Got a nice note from an old friend, chiding me for my comment in my post yesterday. (It wasn’t from the author of the comment I was responding to.) My friend thought I should be more open-minded about how to deal with the ongoing pain I am experiencing, and should reconsider alternative medical treatment. I thought I would post my response, and save myself from having to explain the same thing to others:
My comment reflects how much of a hard-nosed skeptic I have become in the last 15 – 20 years. At the very least, homeopathy or acupuncture needs the willing suspension of disbelief from the patient to have any chance of working, and I’m just not capable of working up to that. The realities of life have just been too hard-edged for me to put faith in prayer or magical thinking.
It’s not that I am bitter, or brittle. In fact, I am remarkably optimistic and hopeful, given all I have lived through and all I have seen. But I am much less willing to invest my energy into any enterprise which doesn’t seem to be well grounded in proven reality. I look for tangible ways to manifest my hopes, and to do what I can to help others.
Communion of Dreams is one such effort – entertainment, perhaps a little dreaming to inspire, maybe with some ideas to provoke thought. Caring for Martha Sr was another, and from that sprang a book which I hope will be able to aid many others in very real and tangible ways.So I appreciate your thoughts, and your motivation, in writing. But though I may be in pain, I prefer to proceed on my own path. It is one I understand.
Jim Downey
* I don’t really need to explain, do I?
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, NASA, Phil Plait, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Space, tech
One of the main technological features of the setting of Communion of Dreams is the Advanced Survey Array – an artificial satellite in orbit around Titan, which is searching for likely planets to colonize in nearby star systems – planets which would be able to sustain Terran life. When I started writing CoD, finding such planets was still very much beyond our current tech – exoplanets of any sort were still just being inferred from other data.
But we’ve come a long way in the last decade. From Phil Plait’s latest blog post on Exoplanets:
Direct imaging of exoplanets is perhaps the newest field in all of astronomy. Ten years ago it didn’t exist, and was something of a dream. Now we have images of seven tiny dots, seven blips of light indicating the presence of mighty planets.
And with the advent of spectroscopy, we’ll learn even more: how hot they are, and what they have in their atmospheres. Eventually, with new technology, new telescopes on space, we’ll be able to split their light ever finer, and who knows? Maybe, one day not too long from now, we’ll see the tell-tale sign of molecular oxygen… the only way we know of to have molecular oxygen in an atmosphere over long periods of time is through biological activity. If we ever see it… that, my friends, will be quite a day indeed.
As I have noted previously, this is one of the dangers in writing near-term SF: that actual technological developments can outstrip what the writer envisions all too easily. We’re still not to the tech of my novel, but we’re further along than I would have guessed. Good thing that the book will soon be in print . . .
Jim Downey
Gotta love the geeky stuff. What happens when you drop water onto a superhydrophobic carbon nanotube? This:
The header reference starts about 2:25.
I love this sort of stuff. And it seems really timely to come across it when I am wrapping up work on the minor revisions of Communion of Dreams, since in there I have descriptions of superfluid materials which behave in non-intuitive ways. Kinda fun!
Jim Downey
OK, I made it through one-sixth of the Sixty Symbols. And I’ve enjoyed them. I’ll probably make it through the rest of them. But I don’t think I’ll do any more reviews of the videos. They’re good, but there really isn’t much for me to say beyond what I have already, since while the content changes, there isn’t much more to add other than that.
So, today’s symbol 
will be the last, unless one of the other videos I look at prompts me to write something.
Dark Matter is like a chocolate pie. No, seriously. Except it doesn’t really interact with the matter of most of the rest of the universe, so it’s like a chocolate pie that you could eat but wouldn’t taste. Oh, it would make you fat if you ate it, since it does have some effect on gravity. Or something like that.
OK, snark aside, this is a good recap of why scientists think that some 23% of all the matter in the universe seems to have gone missing, but has to be there somewhere. It’s worth watching this video in order to understand the issues involved, even though the science to date is very uncertain, as are the models suggested to provide an explanation. And don’t even get me started on theories concerning the 73% of the dark energy which is also missing. Because the vid sets that aside as a whole ‘nuther problem.
So, farewell, Sixty Symbols, at least for now. But thanks at least for giving me a craving for chocolate this morning.
Jim Downey
is the symbol for random force or Brownian motion. I did not remember this, if I ever actually knew it. So, score one for this Sixty Symbols video.
And I’m not sure whether it was intentional or not, but the actual video has echoes of randomness that are kinda funny. Some of the cut-aways to show a little bit of styrene bouncing along on a vibrating bed of small brass spheres seem pretty random, and the person doing the narration ends with a recap of what he’s just said, then sort of turns from the camera and asks “Have I finished?” I like that kind of structural consistency and ambiguity.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Music, Science, Science Fiction, Sixty Symbols, YouTube
“Now it’s complete because it’s ended here.”
That’s from Dune, of course. The context is that it sums up the practical attitude of the Fremen – no dithering, no misgivings, just figuratively take a knife and cut the thing off, so you have a conclusion.
But that is also the attitude of scientists, when it comes to 
, at least according to the Sixty Symbols video about infinity.
It’s a good vid, and I recommend it. No, nothing terribly impressive about the images or production values. But it has a clarity that conveys how scientists think: they may be theoretical, but they’re also practical. They don’t like the concept of infinity, at least not when it is applied to understanding the physical universe. They’d rather leave that to the mathematicians. As a number of the scientists say, when infinity shows up in one of their equations/models, then there’s something wrong with the equation/model.
Jim Downey
A hand mirror? I think I had forgotten that. Which is interesting, because I know full well what the symbol 
means, both in astronomical terms and otherwise.
Anyway, the bit about the mirror is about the only new thing I got out of this well done but very pedestrian video. But part of that may simply be due to the fact that I’m a space exploration geek from way back, and remember following the different probe missions sent to Venus when I was a kid. And the thing is short – less than five minutes – so if you need a refresher course about what we know about Venus, take a look.
Jim Downey
OK, as you might guess from my BBTI project, I am a sucker for “homebrew science”. I love people who are willing to spend some time and a little money to sort out the various issues and make use of current tech in order to do their own type of research, just for shits and giggles.
This is one such project: using a weather balloon, a digital video camera, and an iPhone, combined with a bit of styrofoam and ingenuity, these guys sent a camera into the edge of space – to some 100,000 feet. And then they recovered the camera, which landed just 30 miles from their launch point, thanks to the GPS tracking of the iPhone.
Now, how cool is that?
My hat’s off to you, Luke Geissbuhler & crew.
Jim Downey
What’s big, round, and cost a gazillion dollars – all in order to just smash things? Why, the 
Large Hadron Collider, of course.
At least that might be the impression you take away from the first part of today’s Sixty Symbols video.
Oh, there’s actually a lot of good science and decent imagery in the video, as well. But it’s an odd mix of being too simplistic and then on the other hand assuming that you understand a fair amount of physics. The explanations are good, if a little basic – but then there are repeated use of images showing the energy traces from collisions (in both two and three dimensions) without much in the way of explanations of what it is you are seeing. Someone who doesn’t understand those might easily come to a conclusion that they’re some kind of explosion (which they are, but not in the sense most people think) and think that the whole thing is dangerous (which it is, but only if the multiple safety features fail). That there have been some problems with this massive machine which resulted in a segment of superconducting magnets breaking loose and dumping a ton of liquid helium into the tunnel doesn’t help matters. These are the sorts of things which may well have contributed to the nonsensical fears in the popular press about the LHC creating a black hole and destroying the Earth.
Anyway, it’s a good video, if you ignore some of these problems. I did learn a couple of things from it (I didn’t realize that they were getting their particles accelerated to within 10 meters-per-second of the speed of light, for example). And I like that they did address how basic scientific research leads to real world applications which more than pay for themselves in the aggregate, though that almost seemed like an afterthought at the end of the video. So if you get a chance, check it out.
Jim Downey
That’s an exchange in today’s Sixty Symbols video, on the subject of asteroids: 
But the point is made clearer as the scientist explains that the threat is unlikely – yet, if we had a major impact, the results would be catastrophic.
However, the bulk of the relatively short (6:36) vid is just talking about the asteroid belt, and how it is now thought to be a planetary body which failed to form, due to the gravitational effects of the other planets. One good item was discussion of how even though this is the case, the vastness of space is such that the chances of encountering an asteroid while traversing the belt is very remote.
It would have been nice if they talked about project WISE, which was used to detect some 25,000 new asteroids recently. But I suppose it was important that they talked about the 1970s video game “Asteroids”, instead.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 