Mythbusters

Oh man, this comic says it so well. :)



They're not science, and yet they are! And Zombie Feynman!

Y Baad Speeling Iz Gud

Stolen from a friend of mine, who stole it from elsewhere.

* 0. Stop spelling correctly before it's too late! | 03/04/2008 07:41:42 PM UTC


The Daye Aftur Tumurrow: Y Baad Speeling Iz Gud

Recently, I've seen many people on the internet trying to correct others' spelling. Unfortunately, in doing so, you are endangering the lives of every good person on earth.

As you all know, Earth rotates on its axis, giving us day and night and stopping any portion of earth from freezing or incinerating. What you may not know is that the primary driving force of this rotation is English teachers. More precisely, English teachers rolling in their graves. Thanks to conservation of angular momentum, for a teacher to spin one way forces Earth to spin the other way. Our ENTIRE EXISTANCE depends on these teachers! To clarify the point, here is a diagram:



But how, you ask, could this possibly be related to the internet? As it turns out, teacher grave-spinning is fueled by only two sources: 1st grade essays, and the Internet. Unfortunately for us, 1st grade spelling has rapidly improved in the last decade, leaving the internet as the only source of terrible spelling. For each idiot on the internet, one teacher spins, and this effect has increased over the past decade to become the only force keeping our planet alive. Misuses of there/they're/their and you're/your are especially potent, and account for over 90% of the Earth's rotational velocity.



Why do you care? Because your life depends on it. I put out as a call to all mankind, PROMOTE BAD SPELLING! It is the only thing between us and a horrible, barren world where everything good is dead. For example, consider the following image (it may be shocking to some, parental consent is advised for young children). The red areas are burnt to a crisp, the blue areas are at roughly -42 Kelvin, and only the yellow portions survive.



To prevent the horrific image just pictured, you must forget the grammar and spelling you have learned. Still, if you choose to continue in your rash action, please at least slow down the damage you cause by including the following in your signature. The repeated posting of such content should be enough to allow those truly willing to solve the problem to do so.

Q u o t e:
Their they're, an tey hav there lewt w/thm. Your so dum you're brane is leik a peenut.

Thank you for reading this, and please, consider the future of humanity when you post.

And because I'm who I am (physicist and daughter of an English teacher), I just had to reply...

For completeness, I must point out that there is actually a secondary source of angular momentum: living English teachers rolling their eyes. However, this is a second-order effect for two reasons. Firstly, angular momentum depends upon the mass and the radius of the object (L=mvr), and eyes are both less massive (m) and smaller (r) that entire bodies, so each individual eye will have less of an effect than each individual body.

Secondly, although it is wel known that teachers (of which English teachers are a subset) have eyes in the backs of their heads (resulting in 4-8 eyes per teacher, depending on whether they wear glasses on any of said eyes), there are stll many fewer living English-teacher eyes than dead English-teacher bodies.

Combining these two reasons, the angular momentum from living English teachers rolling their eyes is expected to be more than four orders of magnitude smaller than the angular momentum from dead English teachers rolling in their graves, and therefore can be safely ignored for the purposes of this argument.

Your Astrological Career!

The Chronicle of Higher Education as a *stellar* article on how to find the best career after college - no more of those fancy schmancy personality tests, instead counselors should just ask your sign.

Took me three readings of the intro/closing paragraphs to figure out that it was tongue-in-cheek, despite my *knowing* the Chronicle wouldn't espouse pseudo-science. Have I mentioned I'm not too good at dry humor?

And my ideal career? Academe! :-P

Aquarius: (January 21-February 19) Like all Aquarians, you are unique. You have the celestial gifts of depth and foresight; you are the shaper of new paradigms. You are probably the voice of your generation. Everyone likes you and thinks you are beautiful, kind, and progressive. You are reluctant to stay in one place for too long: You need your freedom to be who you are, and many other places need to benefit from your wisdom and generosity. To Kill a Mockingbird is your favorite book and movie. Above all, you want to help people, and there is nowhere that they can hide in the long run. Of course, you don't want to be the "tool" of any kind of "institution," but you also know that the children are our future. Consider a degree in ethnomusicology, education, women's studies, ecology, or social work. Once you've grown beyond academe, consider expanding your horizons as a community activist, organic farmer, folk artist, co-op worker, weaver, basement gardener, or astrologer.

...or astrologer...

Creationists' Science Ed Master's

And I *still* say that an online Master's of Science Ed degree from the Institute for Creation Research is worth the paper it's printed on.

Follow up here

Total Lunar Eclipse Weds Feb 20

I keep forgetting to mention, there's a total lunar eclipse tomorrow night, Weds Feb 20, 2008. It's got great visibility too: North America from Texas to the East Coast, all South America, West Africa, and Europe from Germany on West. It starts at around 8:43pm for those of us on the East Coast.

Here's what I recommend for a sane person to view it. Go out around 8:35pm (or the equivalent for your time zone) dressed warmly (layers - Bulky is Beautiful!), and bring a camera or tele if you have but it's not needed. Watch until you get cold (5-15 minutes). Go inside for 15 minutes to a half hour. Repeat until done, making sure to come out 5 minutes before the other times listed in this image for the most interesting parts to view.

Clear skies!

Earth-like Planets commonly form, says Spitzer study

Spitzer (the "IR Hubble") scientists have recently put out an interesting paper implying that the majority of Sun-like stars may form Earth-like planets. (Hat tip to the Bad Astronomer for the head's up.) They studied a set of 300 Sun-like stars and the dust around them - dust glows in the infrared, so Spitzer easily sees it.

The color and brightness of the glowing indicate the temperature of the dust. The temperature of the dust is only (essentially) affected by the light from the parent star, so the temperature depends on the distance from the star. So by looking at each star, even though they can't actually resolve the disks they can from the *color* of the disk determine how the dust is distributed around the star.

Next thing they did is determined the age of the stars. I'm less clear on how that was done, since Never mind, I read the actual article (PDF), and they say "Ages for these stars were estimated from pre-main sequence evolutionary tracks, as well as kinematic association with groups of known age (e.g. Mama jek et al. 2002)." I'm actually a little skeptical about this, since those methods also rely on the color and brightness of the star/disk (since we cannot resolve the two separately), so it seems like circular reasoning to me. I ended up posting a question about this on the Bad Astronomy blog to see if I can get any response.

One thing I'm skeptical about is the method they used to determine the age of the stars. For the most part the stars and the disks cannot be resolved. They get information about the disk from the IR spectrum of the star/disk combination. They get the age of the stars (according to the actual paper) from evolutionary tracks on the HR diagram - which rely upon the spectrum of the star/disk combination. Isn't there some circular reasoning there? Or are the evolutionary tracks based upon the visual spectrum and we're able to assume the visual wavelengths are entirely uncontaminated by the disk?

However, let's move on. Assuming they know the disk description, and assuming they know the age of the star, and they selected stars that are all like the Sun, they can then track how the disk changes with the age of the star. They clearly find that the disk thins out at an Earth-like orbital radius as the star ages. One possible explanation of this is that an Earth-like planet formed and cleared out the dust (by accreting it). It's also possible that the dust was just blown out by the stellar wind, but I am under the impression that the study ruled this out - that dust around and Earth orbit is preferentially dissipating as the star ages, not that all dust is dissipating which would be the result of a stellar wind.

So the conclusion: nearly all Sun-like stars form Earth-like planets. Very interesting. We have yet to *see* these planets, but there's evidence they may exist.

Evolution Demo

This video demonstrating a simple version of natural selection and evolution is 10 minutes long.



Unfortunately I don't think this video is likely to convince creationists of the veracity of evolution - they will just complain that the code isn't right or something, but perhaps it will make a difference with the fence-sitters.