James’s Blog

This Villiage Voice article analyses the hit song This Is Why I’m Hot by Mims. The song is, of course, available in Youtube, at least for now. The lyrics are available here.

The popularity of songs like this makes me have fleeting naughty, unpatriotic thoughts about America. I learned a few new words from it though, words like hyphy and guap. The article is a fun read; I particularly enjoyed the photo caption:

But its analysis of the refrain

I’m hot ’cause I’m fly/You ain’t ’cause you not

is way too complicated (see fig. 3). Note that we have

and

If a conditional statement and its inverse are both true, the two conditions must be equivalent, so being fly is the same thing as being hot.

A few ago the spacecraft New Horizons successfully passed around Jupiter and got a gravity assist. The velocity went up by about 9000 miles per hour; it is well on its way to Pluto and will be there in about 9 years. New Horizons just sent home this amazing picture of a huge plume from the active volcano Tvashtar on the moon Io.

There is a small volcanic plume to the left hand side of the picture as well.

My complaint about sleeping pales in comparison with this. Damn those pesky prions.

Victoria Crater

After almost three years, the Mars Rover Opportunity has driven 9.28 kilometers from where it landed on Mars to the jagged edge of Victoria Crater, which is pictured above by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The rover is visible in the higher resolution version of the picture above, as well as this heavily annotated crop of the shot. On the NASA press release page one can find many more pictures, with varying resolutions. Opportunity took some shots of the local scenary, like this non-trivial bluff named Cape Verde that is about a 6-meter drop into the crater.

Cape Verde

The pictures of the general region and the rock layers are supposed to help us understand the history of the planet Mars, advance science, etc., but I’m impressed by the raw beauty of the pictures. All in all, not too shabby for a rover that was only expected to work for 6 months.

Pluto is no longer considered a planet! It is now a dwarf planet, an object that “has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, and is not a satellite.” Pluto’s orbit crosses Neptune’s occasionally, so Pluto doesn’t clear the neighborhood, so it’s a dwarf planet. Sounds reasonable.

Two other objects are now dwarf planets: Ceres and 2003 UB₃₁₃ (”Xena”). CNET.com has a picture list of some Kuiper Belt objects, some of which might eventually be classified as dwarf planets. All over the news they’re calling Pluto’s change of status as a “demotion.” I’m not sure about that characterization–they just created a whole new category in which Pluto is the prototype, which seems pretty special to me. Incidentally, this CBC article says that something like this has happened before: Ceres was also considered a planet when it was first discovered, and later the word “astroid” was coined for objects like it.

Hmm, we can now play Holst’s The Planets without that nagging feeling that we’re missing Pluto. Maybe someone ought to compose The Dwarf Planets now.

I wonder what the percentage of the vote is, whether there is enough dissent that this definition might change later again. But I can’t seem to find the detailed voting results in all the news articles. Here is the result of the vote; only resolutions 5A and 6A were passed.

Update: it was sort of a voice vote: people were asked to raise a yellow card if they agree with the resolution, and it was passed thusly.

Also, this NPR listener (click on “listen”) had the same thoughts as I did with Holst’s The Planets. Wikipedia reminded me that a few years ago someone did compose a movement for Pluto. I heard it once; I don’t remember it being very good.

Update: Vote is on Aug. 24.

Well, they still have vote for the proposal. Summary of the New Zealand Herald article: Three new planets–Ceres, Charon, and that new one out there people are calling “Xena” because dorky astronomers dig Lucy Lawless. (They’re calling “Xena”’s moon “Gabrielle”, as in Xena’s sidekick in the show. Give me a fucking break. Why don’t we just call it Buffy? Or Ally McBeal? They’re better shows.)

2003 UB₃₁₃, aka “Xena”; Pluto and Charon; Ceres

There is allso one new category–plutons, which includes Pluto, Charon and “Xena.” By the way, two exciting space missions are planned for some of the new guys. New Horizons is currently heading to the Pluto-Charon system and should be there around 2015; the Dawn mission is set to be launched next year and should also arrive Ceres in 2015.

According to NPR and the Sydney Morning Herald, there is supposed to be an original, higher quality version of the above footage. The transmission was received in three tracking stations around the world, but it couldn’t be played directly by commercial broacasting equipments. So they mounted a commercial camera in front of a monitor in the tracking station, hence the lower quality in the usual TV footage. Brilliant solution if you ask me; sort of like taking picture of a picture, which I do all the time when it’s too much hassle to find a scanner.

However, losing the original footage isn’t so brilliant, but perhaps understandable, knowing some of these scientist types. Still, one would think that something like the moon landing would be kept track of a little more carefully than, say, 70s cinema. Hope they find it eventually.

Peter Doran is the lead author of this Nature article [UMICH] about how parts of Antarctica is cooling, which skeptics often cites as an evidence against global warming. Doran distances himself from the global warming skeptics in a NY Times article. A lengthier version of the article is on Doran’s website, as well as some links explaining and supporting the claims in his article. He makes the following observations on the skeptics and the debate in general:

1. It has always amazed me that skeptics of climate warming are quite ready to distrust 99% of the scientific community, but they immediately trust me only because I wrote a paper they “thought” supported their argument.

2. My favorite argument from global warming critics is “it’s been warmer than this in the past” or “temperatures fluctuate all the time”. But how do they know this? Because of the scientific evidence. So why do they question everything said by climate scientists concerning modern climate??

3. When did discussing the weather become political?

Well, discussing the weather shouldn’t political, not if we stay away from talking about fixing the weather, even though people often talk about the two topics at the same time. The debate in the future will be whether it’s better to direct resources to fixing global warming or to try adapting to it. I’m in the camp of fixing it, because I don’t like not knowing when that steep slope in the temperature graph is going to end.

For those who may have been abused by science when they were young and have trust issues, Wikipedia has some nice charts that show how the temps are increasing, and they do correspond to increase of carbon dioxide, etc. Now, Wikipedia is something we all can love and trust, right?