Ask Doctor Vector

Neologasms

2010-06-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

I thought of these a couple of years ago and haven't gotten around to publicly deploying them. I decided I'd better tell someone so that if I'm killed in one of those freak zeppelin accidents you always hear about, the world will not be deprived of my genius.

On the desirability of having a surplus of digital horsepower: I need lebensRAM!

The argument for doing something just because it's cool: reductio ad awesome.

It all comes down to this

2010-06-08T07:04:00.000-07:00

I was in Yum-Yum Donuts this morning, and they have a big sign on the wall that says, "It all comes down to this: we build a better donut." The same claim is also emblazoned on their donut boxes.

My initial mental response in the donut shop, which I still believe to be completely accurate, was, "Bullcrap. It all comes down to this: you're close to my house." I'll grant that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that someone might think or even say, "You know what? I'm tired of Pachyderm Sphincter Donuts. I'm going to drive the extra half mile to Yum-Yum!" But I strongly doubt that anyone actually has. I know donut snobs who would pass up other donut places to hit a Krispy Kreme--myself included--but a faceless joint like Yum-Yum? No way.

Which led me to thinking about the strange phenomenon of donut advertising. Mainly the near absence thereof. I vaguely recall seeing some TV spots for one donut house or another, but I don't think they've ever been common. What's to advertise? Isn't the whole point of a donut house that you know exactly what you're going to get inside? OTOH, the same is true of the fast food industry, which from all appearances spends many times more on advertising than on food components. But maybe burgers and burritos offer more avenues for customization. That aren't already exploited by everyone else, I mean. Even the most humble donut store has about a zillion varieties of original glazed, powdered, chocolate-covered, creme-filled, etc. I submit that the donut market is already pretty well saturated with product lines, and that everyone knows it. I further believe that everyone who has a mind to buy donuts already knows if there is a donut place in the neighborhood, and doesn't care what name is on the sign. Or maybe the profit margin on donuts is enough to employ donut makers but not advertisers.

Which brings me back to the odd claim, touted in their stores and on their boxes and, as far as I can tell, nowhere else, that Yum-Yum Donuts builds a better donut. You don't even get this message until you're in the store, or munching out of the box of donuts on the counter at the office/station house/rehab. This is post-hoc advertising. Its purpose is not to entice you to buy Yum-Yum Donuts over the competition's; we all know that you're going to the donut joint closest to your home or workplace, and that you don't really give a crap what brand of donut you buy (with the possible exception of Krispy Kreme). The only purpose I can see in the "We build a better donut" claim is to make you feel better about the donuts you already bought. Which is maybe not a bad idea. When you're sitting in your terrycloth bathrobe amidst smoldering piles of cigarette butts, e-Bay junk, and cat poop, you need all the reassurance you can get.

Massachusetts inspires thoughts of violence

2010-02-10T14:52:00.000-08:00

In my freshman year at OU I took an intro poli sci course. On the first day of class, the professor went through the syllabus and then started describing in general terms how the US government functions. When he paused to allow time for questions, some pedantic, pencil-neck pre-law Poindexter prick (Ah luv me some alliteration, 'allelujah!) raised his hand and said, "I couldn't help noticing that you referred to the US as including 50 states, the District of Columbia, and several territories. I just wanted to point out that Massachusetts is technically a commonwealth."

Now, normally I am not an advocate of beating up nerds, but for 15 years now I have been hoping that on the way back to the dorms, some jock grabbed that kid and beat the living hell out of him.

Two things worth reading about Obama's first year

2010-01-19T10:19:00.000-08:00

Andrew Sullivan's take, and John Scalzi's additional thoughts. Best bit, from the Scalzi piece:

The man has monolithic, unified opposition in the Washington GOP, a fractious and fragile base in the diffuse Washington Democrats, and was handed two expensive, unpopular wars, a profoundly degraded political environment at home and abroad, and a national and global economy which were dual scorching pillars of oh shit we’re all going to die. That the man got anything substantive done, much less had what is objectively a politically remarkable first year, is impressive.

Next up: my thoughts on Avatar (finally).

Sacked out

2009-12-21T19:14:00.000-08:00

Male red kangaroo, LA Zoo.

Walter the squirrel

2009-12-10T00:35:00.000-08:00

We have this squirrel that lives around our house. He's kind of a doofus. It's a good thing this is a predator-free environment, sometimes he makes enough racket in the trees that you'd think a couple of sasquatchi were getting it on. I call him Walter, in honor of Walter Sobchak. He's fat, noisy, but basically harmless, and if that isn't enough to earn the name, check this out:

He's also curious and if I'm out and about sometimes he'll just plunk down and watch me. Which affords me the opportunity to practice digiscoping if the birds aren't cooperating--which, lately, they ain't been.

Last Sunday afternoon, he was up on top of the telephone pole next to the driveway, chittering away at me in between breaks to groom his fur and--I am not making this up--scratch his pits. I hauled out my little scope and started snapping.

The lowest useful magnification my scope will do is 30x. To get this last shot, I had to open the gate to the back yard and go all the way to the end of the property just to get a wide enough field of view. That's a good problem to have.

Stuff that just occurred to me

2009-11-29T01:04:00.000-08:00

Loss of libido: randicapped.

Hyperbole: the greatest rhetorical technique in the history of the universe.

Time to apply for Paleonturology 09

2009-11-03T14:58:00.000-08:00

Hey, if you published a paper in paleontology in the calendar year 2008, send it to:

Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis
Avda. Sagunto s/n. E-44002 Teruel (España). e-mail: fundacion@dinopolis.com
Tel. 34 978 61 76 30, Fax 34 978 61 76 38

Indicate that you are submitting it for Paleonturology '09 and iclude the title, author(s), and contact info. Yes, you can send everything electronically.

You can read the long version about why to do this and what you might get out of it here. The short version is, writing the e-mail and attaching your paper will take less time than reading this post, and you might get a free trip to Spain out of it. I did, and that was back in the dark ages when I had to actually send five dead-tree copies across the Atlantic, probably the highest return on investment for photocopier time in the history of the universe.

Now, you only have until Nov 15 so get crackin'. Don't make me come over there and kick your ass.

Rocket, man

2009-11-02T09:54:00.000-08:00

London is totally into rockets and space right now. Like, he knows more about the US manned space program than I did two months ago. For Halloween he wanted to be a rocket. And not just any rocket, but specifically the Mercury Redstone. And he was _adamant_. I admit to trying to deflect him onto a path that would be simpler (for me), but he stuck to his guns.

Thank goodness for posterboard and black duct tape.

The best blog you're not reading

2009-10-02T23:49:00.000-07:00

Despite having had an English best friend for almost a decade, I only recently became acquainted with the charming expression "can't be arsed", which means "can't be bothered", as in, "This blog may be infrequently updated and have no set topic, but I can't be arsed to fix it." Which is not perfectly accurate if applied to this blog, because I don't think it needs fixing, but I couldn't be arsed to find a better example. I should warn you that the phrase has a tendency to creep and you may find yourself using it too often. I certainly do, but I can't be arsed to find another new favorite phrase just yet.

I bring this up because I haven't updated any of the links on the sidebar in, like, over a year. And the longer I let it go, the less motivation I have to update anything. There are links over there that I never actually visit any more, at least one that has been defunct for a while, and loads more sites that I actually do read but haven't linked to, because--and this time I really mean it, because no substitute captures exactly what I wish to convey--I just can't be arsed.

Exacerbating the gap between my actual and ideal blogroll is the apparently exponential growth of good stuff on teh intert00bz. If I wanted to I could literally spend all of my waking hours just keeping up with interesting blogs (I have experimental justification for this claim from a couple of days this past year). Set against the effectively infinite amount of stuff to check out is the finite amount of time I can afford to spend surfing. I could easily digress here on whether pursuing my various manias online counts as time wasted or time invested, but I've already spend three paragraphs digressing so bump that.

All of this is a very roundabout way of spiralling in on my point, which is that one blog worth checking out is Save Your Breath For Running Ponies. Although the girls occasionally cover music or Syndey or whatever, the lion's share of the posts cover recent research in paleo or zoology or evolutionary biology with...commentary? advice? who the hell knows what from Bec. If TetZoo, microecos and FUP met at a MC Hawking concert and hooked up in a drunken three-way, Running Ponies might be their premie. Reading the posts I am often reminded of a review I saw of the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that said, "This movie is not about drugs. This movie IS drugs." Equally frequently as I am laughing my ass off over there I think, "Damn, I bet most of the people I know are missing out." Hence this post. So get on over there and stand by to be amazed.

Inglourious Basterds

2009-09-03T16:00:00.001-07:00

True story

2009-08-23T15:44:00.000-07:00

So I was going through airport security today with the shinbone of a cow in my bag. As the bag went through the x-ray machine, the Homeland Security dude did a double take.

HS: Sir, is this your bag?

Me: Yup.

HS: What's in it?

Me: A cow bone.

HS: What is that, like a vase or something?

Me: No, it's literally the bone of a cow.

HS: (Face goes blank. Pauses for two seconds. Starts to walk my bag to the bag-search crew. Three steps in, pauses again, laughs, turns back to me.) Okay, you can have it.

Me: Thanks!

HS: (Under his breath, as I'm walking away.) "Literally the bone of a cow." (Chuckles.)

Go somewhere else!

2009-08-18T16:52:00.000-07:00

It has come to my attention that some people looking me up online are discovering this blog first. What a tragedy! Unless you're here for dissection pictures. But otherwise, all the action is at my other two blogs: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, which I share with distinguished Brits Drs. Michael P. Taylor and Darren Naish; and my newly-launched 10 Minute Astronomy blog, which you should make it your mission in life to slavishly follow. So stop wasting your time...unless it was dissection pictures after all, in which case, click the link above and prepare to force down your gorge.

Secular materialism

2009-07-18T13:09:00.000-07:00

WANT

Palinfreude

2009-07-11T14:26:00.000-07:00

Here's the single best thing I've ever read about Sarah Palin. It's not the best writing I've ever come across--there are a couple of sentences in there that furiously resist parsing--but it lays out a lot of Alaska-internal politics that help explain what the hell is going on with that nutjob.

Just think, we were one botched election and a heart attack away from having another self-absorbed, lying moron as the leader of the free world.

Myself, I prefer politicians who can actually articulate a coherent, logical argument. Even if you disagree with them, you at least have something material and comprehensible to disagree about, instead of the reflexive name-calling that passes for most political discourse these days.

And it's nice, for first time in my life, to have a president I can be proud of.

Radio Free Claremont, signing off.

Will dead tree journals follow newspapers over the cliff?

2009-06-06T00:13:00.000-07:00

Take one of these:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

mash it up with this:

Now here’s another thing:

Everything is open.
It just is, and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it . Everything that becomes available as a PDF is quickly passed around the community, and in most cases posted on the author’s web-site (whatever the journal’s Arbitrary And Exploitative Copyright Transfer Form said). So from a purely pragmatic perspective, you could say that in choosing a journal we can also ignore the criterion of whether or not the journal considers itself open access (because it really is anyway)

then consider: is the titular question unthinkable? Printing presses are expensive. Paper is heavy. PDFs have excellent survival potential, and are not going away.

In this new enlightened age, I have disabled comment moderation to facilitate interaction. (Also, I'm curious about this "natural male enhancement".)

Bring it.

Oklahoma tetrapods

2009-06-03T15:47:00.000-07:00

This one's for Darren. The poor guy is working on at least two books, several technical papers, and keeping up two blogs, not to mention being a husband and father with an infant to take care of.

So here are some tetrapods for ya, Darren, from my recent vacation to Oklahoma. I think we've seen that my skillz at identifying non-sauropods are definitely sub-1337, but I will do my manful best. Everything is arranged in accordance with the Great Chain of Being, of course.

I reckon, given the brown coloration, the light spot on the eardrum, and the north-central Oklahoma locality, that this is a Plains Leopard Frog, Rana blairi. I can say for certain that it was too fast for me to catch.

Bullfrog, Rana catesbeiana. We saw this dude sunning himself every day.

The same, or at least a very similar, frog on a different day.

A juvenile watersnake in the genus Nerodia, but no tellin' what species. Note cow poop for scale.

Shed skin of an unidentified serpent.

My brother and I were walking along the creek near the house when we spotted this subadult raccoon, Procyon lotor, moving upstream.

It didn't seem unduly exercised by our presence, so we tailed it for thirty yards or so until it disappeared into some brush.

Nearby we found this skeletonized paw from a nine-banded armadillo, Dasypus novemcinctus.

Also this mostly skeletonized bobcat, Lynx rufus. I boiled and peroxided the skull and it is now sitting on my desk at work, distracting people who come by to give me more work. One of the ribs was broken and healed.

At last we come to the pinnacle of evolution, the saurischians.

A Common Grackle, Quiscalus quiscula. This one was in the top of a tree at my in-laws' place in Oklahoma City. Interesting bird to watch but irritating to listen to; it sounded as if it had eaten a squeaky wheel and dying cat and was trying to vomit them both out at the same time.

A red-winged blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus. The wheat fields around my parents' place were full of these things.

Arf. I saved the best and worst for last. Best because this was the toughest photo of the bunch, and therefore the most satisfying. Worst, because I am probably going to choke on the ID. But here goes anyway. At first I was thinking that that the beak was too thick for it to be anything other than a finch. But further reflection (i.e., randomly thumbing through Sibley's) suggests another, more likely alternative: a Dickcissel, Spiza americana.

That's all I got. Coming soon: selected tetrapods from the LA Zoo.

Duplicate publications: we findz them

2009-05-29T10:18:00.000-07:00

Deja vu finds duplicate publications. These might be cases of plagiarism, or of an author or authors publishing the same thing twice. For some it might have been an easy way to pad out the CV--just publish the same paper in journals in different fields and hope no one notices. But that party is over. Here's a random example.

Oops.

Warn your lazy colleagues! Or don't, and have fun catching them out. Whatever.

The ratite clearing house post

2009-04-27T11:18:00.000-07:00

Darren's post on my emu dissection pictures inspired me to bring all of my ratite blogging together in one place, for the convenience and edification of all.

There's the original emu dissection post and and the immediately subsequent rhea dissection posts (two links). Note the striking difference between the comparatively large, normally-folding wings of the smaller rhea (below) and the silly twig-wings of the much larger emu (above).

Emus use their inflatable throat pouches to make booming calls. I was fortunate enough to witness this and engage in a bout of reciprocal burping with an emu at the Merced zoo, which I covered here.

Later on I posted briefly about kiwis. Also, people loved the gross photos enough that I felt compelled to share pix from dissecting a hyena, which is not a ratite but also flightless and still pretty cool.

Finally, I bought together my biological and then-nascent astronomical obsessions and turned some of the emu gore into a planet.

If you find anything dead, or get to cut something up, or have some other cool interaction with the natural world, post it and tell the world!

Theropods of Claremont, or, learning ornithology in front of a live audience

2009-04-23T00:00:00.001-07:00

Every day between about 5:30 and 6:30 PM I have no scheduled obligations, my driveway is out of direct sunlight and there are lots of birds about. And, as luck would have it, I have a small Maksutov-Cassegrain which functions as telescope by night and a spotting scope by day. So I started photographing birds.

I won't lie to you: this started out as basically onanism with a telescope. You know, I couldn't get what I wanted (moon, planets, etc.), but I could still get something.... But against all odds I started to get interested in who's around. I finally knocked the dust off my copy of The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America, which until the past couple of weeks had gotten about as much use as my copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare (i.e., it looked nice on the shelf, and implied erudition I don't actually possess).

This evening was particularly good; in an hour I saw and photographed five species. That's nothing by the standards of real birders, but for me it was a record. All were perched at one time or another in the top branches of a tree three houses down, or on the power lines at the end of the block. The tree is 70 yards from my driveway, and the power lines are a bit farther. I took all the photos with an Orion Apex 90 scope, Orion Sirius Plossl 25mm eyepiece yeilding 50x, and a handheld Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera. Many thanks to Alan Shabel for help with the identifications. Here they are:

A Northern Mockingbird, Mimus polyglottos. One of several in the neighborhood. I see them mainly when they come perch in the top of the target tree and scare off my intended quarry (see below).

A Band-Tailed Pigeon, Columba fasciata. I didn't know this was anything other than a feral Eurasian Rock Dove (i.e., regular pigeon) until I checked Sibley's. A strikingly beautiful animal, for a pigeon. I've seen these before, and just didn't know what I was seeing.

An Acorn Woodpecker, Melanerpes formicivorus. Today was the first time I'd actually seen one of these things around here, or ever identified a woodpecker to species. He spent quite a while tearing up our municipal infrastructure. Maybe I can score some stimulus bling for something called woodpecker monitoring.

Oh, now this little fartskin was a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. Didn't even sit still long enough for me to get the scope properly focused. Wham, bam, what the hell was that? I think, based on the reddish throat and face and black-and-white striped breast, that this is a ~~Red-Throated Pipit, Anthus cervinus~~ House Finch, Carpodacus mexicanus (thanks to Neil for the save, and for making my secondary title even more appropriate). But for all I know it might be a Rosy-Bummed Sky Kiwi or a Uruguayan Yaksucker, neither of which are covered by Sibley's. Perhaps I got the expurgated edition.

Those are all great birds, but the one that got me into this crazy pursuit is this little fellow, this particular individual, a male Anna's Hummingbird, Calypte anna, whom I spotted a couple of weeks ago buzzing about like a tiny helicopter or a slightly-larger-than-average bumblebee. Belying his clade's reputation, he does sit still from time to time, almost always on this exact spot on this exact branch of the same exact tree three houses down. You'd think that regularity of habit would make him easy to photograph. But he has a couple of traits that I'd never read about which make him a frustrating target. First, he's psychic; if I raise the camera to the eyepiece or, heaven forfend, call someone over for a look, he's gone. Sometimes for the rest of the day. Second, he's happy to show me his iridescent green back all day, but only rarely will he turn around and flash the iridescent red feathers that cover his face and neck.

Finally, finally today I got this shot. This is the same bird as in the shot above, about two minutes later. When the sunlight catches those feathers, the effect is unbelievable. One look at that and you might start to understand why a grown man would spend an hour every evening looking through a thermos-sized telescope at a thumb-sized bird half a block away. But when he turns around, away from the late afternoon sun, the effect is lost, and the feathers are a flat dark red, a bit like dried blood.

And like that, poof, he's gone.

Starscaping

2009-04-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

Hoo boy, you are ska-ROOOOD! Because it's either the morning, and you need to get to work, or you're at work, or it's the evening and you need to do chores/spend time with your family/stalk people online, and here I am pointing you toward the Star Formation game, which in its addictiveness makes the infamous Falling Sand game look like eating your boogers in public (i.e., pathetically easy to kick...not that that's an actual habit anyone would ever need to break...no sirree, just trying to turn a humble phrase here...).

They could have called this Herding Hydrogen. Theoretically, you set off supernovae to compress clouds of interstellar gas so that they become gravitationally bound and collapse into massive short-lived stars which themselves go supernova. Basically though, you Nuke Stuff until it glows, and then it goes BOOM and Nukes other Stuff and the eternal cycle of Blowing Stuff Up rolls on. I submit that this is scientific evidence that the Creator exists and that He is a dude.

In not-completely-unrelated news, last night I got curious about what would happen if I held my camcorder--literally the cheapest commercially available model--up to the eyepiece of my thermos-sized telescope. The answer is that I got something that is pretty crap on any objective scale, but at least recognizable and therefore a smashing success personally. I'm posting this not to brag--oh hay-ull no--but as a reminder that the night sky is accessible even to those of modest means.

Clear skies!

Messier A and B

2009-04-08T00:12:00.000-07:00

Two of my favorite destinations on the moon are the double craters Messier A and B in Mare Fecunditatis. The impact or impacts (read on) must have happened at very low angles because the rays--twin ejecta blankets--point nearly straight west. The hypothesis has been floated that the two craters were produced by a single impactor diving into the lunar surface and then bouncing back out. I'm no geophysicist but that sounds pretty unlikely. Another hypothesis is that a single impactor hit and bounced. Looks like a pretty short bounce for something traveling many miles per second, and it doesn't explain why the two craters have such similar geometry. Given the number of asteroids that are turning up with moons these days, and the frequency with which comets fall apart, a good ole double impact seems much more plausible to me. But that's just my $0.02.

Anyway, it's a pretty sight in telescopes big and small, and well worth a look if you're out looking up. I took the top photo a year ago today, using a 6" reflector and Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera. The photo below was taken this April 1 using the same camera and a 90mm Maksutov Cassegrain at a magnification of only 39x, which goes to show that you don't need a big telescope or high magnification to catch this pair of gems. Click photos to embiggify.

Live-blogging the 100 Hours of Astronomy

2009-04-04T00:13:00.000-07:00

I didn't think this was going to happen; until about sundown tonight the LA part of the 100 Hours of Astronomy had been more like the 50 Hours of Holy Crap It's Overcast and Sprinkling. But then the sky just magically cleared, so I took my little travel telescope to downtown Claremont, set up near the fountains, and started offering passersby a look at the moon. In two and a half hours, a staggering 144 people had a look.

Overall, I was pretty impressed with the general level of knowledge of my visitors. Several of them knew that the 100 Hours of Astronomy was going on, thanks to coverage on NPR (link goes to the IYA 2009 page about the event; the actual 100 Hours page has been mostly shut down by high traffic, but the webcast is still active). Even at low power, the moon drifted out of the field of view in about 3 or 4 minutes, and almost everyone who noticed this knew it was because of the Earth's rotation (which of course carries the telescope along with it, but not the moon). Lots of folks noticed that the view of the moon through the telescope was flipped left-to-right by the right-angle diagonal mirror in front of the eyepiece. Many, many people of all ages told me it was the first time they'd ever seen the moon through a telescope. Until a year and a half ago, I would have been in the same boat. Now I'm just happy to be able to give other people that experience.

People's responses were overwhelmingly positive. Almost everyone thanked me, lots of people shook my hand, and a handful told me it was the highlight of their evening. That felt pretty darn good.

The total number of people who walked by while I was set up was probably closer to 200. My usual greeting was, "Would you like to look at the moon? It's fast and free." It's funny, you get that many people coming by and you start to notice patterns. Here's what I observed:

1. Women of all ages were far more likely to come over for a look than men. Many couples came by because the woman wanted a look and basically dragged the guy over. I don't know if that has to do with (stupid) male aloofness vs. a tendency for women to be more personable, or a vast untapped astronomical curiosity amongst womankind*, or what, but the difference between the sexes was pretty striking. However, out of the people who actually looked through the scope I'd say the questions and complements were about evenly distributed. In parting, women tended to, "Thank you so much, that was really wonderful!", with a ten-thousand-watt smile, and men tended to a quick but heartfelt, "Thanks", with eye contact, and a handshake.

*Sadly, I'm not joking about this; I do think that contemporary society and the educational system tend to steer women away from math and science, and it would not surprise me if the pool of people who would engage with science if it were more approachable was skewed toward women.

2. Willingness to look was basically inversely related to age. I did get plenty of young people to look, from tweens up to young marrieds, but the accept rate was a lot higher in middle-aged and elderly people. I think this is because--and I say this as a former teen and twentysomething whose memory is not perfect but still too sharp for comfort--most people in their teens and twenties have their heads up their butts. It's an ailment that is usually fixed, if it's fixed, by living long enough to get over yourself. (If you find that offensive, wait until you're in your mid-30s and see if you're still offended before you take me to task. And in the meantime, get off my damn lawn!)

3. Among the ethnically diverse passersby I didn't notice any patterns in terms of who would look and who wouldn't. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, whatever, most people were curious and openly so.

4. Smart-alecks were rare, and they were all young men (to a man, as it were). And they all said the same thing.

Me (pointing to telescope): "Hey, would you like to look at the moon?"
Them (glancing skyward): "Nah, I can see it just fine."

I would have thought that would really get on my nerves, but it didn't. I was offering a free service, and if people didn't want to look, okay. If they wanted to get a quip out of it, okay, poor choice, but not my loss. Plus, it was really easy for me to be the bigger man (cuz I'm fat--ha, Mike, said it before you!) because about half the time the dude who smarted off would get dragged over to the telescope by his wife or girlfriend and end up looking anyway, and watching the battle between gratitude and embarrassment in his demeanor afterwards was, I'm sad to say, extremely satisfying.

5. Anyone who asked more than two questions would eventually ask, "How much does a setup like this cost?" And with only one exception, everyone who asked was shocked--shocked I tell you!--to learn that the scope currently goes for less than $250. The one exception was a group of starving students who were impressed by how much better the view was than that given by their telescope, which reportedly cost $30 but "didn't work". The old rule--don't buy a telescope anywhere that also sells underwear--still applies. And, yes, Toys-R-Us sells underwear. You've been warned.

Final thoughts: man, I had a blast. Any time you can single-handedly make 144 people happy in less than three hours counts as a big win (har har, obligatory Annabel Chong joke, etc.). If there are any raging egotists out there (on the internet? Nah!), sidewalk astronomy probably has the highest people-saying-nice-things-about-you-to-effort ratio of any conceivable activity. I had not considered this as a potential draw before; I just wanted to show some people the moon.

Here's the bottom line: every time I look through a telescope, I am blown away. Every. Single. Time. We spend so much time and money on devices that bore us or frustrate us or piss us off. It's nice to use one that doesn't just tickle my sense of wonder, but smacks it across the room Hulk-style. The only thing better than that is sharing the experience with others--the more, the better. That's what the 100 Hours of Astronomy and the International Year of Astronomy are all about. So happily for me there is a global initiative to do what I was going to do anyway.

---------------

Photo taken from downtown Claremont, about 7:45 PM on Friday, April 3, by afocal projection, using an Orion Apex 90mm Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope, Orion Sirius Plossl 25mm eyepiece, and Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera.

Swim, little pilgrim

2009-04-03T10:09:00.000-07:00

As purveyor of all things cool, I am contractually obligated to inform you that Brian Engh has put together a rap video about crocodilian predation, with numerous references to geologic history and lots of footage of cute little antelopes getting destroyed by immense bloodthirsty crocs. Let's see if I can get this bad boy to embed:

Phases for Earthlings

2009-03-31T00:52:00.000-07:00

This is fake. A bit. It's a composite of two objects taken on two different days using two different telescopes. The moon shot I took this evening. The tiny crescent is Venus, which I photographed on March 17. Venus is below the horizon now, so if you're looking to replicate that shot you'll have to wait a few weeks and then catch it on the upswing just before sunrise. I put them together because they're both in crescent phase, which tells us something.

Until I got into amateur astronomy about a year and a half ago I never gave the moon a second thought. Occasionally I noted that it was out in the daytime; like most cosmic provincials I did not realize that the moon is "out" during the day every bit as much as it is at night. I also did not understand that Venus is both the morning and the evening star, just not both at once. These things are obvious, though, if you think about them for even a few minutes.

When the moon is full it is opposite the sun in the sky, which means it rises when the sun sets and sets when the sun rises. Conversely, the new moon is "new" because it is between us and the sun and therefore the side facing us is lit only faintly by Earthshine, which is not nearly enough light to make it show up next to the sun. Occasionally the new moon gets precisely between the Earth and the sun and we get a solar eclipse, and occasionally the Earth gets precisely between the sun and the full moon and we have a lunar eclipse. Lunar eclipses may start at any time of day or night but they can only occur when the moon is full, so you can only see one at night.

In between new and full moons the moon is either ahead of the sun or behind the sun in the sky (from our geocentric point of view), and by the end of one cycle the time the moon has spent in the sky during our days will equal the amount of time it has spent in the sky during our nights. If you don't believe me, go outside and look, and report back in a month.

If you see a thin crescent moon in a dark sky it will always be fairly close to the sun, either at sunset (waxing) or sunrise (waning), and the horns of the crescent will face up into the sky and not down toward the horizon. Again, this is obvious after a moment's reflection: if the sky is dark, the sun is below the horizon, and if the moon is above the horizon then the side that is lit is the side that is "down" (horizon-wards) to an Earth-bound observer, so the horns of the crescent have to point up. It can't work any other way.

It should also be obvious that you can only see a crescent phase if an object is closer than the Earth to the sun. Think about Mars, the next planet out. Mars looks completely "full" when it is behind the Sun as seen from Earth (or would, if we could see it in the glare), and when it is opposite the sun in our sky (i.e., at the two planets' closest approach). When it is a quarter-orbit ahead or behind, it looks gibbous, but we will never see a "quarter Mars" or a "crescent Mars" as long as we are on Earth. The only objects we will ever see in those phases are Mercury, Venus, and our own moon. It should have occurred to me sooner, back at the beginning of all of this, that it is impossible to see a crescent Jupiter from Earth; such a view can only be had from a vantage point that is farther from the sun than is Jupiter!

If you like, you should be able to prove all of this to yourself by drawing some orbits as concentric rings, drawing in some planets, and thinking about what phases you would see from various vantage points in different orbits. Better yet, you can go outside, look up, and watch it happen. Best of all is when you can look up and understand what you see, because you've made a little orrery out of paper or brass or pixels or in the theater of your imagination. Now you have a little piece of the cosmos whirling around in your head, and though you may forget some details or have to look up to check the phase of the moon, you will never be entirely lost in the sky again. (You may get very irritated with movies and books that include the moon for ambience, because they almost always get it wrong, and in doing so violate not just physics but also geometry.)

Why this, why now? It's the International Year of Astronomy, and all over the world stargazers are gearing up for 100 Hours of Astronomy. One of the goals is to get more people looking up than ever have in the history of our species--and, more ambitiously, to help them understand what they see, and where they are in the cosmos. It's all in honor of the 400th anniversary of Galileo turning his telescope to the heavens, which brings us back to the crescent Venus, seen at top through the roiling chemical stew of the LA basin.

Galileo was the first to see that Venus goes through a full set of phases like the moon. From this he deduced that Venus must circle the sun (right); in a geocentric cosmos it could only ever be "new" or a crescent (left); to be full in such a cosmos it would have to appear opposite the sun in the sky, like the full moon, which it never does for reasons that the diagram on the right makes clear. Galileo's discovery that four little points of light near Jupiter are in fact its moons and circle Jupiter rather than the Earth or sun often gets more press (immortalized in the name of the biggest Jupiter mission ever, for example), but the phases of Venus are easier to see and more immediately understood, and were arguably more important in sealing the coffin of the geocentric cosmos.

I often think of Galileo, squinting through his telescopes, which were attrocious by modern standards--"plagued by every aberration known to optics"--but nevertheless the first window into the real workings of the cosmos that science ever had, and I feel very humbled, and a little lost. Humbled because I am fantastically spoiled--the first telescope I ever owned is better by far than any telescope built in the first 200 years that telescopes existed--and I doubt if I would have had Galileo's perseverance, to just keep looking. Lost because I grew up in America in the late 20th century, with more information at my disposal than all previous generations of humans combined, and it still took me more than three decades to stop, look up, and notice the very basic cycles--phases of the moon, for example--that govern the rhythms of the living world, that have informed the calendars of every human society as long as societies have existed, and that formed the first really solid step in our species' long climb into enlightenment.

So, stop. Just stop. Look up. Keep track of the moon for a month. Draw some orbits and think about what phases mean. Discover, or rediscover, the universe.

You have homework

2009-03-24T12:42:00.000-07:00

First, read this excellent post about the behavior of the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) when someone blew the whistle about a very obvious conflict of interest in one of their published studies.

In particular, pay attention to this comment, on the motivations of journal editors with regard to 'incidents' in their journals. Money quote:

Journals are motivated to downgrade the ultimate resolution as best they can, to avoid doing anything if possible, to make a correction when it should be a retraction, etc. And above all else, even when there is a retraction, to avoid anything that suggests identifying fault.

Now read that again, substituting "scientific societies" for "journals". Did it sound eerily familiar? If not, read this. Then this. Finally this.

Discuss.

What do we want our universities to be?

2009-03-22T12:03:00.000-07:00

PZ Myers on universities staying afloat by jettisoning whole departments:

My own discipline of biology is dead without mathematics, chemistry, and physics, and yes, geology is part of the environment we want our students to know. Now it's true that if all we aimed to do was churn out pre-meds, we could dispense with geology; heck, we could toss out all those ecologists, too, and hone ourselves down to nothing but a service department for instruction in physiology and anatomy.
But we wouldn't be a university anymore. We'd be a trade school.

Go read the whole thing.

In my admittedly limited experience, many biology departments are morphing into trade schools already, for pre-meds and moleculoids. Administrations love the publicity that comes from having productive organismal biologists and paleontologists, but we're usually not writing NIH grants for zillion dollar ion reflux pronabulators, which means we're not propping up universities with megabucks of institutional overhead from those grants, which means that when it comes to startup, lab space, getting tenure lines renewed, etc., we often get the short end of the stick.

Fortunately for me, lots of med schools have learned the hard way that moving from cadaver dissection to online virtual anatomy (OMG!!1!!!111!!!!) is a good way to have your students' board scores go in the toilet, so there is at least one place where anatomy will continue to be valued (if not as much as NIH grants) for the near future at least.

But then, I work at a trade school. It's okay for Western to work that way; it's not okay for the University of Florida.

Depressed Academic is depressed.

Hot volcano-on-volcano action

2009-03-20T00:57:00.000-07:00

Gotta interrupt the profundity to bring you a link to some BADASS photos of the new volcanoes being born out of the sea near Tonga. Science here and here, volcano porn here (photos) and here (video--hell yeah!).

Blundering toward productivity, Part 4: cranks, evolution, and humility

2009-03-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

If you're new to this series, you might like to read the previous installments first: here they are.

It's pretty common for internet cranks in general, and absolutely pandemic for dinosaur cranks in particular, to argue that Ivory Tower so-called experts are all blinkered by orthodoxy and that outsiders with no technical training are better suited to having the big ideas because they are unshackled by the weight of knowing all that has gone before. These people are almost always wrong, because they keep reinventing the wheel, and the wheels they reinvent are often square. That's why I was careful to specify in Part 3 that you hang out with people who are not afraid to look stupid (check) but also know enough to make useful suggestions.

The advantage of collaborating with friends is that neither of you mind the occasional stupid comment on either side; laughing those off and going on is worth it for all the good ideas that you'll have that you wouldn't have had otherwise. The disadvantages of listening to cranks are that the ratio of good ideas to stupid comments is very low, that cranks almost always mistake the latter for the former, and that almost by definition cranks are immune to being corrected (if they were willing to accept logic, reason, and the weight of evidence, they wouldn't be cranks). Even if you could somehow engineer a polite crank, who would immediately and humbly accept being corrected when he was wrong, you'd still waste most of your time explaining entry-level stuff and never get to the really good questions.

Although in retrospect Mike and I did a lot of this when we were first friends; he didn't know any biology to speak of but had a decent command of math and logic, and I knew a little biology but had never really been schooled in how to think clearly, and we both kind of helped each other up (i.e., took turns smacking each other down) until the conversations we were having anyway started to be applicable to exciting and tractable problems. So if you are an expert you shouldn't waste any time on a crank unless that crank is both potentially remediable and also your friend, and if you're a crank (or any other variety of n00b), learn how to swallow your pride, find a friend who can do likewise, and start climbing together. Maybe that is the definition of a crank: a n00b who mistakes himself for an expert.

It's not that cranks don't know a lot of facts. Usually, they know too many facts; they are blinded by their own command of the esoterica of the field in which they are cranks. The problem is that their command of that esoterica does not automatically mean that they are capable of thinking clearly about it; usually the opposite is true. After several bitter years of realizing how muddled is my own thinking, I now think that everyone, without exception, could stand to improve the clarity of their thought, and that the surest sign of this is thinking that you already think well enough.

This is like Richard Dawkins's definition of evolution as "the one subject that everyone thinks they understand." If you think you understand evolution, you don't understand it, and the more certain you are, the more grave your misunderstanding. Nor is evolution special: I suspect that this is true of any sufficiently rich field. That doesn't mean that there aren't lots of things that we know about evolution, like the fact that is has happened and continues to happen. It just means that we haven't solved it, in terms of reducing the whole field to anything that can be grasped in a blog post, or a lecture, or a documentary series, or a book, or even a career. Saying you understand evolution is not like saying you understand orbital motion, it's more like saying you understand physics. All of it. The term 'evolutionary biology' is a misnomer: evolution isn't an aspect of a more inclusive phenomenon called biology, biology is an instance of a more inclusive phenomenon called evolution.

The partner of useful stupidity is humility. In Part 2 I mentioned two aspects of humility: letting your guard down enough to let out the good ideas will probably let out some dumb ideas at the same time, and sometimes your dumb ideas will trigger someone else's good ideas. Here I am talking about another, deeper level of humility. Not humility in front of another person, but humility before the universe itself. Recognizing that any commonplace object or idea that you take for granted probably stands at the end of an almost impossibly long series of unlikelihoods, most of which have never been explored. Stephen Jay Gould seemed to have a knack for asking questions that most of his colleagues could not even have formulated; he was really good at not just seeing the box and then thinking outside of it, but wondering what it was doing there in the first place. I wonder if he was a biological evolutionist rather than an evolutionary biologist; I suppose Dawkins must be. Too bad they were always at odds (when Gould was still alive), I'll bet they would have had some killer ideas if they could have ever let their guards down around each other.

In any case, this is another way to quickly separate serious cranks from potentially remediable n00bs: cranks lack humility. Not just humility toward other people, but toward the universe. The true crank is beset by the dual delusions that the answers are all straightforward, and that he has them and no one else does (except maybe one or two of his fellow cranks; sometimes they run in packs). Look around for someone who doubts if we're even asking the right questions, and chat that person up instead. Not just instead of talking to the crank--instead of doing whatever it was you had planned for the rest of the day.

Where am I going with all of this? I have no clue. I just intended to write a little bit about e-mail and the value of conversation. And I'm not going to find out tonight, because right now my need for sleep is greater than my curiosity to see what comes next. Stay tuned, though. I'm probably stupid enough to bring this to a satisfactory close, but it remains to be seen if I have the humility.

Blundering toward productivity, Part 3: smart enough to feel stupid

2009-03-14T23:48:00.000-07:00

Part 1 is about goofing off as the spawning ground of good ideas. Part 2 is ostensibly about whether the goofing off part can be circumvented, but really about the value of working with smart people who aren't afraid to look stupid. In this post, I answer the second question from Part 1: how can the process of turning undirected play into good ideas be accelerated?

The obvious answer, which I intended to write about: have a workshop, get a bunch of smart people from different but interacting disciplines together, and give them time to educate each other AND time to freewheel. I got to experience this for real at the sauropod workshop in Germany last November (see here and here). The importance of this is not to be underestimated. This is why we talk about particular institutions having a "critical mass" of workers in a field, and it's why Berkeley was such a fun and inspiring place to be a grad student.

Another answer, which I discovered in the course of writing the previous post: hang out with smart people who you are not afraid to look stupid in front of, and who are not afraid to look stupid in front of you. This is harder than it sounds, because people who know enough to make worthwhile suggestions are prone to being at least a little bit insecure or defensive about their knowledge, especially compared to others. I would be horrible collaborator with many people in my field because I would never let my guard down; it would kill me if they found out how stupid I am capable of being.

Given that, a further suggestion would be to consider collaborating with your best friends regardless of what they work on; by being vulnerably, stupidly open with each other, you might have enough good ideas fast enough to either find something midway between your specialties, or for one or the other of you to fall in love with a problem in the other person's field. Hence the project on rabbit heads with Brian. I wasn't particularly interested in rabbit heads but I am interested in pneumaticity and we figured the project would be about rabbit sinuses. It turns out we're going to do something completely different and much more interesting, which was not on the radar for either of us because neither of us had made the necessary discoveries (you would call them observations, but for us they were discoveries), which has roots in some papers we read back at Berkeley but really germinated in the soil of undirected conversation.

And this accounts for the feeling that I had when I started this essay, that time spent chatting on e-mail is not always a waste of time. Sometimes it's not just productive time, it's the most productive time it's possible to have. Because it is the spawning ground of new ideas.

Chatting on e-mail with distant colleagues is better than exchanging snail-mail letters or not talking, but it's still vastly inferior to meeting in person. In the past year I have spent just over a month with Mike (one evening in LA last summer, two weeks at his house in August, two weeks in Germany in November, one day at the AMNH last month), but out of that month we've gotten two manuscripts mostly written and plans made for at least half a dozen more. A couple we had sketched out on e-mail, but most of them wouldn't exist even in concept if we hadn't had some time to just hang out with fossils. I suppose that is another potential idea-accelerator to add to the list:

(1) have lots of wide-ranging conversations
(2) don't be afraid to look stupid
(3) collaborate with your best friends
(4) in person as often as possible
(5) with the objects of your investigations at hand

If you're an astronomer and there is a physicist you'd like to work with, meet up at the observatory or the cyclotron or more likely the computer lab where you play with your data. If you're a paleontologist or zoologist, go on field trips and museum visits with your collaborators. Happily, that's probably something you were going to anyway. But now you know it's not just a convenience, it's a necessity. And having a few beers together at the end of the day is not a waste of time, it's an investment in your joint idea bank.

The other implication of this last one is that if you are on your own and you've got some time to kill, you should probably go to where your potential data is and just let your mind and body wander. There is a great bit in one of David Quammen's essays in which Quammen is roaming the Montana State University library and he comes across Jack Horner sitting on the floor between two rows of shelves with journals spread out all around him. Quammen says, "Hey, Jack, what are you doing here?" Horner looks up and says, "Having ideas." The best part is that the journals weren't even paleo journals, they were ornithology journals.

That's yet another important point: it's good to have at least a nodding acquaintance with every field that bears on yours. Which, depending on how broadly you think, might be all of them. And what's more, you should get more than a nodding acquaintance with the ones that are likely to be most important. Birds are living dinosaurs, so if you are looking for new ideas to test about dinosaur biology, it makes sense to camp out in the ornithology section. Crocs are also relevant and elephants are not completely irrelevant, but people have been thinking about dinosaurs as big crocs and slow elephants for a long time. The MSU library run-in happened in the early 90s, when the idea of dinosaurs as stem birds had not yet penetrated paleobiological thought (it still hasn't, fully). Even now, if you were looking to really push things, it would be a good idea.

The downside of jumping into a new field instead of just soaking your toes at the shallow end is that it will make you feel stupid. It doesn't matter what line of work you're in, whether it's paleontology or programming or construction, there is something that you are an expert on now that you weren't when you started, whether it is taphonomy or recursive subroutines or knocking down walls. But you weren't an expert when you started, and when you started you probably spent a lot of time feeling stupid. But you learned quickly, partly because you were anxious to get past feeling stupid, and partly because trying dumb stuff is a good way to learn what works and what doesn't.

I am starting to think that becoming an expert can be dangerous, because feeling smart feels better than feeling stupid, and the risk inherent in expertise is that you stay put and never push the field as much as you might by taking a risk, feeling stupid for a while, and mastering another body of knowledge.

I almost hesitate to say that here on teh intert00bz, where it is often alleged that becoming an expert is dangerous for another reason, which leads to the hopefully non-trivial discussion of cranks in the next post.

Blundering toward productivity, Part 2: is there a better way to have good ideas?

2009-03-14T23:40:00.000-07:00

In Part 1 I discussed the fact that, in my experience at least, good ideas almost always arise from undirected conversations with friends and colleagues (e.g., goofing off). I ended the post by wondering whether this process can be circumvented or accelerated. This post is about the first of those alternatives: is there another way to have good ideas other than gabbing with informed friends?

I doubt it. Mike and I have both noticed that on museum research visits we get a lot more done if we're working with someone else than if we're working alone. And usually that is not because we are sharing the load, like one person taking measurements and the other writing them down. It's because we just notice more and ask more questions.

The corollary is make sure you work with the right person. A good collaborator is curious, open-minded, and not afraid to look stupid. When I'm really in the zone on a collaborative project, I say all kinds of stupid things, and frequently have to be reminded of the obvious. And I am lenient when my collaborators say dumb things, because there is more than one kind of dumb statement. We're so used to dumb statements that indicate that someone is not thinking at all that it is hard to realize that sometimes dumb statements mean that someone is thinking very hard. So hard that they can't be bothered to remember little details like gravity or the fact that necks must necessarily have a head at one end and a body at the other.

Well, why not just guard your inner monologue and not let the stupid stuff out? Because that's what you do for the rest of your time, and because that filter that you set up to catch the stupid stuff might also catch the really brilliant stuff. At the very least, it will slow down the flow. There is some necessary humility here. Not just the humility to not be afraid to look stupid, but also the humility to realize that you are not going to get to all the good ideas yourself, and even your wrong or dumb ideas might jar something loose in your collaborator's head.

Hmm. I have read that you write reports when you have found answers that need sharing, and you write essays to find answers in the first place, and sometimes to questions you didn't know you were asking. I started this section thinking that I was just going to write glowingly about the value of batting ideas around with someone else. But I think I am coming to the view that openness, verging on stupidity, is not only necessary, but also the answer to the next question.

For another recent defense of stupidity as a crucial part of science, go here, and please note that the linked paper is free.

Blundering toward productivity, Part 1: e-mail and goofing off

2009-03-14T21:25:00.000-07:00

Another post inspired by someone else's post. Scott Aaronson recently crossed the E-mail Event Horizon, and sent a report from inside.

I have not crossed the EEH, but I have been through brief e-mail storms, during which I have spent an entire working day doing nothing but answering e-mails that can't be put off. Now, when I was a grad student I sometimes blew a whole day goofing off on e-mail, but that was different. Mostly, though, I am able to plow through necessary e-mail in about an hour and get down to the day's work. Although it is still kinda shocking that, on average, I spend an eighth of my workday checking and answering e-mail. On the other hand, there is no question that e-mail is a huge productivity booster overall, at least for me, because it circumvents so many meetings and vastly accelerates the pace of collaborative research and writing.

It is easy to get carried away and let a focused e-mail exchange with a colleague metastasize into a rambling conversation with a friend. Sometimes that eats up whole mornings. That used to bother me, but not so much these days. At least part of that 'virtual community' BS is true. In a traditional office I would be having water-cooler conversations with whatever chumps I happened to be stuck with. Thanks to e-mail, I can have those conversations with a distributed network of my favorite people, many of whom are not in the same town, or the same state, or even the same continent.

I had a minor epiphany on my recent research trip to the AMNH. I was hanging out with Brian Kraatz and we were kicking around ideas for a project on rabbit skulls (yes, really). To an outside observer, it would have looked like the Real Work/Goofing Off split was about 20/80. But the ideas that we ended up chasing all came out of what would have looked like goofing off.

I had a similar experience when I was visiting Mike in England in August. We'd usually end each day at the dining room table, playing games and just freewheeling. One night we got to talking about sauropod vertebrae (gasp!) and some things that do not make sense, and after we'd scribbled up two or three pages of scrap paper with notes and diagrams we looked at each other and thought, "Hey, this could be a paper." It's in review right now; I'll let you know if it ever sees print.

The epiphany I had in New York is not that good research ideas sometimes emerge from the most apparantly random conversations. It's that they almost always do. This is nothing new--when I look back, the guts of most of my papers started out as a few motes of inspiration distilled from undirected yakk sessions with friends and colleagues. When I was just starting out with undergrad research, I'd meet with Rich Cifelli in his office and we'd just bat ideas back and forth. This turns out to be a good way not just to have new ideas but to make new observations. Rich and I figured out a lot of sauropod morphology because one of us would point at some feature and say, "That's weird. Is it always like that?" and then we'd go check. Same thing with Brian and the bunny heads in New York.

So far this is all pedestrian. What I'm really curious about is, can this process be (1) circumvented, or (2) accelerated?

Another dead snapper tale

2009-03-09T14:01:00.000-07:00

First, if you haven't already read Darren's awesome post on turning dead animals into skeletons, do so now. Look out for the amazing line, "Stig and I once microwaved a dead cat and the results were outstanding."

That reminded me that I have told the story of one of my dead snappers, but not the other. As far as I can tell, anyway. So here goes.

I was working at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History as a grad student, and I had put the word out that I was looking for a big dead snapping turtle. A few weeks later, I got a hit. One of the other grad students had been on a hike at the local lake and seen a dead snapper, so he'd pushed it up into a metal culvert to hide it from scavengers, both human and otherwise. A few days later he told my friend and partner-in-crime, Julian (same Julian as in the other snapper story linked above), a few days after that Julian told me, and a few days after that we finally hopping in Julian's truck and went out to get that thing.

Keep in mind that this was May in Oklahoma, when the temperature and the humidity were both hovering in the high 90s. And that the snapper had been up in that culvert for a week and a half by the time Jules and I went after it, and dead for an unknown additional period.

I waded into the ankle-deep water and dragged the thing out of the culvert by the shell. It was huge, with a carapace 15 inches long and a head three inches wide. Weighed upward of 20 pounds. It was also to the "bratwurst" stage of decomposition, in which the head, tail, and all four limbs were extended and swollen up like unholy sausages (the putative existence of holy sausages is a topic for another post). I didn't want to touch the flesh, which had the texture of gelatin and the rich aroma of rotting horse ass. So I tried to gingerly pick it up by the edge of the shell using only the fingertips of my right hand. Bad idea--as I was turning it over, the entire weight of the animal came down on my right thumbnail, cracked it in half, and bent it back at a 90 degree angle from the quick. I howled, dropped the snapper back in the drink, and ran to shore where I gritted my teeth and snapped the broken nail back down over the bleeding quick where it belonged. Only then did I realize that in my haste I had run smack into a little stand of poison ivy, to which I am seriously allergic.

Somehow we got the dead snapper into a couple of trash bags and into the bed of Julian's truck. Then we went back to my place, put it on the back porch, and took turns showering with Technu to get the poison ivy oil off. I also bandaged my thumb, but ended up losing most of the nail anyway. Not fun.

I wasn't sure what to do with the snapper. Our duplex backed up on a big wild plot at the edge of town, and I was tempted to use ants, but I didn't want to expose the thing to scavengers, which were both diverse (raccoons, opossums, coyotes, dogs, etc.) and abundant. I had used maceration for the mummified snapper but the results were awesomely greasy. I was interested in burying it but had no experience with prepping carcasses that way.

The upshot is that I didn't do anything with it for several days, during which it was sitting on my back porch inside two shopping bags in the 90-degree heat. Jules and I had gotten it on a Saturday.

The following Thursday night Vicki and I were on an evening stroll about the neighborhood, about two blocks from home, and the wind changed just right and we could both smell that snapper rotting. Vicki looked at me and sternly said, "You are going to get up tomorrow morning and bury that thing."

I did. It was simply horrific. I opened the trash bags, grabbed the bottom ends, and pulled up. The snapper slid out on its back. Or rather its remains did. All that was left was a greasy articulated skeleton, a couple of gallons of really evil greenish-black fluid, and about a million grains of white rice. Only they weren't grains of rice, they were maggots. The stench hit me like the proverbial freight train.

I dug a hole about a foot deep in the yard, lined the bottom with a plastic trash bag, slid the snapper in with the shovel, buried it, and covered the spot with a few logs from the woodpile. I say it like I just did all that stuff. In fact it took most of an hour because holding my breath I could only work for about 30 seconds at a time, before I had to go to the upwind corner of the yard and just breathe. The stench was beyond anything I have ever experienced before or since. I didn't know that a scent could be that powerful. I hosed down the porch for a long time, too.

All that summer I watered the logs over the burial plot daily. This kept them moist during the long hot summer, when temperatures got over 110 F for a solid month, and hopefully promoted lots of biological activity in the soil below. I flipped the logs daily to collect rolly-pollies (or pill bugs, if you insist) for my baby box turtles. In August I moved the logs and carefully dug up the turtle. Amazingly, the bones were entirely defleshed and degreased. I cleaned them up with soap and water and they came out shiny white, with no bleach or peroxide. I still have the skull, which is beautiful and impressive, and if I wasn't so lazy I would have included a photo of it with this post. Maybe next time.

Anyway, I've been ardently pro-burial for carcass preparation ever since. Give it a shot, it's a great experience.

Dr Vector spoils Watchmen

2009-03-07T01:52:00.000-08:00

I just got back from the show. I loved it.

It's basically a shot-for-shot remake of the book. In fact, it's astonishing how many of the neat little details from the book survive. The whole pirate comic book is out, but I didn't miss it (and to be honest, I found it a little tiring the last time I read the book). I was also pleasantly surprised to find myself moved by events I already knew were going to happen--to laughter, to excitement, to disgust. Not to tears, but there weren't any real tear-jerker moments in the book, either. Many critics have taken the film to task for being too faithful to the book. I'm not sure how that works, but then I don't understand why most of those dumbasses have jobs in the first place. I didn't think the movie was the "embalmed" version of the book--quite the contrary. It may be a cliche, but Zach Snyder took the book and made it live. I think we may have underestimated him after 300. If it was a violent, homophobic, fascist, historically inaccurate movie, it's because it was a strikingly faithful adaptation of a violent, homophobic, fascist, historically inaccurate comic. Snyder may be a little too good at what he does.

The casting was, frankly, unbelievable. Patrick Wilson couldn't be a better Dan Dreiberg if Dave Gibbons had inked and colored him. But the show is really stolen by Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian and Jackie Earl Haley as Rorschach. When I read the book from now on, the characters will speak with these voices. Especially Rorschach's. It's so perfect, it's a little scary.

The only departure from the book is at the end. The calamity that unites humanity and averts nuclear war is not the teleported-alien-plus-millions-of-psychically-murdered in NYC. It's simultaneous A-bomb-level blasts in NYC, Moscow, Hong Kong, and at least one other city (Paris, maybe?). These are engineered by Veidt to look like the work of Dr. Manhattan--they are set off by a reactor that Dr. Manhattan has been helping Veidt build, to provide free energy using whatever it is that powers Dr. Manhattan. The Earth unites not against a phantom teleporting alien threat but against Dr. Manhattan, who leaves the planet anyway for the same reasons he does in the book.

I actually thought this was rather neat. Usually when a film adaptation messes with the source material, it degrades the story by introducing Hollywood BS that is against the very spirit of the story. Witness Faramir's "story arc" in The Two Towers and the giant pyrotechnic ending tacked onto Stardust. In the case of Watchmen, the revision actually ties the story back to itself. Dr. Manhattan is a better patsy for the calamity than aliens. He's more believable, I think, in in-universe terms. He's harder to falsify, because he's known to exist, whereas I suppose there is an outside possibility that in the book universe some aspect of the creature or its appearance might break down and betray its origins in the inevitable multinational investigation. It's a better play for Veidt. If Dr. Manhattan wasn't already planning to leave the planet, having the planet united against him would give him another reason. And it's a more believable play for Veidt; instead of having to invent several totally new technologies in secret (gigaton monsters, psychic blast waves, teleportation), all he has to do is harness an existing phenomenon, and he even gets the phenomenon in question to help out. Finally, when Laurie gets pissed at Dr. Manhattan for splitting himself to do research while also making love to her, it's not just some random physics experiment he's working on--it's the very reactor that Veidt will use to trigger the explosions and frame him. So it's a neat bit of storytelling all around; it actually makes the story more coherent instead of less, which I would not have thought possible.

I know I may have to turn in my geek badge and fanboy secret decoder ring, but for that alone I think the filmic Watchmen may be just slightly superior to the book. I expect the mob with torches and pitchforks any minute. Have a nice day.

The long view

2009-02-05T23:11:00.001-08:00

I just finished reading Neal Stephenson's new novel, Anathem. As usual after a new Stephenson book, my brain feels like a too-small bubble that was forcibly enlarged by someone who crawled inside and just started pushing outward with hands and feet. The societies of interest in Stephenson's alternative world are built around Millennium Clocks like the one first envisioned by Danny Hillis in this essay and now actively pursued by the Long Now Foundation.

A prime consideration for the Long Now Foundation, and for the cloistered intellectuals in Anathem, is how to ensure the survival of knowledge on millennial timescales. Computers are cool but their value as information storage devices in the long term is unproven, whereas we know that paper, papyrus, and clay tablets can both survive for multiple millennia and--crucially--be decoded by the folks on the other end. In contrast, I have ZIP discs from 2001 that I can't access because I don't have a ZIP drive any more and can't be bothered to get one. My important data has migrated from ZIPs to CDs to an external hard drive and now to several hard drives scattered across the globe. So assuming that I and my friends continue to look after them, my goodies have achieved as much--or as little--longevity as the wired world. That longevity is really the whole question, and I'll get back to it in a moment.

A related concern shared by the Long Now folks and Stephenson: should a given work or body of knowledge be used, which increases the risk that it will be destroyed, deliberately or accidentally, or mutated beyond recognition, or just sealed away for future perusal? As Hillis notes, "The Dead Sea Scrolls managed to survive by remaining lost for a couple millennia. Now that they've been located and preserved in a museum, they're probably doomed. I give them two centuries - tops." Less than that if people start throwing bombs around, which on a long enough timescale is fairly certain. Similarly, inside Anathem's concents--the concentric monasteries surrounding the Millennium Clocks--some topics are taboo because their exploration causes the societies that explore them to stop being long-lived. Reminds me of Paul Graham's hypothesis that innocence is vital to learning.

Since Stephenson had already tripped my brain over into thinking on millennial timescales, I picked up a book that I've been circling around for a few months: Year Million, a collection of essays on how (or if) the post/human civilization will continue for the next million years. Many (but not all) of the contributors assume that we'll eventually dismantle the solar system to construct a Matrioshka brain (ordinary Dyson swarms are so TwenCen) and send out replicators to build Mbrains around other stars. Wil McCarthy has a bracingly hard-edged answer to Fermi's Paradox: we don't see any other civilizations out there because technological progress is so fast compared to biological evolution that the first one out of the gate in any particular galaxy gets the whole pie. The Milky Way is ours, if we can just get off this rock without killing ourselves.

...and now we're back to my ZIP drives. How survivable is our digital knowledge base? Assuming no interruptions, we can just keep copying all of our stuff to the next generation of storage devices and accessing it on the latest version of internet, from now until Mbrain come. But that "assuming no interruptions" is the kicker, ain't it? Interruptions like thermonuclear war--Cold War 1 is over but how long will we territorial apes keep those particular toys in the closet? Or the eruption of the resurgent caldera under Yellowstone, the effects of which would probably be similar to those of an all-out nuclear exchange.

Of course, even an all-out nuclear war between, say, the US, Western Europe, Russia, and China would not mean the end of humanity or civilization or even the wired world. Ever notice how all the nuked-up itchy-trigger-finger countries are in the northern hemisphere? Brazil and Australia might the future superpowers while our descendants in the north literally pull their hair out trying to maintain a medieval standard of living.

It seems, to me, to be an all-or-nothing deal. Either civilization will keep going, somewhere, and we'll get out into space soonish, or we'll do something, or a combination of somethings--nukes, superplagues, Von Neumann nanoweaponry--that will wipe us out.

Let's take option 2 first. I wonder if we are actually capable of wiping ourselves out. Not capable as in willing to pull the trigger, but capable as in actually possessing the means to do so. Let's say that we keep a lid on things for another century or two, until Brazil and South Africa and Australia all have their own huge nuclear stockpiles, and everyone has at least a few cruise missiles armed with multiple-drug-resistant Tb and superanthrax, and we all let go at once. Humans would still survive somewhere. There will be places that are too far down the priority list to be worth bombing, too far off the beaten track to get the superplagues released over the megalopolises, and situated by accidents of climate and geography to avoid the windborn fallout and hypergerms. There are places like that even in the U.S., tracts of land hundreds of miles on a side with no nuke-worthy military installations or population centers, and outside the fallout blanket from any projected nuclear exchange (the government has literally thousands of pages of reports on this stuff).

Even if we somehow wiped out all of our industrialized cities, towns, and even villages, someone out there would make it. On an island in the Pacific, or a cave in Afghanistan, or a valley in the Andes. Even if we got rid of all the humans except that one little town or tribe or clan, they'd eventually expand out and recolonize the globe, just like hominids have been doing for millions of years. And as they spread and diversified they'd find our artifacts, and they'd get industrialized civilization back up and running a lot faster than it took us to get it up and running in the first place.

I notice a lot of futurists mentioning global climate change as a threat to human survival. I'm sorry, but what a load of crap. I'm convinced that AGW is real, and it probably is a threat to many of our nations and institutions, but to our species? Hello, McFly--humans migrated over one pole and colonized two continents, including equatorial rain forests, in the space of a few millennia. And they did it with no tools that weren't readily made from rocks, plants, and animals, no written language, and no domesticated animals besides dogs. Whatever happens with the climate, I'm sure that Homo sapiens, or some variant thereof, will survive. The United States, the globalized economy, and the Internet I'm not quite as sure about, but I would bet on the side of human ingenuity (some would say rapacity) in the face of whatever the Earth throws at us.

So. I think that for the near term--say, the next few centuries or millennia--we are extinction-proof (barring extraterrestrial planet-wreckers, in which case all bets are off). But I don't think it is equally likely that we will get off the planet. I can easily envision a future in which we repeatedly get to the cusp of the space age and then bomb ourselves back into barbarism, over and over again. Technological civilizations will rise and fall and rise and fall, but never quite get enough people and material out of the atmosphere to make it up there, to turn us into a star-faring species. And each collapse will leave the world a little more radioactive and polluted, and with each rise a few more species will be hunted to extinction before conservation re-emerges. It is the survival and successful transmission of knowledge in just that situation that the Long Now Foundation is contemplating. In the world of Anathem, it actually happened--repeatedly.

Before the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, many educated people thought they were living in a debased civilization, which would never regain the knowledge and wisdom of the Golden Age of antiquity. Our future descendants might actually live in such a world. Successive technological civilizations might fail to reach the same heights (literally and metaphorically) as their precursors, because their precursors used up too many of the readily available resources to allow them to do so. But perhaps these nth generation civilizations will also lack the destructive technologies needed for a truly catastrophic collapse. So each rises a little less high, and falls a little less low, and eventually the sine wave of rising and falling civilization flattens out into a steady-state, somewhere between the Dark Ages and the Victorians. Nation-states in that civilization will probably be just as plastic as they are in our world, but their soldiers will ride horses and fight with swords, because all of the oil and coal will be long gone. And so after a surprisingly brief series of flickering florescences, humanity will lurch into the far future the same way it arrived from the distant past, living lives that are nasty, brutish, and short.

Or we get off this rock and go places. I don't see any intermediate possibilities. Either we will lose the ability to travel into space, or someone, somewhere will get a toehold up there and start building colonies. Like Heinlein said, there is no guarantee that it will be America or Russia; if we can't or won't, it may be Turkey or Kenya or anybody else. But someone will go, unless the technological means is taken out of our collective hands, which I think would be impossible without destroying civilization. And even if this technological civilization--by which I mean the globe-spanning one that you are part of--doesn't make it, a future one might, half a millennium from now when the radioisotope load gets low enough that they can plunder what's left at White Sands or Baikonur or Kourou. But we have a better chance than they will, because we still have about half our oil, most of our coal, and none of the memory gaps that go along with nuclear apocalypse.

At this point it is de rigeur to note that we will probably never have the means to move more than a tiny fraction of planet's population off of it. Whatever the spacefarers do, we still have to solve our problems down here on Earth--so goes the refrain. Like AGW, this strikes me as a non-starter when applied to the species. Once the spacefarers have fledged, that is, become self-sufficient--getting their metals from asteroids, water from comets or moons, growing their own crops on their rotating habitats and having babies in one g--they are on the path to the stars (or the Mbrain) regardless of what happens to those who stay in the nest. From that point, they are the cutting edge of human progress, and the clodhoppers down here will have the threat of asteroid bombardment to keep them in line (I'm not saying that's nice, but does it seem hard to believe based on human history?). In fact, both scenarios could play out simultaneously--a long progression of technological civilizations rising and falling on Earth while our descendants build Mbrains around the Pleiades.

So what is the end of all this casting of bones? As Michio Kaku said, "Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." Similarly, either we are going to get off the planet and become starfarers, or we are not. The terrifying part is that we will probably decide in the next few decades.

Your thoughts are welcome.

Onward and upward

2009-02-04T00:08:00.000-08:00

The cool thing about being on a learning curve is that you regularly do stuff that makes your previous efforts look pretty lame. Like this (click to embiggify):

For technical details and more like it, go here.

A big night in a big year

2009-01-31T10:57:00.001-08:00

Everyone who is even remotely interested in the living world knows that 2009 is the bicentennial of Darwin's birth (1809) and the sesquicentennial of the first publication of On the Origin of Species (1859). And this year is the 400th anniversary of Galileo first turning a telescope to the heavens and the publication of Kepler's Astronomia Nova (1609), in honor of which the UN and the International Astronomical Union have declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy.

There are a couple of other astro-themed anniversaries this year, too. This July 20th will be the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing (1969). Bringing things right up to the 21st century, January 4th and 25th were the 5th anniversaries of the landings of the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, respectively, on Mars (2004). That's right, folks--it seems Mars missions either fail spectacularly or succeed beyond anyone's wildest dreams. The primary missions of the twin Mars Exploration Rovers were only 90 days apiece, and here they are still going strong 1854 and 1833 days later (as of this morning), more than 20 times longer. Bring that up the next time some tool complains about NASA's budget.

Last night I celebrated two of Galileo's discoveries: craters and "seas" on the moon, which showed that celestial bodies were not perfect and unchanging spheres, and the phases of Venus, which confirmed the hypothesis that the planets orbit the sun rather than the Earth. Andy Farke (a.k.a. the Open Source Paleontologist, who published a paper on Triceratops combat just this week in--naturally--an open access journal) brought some of his excellent home-brewed beer to the traditional Wedel Friday Night Fish-Stick Picnic, and we spent a little time cruising the sky. We got lucky, too--the atmosphere, which is usually a roiling swamp of turbulence and smog, was as still and clear as I've ever seen it down here. Lately Venus has been so smeared out by bad seeing that it looks like a hyperactive star, but last night we could see it for the planet that it is, and in a crescent phase not to different from that of the moon.

Next month will be even better. As Venus continues on around the sun toward inferior conjunction, it will appear larger and even more crescentic. On the evening of February 27, just after sunset, the crescent Venus will be right next to the much larger crescent moon above the western horizon (as shown above in a screencap from the free planetarium program Stellarium). Get out and take a look. It will be even better in binoculars or a telescope, so start thinking about how you're going to make that happen. I promise it will be worth it.

With a name like Fluckers...

2009-01-20T09:45:00.000-08:00

For my international readership: here in the states we have a brand of jam called Smucker's. Their tagline is, "With a name like Smucker's, it's got to be good." At a rough guess I would say that the average American has seen more Smucker's ads than televised acts of violence. They've been running the same ad for my entire life. Eventually you don't even realize that they are ads anymore, they're just part of the background noise of life.

Armed with that information, you are now ready to enjoy this old Saturday Night Live skit (stolen from here).

Jam Hawkers

Written by Michael O'Donoghue

Jane Curtin: . . . And so, with a name like Fluckers, it’s got to be good

Chevy Chase: Hey, hold on a second, I have a jam here called Nose Hair. Now with a name like Nose Hair, you can imagine how good it must be. MMM MMM!!

Dan Aykroyd: Hold it a minute folks, but are you familiar with a jam called Death Camp? That’s Death Camp! Just look for the barbed wire on the label. With a name like Death Camp it must be so good it’s incredible! Just amazingly good jam!

John Belushi: Wait a minute . . . Dog Vomit, Monkey Pus. We offer you a choice of two of the most repulsive brand names of jams you’ve ever heard of. With names like these, this stuff has got to be terrific. We’re talking fabulous jam here!

Chevy Chase: Save your breath fella! Here’s a new jam we’ve just put out. It’s called Painful Rectal Itch. You’d have to go a long way to find a worse name for a jam. And good? MMM WAH! With a name like Painful Rectal Itch you gotta bet that it’s great . . .

Dan Aykroyd: Mangled Baby Ducks. That’s right, Mangled Baby Ducks! Picture a jam so good that you’d dare to call it Mangled Baby Ducks! Great Jam! It’s beautiful jam!

John Belushi: Wait a minute, wait a minute, this is it - 10,000 Nuns and Orphans.

Jane Curtin: 10,000 Nuns and Orphans? What’s so bad about that?

John Belushi: They were all eaten by rats! Oh, it’s so good! MMM!

Garrett Morris: Hold it, hold it everyone, your attention please, I have here a jam called, Oh God, [mumbles] Ick! Yecch!

Dan Aykroyd: It’s so good it’s sick making!

Chevy Chase: Oh, that’s gotta be great jam!

Jane Curtin: So if it’s great jam you’re after, try this one, the brand so disgusting you can’t say it on television. Ask for it by name!

Personal flying wing

2009-01-18T23:51:00.000-08:00

WANT

Awesome frogfish video

2009-01-18T12:11:00.000-08:00

This is one of the coolest, weirdest things I've seen in a while. I knew that frogfish existed and roughly what they were, but there is a big difference between seeing still photos and watching one of them walking around.

Weird but true: the more widely spread "posterior" limbs are actually the pectoral fins, and the medial "anterior" limbs are the pelvic fins. Lots of teleosts have the pelvic fins moved forward until they are even with or even anterior to the pectoral fins. Suppose this lineage came out onto land (say, after a mass extinction) and gave rise to a parallel group of tetrapods. Those animals would have forelimbs made from their ancestral hindlimbs! (Quick, to the Speculative-Zoology-Mobile!)

The latest stuff on the fish-tetrapod transition suggests that well-formed limbs first evolved in totally aquatic animals and were exapted for terrestrial locomotion later. Although they are very different in habitat and shape, these frogfish show how useful limbs might be underwater, especially for ambush predators.

If you watch the whole video, you'll see the thing walking quadrupedally on all four fins, and also bipedally on just its pectoral fins. It's a freakin' hadrosaur.

Hat tip to Mike.

Gettin' squirrelly

2009-01-06T16:41:00.000-08:00

People come to things by circuitous routes. I have heard of more than one person who got into paleontology through art; they started out by drawing dinosaurs and graduated to studying dinosaurs (not everyone makes that transition...).

I sometimes wonder if I will eventually become a birder. This thought first came to me when I was ODing on natural history a couple years ago. I dig watching animals, pretty much without reservation. I have a big aquarium and keep fish, for most of my life I kept turtles, and every time I've bumped into an animal--okay, a vertebrate--outdoors I've observed it with great interest, regardless of exactly what kind it is. You can go fishing and you can go herping, but those require going where the fish and herps are, and even then there's no guarantee you'll see any. You can't usually just "go mammaling" because usually mammals are either absent or laying low. But you can walk out the door just about anytime and see birds. So it seems reasonable to me that someone with a broad interest in watching critters might end up as a birder because birds are there to watch.

Any committed birders out there are probably appalled at my lack of passion. In which case, hold on, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Over the holidays I blew a hundred bucks worth of Christmas money on a spotting scope. Partly because I'd always wanted one, partly because I intended to use it as a travel telescope for those dark Oklahoma skies (a successful venture, I might add). Today I was just monkeying around with it and decided to try taking some pictures of birds in the back yard. I didn't get any birds, but I did get some good pix of the neighborhood squirrel. If I do ever become a birder, it will be at least partly because I enjoy--in the immortal words of Mike Taylor--badgering around with telescopes.

UPDATE: I'm not alone! "I took my very first bird photograph through my astronomical telescope in 1998."

Taken by afocal projection using a Celestron C70 spotting scope, Orion 32mm Plossl eyepiece, and Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera.

Craters all the way down

2009-01-05T23:13:00.001-08:00

Believe it or not, there are a few features on the moon that are not direct products or epiphenomena of asteroid and comet impacts. There are some small, fairly obscure volcanoes, some lava-carved valleys and collapsed lava tubes, and a few scarps produced through faulting. But these are all dwarfed, physically, in number, and in importance, by craters and impact basins. To a first approximation, everything you see on the moon is a crater, part of a crater, a crater flooded with lava (the maria or lunar seas), part of the rim of a crater since buried under lava (the lone mountains from the previous post), ejecta blown out by a crater (the bright rays extending from "young" craters (i.e., those less than a billion years old), valleys gouged by impact ejecta (the valleys from two posts ago), or in some other way a consequence of an impact. This is especially obvious in the southern highlands, which were never flooded by mare lavas and are thus just piles of superimposed craters, like the oft-rebuilt Troy of Schliemann.

The biggest crater visible above is Clavius. It's 140 miles across, 2 miles deep, and about four billion years old. It is also the site of Clavius Base in 2001. Speaking of, last year was the 40th anniversary of 2001, this July will be the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, and this December will be the 37th anniversary of humans not going beyond Earth orbit anymore. The most optimistic projections for NASA and the Chinese space agency do not put people back on the moon before the 50th anniversary of the first landing, and it may be much later.

I wonder what future generations will think of our half century of going nowhere. Recall that the original point of the space station--the only reason anyone wanted one to begin with--was to be a launchpad for the moon and Mars.

Mega sigh.

Taken by afocal projection with an Orion XT6 Dobsonian telescope and Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera, through an Orion Sirius 25mm Plossl eyepiece and Orion Shorty 2x Barlow lens.

Sunset on the Sea of Rains

2008-12-19T06:18:00.001-08:00

All of these pictures were taken by afocal projection with an Orion XT6 Dobsonian telescope and Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera. The first two shots were made through an Orion Sirius 25mm Plossl eyepiece and Orion Shorty 2x Barlow lens. The bottom shot was made through an Orion Sirius 32mm Plossl.

Quote of the Day

2008-12-17T14:39:00.000-08:00

"Controlling the population by force is unethical, not controlling the population is also unethical. What we need are some predators."

--Southern Fried Scientist

Sea of Crises

2008-12-14T01:21:00.000-08:00

a.k.a. Mare Crisium. A basalt-filled impact basin 376 miles in diameter and more than 3.8 billion years old. It's got some killer mountains around it, and it's a good place to go exploring right after a full moon, when the rest of the moon is still washed out in direct sunlight.

Conditions were suboptimal tonight. It was windy so the atmosphere was just roiling through the eyepiece, which makes for less than crisp photos. But it's supposed to rain all week so I gave it a whirl anyway.

Southeast of Mare Crisium are four big craters in an arc: Langrenus, Vendelinus, Petavius, and Furnerius, in order from closest to Crisium to furthest away. There are also a couple of cool valleys, Valis Palitzsch and Vallis Snellius. There are no true water-carved valleys on the moon. Some lunar valleys formed by faulting, some were carved by flowing lava (strange but true), and some are collapsed lava tubes.

Valles Palitzsch and Snellius formed another way: they were gouged out by immense chunks of crust blasted away from the impacts that formed the maria. Vallis Palitzsch is 82 miles long and 25 miles wide at the fat end. For reference, Mount Everest is less than 6 miles tall and Mauna Kea is just over 6 miles tall if you measure from the ocean floor. Neither would amount to much compared to the block of crust that dug out Vallis Palitzsch when it landed.

Vallis Snellius is another secondary impact feature, created by a chunk of debris from the impact that formed Mare Nectaris. It is narrower but longer, 367 miles long in all. Imagine a piece of rock several miles wide rolling from LA to San Francisco (actually some puritans would probably like to see that happen).

I wonder about the mountains, craters, and so on that were in the way of those juggernauts. I would like to have been around to watch them get flattened.

Some fun, huh?

Happy holidays from Hubble

2008-12-13T12:03:00.001-08:00

If you've never had one, an advent calendar has 25 little boxes to open, one for every day of December through Christmas. Boston.com has a virtual advent calendar of Hubble's greatest hits. This is a ring galaxy, from Dec. 6.

Hat tip to Jarrod, and Merry Christmas to all!

Howl, baby

2008-12-12T01:12:00.001-08:00

Taken by me, from my driveway, about two hours ago.

Read this paper

2008-12-11T10:06:00.001-08:00

It's free, it's short, and it's important.

Young NS, Ioannidis JPA, Al-Ubaydli O (2008) Why current publication practices may distort science. PLoS Med 5(10): e201. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050201

Quote of the day: Ebert on Bubba Ho-Tep

2008-12-03T11:03:00.000-08:00

Bubba Ho-Tep has a lot of affection for Elvis, takes him seriously, and -- this is crucial -- isn't a camp horror movie, but treats this loony situation as if it's really happening...Assuming that elderly versions of Elvis and JFK ever really did do battle with an Egyptian Soul Sucker, this, I am forced to conclude, is more or less how it would look.

The Impact Factor hydra

2008-11-29T09:32:00.000-08:00

Interesting post on the entrenchment of impact factors in small countries over at A Blog Around the Clock. The third comment down, by Comrade PhysioProf, is particularly troubling, because it's almost certainly true:

The bottom line for impact factor--or whatever other quantitative metric might replace or supplement it--is that people are lazy and time is highly rate limiting in the professional lives of academics. People are always gonna rely on something fast and easy to obtain--like a journal impact factor--than they are on something difficult and time consuming to obtain--like a developed opinion about the solidity and importance of a particular published paper.

Anything that is gonna replace impact factor of journals in which scientists publish papers as a metric for comparative assessment of scientific productivity is gonna have to be as braindead easy to deploy as impact factor.

So we have what you might call the Impact Factor Paradox: getting a real handle on something as slippery as the value of someone's scientific contributions is inevitably going to be time-consuming and hard; metrics that allegedly measure that value are going to fall along a spectrum from "time-consuming but accurate" to "quick, easy, and horribly flawed"; in a system where time is the limiting resource, there will always be a sort of grim undertow toward the quick-'n-greasy metrics.

Your thoughts on how to avoid this trend are welcome.

How to get ahead in academia

2008-11-26T01:09:00.000-08:00

After years of bitter struggle, I finally have a toe--nay, a nailhold on terra firma (i.e., I've been in a tenure-track job for about three months), so naturally the ego-bubble has risen straight to the cranial vacuity and I now feel secure enough to rotate 180 and shower my opinions on the masses of grad students, postdocs, and adjuncts who are still dragging their intestines up the jagged slopes of Mount Employable. So listen up.

5. Give good, memorable talks.
I have given, lessee, eight posters at SVP. I reckon that each one ate up about four times as much time and effort as any talk I've ever given, including my hour-long job talk. And I still get the occasional compliment for talks I gave years ago. If you're just trying to convey data then posters are probably just as good or better than talks, but this post isn't about conveying data. It's about getting ahead, and that means not just conveying data but getting yourself recognized as a competent, confident conveyor of results. Give a poster or two to get your feet wet but then switch over to talks and don't look back. Use the time you save to write more papers.

I won't waste your time with a lot of specifics about what makes a good talk. Go see a few and you'll quickly figure it out. The best talks make you feel smarter by helping you figure out something that you didn't know before, or possibly that no one knew before the talk started. They are packed with content and arresting images. I don't have tons of data in the numbers-and-statistics sense; I'm a morphologist. So my talks are crammed with anatomy, pictures of real animals and their parts, as much as I think I can get away with. Not horribly complicated stuff that looks like wiring diagrams, mostly gee-whiz stuff that does double duty by both (a) telling the necessary story and (b) hopefully blowing people's minds just a little. Whatever you've got, deploy it to maximum effect: hopefully just one and never more than four big, easy-to-read images (per slide) that fill the available space. Now is not the time for your avant-garde experiment in the esthetics of negative space. Beat 'em to death with pictures. Just not too many at one time.

Also, don't waste any of your finite space with some cool-looking PowerPoint theme or school emblem or research group logo on every slide. That's your space that you're using to basically brand your talk as someone else's. If you are hell-bent on using that Nike crap at all, put it on the title slide and never bring it up again.

4. Write papers that people want to read.
You probably think that's about subject matter, but it's not. It's about presentation. Richard Fortey got me to choke down several chapters on Precambrian algal slime mats and like it (in the book Life) because he made me care. The bottom line is, if you can make your audience care, you can tell them about whatever you want, no matter how esoteric or superficially uninteresting. And if you can't, all of the venomous feathered coelocanths in Liaoning won't save you.

Easy, right? But how do you make people care about worm tracks or the third principal component of variation in embryonic rat skulls? The answer is two-pronged: harness your own enthusiasm (and if there's none to harness, work on something else), and explain how your results are relevant to something that others care about. I know I theoretically have an advantage here because I work on a sexy system in sexy animals, but I have seen loads of sauropod talks and megatons of dinosaur talks and they suck about as much as all other talks, on average. And I have myself given talks that sucked, talks where I know I lost half the audience because they got up and left before I was halfway through (not at SVP, thankfully, but it was no less painful when it happened). I may tell that whole sordid tale here another time, but the upshot was that I forgot my guiding principles and led the audience into a swamp of irrelevant detail, and they promptly marched back out--right out the damn door. The fulcrum here is 'irrelevant', as in to whom? That swamp of detail looked like a garden of delights to me, but I was the one giving the talk, not an audience member suffering through it, and I got the perspective exactly wrong. Put yourself in your audience's shoes and act accordingly (or get used to failure).

3. Produce a lot.
Give lots of talks and write a lot. I didn't say "write lots of papers" because other kinds of writing can be just as useful for developing your abilities.

But this is not some b.s. peptalk about how writing and speaking a lot will help you pick out what works and incorporate those golden devices into some special personal toolbox that floats in the Realm of Ideas and is lined with the down of unborn swans. When I give a talk that I know works, I go have a beer and rarely give it another thought (seriously, and for reasons that will shortly be explained). The point of giving lots of talks and writing for others is to increase your n, which will increase your number of failures. If it doesn't, it doesn't mean you aren't failing--either your friends are too chicken to tell you that you sucked, or you are too dim to perceive it. And if you have the courage and humility to poke through the wreckage and figure out why you failed, you will actually learn something useful. Mostly more humility, but also real nuts-and-bolts stuff that will make your future efforts better. It's not that success can't teach you, it just isn't a very good motivator (hence my post-victory beer and forgetting). You will learn a lot more from a punch in the nuts than from a pat on the back. Mostly, you'll learn how to avoid getting punched in the nuts. If it happens enough times, you'll either get better or quit.

2. Consume a lot.
Watch lots of talks, and read lots of papers. I would say "especially bad ones" but the world being what it is, you'll get more of those than the good stuff anyway. Every time you find yourself staving off slumber in a talk or wishing the author would jettison the circumlocution, jargon, and superfluous adverbs and get to the damn point, you are learning what not to do in your own work. And every time you bounce out of a talk or put down a paper with a little edifice of understanding newly erected in your head, you are learning how to grab your audience and actually teach them something meaningful and useful. Talks outside your subject area are especially helpful because they help you dissociate the good and bad habits from your enthusiasm for whatever it is you work on. As for papers outside your subject area--I'm assuming that you, like me, don't have time to read the papers within your subject area, so let's not fool around. But all of the reading that you do--novels, comics, monthly progress reports--has the potential to teach you what to do and what to avoid. He who has ears, let him hear.

1. Teach.
This the meta-advice hiding behind everything else. Teach. Teach a lot. Teach your ass off. Every time you get up to give a lecture or a demonstration, that's a little talk. Every time you write an outline or lab handout, that's a little paper. Nothing else will pump up your n the same way, and give you so many exhilarating successes and crushing failures from which to learn.

Even in the classes closest to your heart you will have to teach about stuff that you don't particularly care about or like, and once you've gotten a room full of freshmen to pay attention through DNA methylation, getting a lecture hall full of your peers to care about your research will be easier. Not easy. But easier.

Other than maybe collecting and cranking your data (and sometimes even then), everything you do in academia (and in lots of other aspects of life) boils down to effective communication. That means empathizing with your audience, meeting them on their level (whever that may be), figuring out how to make what you have to say relevant and interesting to them, and never wasting their time. It does not mean dumbing down your message, pandering to their expectations, or especially deciding that "you don't need to know that" when the slide is already up on the screen. It doesn't mean meeting them halfway. Frequently it means going all the way over to them--and then slamming a hook through their mouths and dragging them all the way back to your side, so you can teach them. I'm guessing that you've been hooked that way at least once in your life, so you know it can be done.

It is conceivable that there is a better way to learn how to communicate effectively than to teach a lot, but I don't know what that might be. It would have to involve talking and writing for lots of groups of people and offer lots of opportunities for both success and failure, so whatever you called it, it would probably look and smell a lot like teaching. From what I've seen, the people who teach early and often give better talks, write better papers, do better on their qualifying exams, produce better theses and defend them more successfully, and score better positions than those who don't. All too often the people who are looking to give you an award, grant, or job just look at your research and publication record and assume that teaching will handle itself. What you had better realize is that teaching will not handle itself, but if you can get a handle on it, you can elevate your entire game--and get ahead.

Mindset
Realize I am not speaking from any position of sinlessness here. There are talks that I would ungive, and papers that I would not just rewrite but unwrite. Evolution is a process of killing off the unfit, science is a process of falsifying hypotheses, and presenting is an attempt to avoid failure. Hewing to a progressive ideal sounds nice but avoiding the Reaper is more profitable in the long run.

That may sound overly grim, or pessimistic, or like a glass-is-half-empty matter of taste. It's not. If you don't allow at least some part of your brain to consider the possibility that all of your work sucks and then let it do triage to find and remove the suckiest parts, you won't push yourself hard enough to be as good as you could be.

But also, if you don't allow some other part of your brain to exult in your successes and recognize your own awesomeness without any contamination from false modesty, you will be miserable and you'll never dare enough to be as good as you could be.

Now, go forth and rock.

Bidaily linkpost: Earth from above

2008-11-25T11:23:00.001-08:00

Go here. Hat tip to Carl Zimmer.

The daily linkpost: Lovecraftian horror filmed at deep drilling site

2008-11-25T06:15:00.001-08:00

Video here, pix here. Hat tip to Mike.

Whale dissection

2008-11-24T10:24:00.000-08:00

Not one I was in on, sadly. Nope, this is just the latest example of me using this "blog" as a dumping ground for links to cool stuff. Get yer gore on.

When dinosaurs won the Civil War

2008-11-23T23:54:00.001-08:00

I've been out of the country and off the net for two weeks, so this is probably old news. Still, I felt the need to commemorate a disturbing episode in our national history. Full story here.

The sandworms of Arrakis

2008-11-23T23:46:00.000-08:00

...have little to do with the substance of this post, other than that this microscopic bug part reminded me of them. It's one of about 30 awesome pictures of microscale weirdness to be found here.

I'm in ur tv, flappin wif terasorz

2008-08-29T11:46:00.000-07:00

Here's what I know about pterosaurs:

(1) most of them were full of air

(2) some of them were rilly big

(3) they were worthy adversaries for WWI-era flying machines.

Despite this dearth of knowledge--or perhaps because of it!--I will be on TV talking about pterosaurs, at least briefly, in EVOLVE: Flight, premiering on the History Channel on Tuesday, Sept. 2. Check local listings for showtimes.

Calling all freaks now

2008-08-03T19:53:00.000-07:00

Hey, a commenter on my emu dissection post had a good question: what's the deal with wing claws in ratites? Are they inherited directly from other theropods--i.e., there was never a time when the lineage leading to ratites didn't have hand claws--or were they lost and then re-evolved within ratites, or what? Also, anyone know anything about their function, or lack thereof? Darren, Tom, Randy, Sarah, all and sundry--time to show what you know and expose me for the ignorant poseur I surely am.

I'll drink to that

2008-07-30T00:02:00.000-07:00

Or maybe staying thirsty would be more appropriate.

My two most recent notebooks were crammed with jottings taken in South Africa, where I had examined, at first hand, certain evidence on the origin of our species. What I learned there - together with what I now knew about the Songlines - seemed to confirm the conjecture I had toyed with for so long: that Natural Selection has designed us - from the structure of our brain-cells to the structure of our big toe - for a career of seasonal journeys on foot through a blistering land of thorn-scrub or desert. If this were so; if the desert were "home"; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigors of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pail on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.

- Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

Even in a palace, it is possible to live well.

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The things you own end up owning you.

- Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Oh, SNAP!!

2008-07-28T11:33:00.001-07:00

I'm going to break with tradition and just blatantly repost in full something that someone else wrote. It's a comment from this post, by someone identifying as George Smiley.

"SYSTEMS" biology is a buzzword, a glib and crass marketing term for a set of approaches that underpin much of modern biology and have for a century. What I find most offensive about it is that this particular piece of bullshit doublespeak is used *overtly* to bury the proud history our field. By pretending that these approaches are new, we imply that our foebears were ignorant of them. That we are smarter than they were. That what they did did not lead to "real" understanding. That what they did does not matter, and that you all need not trouble your pretty little heads with it. (Particularly if you're thinking about donating money to us.) Much of the prattle about "systems" biology is pro-hype, pro-marketing, ahistorical, anti-intellectual, and anti-sholarship.

It's disgusting, and it disappoints me to see some people whom I've known for some time and who really *do* know better spearheading the charge.

ANYONE who tells you that that getting physicists and engineering approaches into biology is new is either abysmally igornant of the field's history, trying to sell you a cartload of warmed-over horseshit, or (most likely) both. The agressive use of mathematical modeling? Go back to the turn of the century. Not the 21st century. The 20th. Morgan, Muller and their intellectual heirs. Look up Kimura. (If you don't know who he is, kindly shut the f-bomb up about "systems biology.") Physics and chemistry? Schroedinger, Pauling, Perutz, Huxley, Hodgkin, Huxley, Crick, Benzer, Boxer, Neher, Sakmann, Hille, Chiu, Ashkin, Berg... The list goes on and on.

What is new is high-throughput biology. Assembly-line biology. Factory biology. This is a function of real advances and it offers real opportunities for framing and testing new hypotheses. But call it what it is, or you're a fool, a charlatan, or worse.

Two final points. The most important advance in basic biology in the last decade is the recognition that RNA-based regulation is central to most eukaryotic biology. The first point is that none of the "systems" approaches led in a meaningful way to the breakthrough (though high-throughput and bioinformatic approaches certainly have been useful subsequently). The second point is that RNA-based regulation had been exhaustively documented in prokaryotic systems for almost two decades before the work of Fire and coworkers. To this day, the eukaryotic folks still generally don't cite that work.
We bury our own history at our peril.

Amen, brother.

Another trip to another zoo

2008-07-27T23:53:00.001-07:00

I have always loved zoos. Merced has a little zoo, which I visited for the first time today. It's not big--if you weren't inclined to actually stop and look at anything, you could walk all the way around in just a few minutes. But I was inclined to stop and look.

At a coyote...

...some bobcats...

...and some totally badass emus. I'm pretty familiar with emus, having dissected one, and naturally I'm interested in them because they're (a) big extant saurischians, and (b) have inflatable throat-sacs. I've read about the throat-sac, even stuck my hand in one, but I'd never actually gotten to hear an emu using it. Then this emu walked right up to the fence, stared me in the eye, and started burping at me. At least that's what it sounded like: a really deep, internal burp. The bird's mouth didn't open and no sound or stomach gas came out. It was all inside.

Naturally I stepped up to the fence and burped back. You know how you can make a loud burp in your throat, even though your mouth is closed? That's what I did. So we stood there burping at each other for a few minutes. No lie.

Good thing the zoo was not heavily attended at the time...

My favorite critters today were the mountain lions. I went in the morning, before it got hot, and they were all outside and active, padding around.

Man, are they gorgeous animals, or what?

Also checked out this momma bear...

...and her playful cub. And he was playful, too, bouncing between the pool, a nice perch up in a dead tree, this hammock, and his mom for reassurance. It's behavior I've seen before in a certain diminutive primate of my acquaintance.

These raccoons cracked me up. A bunch of them were asleep on a branch, monorail-cat style, the first time I walked by, but the second time they were running all over the place, checking people out. From the intensity of their scrutiny, I was uncertain whether they were in the zoo for my edification and enjoyment, or I was in for theirs.

I almost hate to post pictures from the zoo because all you see is fencing. Most of the animals in the Merced Zoo are rescued critters; if they weren't in the zoo, they'd be dead. And I'm pretty pro-zoo anyway. First, because I really like going to the zoo. Always have. Second, because of the conservation work they do in terms of animal breeding and so on. Finally and most importantly, because I really believe that they do a vital service in letting us see endangered wildlife. I'm not crazy about the fact that almost no zoo animals have as much space as they actually need, but if we never get to see the critters then their extermination is a hypothetical problem. When I was a kid, seeing a tiger in a zoo made me about 100 times more concerned about the fate of its wild relatives. Heck, when I was a kid there were a lot of animals that I wouldn't have known existed if I hadn't seen them in zoos (Himalayan tahr, I'm lookin' at you). I doubt if I was or am alone.

At the same time, it hardly ever occurs to me to go to the zoo. Witness the fact that I've lived in Merced for more than a year, and only got to the zoo a month before moving away. I did make it to the San Francisco Zoo about three times and the Oakland Zoo once when we lived in Santa Cruz and then Berkeley, but that's four zoo trips in six years. Not impressive. (I'm not counting the visit to the San Diego Zoo last summer; that was a planned part of a vacation, not just some time I got a wild hair to go to the zoo.)

But heck, there are very few things I do as often as I'd like--I've only been to one real arena-style concert since moving to Cali, for example. And too many things I do too often. Like staying up too late blogging. Which I've now done again.

G'night.

Vary. Vary. Good.

2008-07-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

I just read Darren's post on the living and fossil species of Tursiops. (The skeleton above is that of Lagenorhynchus, stolen from here.) Was surprised by this:

The large, offshore dolphins are now called T. truncatus Montagu, 1821, and the smaller, nearshore ones are T. aduncus Ehrenberg, 1832. T. truncatus is longer-bodied (with 62-67 vertebrae, as opposed to 59-62 in T. aduncus) and has a proportionally shorter rostrum.

That's a range of 8 vertebral positions with the genus (whatever that is), and 5 just within T. truncatus. That's a lot. In most tetrapods, it's not unusual to find individuals that vary by one or two positions from their conspecifics. Humans usually have 7 cervicals, 12 thoracics, 5 lumbars, 5 sacrals, and four coccygeals (caudals), for a total of 33, but according to White and Folkens (2000) as many as 1 in 10 people may vary from that norm. Most of the people who do vary do so at the lumbo-sacral junction; for example, having 4 lumbars and 6 sacrals or vice versa. But that wouldn't change the total count 33. My guess is that of the people who actually have a different total number of vertebrae, the difference is in the coccyx. It's tempting to write that off as a consequence of our caudal vertebrae being vestigial, but I immediately wonder if caudal vertebrae are not inherently more variable in number (than other kinds of vertebrae) in other tetrapods. I mean, having a tail that is one vert longer or shorter is probably going entail a lot fewer changes in the rest of the body than having a different count in the neck, thorax, or sacrum.

Which brings me back to the dolphins. I am curious about how much of that 8-vertebra spread is accounted for by varying numbers of caudal vertebrae.

One question that might come to mind is how one would tell. In most tetrapods it's easy: start counting at the end of the sacrum, and keep going until you run out of vertebrae to count. But extant cetaceans--even those with pelvic elements, like most baleen whales--don't have sacral vertebrae. So figuring out where the tail starts is a bit of a pain. I read a paper on it once, which I don't have to hand and am not going to dig up, and the upshot is that even though the sacral ribs that define the bony sacrum are gone, you can still identify the base of the tail based on patterns of blood vessels and nerves. Which is fine when you're dissecting a dolphin (I'd love to but never have), but not much use when you're just looking at a skeleton. If it's a complete articulated skeleton, you could use the haemal arches to get you in the right neighborhood, but the haemal arches are probably variable themselves, and might not be present anyway.

If I was a more dedicated blogger I'd be citing more refs and getting your more answers and fewer guesses. But I've got other fish to fry.

I know that the argument from personal incredulity is weak, but I just can't believe that it's wrong all the time. And, despite my near-total ignorance of vertebral variation in most tetrapods and in cetaceans specifically, a 5-vertebra range of variation strikes me as too much for one species. And since Darren's post touches on variation, cryptic species, and the splitting of Tursiops anyway, it made me wonder if some of that range of variation in T. truncatus isn't actually parceled out among multiple species.

But that's not the actual thought that went through my head. The thought that went through my head was "How do you tell individual variation from biodiversity?"

And the answer, of course, is that you can't. Individual variation IS biodiversity. I've just been teaching my intro bio students about Darwin's views on variation and the origin of species. For Darwin it's all one big continuum, from individual variation to incipient varieties to varieties to subspecies to species to genera and so on up to the entire tree of life. People sometimes rag on Darwin for writing On the Origin of Species without actually addressing speciation. But I think that's because we think species are special (well, not all of us), and must come into existence through some process that is not just business-as-usual. But Darwin didn't think species were special. He worked out the logic of natural selection and showed that it worked. And he argued that organisms struggle most fiercely with those to which they are most similar, usually their closest relatives. Natural selection gives you a mechanism for change, and struggle among the similar gives you a mechanism for diversification (if the struggle is most intense against those to whom you are most similar, it has to be less intense elsewhere). And that's all you need (according to Darwin [according to my reading]). As things diversify they pick up different mate recognition signals or lose the ability to interbreed or do whatever it is that defines them as species to us, but those are effects of diversification that is already in motion, that starts with variation among individuals.

Not everyone agrees. For all the stuff they disagreed about, Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould were both convinced that species are special. And even if Darwin was right, that doesn't mean that speciation isn't interesting and worth studying. Only maybe we should call it lineage divergence rather than speciation so we can stop pretending that we know what a species is. But my point is that it is all connected, all the way up--from individual variation up to the whole tree of life--and back down again--because there is no tree of life, not as a Ding an sich (thank you, Great Books Discussion Group). There are only individuals. There is only variation.

White, T.D., and Folkens, P.A. 2000. Human Osteology, Second Edition. Academic Press, New York.

Storm Hawks

2008-07-10T16:53:00.000-07:00

Imagine Sky Knights whose motorcycles transform into x-winged jet fighters and who use energy swords for sky-fu battles against flying sharks, sentient dinosaurs, and the transforming-jet-fighter-borne legions of a dark queen, in a world where verdant mountaintop kingdoms rear above lava-monster-infested wastelands, steampunk technology runs on energy crystals and, er, actual steam, and life is constantly punctuated by dogfights and wisecracks, all rendered in anime-style 3D.

That's Storm Hawks.

It's like someone took a seine haul through my subconscious when I was 10, looked at the resulting mess, and said, "What the heck, this might be good TV. Let's dump it in a nuclear reactor and turn it up to 11!" I don't care that the target audience is a small fraction of my age. This show flat-out rocks, and I love it. And so does my three-year old.

Impact factors, copyright law, and other science publishing buzzwords

2008-07-05T15:31:00.000-07:00

One of my former labmates just sent around the latest list of journal impact factors. I'd repost 'em here, except that I don't want to perpetuate the perception that they are important (although I was grateful to have seen the last version, in a checkout-stand-tabloid-curiosity sense). Here's why:

People seem prone to forgetting that journals have impact factors because individuals papers are cited widely, or not. It's not like every paper that Nature (IF = 28.something) publishes is widely cited, or every paper that Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences (IF = 0.955) publishes is not. In a field as small as sauropod paleobiology, everyone is going to read all of the literature no matter where it is published (the last remaining exception being obscure foreign journals that are not easily available as PDFs; and I mean foreign here as in "outside any researcher's country", not just "outside the US"; getting hold of un-PDFed papers from Oklahoma Geology Notes is probably a cast iron bitch if you're in a local museum in China). The only real advantage of a high-profile journal is to possibly bring the paper to the attention of non-sauropod workers. Whether Nature does that any better than CJES is probably up for discussion (at least in the small world of sauropod paleobiology). Unless some avian physiologist or human bone biomech person is going to have their world rocked by what I write, that 'crossover' appeal is probably not worth stressing over too much.

And there is an entirely different form of impact that we need to be thinking about, which is: how easy is it for people who are interested in your research area to find out about your work and acquire it? I'll bet that my effective impact is much greater than it would be otherwise simply because all of my papers are freely available online (thank you, Mike!). Although individual researchers are doing this more and more--see the badly-in-need-of-updating list here.

And there's a third kind of impact that is arguably more important than either of other two, which is: how big is the intellectual footprint of a given paper? For example, I'd argue that Kristi Curry-Rogers's paper on Apatosaurus ontogeny in JVP has been far more important and influential than her paper on Rapetosaurus in Nature (feel free to argue otherwise, I'm just shooting from the hip here).

Seems to me that what matters for Impact(3) is quality and timeliness of ideas (and timeliness often trumps quality), and publication venue is almost completely irrelevant (although I'd be interested in seeing a counterargument). What matters for Impact(2) is availability of work, which is better for papers that came out in open access journals but easily remedied for papers that didn't (at least until publishers crack down on free distribution of PDFs, if ever*). And Impact(1) is not unimportant, but it's also not nearly as important as people think it is; indeed, Impact(2) and Impact(3) actively erode the importance of Impact(1).

The main thing propping up Impact(1) as something we all have to at least pretend to care about is that the perceived prestige of having published in a high-IF journal really does matter to bean-counters in universities and funding agencies who can't be bothered to assess the actual quality of someone's work and for whom a nice convenient number is a godsend, even if it is horribly flawed. Therefore it also matters to many of us, who can't get ahead without having the approbation of those faceless but immensely powerful entities. See also: student teaching evaluations.

If we're going to be stuck with one number to evaluate something like the impact of a scientific paper, how about the number of citations that pop up on Google scholar? It's fast, free, and doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is: the number of papers indexed by Google Scholar that cite the paper in question. Tragically, I suspect that ISI impact factors are popular in bureaucracies specifically because they are slow, inaccurate, and not transparently available to all.

* Recently there was a post on the Vert Paleo listserv about how copyright is a barrier to making the existing backlog of literature easily available electronically. My feeling is that those of us needing to get work done will scan what we need ourselves, circulate it through private channels, and keep plowing on. Those who try to stop us with be publicly humiliated at worst (when they come down on us and we all collectively vow never to use their stuff again) or marginalized at best (when we just stop using their stuff because it's harder to get hold of).

Finally, if you haven't been following the blogosphere brush fire (or brush war?) that sprung up in the wake of Nature's pathetically transparent slam of PLoS, Greg Laden has kindly assembled about a million relevant links here.

Discuss.

The State of Palaeontology meme

2008-06-10T07:58:00.000-07:00

This one is the brainchild of Dave Hone, who could be characterized as a machine that takes in observations, co-opts friends and colleagues, and gives off interactive internet projects as waste (witness Ask a Biologist, Archosaur Musings, this). It started with his State of Palaeontology survey, the results of which are now posted at Archosaur Musings.

Here's the deal: each participant sends their answers to someone else, who posts those answers with commentary. So you don't post your own answers, you post someone else's. I won the lottery so I get to post Dave's answers, and comment on them. My own answers have been sent on to a Certain PalaeoBlogger Who Shall Remain Nameless Until She Responds. Here we go!

1. What do you think is the great unsolved mystery of palaeontology?

DH: It is harder than I thought being on the other end of what appears on the face of it to be such a simple question. For me though it would be (amongst many other areas of interest) the issue of evolutionary rates. The living world is just a snapshot in time, as is any given fossil (or formation) but what is happenning in the gaps. It looks like pterosaurs evolved very quickly for example, but just how fast can you go from an arboreal lizard to soemthing as derived and specialised as a pterosaur. Can wings appear in 100 generation in the right conditions or does it take at least 100000? It is not a problem for evolution - we can see some incredibly rapid changes in the morphology of living organisms, but once the first tetrapods got out of the water, how fast did they end up with reptilian scales? The fossil record might eventually give us a pretty good answer in terms of time, but never in terms of generations, or changes and I would dearly love to see that issue taken much further.

MW: Agreed on all points. It is occasionally useful to remember that palaeontology is just a tool. It's big and complex and it's easy to get lost in its internal mechanisms and forget that the point of palaeontology is not to have meetings, write papers, yack with fellow palaeontologists, etc. All of those things are meaningless unless they help the machine serve its greater purpose, which is to understand the history of life on Earth.

I have an axe to grind here about the balkanization of institutions, including fields of study. A few years ago Polly Winsor came to talk at Berkeley, and she said that one of the reasons she helped get 'history of science' up and running as a field in its own right was to get scientists and historians to talk to each other, but that what had been intended as a bridge actually became a wall. In the old days you had scientists over here, and historians over there, and occasionally they talked. Now there is this entity, History of Science, parked in between them, and the result is that scientists talk to historians of science rather than to historians, and vice versa, but the biggest tragedy is that too many historians of science didn't talk to either scientists or historians: they talked mainly amongst themselves.

It is helpful to remember, often, that palaeontology is not a monolith or an end unto itself. We are in the Time Machine department of Earth history and evolutionary biology. And we don't have the only kind of time machine, either--geneticists, phylogeneticists, and genome researchers have their own sorts of time machines. Instead of huddling behind our walls, throwing stones, and grumbling about who is getting the grant money and prestige, we ought to be wandering over to those other departments and having a round of beer.

2. What do you think is the most exciting topic / area of research in palaeontology right now?

DH: Everything really. I don't mean that in a faecitious way, but the fact that as we go further with palaeontology, new fossils are found, new methods are developed, old ones refined, new ideas are formed, new collaborations start and slowly we build an increasingly complete picture of the anciet world and how it fits together. Bird origins are fascintating, but part of that is becuse we can compare them to living birds, we can look at the origns of flight (ground up, tree down, WAIR), physiology (breathing systems, pneumaticy, heart capacity, muscle structures), the origins of feathers, the phylogenetics of dinosaurs and birds, ecological niches and feeding types, nesting and reproduction and more. The origins are inherently interesting, but the way we are able to pull together all these disparate ideas and methods to form a holostic picture produces the greatest interest for me.

MW: It does seem like the amazing stuff is coming thick and fast these days, in the form of new fossils, new techniques, and new ideas. I feel like vertebrate palaeontology right now is amazingly far beyond where we were when I got started back in the mid 90s. In fact, I'd venture that the field has changed more in the past 10 years than it did in the preceding 20. Which is exciting, but also frustrating, because it seems like all this new stuff that is broadening our understanding of evolution and the history of life is really getting eviscerated and bowdlerized when it is passed on to the public.

3. What do you consider to be the biggest problem with palaeontology?

DH: Not enough money (pay), no job security, poor funding for research, poor taxonomy, not enough revision, loss of fossils through private collecting, poor research, poor education. All of these are serious issues, but as ever they are all interlinked - with better education, we might do better research, encourage funding and that would produce better pay and more jobs and get people to see the importance of what we do and protect the fossil legacy of the world. Which is most important, or the biggest? Probably in terms of research the poor taxonomy / revision. What is the point of trying to do an ecological or phylogenetic analysis, if all of the 'species' you are using are made of chimeras, or are synonyms etc. You can't check all the primary literature yourself, yet much of it is massively outdated or just badly done. Building on such an unstable foundation is not a good idea.

MW: I agree that the mountain of primary literature and specimens to plow through to try to get a handle on anything is intimidating. But I also don't see any way around it. As far as I can tell, this is how it's always been, and this is how it always will be. The most we can do is to make sure that we publish the most careful and accurate work that we can, to provide a better foundation for future generations.

4. What area of palaeontology do you think is most neglected?

DH: Exactly as above - alpha taxonomy and revisions / descriptions. Ye, we need to manitain all areas of our science, but the fundamental unit is the description and name attached to a fossil species and too little of this is done on new taxa, and too many of the old ones are out of date / poorly done / not illustrated etc. Without knowing wehat we have and what it looks like it becomes very hard to say what it *means*. Too often it is seen as unglamorous or boring work, and yet it is by far the most important thing we do.
It is irrelevant how clever the architect is for your building, if the bricks are full of straw, the mortar is full of sand, and the foundations are not complete. It might look great, and it might do the job, but it needs shoring up and constant work and rebuilding, when you could save so much time if the basics were done right the first time.

MW: Descriptive morphology is simply not valued right now. Early today I was battling a reviewer who wanted me to gut the descriptive section of a manuscript. I have heard similar stories from colleagues. If even editors and reviewers don't see the value in careful descriptive work, then we are in a really bad spot. I keep waiting for people to collectively wake up and realize that description is the fuel of palaeontology. And it's not just palaeontology; when was the last time you read a lengthy, careful morphological description of an extant animal that wasn't tied to evo-devo?

I think we are really hurting right now because of the way that funding works, and the way that universities look at grants. Genomics is sexy and expensive. Evo-devo is sexy and expensive. Doing careful descriptions is not sexy, but it's also not that expensive. The trouble is, it's not supported even at the meager level it requires. Given the choice between a world-class descriptive morphologist and a mediocre moleculoid who can write a grant for a zillion-dollar ion reflux pronabulator, universities seem to be choosing option B. Not good for us world-class morphologists.

5. How do you think the general public view science / palaeontology in your country?

DH: "Just dinosaurs" is too simplistic, but its not far from it. The big problem is that you are either just digging up something and giving it a name, or doing something wildly speculative on behaviour or ecology built on ephemeral data. Either way, you are not doing 'real' science. They like it and it interests them, but not in the way that studies of living animals do. The biggest issue is the media misreporting things (mammoths are dinosaurs, pterosaurs are birds) and the stoking up of non-existent controversey (e.g. BAD vs BAND). The public don't and can't know better and yet they are being fed inaccurate, wrong, speculative or just heavily skewed information that is posing as accurate and impartial facts. Scienctists can really help to fix this, but they are generally unwilling and that does not help the situation.

MW: Palaeontology, narrowly, and evolutionary biology, broadly, need a Carl Sagan right now. Real bad. But since one is not likely to descend from the heavens or claw its way out of the ground, we each need to take personal responsibility to (1) do the best, most substantive work that we can, and (2) communicate what we do to our colleagues and the public. And to be a little humble about it, and go out of our way to make it comprehensible, and to convey some of the enthusiasm that keeps us working on this stuff. If you're a scientist and you don't like the state of science, you can start fixing it immediately, starting with yourself. Admittedly, this is not going to revolutionize the world overnight. But it's a start.

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Okay, dear readers. The ball is in your court. Discuss!

You can't take the sky from me

2008-06-04T15:07:00.000-07:00

People who dismiss the plains states as "flyover country" don't realize that out here, the sky is the scenery. These are views west from the house I grew up in, over our neighbor's wheat field, out in the country in north-central Oklahoma. I took them yesterday, on the evening of my birthday. The one above is just a few minutes before it started raining here--you can see a curtain of rain falling on the horizon. If you cover up the wheat and the bright sky under the clouds, it could be one of those artists' impressions of the atmosphere of Jupiter.

I took this about half an hour later, after the rain had passed. Some groovy mammatus clouds there on the bottom of the thunderhead.

Pretty good birthday present. Thanks, universe.

Snakes on the brain

2008-05-18T10:32:00.000-07:00

Around the dawn of time I promised to post occasional goodies from what may be the most wonderful book in the world, Gerald Wood's The Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats (this is also how I got to be a Google-recognized expert on headless butterflies). But I kept loaning the book out to people--forcing it on them like a pusher would be more accurate--and I never got around to it. Then just the other day I realized that I had the book back in the house so I picked it up and BANG! had my mind blown by the bit quoted below. Completely by coincidence, Darren decided to visit this overlooked branch of Tetrapoda this week as well. It's a strange world, and I can think of few pieces of information that better demonstrate that than this (from Wood 1982:112):

...the giant snakes are also great fasters and there are a number of records of individuals going 12 months or longer without food. One female reticulated python at Frankfurt Zoo fasted for 570 days, took food for a time and then fasted for another 415 days before eating, and a much larger example at the same zoo went 679 days without food although it drank regularly (Lederer, 1944).

All of these achievements, however, pale by comparison with the fasts carried out by the highly venomous Okinawa habu (Trimeresurus flavovirdes) of the Ryukyu Islands, W. Pacific. On 10 September 1977 the Amami Kanko Pit Viper Centre in Naze City, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan started a fasting experiment with five of these snakes. Four of them died on the 207th, 696th, 1101st and 1184th days respectively, but the oldest individual aged c 12 years was still going strong--if approached it reared up in preparation for an attack--when the experiment was terminated on the 1189th day (12 December 1980), which is a record for a vertebrate animal. Although its weight decreased by 60.9 per cent during this period, its length actually increased much to the puzzlement of researchers. After is marathon fast the snake was given some milk and has since been restored to full physical health (Eiichi Nakamoto, pers. comm.).

If you are even remotely interested in animals, I strongly recommend tracking down a used copy of Wood's book. It's a shame that is has not been updated in 26 years, but it's still an awesome compendium of amazing stuff.

Shoot the moon II: Getting the most out of your binoculars

2008-05-15T00:03:00.001-07:00

Part the First: Mount Up

The biggest pain in the butt about binoculars is that they shake. Or rather we do, no matter how we may try not to. If you can get rid of the shakes, using binoculars is awesome. But it ain't easy. Up until now I have done one of two things: steadied my binoculars against a nearby fence or wall, or steadied them against a monopod but without having them actually attached, just using the monopod as a sort of primitive mobile fencepost. But recently I came up with a better solution: I built a budget binocular bracket.

Lots of astronomy equipment companies sell dedicated binocular brackets, for mounting binoculars to monopods or tripods. The current issue of Sky & Telescope has a review of a premium model that costs $70. That's more than double the cost of my best pair of binoculars! Even the budget model from Orion costs $30.

Well, bump that. You can build your own for about $5. Go to the hardware store and pick up a steel angle bracket like the one shown in the photo above, some 1/4-20 nuts, and a 1-inch-long 1/4-20 thumbscrew. One of the holes in the bracket will fit over the 1/4-20 bolt on your monopod or tripod. Put on a nut and tighten 'er down. I used needle-nose pliers to get in there and get that nut nice and tight--you don't want your binoculars swinging in the breeze, no matter how cheap they were. Put a couple of nuts on the thumbscrew before you put it through the bracket--these act as spacers and keep the flat end of the thumbscrew from bumping up against the bracket when you tighten the rig. Then stick the thumbscrew through the bracket and screw it into the socket on the front of your binoculars. If the thumbscrew reaches the end of the socket before it's tight, pull it out and slip on one more nut as another spacer--that's what I had to do, and in the photo above you can just see the edge of the nut peeking out between the bracket and the socket on the binoculars.

Bang, you're done. Point the binoculars at something interesting and enjoy a completely shake-free view. I like running them up on my camera tripod and observing the moon without having to touch anything at all. I'm telling you, it's a qualitatively different experience from any binocular observing you've ever done in the past. And not just of astronomical targets--it's good for birds, landscapes, sunsets, your perverted neighbors, whatever.

And it's damn near free. If you use binoculars at all and own a tripod, there's no reason not to build one of these. And my tripod is not fancy--it's the absolute cheapest full-size model that Wal-Mart has to offer. It shakes and wobbles like crazy with a telescope on top, but it's plenty sturdy for a pair of binoculars or a camera.

Part the Second: Absolute basics of image processing

This is, no lie, the un-fiddled-with raw photo of the moon that I took through my Celestron 10x50 UpClose binoculars tonight. Well, okay, not completely un-fiddled-with. I did rotate and crop the image to get the moon in the middle and get rid of most of the empty field. But I didn't mess with any color or sharpness settings, so the moon itself is exactly as it came out of the camera.

I don't like to brag, but I was freaking amazed that I could get a picture that sharp using just binoculars. The 10x50s are quite a bit better than the Tasco 7x35s I used for my last attempt, but still. The image quality of the mounted binoculars is not far behind that of a small telescope, either visually or photographically (proof--compare these pictures to this one). The one advantage of even a small scope is that you can crank up the magnification if you want to see, for example, the rings of Saturn. On the other hand, binoculars are cheaper, lighter, easier to set up, and grab a lot more sky--all the reasons amateur astronomers use them in the first place.

Anyway, this part isn't about the binoculars. It's about what to do once you get a picture.

First thing, seriously, always, is Unsharp Mask. It looks like a gimmick but it's not. It can be overdone, like almost anything, but you should be able to play around with the settings minimally and find something that works. And it's available in just about every serious image processing program out there, including Photoshop and GIMP (the latter is free, BTW). The only difference between the photo immediately above and the one at the top of this section is that I applied Unsharp Mask in GIMP, using the default settings.

You'll notice some distracting color in both of the above images. The north edge of the moon is outlined in blue haze, and the southern end is an unwholesome-looking yellowish brown. That's chromatic aberration, and it's an unavoidable consequence of refracting light through glass. For telescopes you can buy anti-fringing filters, or super- or hyper-expensive apochromatic telescopes that use special kinds of glass to minimize CA, but even the best only knock it down to below the threshold of perception. It's impossible to completely get rid of. Physics is like that sometimes.

Let me amend that. It's impossible to completely get rid of in optical trains with refracting elements. A major advantage of reflecting telescopes is that they collect light with mirrors rather than lenses, so their views are blessedly free of CA.

Interestingly, I've never seen any CA on the moon through binoculars, and I've looked for it. Possibly the weak signal of color falling on my cones is just blown out by the intensity of light falling on my rods. Whatever the explanation, in my experience it is a strictly photographic problem.

This won't work for everything, but the moon is basically black and white in real life so it doesn't look weird if you convert the image to grayscale, as I've done here. And that's all I did--I didn't try to erase the dim halo around the northern regions, for example. It was always dim, and it only grabbed the eye because it was blue. Convert it to dark gray and it just disappears.

One last trick. I nudged up the contrast a little. It's really easy to overdo this, but if it's done right it certainly makes for a more interesting and pleasing image. The main problem with doing this on anything but a full moon is that the area near the terminator--the day/night line, where the lit part of the moon meets the unlit--drops off into blackness, and if you make the blacks blacker, the terminator appears to shift. Suddenly instead of describing a gentle curve or line from pole to pole, it zigs and zags as bright craters and dark maria pull it first one way and then the other. Which makes the photo look fake, because the real moon just doesn't look like that.

But there's an easy fix. Copy the image and paste it into a new layer. Bump up the contrast on that layer, and watch the terminator move. Once the contrast on everything else looks good, grab a big fuzzy eraser and erase the parts that got blackened out. The normally-lit terminator in the original image shows through. Flatten and save. You're done.

And so am I (UPDATE: no I'm not. Keep reading). Like I said, this is the bare bones of image processing. There's lots more here, and in many other places on the web. Have fun!

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Hoo boy, what a dumbass I am. The picture above is actually how not to do contrast. I screwed up bigtime, but I'm leaving it in as a teaching tool. There are two big problems with that image, and somehow my poor addled brain didn't catch them until this morning. The first is that I only grabbed part of the image when I copied and pasted, so there is a distinct black box from the contrasty layer visible against the skyglow from the original background. Lesson 1: copy the entire image into the layer you're going to mess with. The second problem is that I colored outside the lines with the eraser, so next to the terminator there is a weird light-colored strip like a fuzzy caterpillar (if you can't see this, try tilting your monitor so the image looks lighter. Lesson 2: if you're going to up the contrast and then erase some of the contrasty layer, you have to be careful not to get off of your foreground target or the brighter background will show through. Both problems are fixed in this version:

I'd like to be able to say that I planned this little goof/save in advance, but I didn't. Just shouldn't process images in a dark room or blog when I'm tired. Sheesh. Keeps me humble.

Now I'm going to take Mike's advice and get back to work. No sarcastic commentary needed.

Shoot the moon: digiscoping 101

2008-05-10T23:37:00.000-07:00

In a comment on a recent post, TheBrummell said, "Any advice on getting a couple of seconds exposure through 1/2 a pair of binoculars with a Nikon coolpix 5200?" Which may sound like a crazy question. Most of us own a pair of binoculars and a camera, but I'll reckon the fraction that have used the two in conjunction is vanishingly small.

I, however, am a member of this elite group. And I realized that although I have blogged the results of my digiscoping adventures here*, I haven't actually explained anything about the process, or given any instructions for doing it yourself. So here goes.

* A lot; possibly too much for those of you who came here hoping in vain for something paleo-related, but now that I have to feed SV-POW! regularly I send most of my paleo ramblings there.

What Digiscoping Is

Afocal projection photography, also known as digiscoping amongst birders and as white trash astrophotography by me, is the simplest and cheapest way of taking pictures using any kind of optical device: you just hold the camera up to the eyepiece and snap away. You can do it with just about anything. TheBrummell reports taking zillions of pictures through dissecting microscopes, my anatomy students take pictures of prepared slides through the compound microscopes in the teaching lab, birders and other nature lovers use spotting scopes or, less frequently, binoculars, and amateur astronomers use telescopes. The results can be striking--do a Google image search for 'digiscoped bird' and you'll see what I mean. The picture at the top of the post is my best image from 8 months of experimentation. Click on it for the full-size version, and check out the detail.

Okay, that's the what. What about the how?

Holding the Camera Steady

I use a Nikon Coolpix 4500, and for almost all of my pictures I really have just held the camera up to the eyepiece of whatever I'm shooting through. For steadier results you could put the camera on a tripod, or buy a dedicated adapter for mounting the camera behind the eyepiece, like the Steadypix from Orion (image from Orion's website).

I have also started experimenting with the camera on a monopod, which is what I used for the recent Earthshine photo. The monopod is nice because it's simple, lightweight, easily adjustable to any length, but sturdy enough to really damp out the little vibrations that you can't escape just because you're alive. (When I'm really trying to hold the camera still I can see my hands move ever so slightly in time with my pulse. Try it.) And mine was dirt cheap, something like $18.

An unexpected benefit of using a monopod is that it helps dampen out the shakes even when it's not on the ground, just by being long and heavy (relative to the camera). I discovered this when I was taking pictures in the OMNH last year and I wanted a tall-aspect photo, so I just picked up the camera plus monopod and flipped the whole rig on its side. The rig was easier to keep steady than the camera by itself, even when it wasn't propped against anything (you can sometimes prop a sideways monopod against a nearby wall, too).

Camera Settings

For settings I use macro mode, sometimes with a timer to eliminate the little bit of shake from manually pressing the shutter release. And I usually zoom in to eliminate vignetting, which is the "stopping down" of the image by the margins of the optical assembly (usually the field lens of the eyepiece). Here's what an unmodified vignetted image looks like:

Here's the same image rotated, cropped, and sharpened:

Vignetting is not a problem when I'm shooting at night, because the black margin does not show up against the dark sky. The settings I use to shoot the moon and planets don't usually show any stars anyway. If you want pictures of starfields, you'd be better off using a DSLR by itself--there are plenty of tutorials around that will explain how, and lots of camera-specific forums you can check out for advice and assistance.

Magnification

Zooming in can also boost the magnification significantly. Magnification of any optical device is equal to the focal length of the objective divided by the focal length of the eyepiece. So a 25mm eyepiece will yield 40x in a telescope with a 1 meter focal length, but only 20x in a telescope with a 500 mm focal length. It is hard to get up to high magnifications with small refractors or Newtonian reflectors just because of that fact. Catadioptric telescopes like Schmidt-Cassegrains and Maksutovs have the opposite problem--their folded light paths mean that very small telescopes have very long focal lengths, and even fairly long-focal-length eyepieces still yield fairly high magnifications. For example, I have an Orion Apex 90 Maksutov-Cassegrain, and the tube is four inches in diameter and less than a foot long--which makes it a good travel telescope, because it fits in a carry-on bag with room to spare--but the focal length is 1250 mm, longer than my "big" telescope, a 6-inch Dob (see below).

So, two points. First, contrary to what most people think, the main point of a telescope is light collection, not magnification. A lot of astronomical objects are big but dim, like galaxies and nebulae. Some magnification is helpful, for sure, but the main benefit of the telescope is that it's light-collecting area is vast compared to that of the naked human eye. I've blogged about this before and I won't beat it to death here.

On the other hand, a good digital camera can pull more detail out of the scene than can your eye, thanks to the zoom. I took the photo at the top of the post at a telescopic magnification of 37x and a camera magnification between 2-3x. Which means my eye saw the moon magnified 37 times, and the camera saw it magnified somewhere between 74x and 111x, and recorded that. I have a 16x20 inch print of that image ($9.99 at Costco, and 12x18s are only $2.99!), and the detail holds up even at that size, which is waaay beyond what I can see with the naked eye at 37x.

Almost all of my moon photos have been taken at low telescopic magnification. The only exceptions are closeups of just part of the moon, like the second pic down here. I am usually forced to use low magnification for the whole-moon shots, just to get the whole moon into the field of view at once.

Exposure Time

Although my Coolpix autofocuses just fine, it's not so hot on figuring out exposure times for small bright objects in a sea of inky blackness. So I go over to manual for most stuff now. Here's why this matters--these photos were taken about a minute apart, but the one of the left is a two-second exposure and the one on the right is a 1/15 second exposure.

The moon varies in brightness a lot. If it's full or nearly full, I may use exposure times as short as 1/250 second or even 1/500 second. And obviously exposure time and camera steadiness are related--the shorter the exposure time, the less you have to worry about the shakes.

What To Shoot

Digiscopers with an astronomical bent have a limited choice of targets. Basically, the moon, the bright planets, and any evening or nighttime scenes you want to see really close up. Starfields are better imaged without a telescope, or with a long-exposure photo on a tracking mount, which is a whole 'nother kettle of (much more expensive) fish. Nebulas, clusters, and galaxies are too dim. You can image those things with simple webcams, but I'm not going to blog about that because I don't have any experience doing it. Yet. (My birthday is coming.)

Still, the moon and planets are pretty great. It is easy to forget that moon is an entire world. Yeah, airless and dead, but still: a whole world. And it's right there. Even cheap binoculars will show you tons of details that you can't see with the naked eye.

So far, the only planets I've shot are Saturn and Jupiter. The results are not going to make APOD, but you can make out cloud belts, rings, and the Great Red Spot, which is pretty amazing considering the entire operation consisted of holding the camera up to the eyepiece and pushing the button.

What To Shoot Through

Whatever you have. Seriously. Experimentation costs nothing, it's fun, and any result you get will probably be better than what your naked eye could have served up. So go nuts.

But if you want some advice, bigger is better. In the case of a large, bright target like the entire moon, the advantage of big optics is neither light-gathering nor magnification but resolving power. Compare these photos from similar phases but taken through scopes of different apertures:

Note that the middle photo was actually taken at slightly lower magnification than the one on the left, but the resolution is far superior. Here's what those scopes look like in real life:

The travelscope is the skeletal thing perched on the tripod. It's currently in its third incarnation, or fourth if you count its ignoble birth as a National Geographic toy (you can read my thoughts on the utility of the original product and the ethics of its marketing here). Previous evolutionary stages are here and here. The red ball-type scope on the table is my Edmund Astroscan, object of my desire since I was about 12 and my primary scope for car trips. The black howitzer-looking thing is my Orion SkyQuest XT6, a Newtonian reflector like the others, but on a Dobsonian or "Dob" mount. It's actually a lot more imposing in person--the tube is four feet long and seven inches in diameter, and the whole thing weighs 35 lbs. It just looks small next to me, which is an occupational hazard for us sasquatchi. And it does look suspiciously like a weapon, which often gets me weird looks from the neighbors and passersby when I set it up out front. So I invite them over to have a look through it, which is a great way to make someone's day.

I have done most of my digiscoping through the XT6, at first because it was my only telescope. I went through a phase this spring of shooting through the Astroscan, because it is so small and portable. I can sling it over one shoulder, put the camera over the other, stuff a couple of eyepieces in my pockets and be outside observing in about a minute and a half. But the images served up by the Astroscan are just a little mushy compared to those from the XT6, probably because of the fast optics--f/4.4 is a steep light cone. For a while it was kind of an enjoyable challenge to see how well I could do with the Astroscan, but pretty soon I got tired of really working for so-so images when I could get better ones for less effort through the XT6.

And by "so-so", I mean only by comparison to the images I'd already been getting through the XT6. I'm actually quite proud of some of my Astroscan photos, and I don't mean to knock the little scope at all. But Aperture Rules. I'm sure if I had a 10-inch scope to play with, I'd stop digiscoping with the XT6.

Which brings up the question of why I have so many telescopes (the Apex 90 I mentioned earlier in the post is not in the above photo, nor is the Explorascope I mention below). Partly it's because I'm a telescope nut, but partly it's because different scopes serve different purposes. The XT6 is both my default scope and my big gun. If I'm home and I want to do some serious observing or digiscoping, that's what I use. The Astroscan is my grab-n-go or quick look scope, my car travel scope, and the scope I share with my little boy. The travelscope, Apex 90, and Explorascope are all contenders in my quest for the perfect airline portable scope. And anyway, according to Ed Ting one really needs six scopes, so I'm still under the legal limit.

But wait, you say, why am I blabbing on about telescopes when TheBrummell specifically asked about

Binoculars

Yes, you can take pictures through binoculars. It takes some forethought. The first problem is mounting them. Almost all binoculars have a mounting socket at the front of the center column, usually covered by a plastic cap. Lots of astronomy and camera stores sell dedicated tripod adapters, which are L-shaped rigs with a 1/4-20 bolt on the vertical side to screw into the binoculars, and a 1/4-20 socket in the base for the tripod bolt to screw into. You could also make your own out of 1/4-20 thumbscrews and scrap lumber for about two dollars. UPDATE: a five-dollar solution is shown in the next post.

But that's not what I did. In my one adventure in binocular digiscoping, I used the Tasco 7x35s that I bought back in high school (or maybe even junior high). They have a mounting socket, but it's not a standard size, and I don't have a binocular adapter anyway. But I still got them mounted to the tripod. I used one of the struts from the travelscope, which has an inset 1/4-20 T-nut for tripod attachment, and simply lashed the binoculars to the strut with big rubber bands. It looked weird as hell:

How did it work out? Not too bad, actually. I had to squat down and put my head right next to the travelscope strut to sight the things in, but the focuser worked fine and I didn't have any problems taking pictures. I went a little nuts that night taking pictures of the same moon through several devices or none at all, in anticipation of writing this very post. Here's the comparison shot:

UPDATE: Gah! Better binocular photos now available, again in the next post.

The only real surprise in putting this together is how well the Coolpix did by itself, using maximum zoom and steadying the camera against one of the columns on the back porch.

To Shoot or Not To Shoot

I actually feel like kind of a weiner putting up the binocular shot here at the end, after having kicked off the post with a picture that is far better than you're ever going to get through binoculars. I'm not trying to discourage you--quite the contrary! The first time you get a nice, reasonably sharp photo of your own, it will feel pretty damn good. And it will hopefully make you want to do more.

I am always telling people that getting started in astronomy does not have to be prohibitively expensive. Even cheap binoculars will show you tons of stuff you can't see with the naked eye (especially if they're mounted on something), and not just on the moon. All of the Messier objects are visible in binoculars in dark skies, and most serious amateur astronomers spend at least part of their time observing with binoculars. Orion has several good beginner telescopes in the $100-250 range, a new Astroscan will run you $199 but used ones can be had for a little more than half that if you look around, and an XT6 is $269. But right now you can buy a workable telescope for about the same price as a modest pair of binoculars: Celestron's Explorascope, an 80 mm reflector, is on sale for under $40. Eighty mm is not much, and you won't get any XT6-worthy pictures through it, but the views will be closer to those through a six-inch scope than to those served up by binoculars (at least at higher magnifications; at low mag, maybe not). So if you've been reading and wondering if you'd get anything out of owning a telescope, now's a good time to find out without breaking the bank. I've got one in the mail, and I'll review it here once I get a chance to test it out.

Clear skies.

Science you should know about: Homosexual necrophiliac duck rape

2008-05-09T15:24:00.000-07:00

Moeliker (2002:fig. 2b): Wakka-cheeka-wakka-cheeka

Those funny guys at Zooillogix just covered the seal-brutalizes-penguin story that's been all over the news lately, which prompted me to post about my favorite scientific paper of all time:

Moeliker, C.W. 2001. The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae). DEINSEA 8: 243-247.

Here's the entire text of the abstract:
"On 5 June 1995 an adult male mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) collided with the glass facade of the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam and died. An other drake mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes. Then the author disturbed the scene and secured the dead duck. Dissection showed that the rape-victim indeed was of the male sex. It is concluded that the mallards were engaged in an "Attempted Rape Flight" that resulted in the first described case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard."

What the author doesn't mention in the abstract is that the 75-minute event ended prematurely when he separated the drake from the object of its perverted affection. Which makes me want to hit him (the author, not the drake). Because, why? Why would he end it? One minute was enough to document the behavior. After 75 minutes, surely any self-respecting scientist would want to know just how long this was going to continue, and watch until it was over. Now we'll never know. What a loss for science.

So if you see an animal doing something perverted--and they are, all the time, the unreconstructed little bastards--cowboy up and record the dad-blamed data. ALL OF IT.

Sheesh!

In for a penny, in for a pound

2008-05-06T23:23:00.000-07:00

Aw, hell, here's the turtle. When I was growing up, with Herbert Zim's Golden Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians, this was Clemmys marmorata, but recent work shows that it is closer to Emys and the name Actinemys has been resurrected for it. And it really was just crawling across the driveway last week. I stuck him in a bucket, hauled him to school to show my ecology students, and then turned him loose in the creek towards which he was slogging when he was apprehended. And it is a him--check out that tail, and his plastron has a stronger arch than my feet ever have.

I'm pretty pumped to know that these things are around here. They're not doing great these days. For obvious reasons--show me a body of water west of the Sierras that isn't the center of a tourist trap, housing development, or agricultural or industrial outflow and I'll explain the optics of mirages for you.

I really just blog about this stuff to make Darren jealous.

Go, turtle, go.

The moon by Earthlight

2008-05-06T23:07:00.000-07:00

There's about a metric buttload of stuff I want to blog about, including the highlights of the Lick Observatory trip (now on my Flickr page) and some awesome predator/prey photos that one of my students took and the Western Pond Turtle that my wife caught crawling across our driveway last week, but it's the time of year when I've got finals to write and grade so all that stuff will have to wait.

In the meantime, this is what the moon looked like tonight. This fetching display is called "the old moon in the new moon's arms"; from the moon the Earth is nearly full and it bounces back enough light to dimly illuminate the shadowed regions of the moon. If you'd like to see it for yourself, you don't have to wait a month--the show should be almost as good for the next couple of nights.

For those who care, this was a two-second exposure with my Nikon Coolpix 4500, shooting through an Orion XT6 Dobsonian reflector with a 32mm Plossl eyepiece.

Speak of the devil

2008-04-27T03:13:00.000-07:00

I was back at the Lick Observatory this evening, with another UCM field trip group.

Like last time, we all got to look through the 36 in Lick refractor (that's the Shane reflector above).

Unlike last time, Saturn was up. Can you guess what that means?

If I was emperor...

2008-04-25T00:30:00.000-07:00

Here's what I'd do first. I'd come to your home, right after dinner, take you by the hand, drag you outside, and make you look at Saturn through a telescope, so you can see the rings.

Partly because I know you'll really dig it. I have to yet to meet anyone who didn't.

But mostly because I love watching people's reactions when they see it for the first time. About three weeks ago I took some of my ecology students on a field trip to Yosemite, and I took my little Edmund Scientific Astroscan (love it!). About 9:30 I set it up on the hood of an SUV (on a towel, so it wouldn't scratch the paint) and gave the interested a brief tour of the sky. We started and ended at Saturn. One of the guys had never looked through a telescope before. I'm not saying that to knock on him--most people haven't. I'm saying it because it was freakin' awesome to get to be the one to show him this stuff for the first time, and especially freakin' awesome to start with Saturn.

Then a couple of weeks ago we had some friends over and as we were walking them to the car at the end of the evening we all stopped to have a naked-eye gander at the moon. Somebody asked if any planets were up so I pointed out Saturn right by Regulus, and then I said, "Look, just wait two minutes. You've got to see this." I keep Shaft, my Orion XT6 Dobsonian reflector, parked against the wall in our pointlessly immense* entryway for just this purpose, and about 90 seconds later one of our friends was getting her first ever look at Saturn. She literally squealed with delight.

* I'm convinced that the houses in this addition have big entryways just to stick it to people from the coast. It's about a third the area of our entire apartment in Berkeley and it serves no purpose other than to ostentatiously show off the fact we have tons and tons of space.

Look, seriously, if you haven't seen it you just have to. It's mandatory. Most space stuff you can see pretty well with binoculars, like the Orion Nebula and the moons of Jupiter, but you'll need higher magnification to grab Saturn's rings and that means a telescope. In the Bad Old Days decent telescopes were usually prohibitively expensive, but not anymore. Orion's StarBlast has gotten uniformly great reviews (here and here for starters; Sky & Telescope and Astronomy both loved it but their reviews are behind paywalls) and it is under $180, so unless you're reading this from a library computer you've got the juice. A new Edmund Astroscan is just under $200, damn near indestructible, and will last forever.

It works well for kids, too, and it's tough enough you won't freak about that. If you need something bigger--something you might need more than one hand to carry outside, say--I got Shaft on sale for under $250 and it looks like a freakin' howitzer.

Back to task: Saturn. Look now, and save me some work in the future.

More glittering gems from my outbox: finishing the dissertation

2008-04-10T19:32:00.000-07:00

I don't update this thing very often, but I'm on e-mail all the time, and the profound wisdom and sparkling wit just comes jetting out of me like one of those lava fountains in Iceland. So I'm going geothermal here.

A recent correspondent asked me about dissertation stuff, and this is part of my response:

-------------------

....The most honest and useful advice I ever heard about dissertations came from Darren. I wrote to ask him what finishing was really like (this was when I was still a few months out). Tragically I've lost his original reply, but the gist was, "Eventually you will realize that you can't finish by treating the dissertation like a day job. It is a godforsaken monster that will continue to ruin your life until finally you've had enough and you just decide to kill it. After that, you may put in impossible hours and push yourself right to your limits, but you will finish. It's the only way I know to do it." [Darren, if you have the original thing you sent, please feel free to resend it or post it as a comment. UPDATE: Darren just posted it in a comment, below, and as I suspected it's much better than my paraphrase.]

That was certainly true in my case. The only thing that finally made me face finishing was my committee's insistence that I needed to get it done that semester. And even then I spent the first half of the spring of 2007 treating the diss. like a day job. It wasn't really until the final month and a half that I went into overdrive, literally staying up past my bedtime every night and gradually letting every other concern in my life slide. It sucked, bigtime. And after I filed I didn't look at the diss. at all for about three months. But I did get it done and filed.

It might be possible to just decide, "Okay, I'm going to finish my dissertation now," no matter where in the process you are, but I doubt it and I wouldn't recommend it even if it is possible. I think it's more like trying to climb Everest when there's a storm coming. There is some point up the side of the mountain when you are close enough to the summit to make a dash for it. There's no point in starting the dash until you're that close; otherwise you'll just exhaust yourself and possibly die of exposure. So for now just keep grinding away, a little here and a little there, until you are (a) sick to death of it and (b) close enough to make a run on the summit.

I read some books on writing when I was trying to write my diss--possibly more displacement activity--but none of them were worth a damn. The book that I wish I'd had then but only discovered recently is Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It's shelved in the Self-Help section at the bookstore, which strikes me as perverse. It's not really that. It's more like a personal philosophy on how to think about your work and all the things that keep you from getting it done....

------------------

I do recommend The War of Art, to everyone. Jarrod put me onto it. It's a short read, but pithy, and decidedly non-lame. I put it up there with Paul Graham's essays in terms of great writing about how to do useful stuff in the real world.

Why we can see unimaginably distant galaxies from Earth, but not the moon landers

2008-04-09T17:55:00.000-07:00

Recent Correspondent: We know where the guys langed on the Sea of Tranquility (and the other missions too of course, not just 11), and though small, they left behind a lander and moon rover etc. So, I assume with a big enough telescope (and we have some monsters) we could just hunt around a bit, and actually *see* where we landed - right?

Me: Sorry, it's a good thought, but the landers and so on that we left behind are waaay too small to be seen by any telescope on earth or in orbit.

Recent Correspondent: I must say I am surprised. We have these scopes that appear to be able to see tiny little planets in other galaxies. I know that is a big object, but it is a shit load further away. I figured the size vs distance would be on the side of the lander...

When I replied, I was just repeating what I've read lots of places. I've never seen anyone actually demonstrate that it's true. So I am endeavoring to do so now. There are a couple of things to clear up here. The first is the discovery of extrasolar planets around other stars, and the second is whether size vs. distance is on the side of the moon landers, or the unimaginably distant galaxies.

Part 1: Extrasolar planets

We have not seen tiny little planets in other galaxies. There is a literally vast confusion of scale here. The most distant extrasolar planet discovered to date, OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, is only 21,000 light years away. On one hand, that is a hell of a long way away. Our ancestors were hunting down the last mainland mammoths when light from that planet's primary was barely halfway here. On the other hand, it's nothing. The Milky Way is estimated to be about 100,000 light years across, so OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb is only a fifth of the way across our own galaxy. The closest major galaxy to the Milky Way--excluding our dwarf satellite galaxies, like the Magellanic Clouds--is the Andromeda galaxy, which is 2.5 million light years away. It is the most distant object that you can see with the naked eye, which is pretty cool, because the photons that fall into your unaugmented retina left Andromeda when our ancestors were banging rocks and dreaming of taming fire. But it is more than 100 times as distant as OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb.

It gets worse. Nobody from Earth has seen OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb. We only know it's there because of gravitational microlensing. The most distant planet we've actually seen is 2M1207b, if it actually is a planet and not some kind of dwarf star, and it's only 173 light years away.

In other news, the "hot Jupiter" that orbits HD 189733 has methane and water in its atmosphere. Here's how we know that. The planet above is not extrasolar; it's wholly terrestrial in origin.

So to sum up, all of the extrasolar planets we've found are in our own galaxy, and pretty close even on a galactic scale, and we've only directly imaged one of them, and the one we've imaged may be more of a failed star than a planet.

Part 2: Which is smaller, the Eagle or a smudge in the HUDF?

The Apollo Lunar Modules are about 14 feet in diameter, with a maximum landing gear spread of about 30 feet. At its closest approach, the moon is 225,000 miles away, or about 1.19 billion feet. So the ratio of size to distance is 1:40 million even if we use the landing gear spread, and 1:80 million if we use the vehicle itself.

The Apollo 17 lander was actually photographed from lunar orbit, but that's a distance of about 69 miles, not 225,000 miles. And it shows up as a single pixel, plus a pixel of shadow. You can see that photo, along with tons of cool zoomable moon landing site photos, here.

Although there are galaxies somewhat larger and much smaller than the Milky Way, let's say for the sake of argument that most galaxies are about 100,000 light years across. The most distant galaxies ever imaged, in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (shown above), are about 13 billion light years away. Which yields a ratio of size to distance of only 1:130,000, or about 300 times bigger than the moon landers to observers on Earth or in Earth orbit.

Which is why we can see galaxies on the other side of the universe from Earth, but not our own moon landers. The galaxies are indeed shitloads further away, but they are also many, many shitloads larger.

Feel free to poke holes in my math or logic.

Saturn

2008-03-27T06:01:00.001-07:00

This is what Saturn looks like at 120x from the polluted atmospheric swamp that is the central valley. On really clear nights, like right after a rain, it looks a lot better. This is my first Saturn photo ever. Not outstanding, but recognizable, which is pretty great considering that all I did was hold my camera up to the eyepiece of the telescope. And that if I had a tall enough ladder I could cut blocks of polluted air right out of the sky and sell them on the black market. As what, I don't know. Star-blockers, I guess. Constellation simplifiers. Troubled by that annoying Milky Way thing? Just look through one of these!

Actually it is just sad, because pictures are so flat compared to the experience. It is easy to look at a photo--especially this one--and think, "Meh." But every single time I find Saturn in the telescope my first thought is, "Holy shit, that's freakin' Saturn!" I will keep banging this drum as hard and loud as I can: the difference between seeing something in a picture and seeing it for yourself is as vast as the gulfs of space.

Credit where it's overdue

2008-03-24T00:56:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of an ass. Neil at microecos has been doing good work for practically ever and he frequently links to me and says nice things, and I've never returned the favor. Our meeting at SVP last year didn't produce so much as a ripple in the blogosphere, at least from my end. So I'm making up for it now by giving him the top space in my list of bio and paleo blogs (right sidebar), even above SV-POW! itself (for now).

Sorry dude.

If you're not Neil and also not on my sidebar but think you should be, let me know.

Dr. Vector's EXPLODING BRAINS Breakfast Massacre

2008-03-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

Inspired by TheBrummell's Bachelor Chow, I present the first of my Dude Food recipes: Dr. Vector's EXPLODING BRAINS Breakfast Massacre. I know you just saw the full name in the title, but it's fun to say, and you're at my mercy, so: Dr. Vector's EXPLODING BRAINS Breakfast Massacre.

Ingredients for Dr. Vector's EXPLODING BRAINS Breakfast Massacre

bacon
frozen tater tots
bear grease (or olive oil)
garlic salt
black pepper
eggs
Worchestershire sauce
cheese
picante sauce
barbeque sauce
horseradish sauce
HP brown sauce (if available)

Instructions for Dr. Vector's EXPLODING BRAINS Breakfast Massacre

1. Fry the bacon to taste. I like mine flexible, but some folks prefer crunchy and that is very much in the spirit of the dish. Set it aside.

2. Throw the frozen tater tots into the bacon grease. Supplement with olive oil if there's not enough grease to get the job done, and if the tub of bear grease in your coldhouse is empty (ya wuss). As the tater tots thaw out, they'll start to fall apart. If you're moving them around with a fork or a spatula, you'll notice that the little tater bits start falling off the end, like those little white balls out of cheap styrofoam. Now you should be able to use your cooking implement to bust 'em apart and make hash browns out of them (you can skip this step if you started out with some form of diced potatoes, Mr. Fancy Pants). Season with whatever you like and fry 'em up. I prefer garlic salt and plain black pepper, but it's a free range, so do what you like. When the hash browns are done, scrape them off and set them aside.

3. Scramble some eggs. I like mine with the usual, garlic salt and black pepper, and a liberal splash of Worchestershire sauce. When the eggs are nearly done, hit them with the cheese. Let the cheese melt a little, then turn the whole mess over a couple of times so everything gets good and intertwingled.

4. Now it's time to start building the breakfast Frankenstein. Pile the cheesy eggs and hashbrowns on a plate. Chop or crumble the bacon and mix it in. Now top liberally--nay, excessively, as if your condiment bottles have Ebola and are crashing and bleeding out--with picante sauce, barbeque sauce, and horseradish sauce, and mix it all up. I used Pace, Bull's Eye, and whatever was in the fridge, respectively. If I'd been in England, I would have added some HP brown sauce. That stuff is awesome.

5. Feed! You don't have to watch Reanimator, Dead Alive, Slither, or Planet Terror while you feast, but that's also very much in the spirit of the dish, and is officially condoned by the Vector Institute of Advanced Gastronomy by Rank Amateurs. Also, depending on your location and level of health, you may be able to save some time by just calling 911 before commencing gustation.

Why is it called Dr. Vector's EXPLODING BRAINS Breakfast Massacre? Because if you've done your job right--mainly by jacking up the condiment level in Step 4 to Ludicrous Speed--the resulting mess looks exactly like somebody blew a zombie's brains out all over your plate. And also because if anyone is watching you cook, their brains will probably explode during Step 4. And because when you get your first taste of the bacony eggy cheesy potatoey Worcestery picantey barbequey horseradishy peppery salty sweet spicy flavor supernova, your brain will also explode. Guaranteed or your money back.

But especially because I am a Tenacious D fan, for miles on to Zanzibar.

im in ur tv, wokn wif dinesorz

2008-03-18T23:32:00.000-07:00

Walking With Dinosaurs will be on the Discovery Channel on Easter Sunday. Same old animation, new talking head bits. I'm gonna be a talking head. So are some other Padianites--should be a Padianlabstravaganza. Watch it or die.

A ring around the moon

2008-03-18T21:44:00.000-07:00

There is something in the sky tonight that is a bit thicker than haze and a bit thinner than clouds, and it made an awesome halo around the setting sun, which I did not capture on pixels, and another awesome halo around the rising moon, which I did. However, capturing the halo meant leaving the shutter open for four seconds, which was enough time for every faulty pixel on my Nikon's five-year-old CCD to fire and junk up the image with noise. So right now it only looks good at very small size, so that's all I'm giving you. It will only take about 15 minutes in Photoshop or Gimp to clean it up, but that's more time than I can spend on it right now, so you'll just have to wait.

UPDATE: the cleaned up full version is here.

Double promo special

2008-03-14T21:55:00.000-07:00

Gotta give a shout-out to my man Dave Hone, who is one of the geniuses behind Ask A Biologist, which celebrates its first anniversary today, and the sole genius behind Archosaur Musings. Stop by both and say hi for me.

The picture above is the proposed cover art for Dave's upcoming Nature-Science Secret Origins Super Team-Up, which I am leaking to you because I am also a little bit awesome.

Aetogate news

2008-03-10T19:53:00.000-07:00

I'm temporarily hosting Aetogate while Mike Taylor celebrates his 40th birthday with a 3-day bacchanalia. If you would like to know what Aetogate is, go here. If anything big breaks in the next 72 hours, I'm on it.

UPDATE: New blog coverage. John Fleck has a link to Bill Parker's rebuttal of Spencer Lucas's report to the DCA. Why is this important? Lucas's long defense of his actions was heralded by some in the VP community as evidence that he was innocent and that we could all put this behind us. However, Lucas's statement is at odds with the facts in many places, as Parker's rebuttal demonstrates (with abundant documentation). All of us involved in this continue to urge you to look at all of the evidence (on both sides) and draw your own conclusions.

Got binoculars? Make some science.

2008-03-06T19:39:00.000-08:00

This Saturday night a bright star in Taurus will be occulted (eclipsed) by the moons of the asteroid Eugenia. Yeah, that's right, the moons of an asteroid. If you didn't know asteroids had moons, check this out. Anyway, observers in the southern US and Mexico can help astronomers determine the positions of the moons by--get this--watching the star go off and on and noting the times. For this, even the largest telescopes on Earth are less useful than you are, as long as you have binoculars, a timekeeping device, and some idea of where you are. Details here, instructions and finder charts here (scroll down to the hideous yellow part).

The photo above shows the 53-km-long asteroid 243 Ida and its tiny, 1.4-km moon Dactyl. Stolen from Wikipedia.

My moon map

2008-02-26T14:22:00.000-08:00

UPDATE, March 23: As is so often the case, an initial effort that I thought was cool at the time now looks like crap. The base image I used above was the first picture of a full moon I ever took, and I didn't realize how lousy it was until I took a better one. Also, the Apollo landing sites are all off by about 50 miles because I was just sort of eyeballing them instead of really checking their precise locations. So now, thanks to a better photo and this awesome site, I present my updated moon map (below). Obviously there are a zillion things that could be labeled here but aren't; everything shown here can be seen by the sharp-eyed on a clear night with no optical equipment other than the Mark 1 eyeball. If you want more details, I strongly recommend Cherrington's Exploring the Moon Through Binoculars and Small Telescopes ($20) and Sky & Telescope's Field Map of the Moon ($10).

How to get started in amateur astronomy. Step 1: Get real

2008-02-23T21:58:00.000-08:00

I've already described how my advent into amateur astronomy was delayed by 20 years by unrealistic expectations. In my case, the expectations were that astronomy requires a telescope and is necessarily expensive, neither of which is true. But I suspect that many people "take up" astronomy--in a very limited, hardware-oriented fashion*--and then drop it because of other expectations that are no more accurate. I have two such in mind, and I'll explain them both.

* By buying a telescope on impulse, or getting one as a present, and then finding it difficult and unrewarding to use. More on this in future installments, and at the end of this one.

The first unrealistic expectation is that stargazing will be effortless. It won't be. Some things are easy, but they're still not effortless. You can see the Galilean moons of Jupiter just by walking outside and looking through binoculars. Ditto the Andromeda Galaxy and the Double Cluster in Perseus, all of which are probably in most amateur astronomers' top ten. But even for the easy stuff, you have to know where--and when--to look. Other things are harder, and all the more rewarding because of the skill and effort that goes into their finding. So here's the first filter: if you're not willing to spend a few evenings learning the constellations, go do something else.

The obvious retort is that you don't have to know the constellations anymore, because computerized telescopes will find stuff for you. That's true, but computerized telescopes are not the push-button-go dreams that they are marketed to be. Most of them have to leveled and aligned, and maybe even pointed at a few known reference stars, before they'll show you stuff. Sounds fun, huh? And dig the irony: you have to know how to find stuff on your own to set up the computerized scope that is supposed to find stuff for you. I can see a way to save yourself a few hundred dollars...

Now, there are computerized telescopes that use GPS and don't have to be leveled and aligned. You really can just turn them on and rock out. They also start around two grand. If you'd rather spend that kind of money than learn your way around the sky, go nuts--just be aware that you're not in my target audience.

The second unrealistic expectation is that the views from your back yard will look like pictures in books and on the web. No backyard telescope is going to give you Hubble-like views, for at least two reasons. The first is that the gorgeous photos of the Orion nebula and the Messier galaxies are all long exposures. Cameras, whether they use film or CCDs, can build up brighter and more colorful pictures than can the human eye, no matter how big the telescope you're looking through. Color in particular suffers, because galaxies and nebulae simply don't have enough of it to register on your retinas. Colorful stars, like red Betelgeuse and blue Rigel, both in Orion, are another matter, and they are among the most striking things in the sky whether you use a telescope, binoculars, or the good ole Mark 1 eyeball.

The other reason that your views will not look like the pictures you've seen is that the telescopes used by professional astronomers and the most advanced amateurs are almost always fantastically large and expensive compared to whatever you'll be looking through. A good starter telescope probably has an aperture between 2.4 and 6 inches (60-150 mm), whereas Rob Gendler takes most of his pictures with 12.5 and 20 inch Ritchey-Chretein scopes (the 12.5" starts at $17K, not including mount, cameras, etc.). But don't despair. As Guy Consolmagno and Dan Davis wrote in Turn Left at Orion (p. 202):

Galileo discovered the four major moons of Jupiter (forever after called the "Galilean satellites" in his honor); he was the first to see the phases of Venus and the rings of Saturn; he saw nebulae and clusters through a telescope for the first time. In fact, a careful checking of his observations indicates that he even observed, and recorded, the position of Neptune almost 200 years before anyone realized it was a planet. He did all this with a 1" aperture telescope.

Charles Messier, who found the hundred deep sky objects in the catalog that bears his name, started out with a 7" reflector with metal mirrors so poor that, according to one account, it was not much better than a modern 3" telescope. His later instruments were, in fact, 3" refractors.

If you've never seen the Galilean moons or the rings of Saturn for yourself, it is hard to explain what a rush it is. I can download gigabytes of Saturn pictures from Voyager and Cassini, but none of them carries the same visceral impact as even the smallest, blurriest view of Saturn through my telescope. It's like the difference between looking at a mounted dinosaur skeleton on the other side of the rope, and holding a chunk of fossilized bone in your hand for the first time, even if it is small, busted, and ugly :-). And I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Most of our houseguests get a peek at whatever is up, and so far every one of them has been blown away.

The pleasure and satisfaction of amateur astronomy do not come from APOD-worthy views or from instant gratification. Rather, they come from finding and seeing things for yourself, and the enjoyment of doing so is proportional to the effort invested. (In these ways, amateur astronomy is no different from any other human pursuit, be it painting or fixing toilets or building relationships.)

Finally, be patient. You can't learn the whole night sky in one go. It may be possible to run out and buy a telescope and be blasting through the skies by bedtime, but it's neither likely nor recommended. Craigslist, eBay, and attics and closets across the planet are home to thousands of impulse-buy telescopes, and most of them are not worth the paper their breathless ads were printed on (or the pixels they were splashed across). Don't buy a telescope. Not yet. If you're just starting out, you don't know what kind of telescope you'll want, you don't know what to point it at, and you probably don't even know if you enjoy observing. The sky will be there for the rest of your life and far beyond, and there will be no shortage of telescopes around when and if you decide to buy one. But there are some things you need to know first, and that's where I'll pick up next time.

Railgun!

2008-02-21T10:06:00.000-08:00

The Navy set a new record for the most powerful railgun shot, and brought my dream of cosmically powerful weaponry one step closer to reality.

From the story:

Thursday’s test produced a record 10.86 megajoules, which sent the 7-pound aluminum slug at Mach 7 (more than 5,000 mph) for 80 meters, a roughly 20-millisecond ride.

Before:

Check out the visible shock wave. That's what you get at almost 1.4 miles per second.

After:

According to the story, the shot trap was a steel box filled with 2.5 tons of sand, and after the projectile hit it, it was splayed open like a flower. I wish we had some pictures of that, instead of this stupid billboard getting blown to hell and gone. Ah well.

The end of the eclipse

2008-02-21T00:47:00.001-08:00

I wanted to take a series of photos like this for the entire eclipse, but two things stood in my way. The first was crappy seeing. If you look at the photos in the last post, they're not fuzzy because the scope was out of focus or the camera wasn't doing it's job. The atmosphere was just yucky. The Central Valley of California has about the worst air pollution of any non-metro area in the US, and the rising moon was swimming up through a roiling stew of hot air and groady particulates. By the time the moon was coming out of totality, it was high enough in the sky to be out of the real murk, but there was still quite a bit of turbulence.

The other limitation is the fact that I was just holding the camera up to the eyepiece. I could have gotten out the tripod and mounted the camera at the eyepiece, but I was lazy. As the moon got dimmer, exposure times got longer and pictures got fuzzier. I threw away literally hundreds. Still, I got a few keepers and I had a good time, and that's about all you can ask of a transient celestial event.

Live blogging the eclipse

2008-02-20T19:21:00.000-08:00

I'm coming to you live from mid-totality. I'm in here showing off instead of out there taking more pictures because I needed to recharge my battery. But don't worry, my sojourn here is very temporary.

Looking east from my back porch.

This is pushing the limit of how long I can hold the camera to the eyepiece without losing all resolution.

Hope you're not missing it, but if you are, I'll have more pictures soon.

Clear skies!

How to get started in amateur astronomy. Step 0: Don't not do it

2008-02-18T23:42:00.000-08:00

When I was 12, a friend brought a telescope catalog to school. It was from Celestron. It was the first time I'd ever heard of a Schmidt-Cassegrain. I borrowed it, kept it for a couple of weeks, read it cover to cover until I had large swaths of it memorized. I was hooked.

I was also broke. I computed that if I saved my allowance for two years I could buy the cheapest model in the catalog. I was 12, for cryin' out loud--my interests changed monthly. Saving up for a few weeks to buy The Dinosaur Heresies was about the limit of my financial stamina.

So what happened?

Nothing.

Nothing.

I returned the catalog. Pretty soon I was back to watching my turtles, reading about dinosaurs or whales or fighter jets, building Lego space cruisers, and listening to Dr. Demento. Life went on.

Astronomy became my dream deferred. I watched every shuttle launch I could, pored over magazine articles on the Voyager flybys and the debut and re-debut of the Hubble space telescope, eventually collected a giant folder of astrophotos for my screensaver, and put APOD at the top of my link list. I even took an astronomy course in high school and saw Jupiter and its moons for the first time through my teacher's telescope. But I never got my own telescope, and I never went out stargazing.

Twenty years passed.

Then last fall I took a trip to the Lick Observatory and picked up an intro astronomy book in the gift shop. Power keg, match, WHOOMP! A few days later I went out and found the moons of Jupiter, which I'd not seen with my own eyes for half of my life. A few weeks later I bought a telescope, and a couple of months later I built one.

I know what went right the second time, and you probably know some of it. But what went wrong the first time?

I didn't participate in amateur astronomy for two decades because I got two ideas fixed in my head when I was 12. Both of them were wrong, and I don't blame the folks at Celestron for either of them.

The first Bad Idea is that If you want to be an amateur astronomer, first you have to buy a telescope. Wrong, wrong, wrong. In the outline I have sketched out for this series of posts, buying a telescope comes somewhere around Step 5 or later, and it's an optional step anyway. Stay tuned, I'll tell you why.

The second Bad Idea is that Amateur astronomy is expensive. Nope. It can be expensive, certainly. In fact, you'll probably be flabbergasted by the money that some folks spend on gear. But you can get a good start for under ten bucks and for $25-30 you can stay busy literally for months seeing things that are invisible or nearly so to the naked eye.

So if you're interested in astronomy, you need not be intimidated. Chances are you already have the most useful piece of gear for the beginner. A few minutes' effort is all you'll need to see if you have a taste for stargazing--and if so, you can equip yourself to do almost everything for a lot less than you think.

Come on, give it a shot.

Total eclipse of the moon next week

2008-02-11T21:13:00.001-08:00

There is going to be a total eclipse of the moon next week, on the evening of Wednesday, Feb. 20 for North American observers and early in the morning of Feb. 21st for Europeans. If you're in Hawaii, Asia, or Australia, I'm sorry, no eclipse for you (this time). Don't feel bad, you've been getting the good solar eclipses lately, and with them lots of astronomy tourism dollars (or rubles, or whatever). Don't believe me? Check this out.

It's the only total lunar eclipse this year and the last one until 2010. For North American observers is it conveniently timed, too, with totality lasting from 10-11 on the East Coast and 7-8 out here in Cali. Get the full details here.

If you've never seen a lunar eclipse, you owe it to yourself to pull out some lawn chairs and watch. You don't need any observing equipment at all, but you'll be amazed at how cool the moon looks through binoculars, even cheap ones. If you have a telescope, it won't hurt; you can pick your favorite lunar getaway spot and watch it slowly drown in darkness and then be reborn in light.

The picture at top was taken by me earlier tonight. It's not very good compared to some others I've taken, but I'm pretty happy with it given the circumstances of its birth. I took it through this thing, which I built myself:

More details at my Flickr site: scope and photo. And I gotta credit David Gilbank for the design, which I shamelessly ripped off.

Dr. Vector visits the other Tethys

2008-02-07T00:15:00.000-08:00

Usually when paleontologists talk about Tethys, they mean the ocean. Which is gone, or at least busted up pretty good. But tonight I explored the other Tethys for the first time, if "explored" is not too grand a word for sighting a wee dot of light at the edge of visibility at 125x in my telescope. Tethys is the fifth-largest of Saturn's 60-odd moons. It's about a thousand kilometers in diameter, slightly less than the distance between Berkeley and Salt Lake City on I-80 (a drive that figures prominently in John McPhee's Basin and Range and Assembling California, and in my own personal history).

I also saw Titan--biggest moon in the solar system, larger than the planet Mercury--and Iapetus. Dione and Rhea were too dim and too close to the planet to make out. (I don't know which moons those are in the photo above, I just liked it and didn't feel bad about ripping it from the horoscope site where Google Image Search found it.)

Actually I had no idea which moons I was seeing at the time; I sketched Saturn and the three I could see and did the IDing later, using Stellarium (still free, still awesome). Here's a screencap:

Seriously: if you haven't seen the rings of Saturn, or the moons of Jupiter, or the Orion Nebula, or the Double Cluster, with your own eyes, you owe it yourself to start figuring out how to make that happen. If you don't have a telescope, find a friend who does. Or buy one; Orion has some good 'uns for less than you think (my six-inch Dob*, which looks like a freakin' cannon, was under $300 nicely equipped). Or if you're not too far, invite yourself over and look through mine. The views don't suck.

* One of the ironies of amateur astronomy is that, thanks the success of even larger Dobs, a telescope four feet long, seven inches in diameter, and weighing 35 lbs is considered small.

Yes, it's true, you can Google up some Hubble images that will smoke anything you can see through a backyard telescope. Nothing wrong with that--I've got a big fat book on the shelf next to me with unreasonably gorgeous views of everything from the moon on out to the galaxy swarm in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. But I promise you this: your first eyeball view of Saturn or Jupiter or whatever gem the scope is pointed at will sock you in the brainpan in a whole different way. Try it and see.

Dr Vector lives up to his name

2008-02-03T02:40:00.001-08:00

As a vector, that is.

I suck at responding to memes. Darren gave me a Thinking Blogger award back around the Kazanian and Julia gave me another one in the mid-Aptian, and I haven't even publicly thanked them, let alone passed it on. So thanks, you two. You're both much better and more productive bloggers than me. Much love.

I'll pass that award on soon, I promise.

But in the meantime I'm going to leapfrog to a newer meme, for which I was also tagged by Julia, called the Writing Meme.

The rules:

List 3 writing tips
Tag 3 people whose writing style you admire

Julia wrote, "I want Matt's sauropod-paper-writing insights", so here goes:

1. Strive to produce not Least Publishable Units, but Most Publishable Units. Don't approach your manuscripts with the attitude, "What could I cut out of this to send somewhere else", but rather ask, "Is there anything else I could put in, either to give this paper more lasting value or because I know it's not worth writing up by itself and I may never get a better chance to say it?" Admittedly that's a tough row to hoe, and I feel like I only properly followed it once (in my Acta paper), but it's a noble goal.

2. In contrast to what I just said, if there is something short and sweet that you could knock out in one shot, don't make excuses and don't wait for the muses. Just go for it. I wrote the first draft of this paper in a single six-hour session. It's a shorty and, as before, it's my only example for this tip, but it felt great at the time and doesn't feel too bad now, either.

3. Write as informally as you think you can get away with (i.e., without sacrificing the science). Your papers will make better reading and more people will read them. There's a reason people still read The Origin for pleasure. Here's a simple heuristic: if reviewers aren't criticizing you for being informal, your prose is too stilted. Reviewers frequently knock me for being too informal, and that helps me find the balance. YMMV.

What the hell, I'm going for four. Memes mutate, right? This is the one that you're most likely to have heard before, but it bears repeating.

4. Play Frankenstein. Don't be married to the structure that you had in mind when you started writing. Feel free to move sentences around in paragraphs and paragraphs around in papers. And by "feel free" I really mean "steel yourself to the abhorrent thought of cutting up your beautiful rainbow children". Because they're not beautiful rainbow children. They're just words. And the sooner you Get Over It and learn to rearrange them in the order that best suits the goals of the paper (not your goals as a doting prose-parent), the better your writing will be.

And as long as I've broken the rules, I might as well go for broke. Here's the one you're least likely to have heard before, but it's something I feel strongly about.

5. Accept the fact that you are going to get things wrong. If you're not wrong at least occasionally, your science is boring (HT). You're not working close enough to the bleeding edge. There's a larger point here, too, which is that science only progresses by discovering new stuff, and that process inevitably means that some old stuff gets modified or reversed. As long as you are participating, that will be your fate at least once in a while. Don't be sloppy; don't invite error; but when it happens, don't kill yourself. I can't think of a single established scientist that I respect that hasn't been wrong about something. Admitting it and moving on is part of being a professional, and a grown-up.

My three tags are:

1. Brian Switek at Laelaps--I want to know how he writes so damn much all the time. It's embarrassing!

2. Mike Kaspari at Getting Things Done in Academia--He already writes a lot about writing, but in particular I'd like his thoughts on what makes for good collaborative writing.

3. Mike Taylor. His prose always seems to flow like water, and I'm not just buttering him up because he's my brother and co-blogger. Read his papers and see for yourself. He doesn't have a blog of his own, but maybe he'll co-opt an SV-POW! post to impart some wisdom (with the obligatory sauropod vert picture thrown in just to keep the letter of the law).

The Evolutionary Pathway of Dr. Vector's Book Club

2008-02-03T00:13:00.001-08:00

Evolutionary Pathways in Nature, by John C. Avise of UC Irvine, reads great on the crapper. The book is just under 300 pages long, and that's including a readable intro on phylogenetic character mapping (PCM), a glossary, references, and an index. The 200 pages of meat cover 67 examples of evolution, at about 3 pages per example. "Evolution of what?", you ask. Damn near everything. Magnetotaxis in bacteria. Bipedal hopping in kangaroos. Caterpillars that get ants to feed them their own larvae. Eusocial shrimp. Fish placentas. Cryptic elephant species. Poisonous birds. Parental care in land crabs. The origins of everything from HIV to Afrotheria.

Avise is a adroit writer. Three pages is not a lot of space in which to explain anything, but his descriptions of these biological mysteries and their elucidation by PCM are masterpieces of concision and tidiness. And he does not shrink from discussing the limitations and complications of the studies where they arise. Every example includes a tree with characters mapped on. I will keep this book close when I am writing my next paper, and hopefully turn out something a little more elegant.

If you're tired of seeing phylogenetic analyses that don't seem to tell us anything about, you know, critters and whatnot, or if you're tired of reading speculative wiffle with no phylogenetic grounding, or if you're just plain tired and can only muster five minutes of attention before you sack out at the end of the day, this is the book for you. Three pages is doable, by anybody, under just about any circumstances. If you can take more, go for it. I like the book as an evolutionary analogue of the 1001 Nights, with Avise standing in for Scheherazade, but there is more here than a big pile of short reads. Reading the stories--and they are stories, and therein lies much of their charm--is like watching the stars come out at night. The first one is a little gem, and so is the second, and third, and the fourth. But soon they add up to something that is vast, awesome, and humbling.

But also exhilarating. Like the night sky, the tree of life has the complementary virtues of being knowable--thus inviting exploration--and inexhaustible, so that we need not fear running out of marvels to wonder at. (Note that I am speaking here of the entire tree of life, not just the extant tips, which are all too exhaustible.)

The book's most glaring fault is that, like most Cambridge titles, it is reedonkulously expensive. Sixty-nine smackers for a small, slim paperback--almost half again as much as you'd pay for a new hardback copy of Gould's Structure of Evolutionary Theory, which is more than five times as long. The best defense I can offer is that Avise's writing is so engaging and expansive that the book seems much longer, and Gould is so baroquely verbose that when you read SET you'll long for death before the end (trust me, I read it twice).

So, Evolutionary Pathways is a little steep. That's what birthdays and holidays are for. Put it on your wishlist, and when it comes in, park it on your bedside table or in the bathroom magazine rack. It's chicken soup for the evolutionist's soul.

Your daily dose of "Holy living crap!"

2008-01-29T00:57:00.000-08:00

Stolen from Zooillogix, which has become one of my favorite blogs ever since they announced E.O. Wilson's upcoming book, Suck It!

Go see Cloverfield

2008-01-19T00:18:00.001-08:00

I have never been scared by a monster movie before. It's just not a scary genre. Even the best eventually devolve into logistical exercises: will the military force/secret weapon/overloading powerplant/competing monster be enough to kick the monster's ass, or not? Usually in monster movies you have a ringside seat for the devastation. Ringside is not a scary place to be.

Cloverfield puts you in the ring. For me, it was profoundly unnerving. It does not look or feel like a monster movie. It does not look or feel like a movie at all. It looks and feels like what it purports to be--some poor schmuck's camcorder ride through hell.

In the forward to Dinosaur Tales, Ray Bradbury confesses that he and Ray Harryhausen and their wives once went to see a production of Siegfried just to see Fafnir, the dragon. I went to Cloverfield to see the monster, natch. Only monster has become waaay too familiar and cuddly a word to describe this thing. It's a monster the way things you imagined would come in the night and get you when you were five are monsters. As a reviewer on Ain't It Cool News said, "What you're looking at quite simply registers in your brain as an abomination."

Yuck. Who knows, maybe you'll see it and think it sucks, but I've been out of the theater for almost an hour and the hairs are still up on the back of my neck. I spent the whole drive home expecting to hear/feel ungodly huge footsteps and see flaming cars and pieces of buildings flying through the air. I don't want to go to bed. I haven't been this heebed out by a movie in ages, maybe ever.

In short, I loved it.

Quick, grab your brain--before it explodes!

2008-01-12T17:34:00.000-08:00

NGC 6543

I am a big fan of big explosions. And I'm not ashamed about it.

I also like to stare into the abyss, and I like having my mind blown by things that are unimaginably old and inconceivably immense. So maybe it was my destiny to work on sauropods. But if I wasn't so attached to dinosaurs, I'd be an astronomer for sure.

Supernovas are good. It's hard to beat a big ole whammy-kablammy. But lately I've been drawn to planetary nebulas. Despite the name, planetary nebulas have nothing to do with planets, they just look a bit like planets through small telescopes, like mine, or the ones around a hundred years ago when they were named. In fact, planetary nebulas are shells of gas blown off over hundreds of thousands or millions of years by the death throes of dying stars. Some of these stars later go whammy-kablammy, which is probably the ultimate cosmic twofer for any observers with a few million years to spend watching. A good candidate for that is Eta Carinae, which has already blown off a sweet planetary nebula that looks like twin mushroom clouds, and which will probably go supernova or hypernova in the next million or so years.

Eta Carinae

One of the best planetary nebulas is NGC 6543, the Cat's Eye Nebula,shown at the top of this post. I've had it as my desktop background since last June. Completely by coincidence, it is one of the things I got to see through the awe-inspiring and hellanormous Lick refractor last September.

Centaurus A

Supergiant stars blowing off immense glowing clouds of gas over millennia are pretty good, but even better are giant jets of crap blasted out by galaxies. That's right, folks. Galaxies. Active galaxies, like Centaurus A here (awesome composite stolen from APOD), emit huge jets of energy from their cores. These jets have their origins in the accretion discs around the central black holes, which eat stars for breakfast.

Just think about that for a while.

And look at the pretty pictures, which are of real things that really exist in our universe.

And try not to let your brain explode.

I dare you.

Walking With Dinosaurs Live

2008-01-09T11:00:00.000-08:00

On the evening of January 3rd, I got to see Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience in Sacramento, courtesy of the folks at Insight Management.

I loved the show. It was just a whole lot of fun. Even after I had seen some preview videos, the smoothness of the animatronics was a pleasant surprise and the whole thing was pulled off with--no other word for it--panache.

Now, these dinosaurs are essentially big puppets. Really big, really smooth, really well-done puppets, but still puppets. You're not going to be completely fooled into believing that these things are real. But if you just go with it--just watch the show, just enjoy what's going on--you may find yourself suspending disbelief more than you thought you would. I found myself flip-flopping between being interested in what the animals were doing and being fascinated by how the technicians were pulling it off.

Fortunately, the technical achievements are impressive enough that in those moments when you are not swept away to the world of the Mesozoic, there is still plenty to admire and even wonder at. There are some excellent bits of stagecraft that I won't spoil for you, and the lighting and music work to enhance and punctuate what is transpiring on stage fairly seamlessly. And the robots and suits are very cool in themselves. They were light years beyond any other animatronic dinosaurs I've ever seen, and that includes the latest generation of standing robots, such as those featured in the Big Dinos Return exhibit at the Lawrence Hall of Science (I should know, I helped write the signage).

Scientifically, much of Walking With Dinosaurs Live was not just good, but surprisingly good. Early on there was a discussion of footprints and other trace fossils and why they are so important to paleontologists: because they give us glimpses of the living animals in a way that bones--no matter how well preserved--simply can't. And in the Early Cretaceous segment there was a great description of plant-insect coevolution and the rise of flowering plants, using those terms. (Lamentably, the frank, accurate, and un-mangled discussion of evolution shows that this was not an American production....) Most of the science was as good as or better than what you get in the average television documentary.

Most. Not all. Stegosaurus lived in the Late Jurassic, not the Middle. The dromaeosaurs were unfeathered, which is in keeping with the television series but absolutely at odds with everything that we now know about their appearance in real life. Regarding Stegosaurus plates, the narrator mentioned the hypotheses that they were for thermoregulation (now pretty much destroyed) or defense (now looking pretty good, thanks to some sweet fossils), before pooh-poohing both in favor of the unlikely, unsupported, WWD-only idea that they flushed red as a warning device.

There was also one outright howler, when the narrator stated that, "another group of dinosaurs has taken to the skies: pterosaurs." Now, pterosaurs are very close relatives of dinosaurs, but they are not dinosaurs. In fact, I think the first thing you learn about pterosaurs in any kid's dinosaur book is that they are not dinosaurs. Possibly the narrator meant to say "another group of animals has taken to the skies"--I'd like to think that--but it's not what came out of his mouth.

Although irksome, the scientific errors were few and they didn't ruin the show for me. It is mainly about watching life-size robot dinosaurs stomp around and roar, and on that front WWD:TLE is great fun. I loved it, my three-year-old loved it, and I wish I could see it again.