New Moon

So I somehow got talked into going to see the new Twilight movie, "New Moon" last night. As I've mentioned before, I like midnight showings. Like many other big events, there's an energy to them that just makes them more exciting. Usually, it's hard to really find a good term to describe that energy. But last night it was easy: Estrogen.

Jeebus there was a lot of it. I expected that there would be a lot of teenage girls there, but the ratio was way steeper than I expected. I'm pretty sure it was close to a 40:1 ratio. Whenever Edward or Jacob came on screen it was a screaming and swooning reminiscent of the legends I hear about the Beatles.

And the director (or writers in some cases I suppose) milked it. "Oh, Bella. You hit your head on a rock? Let me take my shirt off to dab at it for a few seconds and not bother to compress it at all."

*Hurk*

"I'm Edward and I'm so emo that I'm going to go all Romeo by exposing myself to the public as a sparkly freak by slowly stripping as I walk down a hall into the sunlight while wearing my 'sensitive' face.... in slow motion."

I watch anime. I'm used to fan service. But damn was this over the top.

I still can't fathom why people like this series. I haven't read the book, but everything in the plot is cliche++.

"I love you and I'm afraid I'm going to hurt you so I'm going to push you away." x2

"I'm going to do it by telling you I don't love you anymore and you're stupid enough to fall for it."

"I'm going to watch the end of Romeo & Juliet right at the beginning and then try to pull a Romeo."

And let's not forget the plot holes where Bella is brought before the Vampire high council and none of their powers work on her (like Edwards don't). So the conclusion is supposedly drawn that Bella is immune to all vampires.... except that Jasper's (I only remember his name because there's a character in 101 Dalmatians with the same name) powers work on her....

Really, this movie has nothing to offer that hasn't been done better elsewhere.

But at least this movie wasn't as bad as the first one.

God the Hitman?

As I've understood it, the point of prayer is generally to make a request of God to perform an action on your behalf.

*Shrug*

Whatever. We ask for help with things all the time. But generally, it's from people that can actually do something (again, prayer doesn't work).

But when we ask someone real to commit murder, it's a crime. It doesn't matter if they're actually going to do it or not. If someone attempts to persuade someone else to kill someone, regardless of the effectiveness of that person or the final outcome, it's a crime. And not one that should be laughed off.

So what should we make of this story in which some Christians are touting merchandise that reads: Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8. Psmalm 109.8 reads, "Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."

In other words, they want Obama dead and they're asking someone (that they claim is real) to make it happen. The "how" isn't mentioned, but if someone was talking to a real person, it wouldn't have to. It's still a felony.

I'm still not entirely sure how I feel on this. I already knew people like this were delusional, but this is right up on the border of dangerous.

Evolution to be Mandatory in the UK for Primary Schools

According to a BBC article, a new curriculum for 2011 will require the teaching of evolution in primary schools in the UK. This is a fantastic move. Students need to learn the basics of evolution early since childhood is generally the same time that Creationists like to fill children's heads with lies about what evolution is and the "evidence" against it.

Furthermore, by having an early introduction, this means that teachers will be free, at higher levels to actually delve into the functioning of the theory, as well as the evidence for it.

Now if only the US would mandate something like this.

How not to do a study

The other day on Digg, I came across an article on Forbes that suggested that Fox News' claim of being "Fair and Balanced" may actually be correct. It doesn't take John Stewart to figure out they're not, so I knew something had to be fishy about the story.

The idea behind the article is that Fox features a similar percentage of negative coverage of Obama as other media outlets have in the past for other presidents (about 65% negative). Meanwhile, the other "liberal" news stations have a disproportionately high amount of positive coverage for Obama when compared to coverage of earlier presidents.

The fault lies in that it's a overly simplistic system. The coverage is lumped into either "positive" or "negative". Stations can't lose extra points of coverage that gos beyond negative into racist rants, hate-filled diatribes, or tirades full of complete bullshit like their continued coverage of the Birther movement or their fanaticism with the supposed Death Panels.

It's not thoughtful reflection of news that leads to negative coverage that make Fox the target of such criticism. It's the fact that their "negative" isn't even reality based. Furthermore, Fox uses material from its "Opinion Commentators" to pass off as "News". This study doesn't even begin to address that because of its shoe-horning into ill defined categories. When these other important criteria for judging the news worthiness of the station is added, it becomes clear Fox doesn't even belong on the scale.

The Top 8 Dinosaur Discoveries of 2009

Popular Mechanics has a great article up listing their favorite dinosaur discoveries of 2009.

What's amazing to me is that more than half of these are feathered! Creationists always ask for transitional forms, and regardless of whether or not these new discoveries are part of the direct lineage of birds, they still show that a large family of feathered dinos existed for evolution to draw upon. So I guess I'm not just going to be listing archaeopteryx as the only feathered dinosaur I know of anymore.

The Right Idea

I'm not a fan of fantasy romance novels. But my girlfriend loves Laurell K. Hamilton.

Last night she was reading Laura's blog and I happened to read this over her shoulder:

First sign we were in trouble other than the on-going mismatch on sex was when he came home from work with this little announcement. That one of his coworkers had told him the man is the head of the household and that women are not equal in the eyes of God. He quoted scripture at me. We were both good little Epsicopalians at this point, may I add. He made these awful announcements and somehow thought that would make him win all the "discussions" we’d been having about the Bible and church, and I know realize looking back he was also trying to assert some kind of authority over me, in the marriage. My reply to him, "If that’s really what the Bible says, and really what God means, that being a woman isn’t as good as being a man then I can’t be Christian anymore." Not what he expected me to say. I’d never seen him back-pedal so hard in our first year of marriage. He basically said, his friend could be wrong and the Bible verses were open to interrprutation. Damn right they were, and damn right his friend was wrong.

I am now a happy little Wiccan and have been for about ten years.

What perfect sentiment: When you realize your religion is abhorrent and misogynistic, don't cherry pick it; Drop it.

You know it's bad when Fred Phelps has more of a spine

Apparently Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron are switching their edited Origin of Species hand out to today because they're scared of protesters.

Guess they couldn't handle anyone actually directly challenging their BS in front of the ignorant crowds they're hoping to spread their intellectual void to.

At the very least Fred Phelps (the "God Hates Fags" pastor) doesn't have to cower and hide his protests. You know it's bad when Fred Phelps has more of a spine....

Ray and Kirk should be ashamed, but I don't think they're smart enough to.

A New Kind of Supernova?

In general, supernova come in two flavors: The core collapse Type II supernovae, and the white dwarf over the Chandrasekhar limit, Type I supernova. The two are distinguished by the elemental composition of their spectra: Type II stars still have a hydrogen envelope and thus, hydrogen lines are prominent. Type I supernova, being the burned out cores of stars, don't have that envelope, so heavier elements, like silicon are present.

However, the Supernova 2002bj defies classification. Initially, it was classified as a Type II, but observation of its spectra has shown it to be more similar to a Type I (ie, it had the Silicon lines present), but it also had helium lines present which is uncharacteristic of that class. SN 2002bj also faded far more rapidly than should be expected for stars of the Type I classification.

So what are they?

The authors suggest this may be a new class of supernovae, called .1a supernovae, which was predicted theoretically, but had not yet been observed (or if it had, it wasn't realized).

The idea is that the system, instead of being composed of a white dwarf accreting mass from a red giant companion, the companion star was instead a fellow white dwarf. Models of this show that two white dwarfs in a sufficiently close binary orbit can transfer mass. Such systems are known as AM CVn stars.

If this sort of system were to have one star pass its Chandrasekhar limit, several predictions about the resulting supernova could be made:
- The supernova should be (relatively) faint and evolve quickly.
- The short timescale would allow for easier detection of short lived isotopes like ⁵²Fe or ⁴⁸Cr in addition to the normal isotopes we see in the afterglows of supernovae (I mentioned this decay process briefly in this post.
- These events should make up a few percent of all Type I supernovae observed.

Of these three criteria, 2002bj fits the first to a tee. The authors don't say whether or not these additional isotopes were observed. However they did hint that the higher than expected luminosity than that of this theoretical kind may be due to such short lived elements, but at the very least, this paper reinforces the idea that these should be something we keep an eye out for in the future. In regards to the last criteria, in the local region (to a distance of 60 Mpc) only 31 are Type I known, so this is still on track to meet the "few percent" criteria, but we shouldn't place bets with such a small sampling.

It will be interesting to see how this new class pans out in the future and just what new things we find to put in it.

---

Poznanski, D., Chornock, R., Nugent, P., Bloom, J., Filippenko, A., Ganeshalingam, M., Leonard, D., Li, W., & Thomas, R. (2009). An Unusually Fast-Evolving Supernova Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1181709

Star Wars Pareidolia

This one just puts the Jesus muffins to shame.

Wine Rating Statistics

I'm not a huge drinker. I can't stand beer. I prefer liqueurs and on rare occasions, when the food paring is appropriate, I may have a glass of wine (although I generally don't keep any stocked in my personal liquor cabinet).

I definitely have a few brands I prefer (the St. James peach wine can be very good, although it's not always consistent), but generally, if experimenting, I try to go by the ratings listed in the store. In general, these ratings have done very well for me. My absolute favorite brand of amaretto (Gozio) was one I discovered through its high rating.

However, a recently published study has shown that the wine ratings (which is presumably done in the same manner as for the other liquors) may be substantially flawed.

In general, the ratings had a large spread, even by the same taster. Most tasters rated the same wines within +/- 4 points, but some had deviations as large as +/- 10 points! And before you can claim that that is just due to the skill of the former tasters, the study also showed that the same ones were inconsistent from year to year.

In short, the ratings aren't what they should be and there's so many wines clustered in the high 80's and 90's that such a substantial spread makes the system virtually worthless for a statistical standpoint. And the wine makers aren't surprised.

However, wine makers aren't ready to shuck the ratings all together. They still admit that the higher rating does give people a sort of placebo effect in which, having a high rating will make people perceive it as better.

But with this new information, I think I may try experimenting a bit more when I pick up wines and stick with ones that I've come to like, regardless of the rating.

Eclipses and a bit of History

Recently, I've been doing some research for an upcoming talk (a sequel to my Science of Anime talk).

One of the topics I'll be hitting is that of the duration of solar eclipses and how, in popular media, they occur, from the moment the first bit of the moon's limb covers the sun's disk, to the moment it leaves it, in the span of about 1 minute.

In reality, totality can last several minutes (the maximum theoretical length of totality is about 7 3/4 minutes). The entire eclipse lasts closer to two hours. What I wanted to know is just how much we'd have to change physical parameters to make the eclipse happen as it does in TV world.

I won't give away the answer, but wow is it a pain to figure out! The reason is there's a ton of different variables that go into it. First off, consider the shadow of the moon holding still as it would appear to in this static picture. In that, the earth would turn through the shadow, making the eclipse occur.

But in reality, the moon is moving too. So you have to add that motion in. Que moving coordinate frames with spherical trig.

Trying to quantify all this has not been particularly easy. When I first thought this question up, I figured it would take 15 minutes of derivation. I've been tinkering with it for 3 months here and there, and still haven't solved the full system, although I think I've accounted for all the variables to an order of magnitude approximation which is all I really needed in the first place.

I was hoping to find a nice little equation (and by little, I don't literally mean little) that was behind one of these eclipse calculators, but surprisingly, I haven't been able to find it with all the powers of the internet behind me! I've been using Google books, and going through quite a few texts available and still haven't found the full equation (only approximations).

Most of the more recent ones (starting around 1970) all have their solutions written as computer languages (and I don't care enough to sit there and reverse engineer their Fortran or C++). So interestingly, the most useful books are ones that date back to the turn of last century!

I've always thought of astronomical history as very interesting so I find myself reading more than strictly necessary. One of the most interesting things I've come across in this venture was a note on "Flame-like proturberances" during solar eclipses:

Immediately after the commencement of the total obscuration, red protuberances, resembling flames, appear to issue from the edge of the moon's disk. These appearances, which were first noticed by Vassenius, on the occasion of the total solar eclipse which was visible at Gottenberg on the 3rd of May, 1733, have been re-observed on the occurrence of every total solar eclipse which has taken place since that time, and constitute one of the most curious and interseting effects attending this class of phenomena.

- From Handbook of Astronomy, 1875.

Obviously today we call them solar prominences and know they're a result of matter captured by the Sun's magnetic fields or blown out through other stellar activity. But it's interesting seeing just how far Astronomy has come in the last 134 years.

For those that are curious, there's a review article on the history of solar prominences that's quite interesting as well. In the 1840's some thought these prominences were "mountains on the sun". It wasn't until the 1850's that it was realized these were more likely clouds of some sort, and it wasn't the 1900's that a full interpretation was realized.

Think of what we'll learn in the next 100 years....

Teaching - 11/12: Test Fail take 2

In light of my students absolutely failing their first test, I decided that it was impossible for the class to move on and that they should retake the test. On Monday, I told them they would be doing so this past Thursday. So they had 3 additional days to study. Tuesday and Wednesday the entire class was spent reviewing the test material.

In specific, students were having trouble with collecting like terms, dealing with sets, closure, and counter examples, and solving for absolute values. Less so, a few students also still can't figure out that when adding decimals, you have to line up the decimal points. They were subtracting numbers from the tens columns from ones from the hundredths columns. In the two in class days we had, we did numerous examples of all of these.

Yet come test time, scores for these types of problems barely increased. I'd changed the problems slightly, altering numbers here and there, but the problems were more or less the same. Even with clearer wordings that students had said was confusing on the first test (although it shouldn't have been if they had bothered studying the first time around and knew the terms).

Overall, the class average improved by 1.4%. Two students actually got lower scores than they did the first time (one whined about not knowing there was a test even though he had been told both Monday and the class before when it was and then after the test told me he "wasn't in a test taking mood").

As it stands, only one student has scored above a C. Two have scored C's. One is a D, and the remaining four are failing.

I keep asking myself if this is a failure in my teaching, but I asked another one of the teachers that has the same grade level (the 10th graders) for Chemistry, and he told me that the students did so poorly on his first test (same week as mine) he too made them retake it. But even nicer than me, he gave them the exact same test and they still failed.

Words cannot describe how stunned I am at the almost amazing inability to retain any knowledge of these students. Nor can I describe how stunned I am that they don't care.

From here, I think I'm going to have to split the class up: Those that are scoring a D or below will have to retake the test again and again until they can perform these prerequisite skills. The one with a C will need to make sure he refreshes those topics he missed. The A will be allowed to move on.

But what a terrible burden to have to place on a teacher: To be maintaining two different classes in one.

Caught a Wave

I just got invited to test out the new Google Wave today. I have absolutely no idea what to do with it.

For those that don't know what it is, it seems to be a mix between an instant messenger, Email, and a Wiki.

It's an IM service in that you can talk real time. It's Email similar to how Gmail works in that it keeps things as a thread and all posts in a topic are connected. And it's a Wiki in such that anyone can edit anything in the thread, including something someone else has written.

It's supposed to be used as a tool for collaboration and I can see how it could be pretty nifty. If I were still a student doing research, I think this would be a great way to bring together a research project. But alas, I'm not and I can't really see a good way for this to be put into use for me. This sums up how I feel about the Wave right now.

Does anyone else hereabouts have it or have any thoughts?