Ray Comfort vs. Thunderf00t

Ooh! It's finally here! Awhile ago, the youtube user Thunderf00t (most well known for his Why do people laugh at creationists? series and smackdowns of VenomfangX), who I'll call TF for the sake of brevity, took up Ray Comfort's (the banana is proof of God and Peanut Butter disproves evolution guy) challenge to a debate. After Ray initially balked and wanted $10,000 for it, he eventually gave in. And now the discussion is online.

*Gets out the a bottle of liquor and prepares for the stupid fest*

Right off the bat, Ray shoves his foot in his mouth:

Why the name Thunderf00t? I mean, is it African-American?

WTF? Does he mean “Native American”?

When TF says it came from his online capture-the-flag games which he used Thunderf00t as his character name, Ray immediately poisons the well saying

I thought it was because you liked stomping on Christians

Yep. Rational discussion right there.

Only 51 seconds in and there's 9 10 minute videos like this?

*Takes a shot*

At 2:12 in, Ray starts making his unsubstantiated claims:

I know [what happened in the beginning]. You don't know. I know what was in the beginning. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” You don't know. I do.

By 7:03, Ray's chastising TF for our generation thinking they're right. As if that doesn't apply to his claims as well.

9:42 comes along and Ray makes it pretty clear that he's not listening and is just hammering his talking points. He keeps beating on about how this universe is a creation, even after TF has pointed out that that's an assumption that Ray has not supported. But Ray just keeps pounding it with his strawman of “nothing” creating something. Yet TF has never once made this claim.

10:16: Ray claims that TF's position is “all these things [that] happened by sheer accident, that they just formed by themselves...”

As if that's not bad enough, Ray's claiming it's “intellectually dishonest” to admit “we just don't know.” Since when is admitting the limits of knowledge “intellectually dishonest”?!

PART 2

1:00 Ray's claiming DNA is “language” and using the writing in the sand analogy. TF points out that another form of the argument Ray's using is “paintings have painters....”. TF points out that there's a reason Ray can claim this (which Ray calls “common sense”). TF points out that he can make this claim because we've seen people paint paintings. Ray counters that he'd never need to see someone actually paint to know paintings were painted because he'd know it just wouldn't “happen by itself.” (Sounds like what I said watching another video with Ray.)

TF asks if “rainbows just happened by themselves.”

Ray's response is priceless: “No. God created them. *smug smile* I know. Says it in scripture.” Ray also claims that God creates the rain as well.

When confronted with a completely naturalistic explanation for rain, Ray then cops out, effectively saying, “Well God still did it.” Even snow: Goddidit.

By 4:05, TF finally gets to the point that Ray is beating around: “So you're asking, can I violate the Law of Conservation of Energy?”

Ray says of course he can't: “You can't make anything from nothing.” Back to beating on his assumption of “nothing.”

Ray then attempts to say that, no matter what, TF can't know there's no evidence for God because you'd have to know everything to know that, of course failing to realize that since he doesn't have omniscience either, this applies to his claim of knowledge as well. But that's ok. Because the Bible tells him everything.

Finally, at 6:40, Ray is finally able to get to his next talking point after spending several minutes trying to change the topic before TF can make a full answer (Gish Gallop much?). His next claim: Man is different than animal because we are a “moral” creature.

TF's response is to point out that many of our morals are dependent on just how society will permit it and whether or not a behavior will cause the extinction of the civilization. Simple explanation, no need for additional causes.

PART 3

0:43 – Ray quickly changes the subject again without bothering to address TF's points. Next subject: Where do people go when they die.

Again, TF calls Ray on the assumption that they “go” anywhere. Ray dances around invoking the “soul” and then equivocates it with “life” with absolutely no basis for doing so.

At 2:40 Ray invokes an argumentum ad populum saying that since most people believe in afterlives, that should be the default state of assumption.

4:30, Ray's claiming that his interpretation of the scriptures must be right because “it's clear to [him].”

At 5:38, Ray makes a really weird claim.

I know God in the same way I know my wife. It's an intimate relation, relationship with her.

Woah there buddy. Don't need to know what goes on behind closed doors.

PART 4

Most of this section is TF talking about how, from a psychological standpoint, people are tuned to follow an “alpha figure” and when they do, it gives them happiness and comfort via a placebo effect. This was in response to Ray's claiming that, because he woke up one night and acceptance of God suddenly dawned on him and made him feel good, that God must be real.

PART 5

Ray leads this part off asking if TF is using this to imply that people are easily deceived. TF replies that he does, and Ray would have to agree with this by saying everyone not following his religion are being deceived by other religions.

TF admits that even he can be easily deceived as well, but reiterates his point that people will believe and act in ways that don't necessarily follow logic (such as the Milgram experiment) when given authority figure.

At 8:18 TF asks a question that surprised me, because it's answer should have been so expected coming from Ray. TF asks “What other definition is there for “morality” [besides what benefits and creates a stable society]?”

Ray instantly claims that TF has no absolute morality (although in part 4, TF stated clear as day that he did because there are absolute limits on actions that will not create the extinction of a society, thus making it obvious again, that Ray isn't listening and just hammering his points) and that he does have another, better definition: The 10 Commandments.

PART 6

Ray's first question in this section is if TF had to choose whether to save his “rotten neighbor” or his dog from drowning, who would he save? TF answers that he would save the dog because he doesn't feel any empathy for someone who's his enemy.

I think a better answer would be “define 'rotten'.”

Next topic: abortion.

Ray immediately tries to get TF to admit that “life” starts at conception. TF tries to remind him that it's not self viable.

TF then asks, whether or not a zygote that develops into a fetus without a head, it would still have the soul that's so important to Ray. Ray gives an honestly incredulous, “I don't know. I have no idea.” But before even considering the question, he goes, “But it's dead.” His reasoning? “If it hasn't got a head, it's dead.”

TF tries to explain it, but Ray quickly ducks away hiding behind the Bible saying “the Bible speaks of a woman being 'with child' again and again. It doesn't say with fetus or with cells.” Thus, anything (unless without a head) is a child because the Bible doesn't contain any mention of anything else (not that they'd have known about it 2000 years ago).

TF goes back to the point that there's no distinguishable difference between the good feelings one gets following a “phantasmal” authority figure as Ray does following his God. TF asks how Ray can distinguish between the two since the results are apparently identical. Instead of answering, Ray goes on a rant about idolatry and drags Dawins' understanding of God into it. Not letting him get away with it, TF drags Ray back to it and Ray responds with the usual, “Bible says so.”

At that point, they start discussing how to conclude which leads us to

PART 7

They go back to the topic at the end of the last one on distinguishing “mental teddy bears” vs God. Ray's only answer is that it's in the Bible, so God is real so he's following that to get eternal life.

TF asks if eternal life would really be a blessing or a curse. Ray immediately answers it would be the greatest of blessings because “We live in a fallen creation. Everything is futile. We're about to die, every one of us. Look in the mirror, things are degenerating. The future is bleak...”

TF interrupts and says that the future is bright because of the accumulation of knowledge. This is an interesting split between the two which shows where their focus lies. To Ray, he's only good because God says so and he wants eternal life for himself. He doesn't seem to genuinely care about others, but only does so because God tells him to, so he fakes it. TF meanwhile, actually cares about the improvement of the species. The question of what's in it for him after he dies doesn't even seem to cross his mind.

Again, it's clear who has more mettle.

TF then points out that the retarding of knowledge Ray does by sowing disinformation about evolution is what gets him so irate.

Ray claims that evolution is “just a theory” and that there's “no species to species transitions in the fossil record.”

Oh the willful ignorance.

*Takes a shot*

Ray then vacillates about “kinds” and how he has no reason to believe in evolution because the Bible doesn't say so. As much as I've debated and watched Creationists, it still amazes me that they obsess themselves with “Truth”, yet can't be bothered to pull their heads out of the Bible long enough to look at reality.

At 5:11, Ray says something amazing

You can tie me in knots with evolution, but I don't believe it.

Translation: All the facts of the world could be against me, but I won't believe it.

This comes right down to the core of Creationist belief. Evidence and reality aren't important to them. This is why we must keep these people out of schools. They're dangerous to knowledge.

Ray then equivocates about TF's “faith in the word of man.” No mention of all the evidence. It can all be lumped together as “faith” and then compared to the “faith” of having absolutely no evidence at all.

TF goes on to give a functional definition of speciation so Ray can't wiggle out of it anymore. He then gives an example of some salamanders that are genetically isolated by a mountain range who can no longer inter breed. Ray claims it's “not evolution” and that the salamanders “have an infertility problem.”

Wut?

Ray even admits that you can breed dogs far enough apart that they can't interbreed, but that has nothing to do with evolution.

*headdesk*

TF points out that that is speciation and Ray even admits it. But then demands something “not reproducing after its own kind.” Whatever the hell a “kind” is.

Ray admits that, at that point, “you need time.”

TF explains that, given geological time that's not a problem. Ray keeps on with the equivocating about belief and when TF reminds him that a four and a half billion year old Earth is what the evidence supports, Ray just responds with, “So you believe.”

“Yep. Damn the evidence. If I can just pretend it's 'faith' or 'belief' and drag them down to my playing field, I can win.”

It really is futile to argue with these people (for the sake of convincing them. I think it's perfectly reasonable to debate them to show others just how intellectually challenged they are). As the saying goes, “Don't argue with an idiot. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

PART 8

To start off this part, Ray invokes Pascal's Wager. TF's response is one of the cleverest I've seen. He points out the premise is that the consequence is infinitely bad, such that we should believe in God even if it's the slightest chance that he might actually exist.

TF poses another such scenario: That of a rhino running around at the speed of light. If someone gets hit, relativistic effects would be such that they'd be stuck in that moment of agony for eternity.

Ray's response is that “the chance of that happening are totally unreasonable.”

Way to miss the analogy, Ray.

He can't actually consider how unlikely his God is because “this creation screams to me there's a Creator.”

But as we've already seen, Ray hasn't looked around enough to actually make an honest statement about whether it's possible to explain “creation” without a “Creator.”

Since Ray keeps hammering on about the Bible, at 6:17, TF pulls out his bible, stuck full of little blue sticky tags.

PART 9

Ray says that it's impossible to understand the Bible without the holy spirit. In other words, you have to accept it as true without question, before you can see it's truth. I'd think that an all powerful God would be able to come up with a better method of communication than that.

At one point, Ray acknowledges that there's a lot of things in the Bible he doesn't understand. Yet he continues to have unyielding faith in it? And he claims to preach it?

CONCLUSION

Overall, I don't think Ray makes a single salient point without having to resort to “the Bible says so.” Given he has to rely on this every few minutes, I think it's safe to say that Thunderf00t completely humiliated him. Of course, those that think such answers are acceptable will disagree.

EDIT: Looks like I was right. VenomfangX is back and adding his worthless, hypocritical, .02 Willing to bet my comment doesn't make it through "moderation".

Carnival of Space 112

Carnival of Space 112 is up. Check it out.

Harry Potter!

My girlfriend and I are at a midnight showing of the new Harry Potter movie. The theater was nice enough to seat everyone now instead of making everyone sit in the halls. But they haven't been nice enough to turn on the overhead lights so I can't read the book I brought. And there's 2 hours till the movie starts.

Thus far, my girlfriernd and I are about the oldest ones in the theater. Not too many people dressing up, which makes me sad. I miss the Star Wars premiere when almost everyone was dressed up. Even the bad costumes were fun.

More Science Surveys

The Pew Institute has a new poll regarding scientific literacy and acceptance.

In general, it's more of the same things we've seen before:

Americans like science.
But they don't understand it.
People with more education understand it more.
People with more religious tendencies understand it less.
The media doesn't help.

However, there's some things that surprised me:

The majority of non-scientists feel government funding is “essential” to research. Granted, it's not a whopping huge majority (only 60%) but at least there's more people out there that realize this than don't. Why? The poll shows the majority of people think that scientific funding pays off in the long run. As can probably be expected, Democrats felt this more strongly (80%) than Republicans (68%).

Another somewhat surprising finding was that the most knowledgeable demographic was the 30-49 age bracket. Out of 12 questions, this bracket averaged 8.5 correct; A full question better than my own demographic (18-29) and notably better than the 50-64 bracket which only got 7.8 questions right on average. Was there something better about that group's education? Or is this just a demographic that tends to stay better informed? Amusingly, the only question my age group did do the best on was the “which of the following is no longer considered a planet?” question. I suspect it may have something to do with the “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet” Facebook group.

One question I've never seen before on these polls asked scientists why they chose their career. I was pleased to see that 86% of scientists answered that solving intellectually challenging problems was very important to them. Only 4% said the money was important.

Not only does the general public not know about the science itself, but this poll also showed they were pretty deaf to the oppression of science under the Bush administration. More than half (55%) of scientists heard “a lot” about it, but only 10% of the public was aware. Among those that did hear, 77% of scientists felt it was true, compared to 28% of the public. As expected, 77% of scientists felt this occurred more frequently under Bush than other administrations while only 28% of the non-scientists.

Of course, what would a poll on science be without the evolution question: Among scientists, 87% say they “think that humans and other living things have evolved due to natural processes”. What about the other 13%? Sorry creationists. Almost all the rest are theistic evolutionsts. Only 2% actually believed humans were created in their present form (compared to 31% of the public). Happily, the younger generation seems to be more accepting of evolution. A total of 61% accept evolution (including theistic evolution). This falls about 5% per 20 year age group.

Disbelief in global warming, rejection of animal research and stem cells, fear of nuclear energy, and vaccines are also starkly highlighted as being far less supported by the general public than scientists. Fortunately, a strong majority (69%) of the public still feels vaccinations should be mandatory. I'd be curious to see if/how this has changed over time.

However, the public still remains positive about science, rating scientists as the #3 contributors to the well-being of society (behind the military and teachers). Humorously enough, that ranks us well above clergy and journalists (42% of those attending religious services say their clergy brought up science or scientific findings although the majority said that these references were neutral). As such, I find it very ironic that so many Americans get their science from clergy members and journalists.

But what are scientists trying to do to fix this? Sadly, it looks like it's not much:

While 87% often to occasionally talk with non-scientists (which I presume could also include their spouses or friends) about science, other means are far less common. Only 3% of scientists talked with reporters often (20% occasionally) and 2% blogged (5% occasionally). I'd like to see an break down of the frequency on the journalists by age. I'm willing to bet younger scientists are more willing to talk to reporters but quickly become disillusioned by having their work mangled.

However, one of the things I found the most disappointed wasn't in the poll itself. It was in the commentary. The commentator had this to say:

respondents did far worse on more complex science questions. Only slightly more than half of all public respondents (54%) knew that antibiotics do not kill viruses along with bacteria, and fewer (46%) understood that electrons are smaller than atoms.

I was disappointed enough when a poll showed that nearly half of Americans didn't know how long it took the Earth to orbit the Sun and nearly 20% though the Sun orbited the Earth. Those are pretty basic questions. But then again, so is knowing the parts of an atom. It's not even high school material. And here we have the CEO of the AAAS calling them complex?!

What happened to our standards? If junior high material is can be considered "complex" it's no wonder we're doing so poorly.

Stars, Planets, and Metal

One of the characteristics of most stars with planets is that they tend to be towards the higher end of metallicity (they have more heavy elements). This should make sense since planets are thought to have rocky cores and you can't have a rocky core without heavy elements.

So what happens when a study of low mass stars in the nearby galaxy shows that all the M class stars are metal poor?

Obviously something is seriously wrong. There's two ways this could be taken: Either the study is wrong, or our theory of planetary formation has a major flaw in it.

Much to the disappointment of young Earthers, it's much more likely that the study. The reason is that for M class stars, finding accurate metallicity is not an easy task. To understand why, let's take a look at the ways we measure metal content of stars.

The most accurate method is via spectroscopy. This method is accurate because you can get the relative strengths of all the elements present by looking at the depth of their absorption lines. That's very nifty since the way we calculate metallicity relies on those ratios.

But the difficulty with all spectroscopy is that it must be performed on each star individually, unlike photometry which allows for quicker data, but with larger errors without careful calibration.

Fortunately, there exist photometric methods by which we can determine metal content. In the photometry I talked about in the post I just linked to, the filters used are carefully selected to avoid as many of the absorption lines as possible to get accurate measurements of the blackbody spectrum. However, if we instead choose filters to hit the pits of these absorption lines for the elements we're interested in, we can use those to determine our metallicity.

The trouble is that for small, cool stars, like the M class stars in question, there's lots of absorption lines. In fact, there's so many, there's almost no distinguishable continuum. Lines can overlap which makes spectroscopy, let alone photometry, exceptionally difficult.

To help try to improve things, the authors of the study used the fact that there's a relation between how much metal a star has and how much it's moved off the main sequence (metals tend to make a star slightly redder and scoot it right on the HR diagram). Piecing this together with photometric data, they argued that they had reliable metallicity estimates.

However, a recent paper is suggesting that the estimates may not be so reliable after all. It tested the older study to see if it could accurately estimate the metallicity of several stars for which they had higher quality measurements. The new study found the old significantly underestimated the metallicity!

Whew! Planetary formation theory is safe!

---

Bonfils, X., Delfosse, X., Udry, S., Santos, N., Forveille, T., & Ségransan, D. (2005). Metallicity of M dwarfs Astronomy and Astrophysics, 442 (2), 635-642 DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20053046

Johnson, J., & Apps, K. (2009). ON THE METAL RICHNESS OF M DWARFS WITH PLANETS The Astrophysical Journal, 699 (2), 933-937 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/699/2/933

WTF Spencer, Iowa?

Up in Spencer Iowa, a small town's school board is doing something monumentally stupid: They're trying to shove religion back into schools. And they're not even being subtle about it.

The draft resolution reads like typically uninformed religious propaganda. It starts off requiring that staff and students be granted rights they already have:

School will not discriminate against private religious expression.
School will educate about, not indoctrinate religious faith.

*headdesk*
Students have always had the right to private religious expression. It's when they start doing it publicly, in a manner that disrupts the curriculum or the academic environment that it becomes unacceptable.
Schools have always had the ability to teach about religion. This is something the religious right frequently whines about because to teach about it, means we don't leave out the things they'd rather not have people know.

But it doesn't get any better.

Promote dialogue between schools and community concerning faith.

Yes. Invite sectarian groups to proselytize. Smart one there. And who gets to pick which groups are invited in to do this?

Create a climate of academic freedom concerning faith issues.

This idea sounds wonderful, but how fairly will it be applied? I remember a few years ago a similar notion of allowing religious groups to distribute “backpack mail”. But as soon as a Pagan group wanted to use it, it drew complaints.

Allow for student and employee religious expression within the law.

I feel pretty repetitive here, but students do have this right. Teachers, not so much. If the “within the law” statement is actually upheld, then this resolution doesn't actually mean anything.

School will neither promote, or disparage religious faith.

Which isn't never been allowed to in the first place! Why is this crap included in here? I think it's pretty obvious: A critical analysis of these people's religions and the history of their religion doesn't necessary cast it in a positive light. That's not disparaging it. It's being honest about it. But such people are so thin skinned that they can't tell the difference anymore.

The next section is “Definition”. The one for religion is stupidly vague:

Religion-a specific system of belief which may or may not include a deity, is not limited to orthodox belief systems or practices.

Oh look! Words to equivocate with! Let's not define the difference between “belief” based on evidence and “belief” based on blind faith.

The next one is even worse:

Evolution – The belief that an unguided process of mutation and natural selection resulted in the existence of life on earth.

I can guarantee no one with any scientific knowledge beyond a basic course helped write this crap. Evolution is not unguided. Natural selection is a powerful guiding force. Evolution does not have anything to do with the “existence of life on earth”. It only discusses the diversity.

The section on “Graduation exercises and other Extra-Curricular Activities” is nothing but things that have been ruled against by courts in the past:

a. Content of speeches by private individuals will not regulated on religious content.
b. School will permit the graduating class to choose whether to have an invocation and or benediction to be given by student volunteer in a non-proselytizing and nonsectarian manner.

The first one is basically saying that the school will not keep out preaching. The second contradicts the first saying that proselytizing is not ok. Make up your minds guys. It even contradicts itself by allowing for a “nonsectarian benediction”. While a benediction can be just a general well-wishing, given the title of the document (Religious Liberty), it's safe to assume that it's talking about a religious one.

Like the school I mentioned before, this school is trying to allow for distribution of religious materials too:

a. Religious materials may not be singled out for specific regulation based on content.
b. Students may distribute religious materials at reasonable times and manners designated by the school.

Again, something that sounds good, but just wait till someone with views they don't want tries to apply for the same rights. As for the second statement, students already have these rights, but it's pretty worthless anyway. Unless you want trashcans full of Chick tracts.

The section on “Religion in the Curriculum” is just a mess.

1. Curriculum areas that overlap religious faith shall demonstrate respect for affected religious convictions.
2. Electives to be offered at Spencer High School:
  a. The Bible in History and Literature
  b. Critic of Darwinism, a scientific approach. (provide a balanced review of evidence for and against the theory of evolution, using texts which include “Darwin’s Black Box” by M. Behe)

The idea that topics that may overlap must “demonstrate respect” is just code for “tiptoe around anything we don't like to hear” which destroys the stance of neutrality they're pretending to create. As far as the elective courses, the first one is fine. The second is, well, at least they're admitting the “criticism” of religion is a religious exercise. But seriously, Darwin's Black Box!? That book's been torn up and down so many times now it's not even funny. That's hardly “balanced”. Nor does “Darwinism” even exist beyond a silly Creationist strawman!

And just so the whole thing ends on a stupid note:

Teaching about the holidays. Discussion of the significance in an objective and historical nature will be allowed.

Sure. So they're going to admit that every Christian holiday is a rip off of other religions? Yep. Thought that one through real well...

HT: Stupid Evil Bastard

Planets and Shadows

Last year, I blogged about why catching stars forming is a tricky proposition; They're surrounded in gaseous nebulae that makes trying to observe the act a bit like watching a sports game from a plane flying through the clouds. You just can't see through it all.

In general, this should hold true for planets. Until the star clears out the dusty disk, the planets will remain hidden, even if we could spatially resolve them. So a paper talking about forming planets with “Observable Signatures” in the title caught my eye.

In this paper, the author explains something that, at first glance, is actually counter-intuitive: These dusty shells may help find newly forming planets. The reason is that, as planets form, they will slowly accumulate the material around them. In the vertical direction, this has the effect of making a “dimple” in the proto-planetary disk proportional to the planet's accumulated mass.

According to the author, the dimple will appear observationally as a “shadow”. She doesn't completely explain why this is and it seems somewhat strange to me. The reason is that “shadows” are usually caused by something that blocks light. Although the forming planet would cast a (relatively) small shadow that would be lost in the disk, it's not at all clear what would cause a shadow in the dimple.

Rather, I suspect a better word choice would have been to say there would be a “darkening” in the dimple. This would make more sense to me, since the dimple would be a lower density and have less material to scatter light propagating along the plane. Less light means that, relative to the rest of the disk, it would appear darker. Thus, I'm pretty sure that's the actual mechanism at work here.

But there's another interesting component: On the side of the dimple that's further from the parent star, there's a brightening! Weird huh?

This again, is not well explained in the paper, but I suspect the reason for this has something to do with the angle at which the photons coming through the disk are striking the side of the dimple. Either that or it's the opposite of the darkening effect where suddenly the boost in numbers of photons that were allowed to flow relatively freely through the empty space created by the dimple are suddenly again encountering a relatively dense medium again.

Regardless of how these effects should be created, planets should show a dark spot next to a brighter spot with the sizes proportional to their mass. But should these be observationally detectable?

According to the paper, yes. These features would be most readily observable in the visible to near-IR bands. The real limiting factor would be how well we're able to spatially resolve these dimples. Obviously, the further away a system would be, the smaller it would appear. Even for the largest planets simulated (50 Earth masses), the dimple is about 3 AU across. That means that we'd need to be able to resolve half of that to see both the darkened and lightened portions.

Tossing that into the small angle equation and assuming a fairly typical resolution for a good telescope of 1arcsec, we get that we should be able to observe these systems out to 3.1 x 10⁵ AU or 4.9 ly.

Eep!

That's not very far at all! In fact, the only stars that fall in that range are the stars in the Alpha Centauri trinary star system. The next closest one after that (Barnard's star) is 5.9 ly away!

The Hubble can get down to ~0.1arcseconds of resolution, which would mean 10x further, but there's still not really any star forming regions within 40 ly.

So ultimately, while this technique is interesting it doesn't seem the least bit practical with the current generation of telescopes.

---

Jang-Condell, H. (2009). PLANET SHADOWS IN PROTOPLANETARY DISKS. II. OBSERVABLE SIGNATURES The Astrophysical Journal, 700 (1), 820-831 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/700/1/820

Anime Review – Planetes

No. I didn't spell the title of the series wrong.

Planetes isn't a series of which many people have heard. It received the prestegious Seiun award for the manga in 2002 and for the anime in 2005 (the famous series Cowboy Bebop won this award in 2000). Even among rabid anime fans, it's gone largely under the radar. I suspect this is because it doesn't fit the norm of being ridiculously over the top; There's no giant mecha, no magic powers, no crazy transformations, no ninjas.... oh wait. There's ninjas. But not in the normal anime way....

Instead Planetes is a very subdued series that focuses more on character development and complex yet subtly highlighted issues rather than the in your face action. The series takes place in the near future when space debris has reached a level so critical that it's requiring international clean up efforts. The main characters in this series are debris haulers in charge of this zero-G cleanup.

For an anime series, the science is unexpectedly good. There's frequent talk of transfer orbits, Van-Allen Belts, relative motions, dangers of radiation sickness, muscle degeneration in weightless environments, and other things that, in most series, I'd expect to be filled with techno-babble. But in this series, it's apparent the writers did their research and yet, it's not even boisterous about it. Whereas many series that have to do similar research for accuracy will take the time to show it off (usually by having awkward lines of someone having to explain the concept to someone that should already understand it), Planetes drops it in seamlessly, merging into an unusually harmonious background.

As I mentioned, the series manages to touch on many very human themes throughout the 26 episode run. It tackles the place of humanity in the universe, class divisions, terrorism, the difference between ambition and greed, and isolation.

It's one of the best series I've watched in a long while. If you're into anime and haven't seen it, I'd recommend picking it up when you have the chance.

Book Review: Zen in the Art of Archery

A few years ago, a friend recommended Zen in the Art of Archery to me. I bought it quite awhile ago, but until this past spring, it was sitting on my bookshelf collecting dust. This spring I read it, and apparently it then sat in the back of my mind without review collecting proverbial dust.

An inspiring review right there, to be sure.

While the book was interesting enough to read, it was not especially captivating in any manner beyond a cute personal narrative.

The book's primary purpose is to tell the story of the author's journey to become a Zen master through the art of archery. In doing so, it seeks to explain the philosophy of Zen, namely that through mastery of an art to such a degree that it can be done without conscious thought (thus becoming "artless") one transcends the material world and frees one's mind to reach higher states of consciousness.

Most of the book is the author making mistakes and being too conscious of his own actions and his master rebuking him with cute riddles and analogies. These are thought provoking, certainly, but in no way convincing of the "truth" of the religion.

The most impressive feat along these lines is an example of the master hitting a target dead center in a darkened practice room. Certainly inspiring, but this would seem more an impressive example of muscle memory and familiarity with one's own practice area than any transcendental physicality.

Rather, that (and the rest of the book) would only seem compelling to those already lacking an inherent skepticism or any critical thought. Indeed, the author at one point goes so far as to mention that it's only convincing if you already believe. Echoes of the Christian motto that you have to open your heart. It was a fun read and a good introduction to the religion, but fails to be anything more.

Heavy in the Halo

If you've been following my blog a long time, you may remember a post on stellar evolution that was responding to some rather silly claims made by some Creationists. One of the claims was that the universe must be young, because we see young, massive stars where there's no gas and dust to form them. The example he used was near the galactic center. My response then (and still is) that this makes the rather ignorant assumption that stars stay where they're formed.

The center of the galaxy is a very messy place and this is certainly not true. The massive black hole swings stars far and wide.

Meanwhile, the center of the galaxy isn't the only place we find these peculiar stars. They're in the halo of the galaxy too, far removed from the disk of the galaxy. In many instances, this isn't that much of a problem. The stars we find way out there have velocities that are too high for them to have remained in the disk, indicating they were indeed flung out by either a close binary reaction with another star, or in the case of some of the exceedingly fast ones, by our galactic black hole.

However, for some of the most massive stars, their lifetimes are shorter than the amount of time since they were thrown from the galaxy. In other words, if we track backwards, the stars didn't exist when they were last in the galaxy!

Uh oh.

Is is possible that these stars actually came from a satellite galaxy like the Large or Small Magellanic Clouds?

Not likely. Their spectra show their chemical composition is more likely related to our Milky Way than any of our neighbors.

So what's the story?

The outer reaches and inner disk aren't the only place we've seen stars of masses and lifespans that don't fit. Nearly three years ago, I mentioned another one: blue stragglers in globular clusters.

In globular clusters, all the stars tend to form in one big burst from one big cloud of gas and dust. This means that their chemical composition and age are effectively the same. The only thing that will determine their evolution from their on out, is their mass. The massive ones peel off the main sequence first and slowly die towards the less massive ones (see this post for more on this topic).

Yet in several globular clusters, there are massive stars remaining on the main sequence when there shouldn't be. The notion here was that normal stars interacted, either by direct collision or mass transfer in a post main-sequence phase, which rejuvenated a star by giving it more mass and dropping it back on the main sequence.

Could such an explanation be possible for these odd runaway and hypervelocity stars?

The first question is whether or not there are any known runaway stars exist in binary systems in the first place. It turns out there are, but not many. Only about 1% of ejected stars appear to be binaries. However, many of these binary systems have very short periods (<5 days) which indicate a very close pair. This is perfect for mass transfer or instability such as predicted by the theory.

Additionally, many individual high mass stars like these have strong cases to make for their binary birth. Some are still binaries where one star is significantly more massive than the other with periods of closer to 10 days. More need to be observed to get a really good feeling on whether or not this possibility is right, but statistically, it works out pretty well on the theoretical level.

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Perets, H. (2009). RUNAWAY AND HYPERVELOCITY STARS IN THE GALACTIC HALO: BINARY REJUVENATION AND TRIPLE DISRUPTION The Astrophysical Journal, 698 (2), 1330-1340 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/698/2/1330

Bento lunch

A few weeks ago, I moved in with my girlfriend. Since this meant moving back to St. Louis from Kansas, I'm still looking for a job. In the mean time, my girlfriend is paying the bills and everything else.

In exchange. I have to do all the cooking. Given I've been cooking since I was 12, this is pretty easy for me. But to make things interesting, I've been sending her to work with Japanese bento lunches for the past 2 weeks.

I haven't done anything too fancy yet, but I'm getting there.

You're doing it wrong.

Although I don't often say too much about it, there's more forms of dangerous pseudo-science out they aside from Creationism. The anti-vaccination movement is one that seems to be growing a lot recently (or is at least getting more attention) that I've been growing pretty concerned with.

Another is the recent actions of the British Chiropractic Association (BCA). While I, nor anyone else I know has a problem with a good back rub to relieve some stress, Chiropractors and those they dupe seem to be under the delusion that spinal alignment fixes all sorts of problems. The evidence simply does not support this.

So what happens when a prominent figure points this out?

If you haven't been following the story of Simon Singh at Bad Astronomy, go do so. In short, instead of actually presenting their evidence in court when their practice was called for what it was ("bogus"), they decided to sue.

And against all reason, they won.

The decision is obviously being appealed, but the entire assault against honest inquiry via abuse of the legal system is staggering. And fortunately, a lot of people seem to be realizing it.

In response, the Vice-President of the BCA wrote an article in New Scientist entitled In Defense of Chiropractic. And boy did he bungle it.

His first claim is that no real Chiropractor actually believes they can treat entirely unrelated illnesses like asthma, digestive disorders, infant colic, menstrual pains, sport injuries, tension headaches, and migraines.

[The criticism] has the clear intention of suggesting that modern chiropractors cling to the 19th century idea that spinal misalignments are responsible for the majority of diseases. While a tiny minority retain this view, most are aware that such claims have long since been debunked.

Orly? Then why, according to they very article that the "defense" was responding to did the author point out that the illnesses I just referred to are, in most cases, believed by more than half of Chiropractors to be treatable through their profession?

A 2004 survey by the UK General Chiropractic Council revealed that most chiropractors believe they can treat asthma (57 per cent), digestive disorders (54 per cent), infant colic (63 per cent), menstrual pains (63 per cent), sport injuries (90 per cent), tension headaches (97 per cent) and migraine (91 per cent). According to a 2007 survey, 69 per cent of all UK chiropractors see themselves as more than just back specialists, and 76 per cent consider Palmer's original concepts to be "an important and integral part of chiropractic".

Oops. Either you're lying or didn't do your homework.

Meanwhile, the evidence suggests that he knows he's lying. And the BCA is hurriedly trying to cover it up. Sounds like the guys over at Uncommon Descent.

But the bungling doesn't stop there. The author then tries to justify the notion that Chiropractic medicine is safe. How? By saying it doesn't cause stroke:

Claims that chiropractic is dangerous overlook two recent pieces of research. One found no causative association between chiropractic manipulation and stroke. The other concluded that the incidence of stroke after chiropractic was no greater than after a consultation with a general practitioner

Well huzzah!

So it doesn't make things worst (most of the time). But that still doesn't mean it makes things better which is the claim that Singh was making in the first place.

But even if it doesn't directly harm people, it does indirectly by making people think that they're going to get better through this bogus treatment. They forgo treatment that actually does solve the problem. And that's when Chiropractic treatments, faith healing, and all the other "alternative medicines" stop being just silly, and suddenly turn dangerous.

Of course, the author's mouth is so big, he has to shove his foot in it a few more times. He claims:

[Critics overlook] the fact that many accepted medical interventions have little or no research evidence to support them.

Translation: "Woot! We don't have to have standards because lots of other alternative practices don't either! If we can drag everyone down to our level we can all win!"

Pathetic. Sounds just like Creationists trying to abuse the term "theory" to try to get themselves on the same level as honest science.

I'd love to see patients form a civil action lawsuit against the Chiropractic association under the notion that, aside from a placebo effect, they been hoodwinked to pay good money for a treatment which provides no discernible benefit in most cases.

So, dear BCA, if you think that's a real defense, think again. You're doing it wrong.

This is why you fund science

NASA keeps a magazine devoted to spinoff products. Spaceref discusses a new one from the Mars missions that has the potential to liberate resources from rocks that were previously trapped in them.

This is why we should fund science. It's not just to satisfy our innate curiosity (that's why the scientists do it). You never know what unexpected benefits research will churn out. Those spin offs can improve our quality of life.

That's gotta sting!

Phil's been talking a lot recently about meteors. Most notably, he pointed out just how unlikely it is for a plane to be hit by one. But what about a person?

Back in 1954 a woman was hit by a fist sized one that crashed through her roof while she was sleeping and left a good bruise, but didn't leave any real injuries.

But this past week, a UK boy was hit by one without the luck of a roof in the way. This one left a nasty scar.

Meanwhile, I'm skeptical about the claims of speed the article has listed. 30,000 mph? Seriously? And just left a scar? The muzzle velocity of high speed guns is only 4,000 mph. 30k mph is a perfectly respectable speed for a meteor before it hits our atmosphere, but they slow considerably.

Additionally, I think the chance of getting hit by a meteor is far less than "one in a million". I think that's just their innumerate way of saying "very unlikely".

Despite the sloppy journalism I've come to expect from science, it's still a pretty monumental occurrence. It's good to hear the kid's into science and hopefully this event will promote an interest that lasts as long as that scar.

Fuzzy blob = ghost

Here's another case of unbelievably stupid credulity.

A security camera catches an image of a fuzzy blob. Those looking at it can't figure out what it is. Therefore, it's a ghost.

Forget the possibility of internal reflections in either the camera itself or the dome covering the camera. Forget that it "jumps" as it moves up the chair, just as a light source shining on it would. Forget common sense.

Instead, the unknown must be personified. In fact, so much so, that little blob of light gets a name. It moves to a chair so it must be "sitting".

*facepalm*

How sad it must be to be so scared of the unknown that the only way to deal with it is through fantasy instead of honesty.

Mythical Pictures

Although people frequently claim photographic evidence of flying saucers or aliens, skeptics like me an Phil Plait have (what should be) a simple request: Give clear pictures. Not fuzzy blobs, or poorly contrasted images, or lights with no reference in a dark sky. With all the technology available, it shouldn't be that hard.

In fact, just to demonstrate how simple this should really be, check out this article. It includes a beautifully framed, focused, and lighted image of a bear that's so rare, it's reported it was thought not to exist.

I'll admit the photographer was a professional and taking good pictures is his job. But then again, you'll have to work pretty hard to convince me no professional photographer has ever gone after UFOs.

Movie Review - Fanboys

After four years of waiting, and being a complete n00b and missing it in theaters, I finally got to see Fanboys when Netflix sent it to me.

Quick review: It was funny. Not the funniest film I've seen, but I laughed. I think if you're not an immense Star Wars fan, this movie would have been pretty awful. There were so many little jokes that would go completely missed if you weren't intimately familiar with the Lucas films.

The plot was manageable even if somewhat predictable. The biggest surprise to me though, was the ending wasn't what I was expecting. The reason was that this Fanboys wasn't the first Fanboys with pretty much the exact same basis.

In 2003 a group of New Zealand film makers put together a short film called Fanboys about a group of friends that intended to steal a screener copy of Episode I before it was released in theaters. Hijinks ensued and it ended up that Lucas was aware of the plan and let them get away with a copy of the Star Wars Christmas Special as punishment. If you're not familiar with the Christmas Special, well, it's better that way. It featured Bea Arthur singing some crazy lyrics to the Star Wars theme and some campy story about Chewbacca having to get back to his family for “Life Day” (the Wookie knock off of Christmas). It was bad. Really bad. The only notable part of it was the first introduction of the bad ass bounty hunter Boba Fett who later appeared in Empire Strikes Back to capture Han, then fell into a Sarlaac in Return of the Jedi (yet lived according to the novels) and was later revealed to be a clone of Jango Fett in Attack of the Clones.

Anyway. That's how I was expecting the film to end. But it didn't. It ended as you'd expect if you were watching the movie with no prior knowledge of any of these things. The acting was pretty good from all the main actors. The Trekkies were pretty bad, but who cares? They're Trekkies. The cameos were awesome. And I swear Kristen Bell is stalking me. She's been in all sorts of cool stuff, from the Showtime adaptation of the musical version of Reefer Madness, to being a major character in the TV show Heroes, to a voice for the upcoming Astroboy movie, and apparently even a film adaptation of the classic mathy novella, Flatland. Either way, I can't get enough of her (or Felicia Day for that matter).

So should you run out and get the movie? If you've seen everything else for the summer and are feeling geeky, go for it. It has a few touching moments between a few laughs. It's short enough to hold your attention span. Seven stars out of ten.

Building a New Ladder

As I've discussed before, Cepheid variable stars are a fundamental method to the entire understanding of the scale of our universe. These standard candles were first used to conclusively demonstrate that fuzzy patches of light were entire “island universes” or, as we call them today, galaxies. From there, they've been used to calibrate most of the rest of our cosmic distance ladder.

So what would happen to our cosmic distance ladder if they'd never been discovered?

A paper in the June 1 ApJ is the third in a series that asks just this question. Sadly, only the first is available on the preprint server currently.

The first paper looks at how possible it is to rebuild the distance ladder without the use of Cepheids. As a replacement, they use the tip of the Red Giant Branch (RGB). As stars die, they expand. The larger surface area corresponds to a greater luminosity, but also means that the same energy is being spread out more, so the temperature drops. In more practical terms, this means that the star's position on the HR diagram moves up and to the right.

Overall, stars will max out at an absolute luminosity of about 10⁶ times the luminosity of the sun. If astronomers can isolate those stars, as with other distance indicators, they know how bright they should be, and then comparing them to how bright they are (and correcting for other dimming effects), they can then get a new distance estimate. Fortunately, the RGB tip method works very well because it's fairly insensitive to the chemical composition of the star (how much “metal” the star has).

This study used the RGB stars to calibrate the distance to 14 galaxies which was in turn used as a reformulation of the secondary distance indicator, the Tully-Fisher (TF) relation. Although there was some difference, it was very slight. In fact, it was very nearly within the error range (0.19 ± 0.13 mag).

Using this in turn, to recalculate the Hubble constant (which the inverse of gives the age of the universe) they got a value of 73 ± 5 km s^-1 Mpc^-1. This is amazingly close to the most recent calculation of 74.2 ± 3.6 km s^-1 Mpc^-1!

Since this paper was published in 2008 (before that most recent Hubble constant), the authors instead compared their value to that from Sakai et al. (2000) which gave a value of 67 ± 10 km s^-1 Mpc^-1.

In one case, a bit higher. In one a bit lower. In either case, a very consistent value! No matter how you approach it, the universe is 13 billion years old.

(PS: If anyone can get the next two articles in the series for me, I'd greatly appreciate it! DOI numbers are 10.1088/0004-637X/694/2/1331 and
10.1088/0004-637X/697/2/996.)

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Mould, J., & Sakai, S. (2008). The Extragalactic Distance Scale without Cepheids The Astrophysical Journal, 686 (2) DOI: 10.1086/592964

Gyrochronology

In case there was any confusion, we live in a dynamic universe. Stars are born. They die. Galaxies collide. Things happen.

In trying to put together a comprehensive picture of how this all happens, one of the things we need to know as astronomers, is in what order things happen. How has our universe evolved?

Knowing how to tell just how old objects in the universe are is a serious challenge. There's some tricks out there, like looking at the main sequence turn off for clusters, but for isolated stars, it's much more challenging. Stars that are still on the main sequence pretty much all look the same for a given mass. Although they cook up heavy elements in their cores, most of it will never reach the surface and even if it did, there would be no way to be certain that those heavy elements weren't present when the star formed.

For isolated stars, one of our best hopes is to look at how fast the star is spinning. As stars age, they radiate away energy in various manners, burning off the angular momentum with which they're born. So if stars of similar masses all started off with the same rotational speed, and spun down at the same rate, the amount by which they'd slowed down would tell us the age.

Sadly, nature's rarely so simple.

Dating stars from their spin can be done (known as gyrochronology) but it's a tricky business.

A paper in last month's ApJ discusses the problems and some of the solutions.

The idea is to calibrate the method by looking at the rotation period for stars for which we know the age. As I pointed out before, clusters offer this potential. Then, by plotting the period vs the age, we would hopefully be able to make some sort of relation.

This paper built on previous work which looked at clusters like the Pleiades, M34, NGC3532 and the Hyades. In specific, the authors added M35 to the list of clusters for which the periods were plotted.

As I hinted at before, things aren't quite so simple, mainly because there's other variables to consider. One of the ones you might expect is that the mass plays a factor. This study concentrated on “late” type stars; stars that are on the low end of the mass scale (G, K, and M spectral classes).

Another issue is that, even for a single cluster, there's apparently not just one sequence that stars for a given age, but two! Here's what I mean:From this picture, you can see that there's a line going diagonally from the lower left to the upper right, and one along the bottom. Incase you're unfamiliar with the terminology, the B-V (bottom axis) is the color. Bluer (hotter and more massive stars) are to the left. Cooler (less massive and redder) stars are to the right.

What this means, is that for stars of a given mass, you can have have two possible periods! Blah. Very blah.

The first question that should be asked from here is, "Why are there two sequences in the first place?"

The notion is that there's two different processes that are controlling how the star is spinning down at work. To understand one of them, let's consider a very simplistic model of stars:

Stars form as giant clouds of gas collapse. Since angular momentum is conserved the forming star spins up, faster towards the center (what will become the core). Once the star is formed, the core will be rotating faster than the surface. Since stars aren't solid, that means there's not a good way for the outer layers to steal the angular momenum from the core and for the rotational period of the core and the outside to even out. As such, the observed period of the star will be longer. The authors call this the "C sequence" for "convective". In this one, the core and shell are decoupled.

Quite often, however, this won't be the case. Stars will quite often have strong magnetic fields that act like anchors, and they drag the surface layers of the star along. This will speed up the outer layers and defines the second, faster sequence (the bottom one) which the authors call the "I sequence" for "interface".

Well, that's all well and good, but it still doesn't tell us anything about the age. At least, not until you start looking at the ratio of stars on each sequence vs cluster age. When that's plotted up, young clusters tend to have more stars that are on the C sequence with slow rotators. As you get to old clusters, more and more stars are on the I sequence (short periods). Obviously, stars will tend to switch from one to the other as the clusters age. The idea here is that the friction between the layers of the star will help create a dynamo and set up a magnetic field which will switch stars from the C to the I.

Regardless of what the processes are that govern the switch, the main thing is that it happens. And it works out that there's a fairly well defined way it changes from one to the other. The ratio of the number of stars on each sequence is directly correlated with the age!

So how well does it work? Using the data from M35 to help calibrate the method and then applying it to M35 gave the authors an age of 134 million years with about a 3% uncertainty. This isn't quite the 150 million year age given from the main sequence turn off, but it's still not a bad approximation.

Meanwhile, there's still a few niggling bits to clear up. The big one is what's with the stars that aren't in either sequence? There's a lot of stars that fall somewhere in between. The authors predict that these stars are likely close binaries that have slowed without the benefit of magnetic fields, but rather, through tidal locking. At least one of the dozen or so stars caught in between is known to be a binary star with a period of 10.33 days. This orbital period is strikingly similar to the 10.13 rotational period which lends support to this prediction. Additionally, 3 of the other stars in the gap are photometric binaries (in otherwords, their brightness changes in a manner consistent with what's expected for a binary system).

So overall, this method looks like it works pretty well. Undoubtedly, more clusters will be added and the relation further refined. Obviously, isolated stars can't take advantage of this method either, since it requires a ratio of many coevolutionary stars. But that's a challenge that will have to be met in another paper.

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Meibom, S., Mathieu, R., & Stassun, K. (2009). STELLAR ROTATION IN M35: MASS-PERIOD RELATIONS, SPIN-DOWN RATES, AND GYROCHRONOLOGY The Astrophysical Journal, 695 (1), 679-694 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/695/1/679

Scientia Pro Publica #4

My post on the cosmic distance ladder was submitted and selected for the blog carnival Scientia Pro Publica. If you're interested in other sciency things, head over and check it out.

In the mean time, I'm slogging through some new (and very long) journal articles I'll post on once I finish them.

Egads! What's 'appened to that galaxy?

It's going backwards!

Well, part of it at least.

A paper from last month's ApJ takes a look at two galaxies (NGC 2551 and NGC 5631) that are a bit... odd. Namely, part of the disk of the galaxy rotates one way, part of it rotates the other.

Both of these galaxies are classified as spiral galaxies, but only just. SIMBAD (an astronomical database) lists NGC 5631 as an S0/Sa galaxy which means it barely shows any spiral structure. Meanwhile, NGC 2551 is just a generic S, so very little spiral structure at all.

One of the things I found interesting about this paper is that just reading the galaxy designations in the abstract, I suspected these galaxies were not particularly nearby (since if they were, I'd probably have heard of them before). Thus, since they're likely too far away to resolve individual stars, how do they separate the rotational velocities of the stars from that of the gas?

The answer is to look for properties that are different between the two. The two are largely composed of the same elements, but they exhibit different properties due to the difference in pressures and temperatures. Low density gasses like gas exhibit emission line spectra while stars which are at high density have absorption spectra. (I talk more about these here if you need a refresher).

By picking out lines of each that would be prominent (the NII line for gas and the K1III and K3III lines for stars), it was possible to separate the radial velocities of each of the components.

So what's up with the backwards gas? Or is it the stars that are backwards?

The best answer is that gas rich satellite galaxies, like our own Magellanic clouds were cannibalized by these galaxies. Statistically, these types of mergers were calculated to happen fairly often and be present in 8-12% of spiral galaxies. But is that just jumping the gun and assigning a probable causation to this?

Not at all. In at least the case of NGC 5631, there was also a prominent dust ring associated with the gas that is inclined 35º to the plane of the galaxy! (I've talked about similar phenomena in our own galaxy here.)

Oh, and this group also gets cool points for using a telescoped name SAURON.

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Sil'chenko, O., Moiseev, A., & Afanasiev, V. (2009). TWO MORE DISK GALAXIES WITH GLOBAL GAS COUNTERROTATION The Astrophysical Journal, 694 (2), 1550-1558 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/694/2/1550

Why did no one tell me?

Fanboys was released? How did this sneak in under my Nerd-dar?

Dear Kansas Republicans,

What are you smoking? May I have some?

I read a while ago that there was a cut of 3% across the board to help balance the budget. Could be worse.

Then I read that this is hitting education in Kansas on top of a cut of already 7%. Uh, not cool.

Then I read that the budget defect is $328 million and you're wanting to solve over half of that by cutting education?

I guess this is a pretty clear sign of where your priorities lie.

So if you'll excuse me, I have some more resumes to send to schools in Missouri, since they seem to actually respect education over there.

Bye Venomfang!

Looks like VenomfangX is gone again. His youtube channel has been deleted, his videos are gone, and even his website is taken down.

Apparently, there's been claims that he's received "death threats" from "Muslims". He's posted some pretty condemning things in regards to Muslims before, so it wouldn't completely surprise me, but if he really were going to let that cause him to wet his pants, why not just take those down and leave up all his Creationism nonsense?

Safe to say, I'm highly skeptical. My personal thought when I heard this, is that VFX is doing what he tends to do a lot: Play games to try to garner emotional sympathy. If you watched his video in response to one of his followers going and committing the murder/suicide earlier last month, he has his little "crying moment" at the beginning and intentionally chooses not to edit it out. Why? Because it makes him look sympathetic and plays the pity card. Sadly, that's the best he has to offer.

Meanwhile, his website tells a different story:

This site has been taken offline by the parents of VenomFangX, they don't support/share his views and apologize if he has offended anyone.

Oops. Guess mommy and daddy didn't like having a little liar in the family pushing it all over the internet.

Is he really gone though? Who knows. After all, he pulled disappearing act last year too.

Another Rung on the Ladder

One of the most fundamental problems in all of astronomy is to determine the distance to objects. To be able to do this, astronomers have developed what's known as the cosmic distance ladder. The base is built with extremely reliable methods, like parallax, which is then used to calibrate distance indicators for objects further away, which are then used to calibrate even further objects, etc....

In this ladder, one of the most helpful and commonly used types of distance measurement is based on a type of star known as Cepheid Variables. These stars are stars towards the end of their lives, off the main sequence, in what's known as the instability strip. Because of their unstable nature, they change their brightness in a regular way. In particular, the average brightness is directly related to the amount of time it takes to make one full cycle (the period) by the equation

M_V = -1.34 – 2.85 logP.
Thus, by observing a Cepheid type variable's period, we can determine the overall brightness, which we can then compare to how bright it actually looks to determine distance via the distance modulus.

As with all things, there is some inherent error in this equation. It's well established that the amount of heavy elements in a star (the “metals”) will change the overall brightness. As a result, it's suggested that Cepheids in the Large Magellanic Cloud are about 0.4 magnitudes fainter than stars with metallicities similar to the sun (Sekiguchi & Fukugita). Additionally, the calibration of the equation I listed also has general error associated with it as well, but in general it's nothing too outstanding. In general, Cepheids are a wonderfully reliable distance indicator that works over a large range of distances.

However, there's a limit. The problem is that this type of variation only occurs with the more massive stars. Since more massive stars burn through their lives faster, Cepheids are relatively speaking, young. As a result, they tend to be concentrated in clusters since they have not yet had time to disperse. The problem then becomes that, eventually, you simply can't reliably resolve the star you want and be certain you're not getting light contamination from other stars of a similar brightness contaminating your data. Due to this Cepheids only end up being useful to a distance of about 25-30 million parsecs.

A recent paper in the Astrophysical Journal provides a potentially new way to extend that distance to as much as 100 million parsecs (Bird, Stanek, Prieto)! Their trick is to use Cepheids that aren't the prototypical variety. Normal Cepehids are considered to have periods of about 3 days to about 100. But the ones looked at in this study exist at the upper edge of that limit and well beyond, going from 80 days to as much as 210 for the 18 stars they analyzed. They call these stars, “Ultra Long Period” (ULP) Cepheids.

The advantage to these stars is that they're about 2.5 magnitudes brighter than their classical companions (remember that the magnitude system is a logarithmic scale so that's actually about 23 times as bright!). This means that (1) we can see them further away and (2) it's less likely that there will be stars of a similar brightness to contaminate the field. Sounds like it solves all our problems, right?

As of yet, I'd still be somewhat skeptical to fully rely on this system. The issue is that, although promising, the statistical certainty just isn't there yet. The authors of this new paper looked for a new period-luminosity relation in three different filter systems. In all three, the root mean squared values (in essence, the amount of uncertainty) was at least twice as high as it was for classical Cepheids. While twice the error can be dealt with and doesn't ruin the science done with such a method (assuming that the error is properly figured in), it does not yet match the statistical certainty of other available methods available up to 100 million parsecs (namely the use of Type Ia supernovae).

But could it get there?

The authors suggest (and I'm prone to agree) that their uncertainty is not too much higher than that of the Type Ia supernovae. But to get the certainty of the supernovae method as low as it is, significant effort has been invested in beating down the statistical errors. If a larger survey was conducted and the baseline was expanded it's entirely possible that the errors for this ULP Cepheid method would decrease as well. It's not a guarantee, of course. It's entirely possible that in expanding the sample size may begin to reveal other variables they had not yet considered, but it's a good possibility.

So in the end, this paper is giving us the very real possibility of adding a new rung to our cosmic distance ladder. Each step makes us more certain of where we fit in our universe.

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Sekiguchi, M.; Fukugita, M. (1998). Metallicity dependence of the Cepheid calibration The Observatory, 118, 73-77

Bird, J., Stanek, K., & Prieto, J. (2009). USING ULTRA LONG PERIOD CEPHEIDS TO EXTEND THE COSMIC DISTANCE LADDER TO 100 Mpc AND BEYOND The Astrophysical Journal, 695 (2), 874-882 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/695/2/874

Knowing Our Cosmic Sperm Donor

In perusing the recent articles in the ApJ, one of the ones that caught my eye this week was one entitled, “²⁶Al and the Formation of the Solar System from a Molecular Cloud Contaminated by Wolf Rayet Winds”. Quite the mouthful to be sure, but it's an interesting paper.

The idea is that a number of unstable elements (specifically ²⁶Al) are present in the oldest of meteoritic materials in higher concentrations than would be expected if our solar system had simply formed from the gravitational collapse of the local interstellar cloud. Their presence indicates that some sort of event happened near our solar system which injected these elements as the cloud underwent its collapse.

In general, heavy elements like aluminum are cooked up in stars. In fact, the ratios of elements observed in these remnants suggest it wasn't just any star, but a massive star. But once those elements are cooked up, the next trick is transporting them to our fledgling solar system. But how?

One obvious answer is to blow up the star that's making the elements in a supernova and spread them all over the place. Another possibility was that the elements were blown here in a gentler manner from a type of star known as a Wolf Rayet star. These stars are massive stars that are so hot, they blow off their outer layers.

The trick is to determine which of these possibilities was the real deal. Again, the ratios tend to rule out supernovae as a possibility due to the fact that such an occurrence “invariably over-predict the abundance of ⁵³Mn”. To get the right abundances, the scenario that fit was that a nearby cluster of stars released the necessary elements as our solar system was forming, but while it was still dispersed enough to be vapor.

This paper really highlights one of the things I really love about astronomy and science in general; Small details, like the overabundances of rare materials in this case, can give hints at very grand questions, like where we came from. I find it amazing that we are capable of determining what our fore bearers must have been like even though they are no longer around just by looking at that which we carry inside our own solar systems and bodies.

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Gaidos, E., Krot, A., Williams, J., & Raymond, S. (2009).
Al AND THE FORMATION OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM FROM A MOLECULAR CLOUD CONTAMINATED BY WOLF-RAYET WINDS
The Astrophysical Journal, 696 (2), 1854-1863 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/696/2/1854

On the other foot

In America, we frequently hear that this country "is a Christian Nation". While I disagree in some senses, this is in many ways very true; The majority of the nation is composed of Christians, and despite laws against it, Christian morality works its ways into our politics, schools, and just about everything else. Those of us that aren't Christians, or are but are the wrong kind of Christians constantly have an uphill battle to make sure that our rights aren't trodden upon. It would be wonderful for atheists as a minority, if we got the theocrats out of power and had a secular government.

So wouldn't it be strange for Christians to be the persecuted minority praying for a secular government?

Turns out, it's happening in India. The plight there seems worse than minorities have in the US, but it's a good reminder of what happens to minorities under sectarian governments. So while Christians have it good here, they should keep in mind just what it would be like if that shoe was on the other foot.

Sadly, experience has told me that those that most desperately need to keep this perspective are completely blind to it.

Pareidolia: n + 18

Apparently fried junk food must be among the favorite foods for divine beings. Of all the pareidolia cases I see, it seems there's an unusually large number from diners. Either that, or people working at such places are credulous twits. And yet again, a fuzzy figure has shown up on a griddle.

Phenomenon

Made by a friend for an Astronomy project. Too epic not to share.

NCLB Shown to be Ineffective... again.

The newest Nation's Report Card is out for the Math and Reading topics. Although gains have been made in both areas, they are strongest for the nine year old level. By the time you've reached the high school level, gains have been pretty marginal since the 1970's.

But don't let that from people saying it's effective. The education secretary, Margaret Spellings is quoted in the NY Times as saying,

It’s not an accident that we’re seeing the most improvement where N.C.L.B. has focused most vigorously.... The law focuses on math and reading in grades three through eight — it’s not about high schools. So these results are affirming of our accountability-type approach.

Wonderful. We give kids a boost early on, but still allow our education to drop the ball by the time they complete high school. That's great!

One other interesting thing I found in the Report Card is that although the gender gap in math and science is usually reported to be large, the report card shows it to be small, at least in terms of math. Although it grows by the high school level (but only to 6 points out of 500 in the most recent year), it suggests that females aren't going into science and technology fields due to a lack of preparation or ability. Rather, the lack of females in these fields is more due to cultural stigmata drawing females into other lines of work. Something for teachers to keep in mind.

Things that don't work

I was going through my folder of links on things to write about, and found this article from the summer of last year that made me chuckle at just how wrong it turned out to be. Out in Iowa a bunch of people from the "Invincible America Assembly" got together to meditate and solve all of Americas problems. They predicted that they would send the stock market soaring via "harmonious waves" with the Dow surpassing 17,000.

HAHAHAHAHA! Nice timing. Predicting your voodoo would fix make a utopia right before the economy went in the shitter.

FAIL.

But to make the guy sound even dumber, consider this quote:

We have control over things we didn't have control over before. That's the progress of science

Wha? He claims to be using science?!

Sorry pal. Science works.

Jedi Cops

News stories pop up from time to time about the "Jedi" religion over in the UK. But this story mentions there's a number of them that are police officers in Scotland!

I just giggle at it, but one comment stands out to me:

As long as they don't try to start using ' the force' to try to solve crimes, I'm sure it's harmless.

I doubt they'd be that silly. But then again...

But whatever. Just as long as the cops are Jedi and not stormtroopers.

Not Just the Christians

In the three years I've been running this blog, I've seen an alarming numbers of botched exorcisms from Christians. I've never suspected that this was the only religious organization partaking in such archaic superstitions, but only that it popped up more in the media due to the fact that the media I observe is American, which is, by and large, Christian.

And I was right. A Buddhist man critically injured his son trying to expel demons from a statue he bought.

The problem with labs

Looking back on my time spent in college and recalling some of the best and most interesting times I had, there are several instances that stand out. Surprisingly, to some, most of them were the labs and research I worked in. Whether it was the tedious photometry of 1,500 stars in a cluster during my internship, or the laborious pouring over journals and trying to come up with a future research plan for my flare star research or even the advanced physics labs in which we spent far too much time for far too little credit demonstrating principles we had long since taken for granted, that final result of getting an answer and knowing that it was meaningful was a wonderful feeling of success.

So what is it we teach in high school labs?

Thinking back to the labs I did in high school, I can only remember about three labs. One was rolling blocky cars down inclined planes and trying to measure the force of gravity. One involved some pulleys and who knows what the point of that was. The last was spinning electrons in a magnetic field in some manner that caused them to scintilate and the diameter of the circle could be measured to determine the mass of the electron.

I always liked labs at that point, but in reflection, it was for a very different reason. It was a free day or two to not have to think. All we had to do was blindly measure what we were told, plug it into the equation we were given, and pop out numbers that were off from the values we should have been getting by, quite often, nearly an order of magnitude.

I can't be certain that my high school experience is completely indicative of the situation in the majority of schools (although Time magazine did choose my high school as representative of American high schools in 1999 when they did an expose on what life in high school is really like since Columbine), but assuming such conditions are common, I see two major problems with this.

The first is that such labs don't hold the students accountable for why they do anything they do in such labs. There is little connection between what is taught in the lecture portion, and how the lab was created to illustrate or test the concept in question. Pick up any journal article and there is always a lengthy section right at the beginning setting up the theoretical framework before any description of methodology in an experiment is even approached. Yet this has always been absent from my memory of high school labs as well as the introductory astronomy labs I taught during my time at KU. While I was able to insert this material in my own labs via my lectures prior to the start of lab, this, as best my memory serves, was completely absent from any labs in lower levels.

The other thing that is similarly neglected in high school labs is something that actually stands out like a sore thumb: The amount of error. Error in measurements is, of course, unavoidable. Whether its due to inherent limitations in tools, or variables that cannot be constrained at such levels (eg. how do you try to approach friction and drag in carts when the math needed to do so is at least two years of college beyond what most high school students will ever obtain), the order of magnitude errors I discussed earlier are often just swept under the rug.

So what does this tell students? The message is that science is sloppy. Measurements can be wildly different and it's ok.

What's not included, but I feel should be, is at the very least, some sort of quantitative analysis of the error involved. In my own classroom, I've seen this attempted, and the way I've always seen it done for low level classes is wholly disappointing. In most low level classrooms, the method to determine error is that you take the difference between the "True" value and your value, and divide it by the "True" value. This gives the amount that you're off.

But since when does real science have a "True" value by which to compare the derived value?

Never. And we wonder why people nod in agreement when creationists push the notion that science is dogmatic when we're the ones putting ideas of "True" values in their head?

This methodology seems entirely counterproductive. While equations to determine error are obviously beyond the capabilities of high school students, I feel there is still a solution.

Although the capability to carry out higher mathematics is certainly constrained to such students, what I do not feel is limited is the ability to show the qualitative reasoning behind the math. Even the concepts of calculus aren't beyond the capabilities of students.

To give an example: In the lab I taught at KU, we had an assignment in which students were required to measure the position the sun set along the horizon throughout the semester (ie, the azimuthal angle). One of the questions we required students to address was "When was the rate of change the fastest?"

To those that have taken a calculus course, the answer is instantly obvious: the highest rate of change is the point on the graph with the steepest slope.

While, as an instructor, I can point this out to students and they'll swallow it, the point becomes even more convincing when a bit of dimensional analysis is performed and I demonstrate that the slope of the graph does indeed give the correct units for the rate of change!

Similarly, I feel that, even if an important equation is, in a quantitative sense, too difficult for a student, we should at least approach it qualitatively, and then do the quantitative bits for them. In other words, the instructor should solve the equation for the given lab so that students (once they understand what the equation is doing) may simply plug in the necessary numbers.

This alleviates the problem I have presented; Instead of telling students that there is error and doing vague hand waving claiming it's "friction" or other ways of sidestepping it, it lets students know that, in real science, not only do we consider the error in our techniques, we can even say how much!

There is, of course, another, probably simpler solution: Get rid of labs with such high inherent errors. Instead, find labs that can be easily constructed with minimal tools that still result in high accuracy measurements.

My favorite lab I've seen along this line is one involving measuring the speed of light with nothing more than a bag of chocolate chips, a microwave and a ruler. I've done the experiment myself and even gone through complete error analysis. The result I got for it had less than a 1% error and fell, within significant digits and the error bars, right on top of the canonical values of the speed of light!

Now why didn't I ever do this in high school?

Life - Or something like it

Bah. Almost 4 months since I've posted anything here. Certainly a new record.

As I pointed out back in November, my life has largely taken me away from the topics about which this blog is ostensibly centered.

However, as things often go, life is beginning to take me back to topics on which I feel are worthwhile to blog about.

I've mentioned my attendance at conventions several times in the past, and this past month saw yet another con come and go. This one was Naka Kon 2009 and was my first con I've attended as a staff member (game room overlord if anyone cares). Aside from that duty, I also managed to get myself roped into MCing the cosplay competition (Note to self: Next year, wear gel insoles in costume's shoes).

But perhaps most pertinent was the panel I prepared. It's something I'd been working on for nearly 5 months and went over astoundingly well. The title was "Science of Anime". The idea was to take various phenomenon I'd noticed in anime that were certainly not realistically possible, and use science to show just how nonsensical they really were. The title was patterned off the series of TV shows with titles like "Science of Star Wars" or the "Science of Batman" which occasionally pop up on the Discovery channel. In reflection, I really wish I hadn't named it such (and I'll probably change it in the future) because those shows try to rationalize obviously fictional events with scientific principles but stretch them so implausibly all over, that it's right back into the realm of science fiction. The shows are cute, but ultimately I'm not a fan of them. Thus, I think my future title will be "Anime Mythbusters - Where everything's BUSTED".

Anyway, the panel was videotaped, but since it was in a dark room with a powerpoint, the room is too dark to see me, and the screen is to bright and is overexposed. So the video is worthless. I'm working on getting the audio ripped and making a video with just the slides, but it'll take awhile longer since the person doing my editing work's computer doesn't like the codecs I used to export some of the videos. I'll make a post when it's up on Youtube (or perhaps somewhere else).

Life is also working to take me towards a new career. For the past 9 months, I've been working as a waiter to pay the bills until my lease is up and I can look for a real job somewhere else, but now I'm planning on moving back to St Louis and am planning to teach high school physics (and astronomy if the school offers a course in that area). As such, physics and astronomy education have been on my mind quite a bit recently and I have ideas for a few posts on that topic that I'll likely be writing up when I find time. I've already done an interview with one school district and have resumes out to a few more. Hopefully things will go well.

A page from the "Well no shit" files

I hear all the time that religion doesn't make people mistrustful of science all the time. It just happens that there's a direct correlation between religious belief and the ignorant criticism of evolution. It's not all science. Just that one area.

Oh yeah. And nanotechnology.

The article also said that mistrust of "the internet, genetically modified food, nuclear power" and other things tended to go along with distrust in nanotechnology.

In other words, religion gives people a general sense of paranoia in which everything's turned into another demon from which they need saving. Forget that pesky reality.

"The researchers say their finding support the idea that underlying cultural beliefs have a stronger influence on opinions formed about nanotechnology than science based information".

Duh.

Another Child Murdered thanks to Exocism

Q: How do you get demons out of a 1 year old?

A: With a hammer.

And how does such religious nonsense not promote child abuse again?

Pareidolia: n + 17

Jesus is a rock fan? Who'd have guessed that he'd show up on a guitar.

Not really sure it looks like Jesus. That beard is pretty ratty. Or perhaps it's just tentacles and PZ needs to learn how to play.

But if it is Jesus, does he like Pearl Jam or the Stones?