh.

CGI everything. Okay, watching Yellowstone explode was cool.  But some visceral part of me wants for something to be actually destroyed.  A model, a car, something.  This hit me in one of the very first disaster scenes as the main characters are driving through a series of white picket fences. I noticed that the fence shards were CG.  C’mon, can’t you bust up just ONE fence for me and my $9?!

Roland Emmerich thinks we’re morons.  I guess we are for coming along to see this movie, but nevertheless… the cheesy jokes and over the top symbolism that is cliche for any bad movie simply saturated this flick.  The wholesale destruction of various religious monuments gave a “God says eff you” feel to the flick, but he had to rub it in when the wave of destruction hit the Sistine Chapel and a crack running along the ceiling went OUT OF ITS WAY to split exactly between the fingers of God and Adam.  WOW.  Thanks for being so SUBTLE.

THAT’S what you call a happy ending? All of humanity is pretty much dead with almost a hour left to go in the film which centers around these arks that are to carry a minuscule percentage of the Earth’s population (mostly politicians and rich people) and their art to safety.  I wanted spaceships, I got arks. You just DESTROYED THE PLANET and you want me to care that John Cusack is stuck in a water-filled compartment? Check, please.  But at the end they had these few survivors prancing out of the ark onto new land and we’re supposed to be happy about this? I was totally expecting a rainbow and a dove like in all those cartoon versions of Noah’s Ark that I had to watch as a kid.

For all the complaining, it was worth it for the funny and to say I survived it, but I’d recommend only watching it if you have fast-forward as an option.

And if you are really worried about 2012, check out this cool visualization by Information is Beautiful. I have a small beef with the skeptics side which agrees that precession has a beginning or end point or a length of time for termination… I don’t think there is a particular end point, nor does precession changing by half a degree mean anything significant. Minor point, and if someone knows why they said that, I’d like to be corrected!

Then again, maybe we are in trouble…

Click for the rest…

Posted in 2012, humor, movies, stupidity | 20 Comments »

Astronomy Songs – Part I

November 27, 2009 by Nicole

For those of you that follow along on twitter, a little while ago I asked for some help finding space and astronomy songs for our Dark Skies, Bright Kids end of semester party. And did I mention that my twitter friends are freaking awesome! I got TONS of lists and suggestions and promised to compile a list once I had it all done. For the party itself, I threw these all together into a big playlist and just hit “shuffle.” For listing purposes, I tried to separate the more educational songs from the pool of general space song awesomeness. This also includes suggestions from our other club members here at UVa. Where possible, I’ve provided links for you to download (if free) or buy these songs. Enjoy, and feel free to add even more to the comments!

Of a more educational bent:

"Glorious Dawn" by Colorpulse ft. Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking - song, video, and more
"Far (365 Days of Astronomy Theme)" by George Hrab - song and video
"Cosmic Carl" by Dr. Paul Shuch aka Dr. SETI - mp3 and MORE songs
"Galaxy Song" by Monty Python - video
from Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants (really, get the whole album!)
    - Science is Real - video
    - Meet the Elements - video
    - What is a Shooting Star?
    - How Many Planets? - video
    - Why Does the Sun Shine? - new version and old version
    - Why Does the Sun Really Shine? - video
    - Roy G. Biv - video
    - Put It to the Test - video
    - Speed and Velocity - video
    - Solid Liquid Gas
"Stars by the Colors" by Alan Marscher - song and lyrics and more songs
AstroCapella by the Chromatics - buy the CD or sample free songs
"Elements Song" by Tom Lehrer - video
"Interplanet Janet" by Lynn Ahrens for SchoolHouse Rock - video
    (I could not find the Man or Astroman version! Help?)
"The Planet Song!" from Blue's Clues - song and others
"Yakko's Universe Song" from Animaniacs - video
"Our Solar System" from Animaniacs - song and video
"Big Bang Theory" by Barenaked Ladies - video

For the fun, spacey, and starry-eyed songs, stay tuned for part II…

Posted in astronomy, education, fun, music, outreach, science, space | 2 Comments »

Happy Thanksgiving!

November 26, 2009 by Nicole

It’s Turkey Day for the US folks, and I want to say that I’m very thankful for my family.

(AWWWW)

It’s true, they rock. So what if my brothers think football is more important than science, or if my mom thinks Nathan Fillion isn’t funny… I love them very much, and they have always been close and supportive.

Me and my “little” bros, Even Steven and Paulie Wally. I’m now going to get beat up for calling them that!

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

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