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Somehow in all the incredibly complex hubbub of getting this blog set up (ie. figuring out how to post), I completely missed the fact that August 24th was the one-year anniversary of that infamous day when a bunch of dimbulbs at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided to demote Pluto to non-planet status with an ambiguous definition of a planet and criteria that are very difficult to apply.

The online reaction to this development was fierce. Websites like PleaseSavePluto.org, Save-Pluto.de, SavePluto.org, and… um… several other sites that appear to have gone dead due to lack of interest (buncha lazy-butts). I was outraged enough to write an angry missive to the IAU, which was probably never read, and published a letter to the editor about it in my local paper, also which nobody reads.

I swear my opinion has nothing to do with the fact that, if Pluto gets reinstated as a planet, then Eris, formerly “Xena,” formerly UB313, named after the Greek goddess of chaos and formal deity of Discordianism, my favorite theology, will also attain planetary status.

Hail Eris! Goddess of Discordia! She Deserves Planetary Status!

Eris’ discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, named the planet after the goddess in light of all the controversy his discovery stirred up (and perpetuates) in the world of Astronomy.

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The operative word here is “planet.” Even if Pluto retains its Dwarf Planet status, it’s still a planet. So there are still 12 planets in the solar system, and all you dog-butt-sniffing Pluto h8ers who are so happy because you think you’ve won are actually dumber than a box of hair.

“Dwarf Planet” is still a “Planet.” Not convinced? Try to imagine the following conversation:

Frakwit Pluto H8er: There are 6.4998 billion people on planet Earth!

Person Who’s Not a Frakwit: I thought there were 6.5 billion people on Earth.

Frakwit Pluto H8er: Oh, I’m not counting the 162,500 people with dwarfism. Those are “Dwarf Humans.”

Person Who’s Not a Frakwit: Huh..?

Where’s the #%$&ing ACLU when you need them??? Here is a blatant case of discrimination against people with dwarfism and Discordians/Erisians!

‘elp! ‘elp! I’m being oppressed!

I’ve already been over it, Real Astronomers have already been over it, and the online community has already been over it to death. We all know that this injustice is the result of the Orbital Dynamicists, who felt their field of study didn’t have enough influence over the original drafts for defining a planet.

Well you know what? Boo-Hoo. Go cry emo boy.

Dynamicism is a panty-waist field of study anyways. I mean, come on, you can’t see gravity. So what’s the big deal? Who cares what a bunch of thumb-sucking, diaper-wearing, whiney-ass astro-physicists think anyways? If they’re so smart, why can’t they predict the orbit of Saturns moons?

Mark my words: This is not over yet! Just wait until IAU General Assembly 2009 h8ers!

August 8, 2009 through August 14, 2009 IT WILL BE ON LIKE DONKEY KONG!!!

Just 709 days to go…

Of course, these links are purely in the interest of science, and not at all about skeezing traffic off the masturbating zombies of the Internet who are googling for science-related sexual fetishes.

• Cicero, in his Treatises on Friendship and Old Age, talks about how an old man’s mind is stronger because it is unclouded by lust, unlike a younger man, who is ruled by his physical urges.Obviously he hadn’t read last week’s study, which found that old people are doing the nasty.Of course, this is nothing new:
  

  A Roper Starch poll of 1,292 people in the United States aged 60 and above found that 74% of the men and 70% of the women who had remained sexually active said that they were as satisfied or more satisfied with sex than they were in their 40s (Leary, 1998)

  The female’s vagina looses its elasticity and shrinks as she ages, and men require more time to become arouse; therefore, more foreplay is required and there is more friction during intercourse. Plus experience lends to the pleasure as well (Rathus, 2000)

• Embryonic stem cells, which are a byproduct of sex (or invitro fertilization), have successfully been used by California-based biotechnology company to heal the hearts of rats, after suffering medically-induced heart attacks. The next step is to get the process working in sheep, with the hope for human clinical trials in two years.

• Ex-Astronaut, Lisa Nowak, intend to use an insanity defense at her trial next month, where she is “accused of assaulting and trying to kidnap her rival in a love triangle.” I don’t think she’ll have any trouble convincing anyone of that. (Hat tip to the Guardian, NYT, and any other news source that managed to cover this development without mentioning the diapers.)Oh, the days of our lives… Although NASA has denied the urban legend that it conducted experiments into it, we can still speculate about the many complications sex in space would entail.

• Keeping with the science and sex theme, check out Jennifer Chowdhury’s Ph.D thesis project, an intimate video game controlled with sensors in underwear titled Intimate Controllers

• And just for good measure: Nintendo Power, Safe Sex is the Best!

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Leary, W.E. (1998, September 29). Older people enjoy sex, survey says. The New York Times, p. F8.Rathus, Nevid, Fichner-Rathus (2000). Human Sexuality in a World of Diversity, p. 439-442. Pearson Education Company.

So in case you haven’t heard yet, according to Dr. Nick Bostrom at Oxford University, chances are pretty good that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation. The professor puts our chances of living in a simulation at 20 percent, based on his gut feeling. I agree with the journalist, John Tierney, when he figures the chances are higher than this. Especially when you consider scientists figured out how to simulate an out-of-body experience this week.

But what kind of simulation? Is reality a World of Warcraft/Second Life world, where we jump into it, live a life, die, and get booted out to the real world exclaiming, “Wow! What a ride!”? Having no memory of another reality or former life would add to the immersibility of the virtual world. Your adventures in WoW would be that much more intense if you thought you actually were your character, and your avatar’s death was indistinguishable from your personal death.

This hypothesis, which lacks the virtue of being falsifiable, makes sense to me. I mean, it’s pretty obvious. The more I think about it. Reality is so fake! It would certainly explain why we haven’t found evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations in the form of gigantic equilateral triangles floating in space or laser-lightshow-generated “Eat At Joe’s” signs dancing on the Cat Eye Nebula, because rendering that level of detail would cause the creator’s servers to lag something fierce.

It would also explain why I am not Supreme-Master-of-the-Universe (yet), because the programmer’s a jerk (no other possible explanation for this injustice).

And, as the NYT article points out, here we are, working to build newer and more realistic virtual worlds all the time. If this is a simulation, then we are traveling further “down the rabbit hole,” to borrow The Matrix’s borrowing of Alice in Wonderland’s imagery.

And the programmer’s reality? Maybe it’s like The Thirteenth Floor, where those simulating us are also living in a simulation.

Maybe… (Cue the Twilight Zone Theme) …it’s simulations all the way down…

Google Earth: I can see my house from up here.

It was a tremendous relief when Elizabeth City finally got scanned into Google Earth. Having this application installed on the Science Center’s computers, it was disheartening to zoom in on the center and find the satellite view blurry and indistinct. Even without Elizabeth City in the application, Google Earth provides an incredible perspective on our pale blue dot of a biome and has even become an invaluable tool for scientific research.

Now comes Google Space (Google Earth 4.2). With the click of a button, the Earth vanishes and we are hurtled into a night sky filled with star names, constellations, planets, and fantastically detailed Hubble space telescope images.

Horsehead Nebula

For the first time, I actually got to see the horse head in the horse head nebula. So many astronomy books and NASA photos of this object render it in such detail that I couldn’t understand the name. It’s only when you pull back, and see this cloud of dust hundreds of thousands of miles across as a distant blob–the same way it looked through earlier telescopes–that you can see the knight chess piece it is fabled to resemble.

I soon couldn’t resist actively hunting for familiar objects I’d seen in Hubble Space Telescope photos. Were there any bok globule’s in Orion’s Nebula? I couldn’t find any, but Google Space presents the Nebula in such size and detail, I could easily have missed the phenomena.

I did, however, find these two gaseous arcs. The star on the left has created an arc around it as the interstellar winds blow by it, while the star on the right appears to be pushing the gases out into a bubble shape around it.

Arching Gases in Orion’s Nebula

The search feature was a wild ride. Flying through space and zooming into the Cartwheel Galaxy, Sombrero Galaxy, or all the different stars named Monocerotis trying to find one of the most eerily beautiful nebulas in the night sky. I eventually did find this jewel, when I zoomed in on an object labeled “Light Echoes” to the west of Monoceros.

The planets suck. You click on Jupiter and the program zooms in past the Milky Way, and the gas giant doesn’t get any closer. We just get a “Check out Jupiter on Wikipedia” link. I’ll keep in mind that this is a work in progress, and the folks at Google will come up with a way to give me a 360-degree view of each planet, complete with moons. They have had their hands full with the monumental task of trying to get Elizabeth City’s awesome micropolis into the application without bringing down their servers after all.

I learned in childhood that the Sun was on the outer edge of the Milky Way, that we are on the end of a spiral arm out in the middle of nowhere, but this is not exactly true. We are still out in the middle of nowhere, but we actually on a piece of a spiral arm called the Orion Spur, between the Perseus and Sagittarius spiral arms. Google Space illustrates our locality inside the Milky Way, as opposed to outside it, when we spin around in a complete 360-degree and find the ring of stars encircles us.

There’s still much adventuring to do in this application, which, like Google Earth, will certainly grow in detail with time. I still have the Carina Nebula, Eagle Nebula, and the gaping hole in the universe to go searching for.

What is this? (Not the gaping hole in the universe)

Oh! And what about comets? I didn’t even think to go searching for Hailey’s. And what does it look like when you go back to Earth after adventuring in space?

This is such an important piece of software, as we live in a world where light pollution drowns out all but a dozen stars in the night sky for most of the world’s population. Is it ironic that hunching over in front of our computer monitors, staring at computer simulations of our night sky can inspire the human race to start thinking about “out there” again?