Apparently the Hulk move is “an action-packed pleasure” according to CNN.com. That’s good, because we wouldn’t want to make anyone angry with a bad review, would we? I’m afraid of spoilers so I’m not reading reviews closely, but the reviews seem to be good.

John Scalzi, on the other hand, slams the original Godzilla movie and other sci-fi classics. His main point is that a lot of these older movies are awful (a debatable point in some cases, very true in others — I have to concede), but that the ideas are valued more than the delivery system.

William Gibson, however, is a fan of Godzilla. It isn’t clear if he’s more of a fan of the idea of Godzilla or the movies themselves.

The Hulk is big, Godzilla is bigger, but both would get wiped out by an asteroid impact. Calculate your own here. [Thanks, badastronomy.com.]  This looks really, really handy for science fiction writers, by the way.
Finally, what’s bigger than the universe? And now it can be yours for vacation. An “Astro Retreat” will be opening in Switzerland soon, a place with a suite and your own personal observatory to play with.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: general, popular events, science, science fiction

It’s here. There’s a nice video slideshow of the Hubble images of the post-starburst quasars. Check it out.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, general, personal, science

The Hulk movie comes out tomorrow.  I will probably wait to see it until Sunday.  This is an ecard I’d like to send out to everyone reading.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: general, popular events, science fiction

Apparently gas is too expensive for him.

Liar. The man has money. He’s a shill for right-wing politics of the basest sort. Let’s blame the liberals for all our problems instead of conservatives who actively ignored Jimmy Carter’s entreaty nearly 30 years ago to get off of foreign oil. Well, gas is going to get a lot more expensive and all he wants to do is blame liberals and point at short-term solutions that aren’t. Gas prices have skyrocketed since Bush took office with Republican majorities in congress, but it’s all the liberals fault. Christ. As the jokes go, the man may have six balls but he’s barely got a brain lobe apparently.

Maybe he’s been listening to his own press a little too much. Campaigning for Huckabee was bad enough, a man who thinks a president doesn’t need to understand eighth-grade science. Now he’s apparently continuing to be political, where he is as weak as the fictional Chuck Norris is awesome in everything.  I fear he believes in fact that “There is no evolution.  Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris allows to live.”

Man, I really feel up to kicking Chuck Norris’s ass today, you know? Guess I’m an internet tough guy.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: general, popular events

I had a post over the weekend where I claimed that life on a planet around a type M star (see classifications here) would be like living in a red light district. Not the sex part, just the red light part. M stars are cool as stars go, around 3000 Kelvin or a bit less, and put out most of their energy in the near-infrared, invisible to humans. What visible light is emitted is heavily skewed toward long wavelengths — red light. Simple physics, right?

Well, James Nicoll reminded me of something I had conveniently forgotten. Your typical old-fashioned light bulb operates at about 3000 Kelvin and emits a spectrum an awful lot like an M star. They look white, don’t they?

Well, yeah. That’s true. But I have also looked at M stars through telescopes and those suckers sure look red.

I’m calling this the “light bulb paradox.” Why doesn’t light from a light bulb look red? Should it? When doesn’t a spectrum correspond to the color of an object?

I’m not completely certain, but I think I’ve got some insight and an explanation, although it’s a little outside my expertise.

First, some reference material.  Spectra of M stars, which, except for the very coolest M8 star do put out some blue light and do resemble the spectrum of an incandescent light bulb.   For good measure, let’s also have the efficiency of the human eye as a function of color, the spectra of the sky and sunset (and light bulbs, tungsten and “full-spectrum”).  Finally, a nice discussion of the perception of color.

OK, that’s a lot of stuff to get through.  The key to understanding the paradox lies in the perception of color.  The eye has different cells that respond to different colors (red, green, and blue, with some overlap equivalent to the bandpasses of filters we use in astronomy).  When all three are sufficiently stimulated, the color is regarded as “white.”  Light bulbs are intense enough that all three are sufficiently stimulated and they look white, even though the spectral shape of the tungsten filament is very similar to that of an M star in a telescope or a sunset, both of which definitely  appear as shades of red.  The red-detecting cone cells in these fainter light sources send a much stronger signal than those from the red and green cone cells.

So the key to the paradox is the intensity of the light.  Saturating all the varieties of color-detecting cone cells results in white.

So what of our hypothetical planet orbiting an M star?  It’s going to depend on the particulars of how bright and large the star appears in the sky.  Let’s take an Earth-sized planet with Earth-type temperatures, ballpark.   Let’s take a typical M star with half the temperature and half the radius of the sun.  That will make the star emit only about 1/32 as much energy as the sun (see discussion in wiki blackbody article).  This will mean that the planet has to be much closer than the distance from the Earth to the Sun (an astronomical unit).  Because the radiation follows the inverse square law, it’ll have to be about 1/6 (square root of 1/32) of an AU orbital radius, and the star will look about three times bigger across than the Sun in the sky (it’s about half the size, but six times closer).  Now, that’s not the only large effect, however, even though it does affect how intense the light will be as it will be spread out over an area ten times larger.  Another large effect is that the spectrum is peaked in the near-infrared, and the ratio of visible light put out by the M star to that of the sun is very small (governed by Planck’s Law, again see the wiki blackbody article).  Based on some plots, I’m estimating another factor of five or so, largest in the blue.

This means that the M star’s visible light surface brightness will be approximately 50 times fainter than the sun, with a larger factor at shorter wavelengths.

The discussion here suggests that the Sun at sunset is seen through 6-10 magnitudes of visual extinction at yellow colors, which corresponds to factors of a few hundred to a few thousand, order of magnitude, compared to the Sun at noon.  I can look at the sun at sunset and it looks pretty dang red.  If we let it get ten times brighter, that’s somewhere approaching sunset and I think the sun starts to look red before it gets all the way to sunset.

So, having said all this, I think it will come down to specific details.  This order of magnitude estimate seems to put us on the boundary between what’s going to look white and what’s going to look red.  The colors of plants and things and the quality of the sky and general lighting should be equivalent to what we see on Earth approaching sunset, but not quite there.  It should look different, but probably not quite as different as I indicated in my original post.

Let’s call living around an M star as the “almost sunset” district.

Apparently, James, I will do other people’s homework when they disagree with me!  You’re on your own for the moment with the Jovian moons.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, general, personal, science, science fiction

Brian Green has an op-ed in the New York Times speaking about the personal importance of science in our lives.  It is a good article, and meaningful, in my opinion.  Science has enabled you to read this post, but it has also done so much more.  Reflect on that.

Sometimes I feel like I’m a lucky bastard who gets paid to play full time.   But that’s not true.  The value of science isn’t in the dollars or the results.  It’s in the quest, and the understanding.

I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of government money making incremental advances in understanding quasars.  To what end?  To every end.  This is the quest, to understand the universe, for the world.  Some one should be figuring this stuff out, and it costs what it costs.  It’s about more than making a living or the American Dream.  It’s about understanding who we are and our place in the universe.

I care about this.  It is important.  It does matter.  And it costs what it costs.  We need to know in a meaningful way, true things, and this is the way.  Let’s all enjoy it.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: general, personal, science

I overslept and almost missed it yesterday!  The traveling, stress, and lack of sufficient sleep caught up to me.  I made it over okay, with a couple of minutes to spare.  I wanted to make some adjustments to the slides and practice the talk again just before the actual event, but didn’t have time.

The actual experience was a little anti-climactic.  It had the look and feel of a panel at a science fiction convention, although we had clearer rules and slides to display as we talked.   The room was large, especially given that there were maybe 25 people in the room total, so it appeared a little empty.  I was happy to see Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, sitting off to one side — he’s great at conveying astronomy to the public.  There was a webcast of the slides and the audio went out to a conference call, so that the actual audience was likely much, much larger.  I talked with one reporter on the phone afterward, however, and she said that the audio quality was far from optimal.  There was a question and answer session following the presentations, and all of us received a number of queries.  It made me realize I hadn’t done as good of a job as I’d wished.  The easiest, most obvious thing I needed to do was to skip the nuance, and focus on what was the single main result: how key aspects of galaxy evolution do indeed seem to be driven by mergers and interactions, at least in the most massive systems.  The business about how we see post-starburst quasars in every stage from interaction to full-bore post-merger is an imporant but secondary result, and confusing to emphasize too much.

The presentation that seemed to get the most attention was Marc’s Seigar’s talk about how the tightness of spiral arms can be used as a way to estimate a galaxy’s central black hole mass.  That observation is much easier to make than others in high-redshift spiral galaxies than others.  Phil Plait has a nice post about it.

So I’ve seen our work online in a few places so far: Bad Astronomy, National Geographic, Kazinform, Softpedia, and my own University of Wyoming.  If you see it mentioned elsewhere, let me know!

Overall, I’d give myself a B or B-.  An A for effort for sure, but there wasn’t enough time to do a superlative job given how I was overcommitted this month.  I was exhausted yesterday, went to bed early and slept for 11 hours.  And while I’d just gotten over another cold, I seem to have come down with one this morning again.  When I was younger, no problem.  Now, any time I’m traveling, stressed, sleep-deprived, I seem to get the sniffles. I’m looking forward to getting home to Laramie to relax and get healthy.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, general, personal, science

An article from the Economist on a recent study of gender disparities in math and reading scores reminds us of how talking Barbies used to reinforce the notion that girls didn’t find math easy. However, research indicates that disparities are strongly linked with culture, and that they are largest in countries with the largest inequalities (e.g., Turkey) and vanish in those with the least (e.g., Norway).

Differences remain, however. Boys still rock it out over girls when it comes to geometry in all countries. Girls have already been recognized to have stronger much reading skills than boys, but this this advantage may be even more pronounced when corrected for cultural biases.

This is interesting information to know, especially for someone like myself in the worlds of science, education, and writing. We’re learning a lot of things that I hope will make things smoother for society, rather than more contentious. Couple this with another recent article I mentioned a few weeks ago, about how gender preferences seems to be a major factor in career choice, and maybe we’re getting somewhere on these issues.

We need to work hard to ensure equal access to education, equal opportunity, equal options, but if the results are not equal by some particularly politically correct measures, that’s not necessarily a terrible thing. It may not be the result of discrimination or other artificial bias, but rather the reflection of characteristics of our species. Soon, perhaps, we’ll be able to change those if we don’t like them, but let’s figure out what they are before they’re gone into a post-human future that may be inevitable in the next century.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, general, science

Literary Agent Donald Maass’ book THE CAREER NOVELIST is now available as a free download from the agencies website.

http://www.2morrow.bc.ca/documents/career_novelist_DonaldMaass.pdf

Don Maass is also the author of the Writing the Breakout Novel, which I read and liked. Don is a top agent, by the way, if you haven’t heard about him before.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: general, science fiction

Cryptology Chronicler Loren Coleman reports that Bushnell, a maker of trail cams, is offering a million dollars for a verifiable photo of bigfoot. He’s got a nice illustrated essay showing how trail cams have been instrumental world-wide in taking pictures of rare and new animals.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: general, popular events, science, science fiction