Toaster sent me this link with a comment saying I would probably like it. There's no probably - it's as beautiful as the first one if not more. Four of my favorite "faces of science" in one video! Sagan's still the cutest, athough Feynman would be a hoot to hang out with.




Meanwhile I'm having an awesome night! My aunt and uncle are visiting from NY, and we had them up for dinner. I made chili and John made tamale-stuffed peppers. I also did a big ole cheese tray for snacking and heated up a store-bought cherry pie for desert. Then we made them watch the IT Crowd (which they loved - cuz they are crazy cool) and now we're watching Criminal Minds and CSI:NY, which I had better get back to before I miss something important. :)

This panel was not what I expected it to be. I was hoping it would be stuff we could do from our backyard without telescopes or much brain power. Our gang sometimes meets for meteor showers; we just hang out at the beach chatting, drinking cocoa, and flying kites while watching for shooting stars. There is a great beach about 30 or 40 minutes away that's perfect for star watching because there are no trees blocking one's view and unlike most of our beaches there's hardly any light pollution there. Basically from this panel I just wanted more cool stuff I could goof around with at Toaster's giant yard next bonfire. (Preferably something involving green laser pointers.)

Turns out the panel was cohosted by Pamela Gay formerly of Slacker Astronomy, so most of the backyard activities involved variable stars (two other Slacker Astronomy podcasters worked with variable stars) and low level telescopes. It was still pretty interesting, but a bit above my level of commitment as I don't have a telescope. On the bright side - one of my favorite Slacker Astronomy episodes was all about getting involved in the science of astronomy, so it is a topic I am interested in. One thing I've always loved about astronomy is that some of the *major* discoveries are made by normal people who like to look up. There are all sorts of ways you can participate, for example if you are good with photoshop, you can work with NASA photographs to colorize raw images. I tried to be more involved by doing SETI@Home. So as sleepy as I was, I did *try* to pay attention to ways the panel said I could contribute. I should have taken better notes. :( I did manage to remember two websites, and one of my other friends who took notes sent me the links.

I'm learning to do Galaxy Zoo right now. It's easy and actually really fun. I don't know that I will do Citizen Sky or adopt a variable star as I appear to have commitment issues and am lazy, but who knows!

Galaxy Zoo 2
"The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, no less). In order to understand how these galaxies — and our own — formed, we need your help to classify them according to their shapes — a task at which your brain is better than even the fastest computer."

Citizen Sky
"Help us solve the mystery of epsilon Aurigae, a star that has baffled scientists since 1821. You don’t need any prior scientific training— we will give you all of the tools you need to become a citizen scientist. Citizen Sky is a citizen science project providing you with a chance to do real scientific research. We are seeking to understand a star that has been a mystery to scientists for many years. This star is epsilon Aurigae, a very interesting, very bright star located in the constellation Auriga, the charioteer. This star is bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye even in the most light-polluted cities, and it is visible every fall, winter, and spring. Epsilon Aurigae is a variable star—this means it changes in brightness over time. Collecting data on these changes can help us understand the star. "


Pamela said something particularly interesting - that she didn't think alien life would be discovered via radio/SETI. Instead she thinks it will be from spectral analysis of exoplanets revealing pollution in their skies. (She said it much better.)

I love Mythbusters. :) Possibly not the best video to publish in honor of the first moon landing, but certainly an entertaining one. And, they are showing the landing seems legit. ;) Plus, I expect loads of videos of the actual landing will be being shown.



Anyway, tomorrow be sure to look up at the man in the moon and wave. One small step...

The whole presentation was wonderful. Some awsometastic person has posted all of it; this clip is part 10 of 10 as you can see. Anyway, this clip contains my favorite portion of the presentation. He fields a question asking as you are the current "face of science" for this generation, who is your favorite of the previous faces of science: Sagan, Burke, Clarke, etc. His story about Carl Sagan made me cry. I wanted to marry Sagan when I was five. :)

Start around 3:30 for the question and his beautiful response.




Through some lucky turn of chance, I timed returning home just in time to catch him on Book TV. :)

Neil DeGrasse Tyson just said that Pluto had it coming! LOL!
Ha!! Some 5th graders sent him hate mail over Pluto's demotion!! One of the kids said to write back in printing because he couldn't read cursive!!! OMG - love Neil. :) :) And New Mexico is refusing to recognize the demotion. In New Mexico they write a resolution (whereas this and whereas that) stating that w/in their borders it's still a planet!!!

I can hear Monkeys practicing the Tetris theme song on his ukulele right now.

I got tagged over on Facebook to write 25 random facts about myself. I posted it a couple of days ago, but tonight I decided I'd put so much time into that I should stick it a few other places. Plus, i love reading other people's versions (their 25 things) so I figured I'd spread it around.
( this was actually kind of fun to write )

I don't have anything profound to say, but I didn't want the day to pass without acknowledging today. There are those moments in time that are so powerful your memories almost crystalize.

For those who are free tonight about 11 pm - got outside and look up. You might see something.

Blog about it because I couldn't find the other article i was looking for...

_{EDIT - it's not just tonight, btw. So if it's cloudy tonight you can try again tomorrow. I think it goes on for another week, but tonight is supposed to be a peak night.}

Apparently McCain dissed planetariums?!?! How long ago did that happen?

One of the quotes I read was "[OBAMA] voted for nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel earmark projects, including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?" - Sen John McCain

Apparently he made a couple of references about planetarium funding, and many of the astronomy blogs I skim went a bit off this week. Some are rather amusing and some are rather zealous.

This is probably my favorite based on the title...

John McCain, Planetarium-Mocking Bastard
October 7th, 2008
... Dissing the planetarium support again as a ridiculous piece of pork funding. The Alder Planetarium is a treasure that plays a valuable role in educating the public and inspiring the next generation of scientists, something that McCain says he supports in the abstract, but clearly fails to understand in practice. What a clueless dork. He even referred to this as an *overhead projector.* ...

This one has a full transcript and YouTube link

Looks like McCain lost the Astronomer vote by Nina Mehta
Posted: Oct 08, 2008 in Things to do, Culture
... I guess Sen. Mccain isn't jonesing for the science vote. ...

And some more serious ones...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jules-siegel/the-adler-planetarium-and_b_133024.html
The Adler Planetarium slur reveals both the slovenly nature of the McCain campaign's opposition research as well as the cynical and tone-deaf disconnect from reality. This is a high-tech scientific educational project, not an entertainment device. When I was a child and teenager growing up in New York, the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History was among my favorite places to visit. It was an important factor in the formation of my life-long interest in science and technology…

http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2008/10/obama-adler-on-defense-after-mccain-criticism.html
McCain has criticized Obama's earmarks on the campaign trail, especially singling out the planetarium. The campaign attacks have frustrated astronomers, who called the remarks "anti-science," as the earmark criticism was repeated in recent weeks by political bloggers.



I remember being terrified by a planetarium as a six year old! I actually remember hiding under the chair during the show and for months afterwards thinking that the sun was going to supernova at any time. I also developed a lifelong love of astronomy and read every single book on the subject Kate Sullivan Elementary School library had before finishing first grade. I might not have become an astronomer or physicist, but many inspired youth did go on to such fields. We need such people to make our world a better place, fix some of the environmental damage we have done, make smaller iPods with bigger screens, and (for McCain) bigger weapons to fight the war on terror along with better/stronger/cheaper armor for soldiers in that war. I bet Tony Stark went to the planetarium as a child!

I'm totally serious. My name is going to go flying around the earth! Woot! I printed out a copy of the certificate and it’s pinned to my bulletin board at work. LOL!

NASA site so you can participate

Even better, I have another excuse to use this space shuttle icon! I'm so happy. :)

Anyway, here's more info on the program. Deadline to participate is November 1st.

Send your name around the Earth on NASA'S Glory mission

WASHINGTON – Members of the public can send their names around Earth on NASA's Glory satellite, the first mission dedicated to understanding the effects of particles in the atmosphere and the sun's variability on our climate.

The "Send Your Name Around the Earth" Web site enables everyone to take part in the science mission and place their names in orbit for years to come. The Web site, where participants can submit their information, is located at:

http://polls.nasa.gov/utilities/sendtospace/jsp/sendName.jsp

Participants will receive a printable certificate from NASA and have their name recorded on a microchip that will become part of the spacecraft. The deadline for submitting names is Nov. 1, 2008.

The Glory satellite will allow scientists to measure airborne particles more accurately from space than ever before. The particles, known as "aerosols," are tiny bits of material found in Earth's atmosphere, like dust and smog.

"Undoubtedly, greenhouse gases cause the biggest climatic effect," said Michael Mishchenko, the Glory project scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "But the uncertainty in the aerosol effect is the biggest uncertainty in climate at the present."

Glory will carry two scientific instruments, the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor, or APS, and the Total Irradiance Monitor, or TIM, and two cameras for cloud identification. The APS instrument will help quantify the role of aerosols as natural and human-produced agents of climate change more accurately than existing measurement tools. The TIM instrument will continue 30 years of measuring total solar irradiance, the amount of energy radiating from the sun to Earth, with improved accuracy and stability. Understanding the sun's energy is an important key to understanding climate change on Earth.

Glory is scheduled for launch in June 2009 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Glory will orbit as part of the Afternoon Constellation, or "A-Train," a series of Earth-observing satellites. The A-Train spacecraft follow each other in close formation, crossing the equator a few minutes apart shortly after 1:30 p.m. local time each day. The A-Train orbits Earth once every 100 minutes.

I made a new icon.

Over on my child_of_orion journal I have some space icons and one of them is of the shuttle. So I posted this over there. Then I decided to improve my shuttle icon and liked it so much I wanted it over here on MLR so that I could use it more often.

( post from child_of_orion )

In more cheerful news, I also made a bunch of Kids in the Hall icons yesterday that I haven't decided if they are good enough to share or not.

Also, in more spacey news didja see they are doing another HD documentary with the help of Ron Howard about the moon?!? Yay! Not that I have HD. But still, it's lovely.

EDIT:
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
--Gillespie Magee

Yay! Now, let's see if Jedi Joe shows up again and makes me miss the second half. (Said with love and a smile, I swear ;)

As much as mankind makes me mad sometimes with the jealousy and selfishness and greed and stupidity that exists, when you see shows like this I'm put right back in awe of what we can accomplish and how much we have to be proud of. (And how you can fly a space ship put together with duct tape.)

Yay!!! Been looking forward to this ever since saw the previews at some movie. :) :) :)
Discovery Channel.

From my iGoogle links....

1) This amused me. It's a New Scientist article about space tourism. I'm so juvenile, I just like they kept saying "Virgin marriage". *giggle* But cool that Richard Branson would conduct the ceremony.
Virgin's in Space

2) Check out this competition called N-Prize where you can win 9,999.99 pounds if you are the first person who can put a tiny satellite (less than 19.99 grams) with a budget of only 999.99 pounds into orbit 9 times around the Earth by 19:19:09 on the 19th September 2011. How funny is that? I'm in discussions with some friends. I'm sure mcamason has the parts, Mike B has the smarts, and disbandedtoastr has the technical skills. Plus, she's got a copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys and I bet that as rocket stuff in it. And whatever parts we don't have reddheaded can find anything on eBay. herzograven can film the whole thing as a documentary. I told them if they do it I get a $0.99 finders fee...
I couldn't get the Official N-Prize page to open at home but it's a cute page. Otherwise there's the link from New Scientist

3) Finally, this is one of the most beautiful astronomy pictures I've ever seen. It's the Fox Fur Nebula and it really does look like fox fur. Fox Fur

Remember the coolest counselor in the world from the Duck post yesterday? This is what he sent me today... The title of his email was "The Ultimate Peepshow".


I'm so tired. My new job plus the pottery class plus social life have taken a bit of a toll and I'm exhausted. But on the bright side droidgirl's mom gave me a peppercorn cheese ball tonight at a Mary Kay party so life is beautiful. There is nothing like going to a Mary Kay party where the four people in the room (including the host) do not wear makeup because they do not like makeup. That poor MK Consultant!! She put on a good show and everyone was really polite. We actually had a good time because she was animated and we enjoy each others company. However, I'm sure it was like pulling teeth for her. Lots of blank stares, poor girl.

OH! And it's pi day!!! (3/14) So I ate pie today! Droid's mom made mini pecan pies for Droid's party, too. She's a really good cook!!!

And because I'm an idiot... ( New Plantes = New Mnemonic )

And, for those curious about the new planet order mnemonic, the Wired article also talks about the girl who won the National Geographic competition– ten year old Maryn Smith of Great Falls, Montana suggestion was "My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants."

For some reason I can’t keep the "carpet" or the “sailed under” in my head. I want to say “showed us” and a carpet can't really show you something so I forget the C word and spend so much time trying to remember the mnemonic that I actually forget the planet order I do know. Alas.

For my friends who are StarGate fans...
Space.com did a review of the new movie (possible spoilers depending on what you consider spoilers) and I loved the description of some of the extras on the DVD. Toaster and I got to see Chris Judge on a panel at Dragoncon and he was hysterical. :) This brought back memories. DVD Review: 'Stargate: The Ark of Truth'
***************

Plus, Space.com had a cool article about alien contact in real life. I think this was written in response to suggestions for what to include in a first contact type beam from Earth (as opposed to the stuff sent out on Voyager). The Doritos commercials and Beatles songs from my earlier posts weren’t part of a planned continuous broadcast to space in a focused attempt to contact other cultures. But apparently SETI is considering doing just that and odds are the beings receiving and translating that message will be considerably more advanced than our own. So what do we send? Most people seem to think send the best of the best to impress and make a good first impression. But this guy thinks differently. I’m editing the heck out of this because really I just wanted to share *embracing imperfection* because that paragraph made me giggle but to get the joke you need these other two paragraphs…

… But perhaps even more impressive to an advanced civilization would be a more balanced presentation that reflects honestly on our foibles and shows a certain self-awareness of our imperfections. When looked at in this light, perhaps even a description of our somewhat primitive science, mathematics and technology could be illuminating to extraterrestrials.

A Measured Response … What might surprise ET is how well humans get by, even when we are a bit inaccurate. Though we now know that the value of pi is 3.14159 ... (and on it goes into infinity), earlier mathematicians used much cruder estimates of pi. For example, when wise King Solomon was planning a bathing area in the great temple he was constructing, its specifications indicated that the pool would have a radius of 5 units and a circumference of 30 units. If you plug these numbers into the equation for calculating the circumference of a circle, you'll see that the value of pi was estimated to be 3. While this number underestimates pi by about 5%, by all accounts, the temple turned out to be quite spectacular. Perhaps the most important message that ET could gain from this example is that in spite of our imperfections and miscalculations, we humans are capable of moving forward, sometimes with a fair amount of style.

Embracing Imperfection Indeed, rather than continually focusing on ways that we as a species are superior beings, perhaps as we attempt to make contact with ET, we should take the opposite approach. As a species we are, to put it bluntly, quite imperfect. More often than our egos would like to admit, we snap at our spouses, forget appointments, pay our bills late and round off important mathematical constants to the nearest integer. …

Oh come on! That was funny!!! The article is good, too. Like I said, this is just part of the article. The full piece can be found here: How we present ourselves to aliens

I have that iGoogle thing set up to give me a bunch of links to science articles from various agencies but my favorites are New Scientist Magazine (LOVE THEM - they have several editions for the various scientific fields) and Space.Com. Today there were two interesting links.


You know those commercials for the HPV virus (I wanna be one less!). Well boys need to get vaccinated, too!!! If they are sexually active and perform certain acts, it is possible they can get tongue, throat, and other oral cancers. That surprised me. The full article is here New Scientist


But my favorite article today was from Space.Com regarding finding extraterrestrial life that's trying to find us. I guess it was written in response to a politician's claim that our television/radio signals would scramble beyond recognition of intelligence before they got far enough into space to reach aliens. I will not pretend to know a lot about telecommunications or satellites or anything - I don't. But several asides in the article really made me laugh. Of course, this is my favorite...

“Let's consider some other earthly transmissions, for instance NASA's recent broadcast of Beatles music to Polaris (the North Star). For this, the space agency used the 210 foot Deep Space Network antenna near Madrid, Spain, and a mere 20 kilowatts of transmission power. In order for the Polarians, if there are any, to notice that this unsolicited serenade is washing over their planet, they'll need an antenna about 7 miles across. (Note to propeller-heads: I've assumed that their microwave receivers are about ten times less noisy than ours. Hardly unreasonable.) If they actually want to download the music to their iPods, they'll need heftier gear: about 500 miles on a side. Polaris, of course, is not next door. Its 430 light-years distant. This enormous span is what accounts for the large antenna requirements. The North Star is not the nearest audience for such a Beatle blast, incidentally – there are about 100,000 stellar systems that are closer. Maybe NASA chose this target because the Polarians agreed to pay royalties.”

My thoughts about the politician's statements were not as clever: 1) Our television and radio signals are not typically intelligent before the scrambling so what's the big deal about after, and 2) Yay! A politician was talking as if aliens were there but we just weren’t technologically good enough to reach them. (Though he was probably "assuming for the sake of argument" trying to cut funding to something and not really believing in aliens at all.) Anyway, the entire article is at Finding Them Finding Us

Since I could not watch the moon much I tried to make my own moon. Hahahaha - see, it's a giant telescope checking out Starry Night. It's funny. Or not. I'm learning how to use the lasso tool and the eraser. Huzzah.

ARGH!!!

this is the last lunar eclipse until 2010 and it's CLOUDY.

:( <--- see this? this is my frowny face. i am frowny.

* pout *

I made some icons! Yay!

Now watch this video, it's my favorite SNL sketch ever. SPACE: The Infinite Frontier


It's Will Farrell (yay! adore him)
Doing Harry Caray (I was a HUGE Cubs fan in the 1980's)
Interviewing an astronomer (love science!)
Played by Jeff Goldblum (again, yay! adore him)

What's your favorite planet? Mine's the sun!

I finally finished the Simon Singh book and I'm glad I stuck with it. I really enjoyed it toward the end.

Anyway, it talked about how serendipity affected the evolution of the Big Bang theory. ( (Wanna hear how?) )



QUOTING Winston Churchill - "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened."

and i know i have already posted several stardust related quotes on stardust, my fav being http://madladyred.livejournal.com/14446.html This quote is not as beautiful, but it's fun.
"Marcus Chown, author of The Magic Furnace, described the significance of stellar alchemy as follows: 'In order that we might live, stars in their billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions even have died. The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the oxygen that fills our lungs each time we take a breath - all were cooked in the furnaces of the stars which expired long before the Earth was born.' Romantics might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust. Cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste."

OH, and I'm going to marry George Gamow :)
Somebody buy me a copy of Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland...please?