admin

The TRAPPIST-1 System to Scale

 drawings, Hmm..., news, science  26 Responses »
Feb 232017
 

I figured what the world was lacking was a simple line drawing diagram showing the worlds of the TRAPPIST-1 system to actual scale. The worlds are to scale in both diameter and orbital radii.

Considering some additions. The main one: comparison of how big the primaries are in the skies of the secondaries. Suggestions?

 

Note: TRAPPIST-1 is the headlining image on Google today. It’s actually pretty cute.

UPDATE:

Here’s what things look like from other things. On the far left is how Jupiter looks in the sky of the four Galilean moons, compared to how Luna looks from Earth and Earth looks from Luna. One the top right is how the TRAPPIST-1 star looks from its various planets. Note that even though the star is *dinky,* it is gigantic in the sky  of its planets due to proximity. For all of them, the star is bigger than the moon as seen from Earth (and thus bigger than Sol in Earths sky).

At lower left is how some of the planets look from some of the other planets at closest approach. Note that virtually all closest approaches are *substantially* bigger in the sky than the moon in Earths sky, though none are as big as the Earth in Lunas sky.

Note that all three of these views are to the same scale. Jupiter from Io would be an amazing and quickly fatal sight.

Here’s just the planet-to-planet view:

 Posted by at 8:28 pm

Slavery is awesome and rape doesn’t exist

 blather, Crazy, Forward!, history, Hmm..., politics, religion, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  5 Responses »
Feb 232017
 

I have some small hope that anybody reading the title of this post won’t actually believe that I believe it. I would hope that *nobody* would believe the title. But as with so many of my hopes, this is another one that has been dashed. For there are people – not just uneducated jerkwater morons, but educated university professors such as Georgetown University’s Jonathan Brown – who believe that slavery, when done under the rules of one particular religion, is a wonderful thing. And that rape doesn’t exist because it was never mentioned in his favorite book of religious fairy tales.

Professor Uses Lecture to Defend Islamic Slavery

The lecture was sufficiently vile that even fellow Muslims were appalled.

It seems Prof Brown is a recent convert. There’s no fanaticism like that of the recently converted… the newly minted vegan or non-smoker or non-drinker or… but to get *really* nasty, nothing beats the new convert to a religion. Especially when you think that your new religion not only puts you right with some divine moral absolute, but also gives you the right to be a monumental dick.

Of course, this lecture has received some discussion and debate in the days since it was publicized. And of course Prof Brown is trying to walk it back, with the usual “I was taken out of context” scheme we always see when someone is recorded saying something indefensible.Brown even starts out his lecture by announcing that he will be saying hyperbolic things and that he’ll be taken out of context.

It was clear that he wanted to make sure that he controlled the debate as he had a “Jihad Watch” reporter expelled prior to his lecture. But what’s extra-remarkable is that the audio of the lecture was uploaded to YouTube by… prof Brown his own self. Clearly he thought that his advocacy and defense of the indefensible was perfectly wonderful.

Here’s a simple test: if you are being a dick and your understanding of your deity backs you up on your dickishness… consider that perhaps either your deity is a dick and does not deserve your worship and belief, or that you are simply a dick and have chosen a belief system to confirm your dickish nonsense.

Here’s a shorter video of the lecture. Better audio, though edited.

 Posted by at 5:35 pm

Gosh, who could have foreseen this?

 blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, news, projects  6 Responses »
Feb 232017
 

I mean, other than anybody…

Soda companies, supermarkets report 30-50 pct. sales drop from soda tax

Short from: Philadelphia institutes a high tax on sugary drinks. The end result is that people have stopped buying them… or at least, stopped buying them in city limits. And the end result of *that* is:

One of the city’s largest distributors says it will cut 20 percent of its workforce in March, and an owner of six ShopRite stores in Philadelphia says he expects to shed 300 workers this spring.

Good job.

The funniest part of the story is this panicky email from the Mayor:

I didn’t think it was possible for the soda industry to be any greedier … They are so committed to stopping this tax from spreading to other cities, that they are not only passing the tax they should be paying onto their customer, they are actually willing to threaten working men and women’s jobs rather than marginally reduce their seven figure bonuses.

Huh. You raise a tax on a product, and the people selling the product don’t cut the price of the product so that the customer pays the same? How scandalous!

The real question in situations like this is: are the people who push for this sort of thing, then act surprised when the inevitable happens, stupid, deluded or just lying? When you tax something, you get less of it. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. This not only just makes sense, it’s also historically supported.

Extra betterness: the city is relying on the soda tax to fund its schools. They had planned on $7.6 million per month in tax revenues for that purpose, but only drew in $2.3 million the first month. So, once again good job: linking childhood education to a tax scheme that you had to know would be a disastrous failure.

Even more betterocity: the results of this have meant that far less soda is sold in town, which means far less soda needs to be moved into town via truck, which means there’s less work for truckers, which means members of the Teamsters Union are seeing up to 70% pay cuts. Good job, Democrats who supported this: you’re ticking off the Teamsters.

For some fun reading, take a look at the Wikipedia page of Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney. Right after the section on the sugary drink tax he pushed is a section on his opposition to Donald Trump… with extra emphasis on how he’s going to maintain Philadelphia’s status as a crime-enabling “sanctuary city.” Yeah. I’m sure that’ll work out greeeeeaaaat.

 Posted by at 3:32 am

Exoplanet news: now with news

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, science, science fiction  16 Responses »
Feb 222017
 

OK, now this *is* interesting…

Wonderful Potentially Habitable Worlds Around TRAPPIST-1

Seems a full *seven* roughly Earth-mass/size planets have been detected around the terribly small, dim, cool star TRAPPIST-1 (so named because of the TRAPPIST telescope in Chile). And three or four of them are  in roughly the “Goldilocks zone” where liquid water can exist.

TRAPPIST-1 is 12.1 parsecs away. Which means two things:

1) Go ahead and get those Kessel Run jokes out of your system

2) We won’t be sending crews there anytime soon.

At just 8% the mass of Sol, TRAPPIST-1 is a tiny little thing. The planets are tucked in *close…* closest is at 0.01 AU, the furthest at 0.06 AU. This will probably have two effects:

1) Tidal locking. Chances are good the planets will always keep on face to the star. Through the plaents are close enough to each other that some sort of resonance might be at play.

2) Depending on how well behaved TRAPPIST-1 is, the Goldilocks Zone might still be a nightmare region of solar flares and X-Ray bursts, as was recently shown with Proxima b. TRAPPIST-1 *seems* relatively well behaved, but the star itself was only recently discovered so there isn’t that much data on it long-term.

 

Planetary data from Wiki:

The TRAPPIST-1 planetary system[4][19]
Companion
(in order from star)		 Mass Semimajor axis
(AU)		 Orbital period
(days)		 Eccentricity Inclination Radius
b 0.85±0.72 M⊕ 0.01111 1.51087081 ± 0.00000060 < 0.081 89.65 ± 0.25° 1.086 ± 0.035 R⊕
c 1.38±0.61 M⊕ 0.01522 2.4218233 ± 0.0000017 < 0.083 89.67 ± 0.17° 1.056 ± 0.035 R⊕
d 0.41±0.27 M⊕ 0.021 ± 0.06 4.049610 ± 0.000063 < 0.070 89.75 ± 0.16° 0.772 ± 0.030 R⊕
e 0.62±0.58 M⊕ 0.028 6.099615 ± 0.000011 < 0.085 89.86 ± 0.11° 0.918 ± 0.039 R⊕
f 0.68±0.18 M⊕ 0.037 9.206690 ± 0.000015 < 0.063 89.680 ± 0.034° 1.045 ± 0.038 R⊕
g 1.34±0.88 M⊕ 0.045 12.35294 ± 0.00012 < 0.061 89.710 ± 0.025° 1.127 ± 0.041 R⊕
h unknown M⊕ 0.063+0.027
−0.013		 20+15
−6		 unknown 89.80 ± 0.07° 0.755 ± 0.034 R⊕

 

TRAPPIST-1 is about half a billion years old, which means that if life has arisen on one or more of its planets it *probably* hasn’t had time to evolve great complexity yet. But on the other hand, the star is so cool and slow burning that its lifespan is expected to be on the order of a *trillion* years. Long before this star reaches adolescence, the rest of the universe will have grown into a pretty dark, uninteresting place. Unless a Giant Green Space Hand swats it, TRAPPIST-1 will be one of the last stars burning in the universe.

 Posted by at 4:02 pm

Satellites in Orion

 awesomeness, photography, spacecraft, youtube  4 Responses »
Feb 222017
 

The Orion nebula lies real close to the celestial equator, which means that satellite sin geostationary orbt will tend to pass quite close to it. Here are some videos some people shot that show just that happening. It seems that the satellite I managed to photograph gong through the nebula was probably a geo-sat. Which is honestly rather astonishing… my new camera, a bog-standard commercial model that is a few years past being brand new, was capable of capturing a chunk of human engineering from a distance of more than twenty two thousand miles.

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 3:00 am

More from the hood

 art, photography, Utah  No Responses »
Feb 222017
 

Weather began moving in a couple nights back, which added some variety to the night sky. As always, 1/10 scale panoramas from Thatcher, Utah.

Looking west:

 

Looking south, with the lights from Salt Lake City at center (behind Little Mountain) and Ogden at left.

 

 Posted by at 2:35 am

Exoplanet news, without the news

 Hmm..., news, science  5 Responses »
Feb 212017
 

NASA set to make major exoplanet announcement

All data about the announcement embargoed until 1 PM Eastern on Wednesday. The only hint:

CNET said that it had seen the research in an article published Monday, adding that “while we can’t share details yet, let’s just say it could very easily provide us with new settings for many future works of science fiction.”

Let’s just hope it’s better than some other recent NASA announcements that turned out to be busts… arsenic life forms, anyone?

 Posted by at 9:57 pm

Antidote for Nostalgia: Furry Edition

 AARRRGH, Antidote For Nostalgia, Crazy, Gah., history, ಠ_ಠ  11 Responses »
Feb 212017
 

Here are two more images to haunt your dreams and harrow, yes, your very soul. Two ads from the early 70’s that demonstrate not only tragic notions of what makes good mens fashions, but also incomprehensible notions of how to sell said fashions. I’m guessing that this was a result of the fetish for “machismo” that filled the 70’s… not so much actual masculinity as a theatrical parody of it.

Pictures after the break to protect fragile minds.

Continue reading »

 Posted by at 1:41 am

Opinion time: Alternate History John Glenn

 blather, history, Hmm..., spacecraft  27 Responses »
Feb 192017
 

So, John Glenn was Americas first astronaut into orbit. For a time he was Hero Number One, and apparently considered so important for PR that he was essentially blackballed from going back into space for fear that were he to die it would’ve trashed national morale. The end result was that he didn’t get to fly into space again until he was an old man.

But consider another course of events. He flies to orbit, comes back a hero… and stays a flying astronaut. In that case, chances are good he would’ve gone up on Gemini and an Apollo (not necessarily the first lunar lander, but one of ’em).

My question to ponder: let’s say on his first mission to the moon – call it “Apollo 4,” because “Apollo 1” didn’t burn up on the pad Because Reasons – something goes wrong and the crew is lost. America’s Greatest Hero dies in the course of the mission, out in deep space.

OK, we can all agree that this would be a bad thing on a human level. But from a *political* point of view… would losing the Great Hero and two Red Shirts out in space, rather than a trio of Red Shirts, have *necessarily* trashed the space program? When Challenger was lost, the crew were, as far as the public was concerned, a bunch of folks nobody knew (and one supercargo teacher that a lot of folks knew). Certainly not mid-60’s John Glenn level of celebrity. But even so, they all became national heroes instantly, and their memory helped to keep the Shuttle program going. So it seems to me that losing a national hero on the level of Glenn would *not* be an inevitable death knell to the program, but perhaps a *spur* to the program.

Thought?

 Posted by at 3:06 pm
 Older Entries  Newer Entries