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Post by Ijon the Asano on Jun 20, 2013 8:39:47 GMT -5
Oh, my. My half-brother used to go on and on about Velikovsky. Everything old is new again.
A month or so back I was in the mood for some pseudo-babble one Sunday and searched YouTube for "Atlantis." Found a BBC bit on a guy who seems to be sort of Erich von Däniken for the new millenium. Thankfully it pretty well hung his arguments out to dry. These days I don't even trust the BBC on such topics as much as I once did.
Heh heh . . . I was just remembering Sagan's discussion of Velikovsky in Cosmos, where the Jupiter model had a little trap door from which he pulled Venus. "Congratulations! It's a girl!"
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Post by nondescript spice on Jun 20, 2013 10:58:42 GMT -5
does it make me an idiot that i know next to nothing about astronomy? i just like staring at the sparkly dots in the sky and i can stare at the moon until my eyes fall out of my head. i just could never care about the math of astronomy. and i'm a genius at math. well, no, i'm lying. but the science & calculations took out all the beauty for me, so i never got into that side of it. i was going to say you guys should start a thread about it, but i suppose we're in one now. durhey.
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Post by afriendlychicken on Jun 20, 2013 17:17:48 GMT -5
I love that picture! And don't worry Spice, I wont pretend to understand the math, I just loved looking at the night sky and wanted to know what all those patterns I saw were. Until this day I still enjoy going out and laying on the grass, or a car hood, and watching the star scape go by with a set of binoculars next to me. And I still enjoy finding asterisms, those are stars that form patterns and like the constellation are line-of-sight and are not bound by gravity like a lot of star clusters. This months Sky & Telescope mentions one that someone named the kangaroo in the constellation Bootes. My favorite is the coat hanger in Vulpecula which can be seen with the naked eye: Can you see it? It's there towards the upper left. The hanger part is facing left. 'Heh heh . . . I was just remembering Sagan's discussion of Velikovsky in Cosmos, where the Jupiter model had a little trap door from which he pulled Venus. "Congratulations! It's a girl!" ' I think that's why this new book has Phaeton skip Jupiter. You know, so the Velikovsky thing can't be aimed at this idea. I just found another dozy. On the copyright page I find an apology by the publisher for part 4 because most of it is ideas and materials covered and proposed by one Zecharia Sitchin. Bells start ringing: 'ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!' Now why does that name ring those bells? Why it's the humans-came-from-ancient-astronauts-on-Nibiru author. I guess this book is now a comedy! No wonder it has over 3000 references. They really did their research on this door stopper.
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Post by Ijon the Asano on Jun 20, 2013 17:35:25 GMT -5
Second the love for anything to do with Calvin & Hobbes.
Y'know, it's a shame, though, that the science and math has an aura of grey gloominess. Maybe it's how it's taught? Truth to tell, I began struggling at memorizing the multiplication tables, but I bulled through. I can still remember the moment when I was sweating over my differential equations text and suddenly, pop! Sense was made.
Good math is like good poetry. I can't quite recollect a Feynman quote on the topic, but something about understanding how should make the phenomenon more rather than less beautiful. 'Course, I seem to remember that he wasn't as good with the formal math himself. Seems he'd work everything out in pictures in his head, and then I think it was Dirac that he's kind of act it out for and Dirac would formalize it.
But I'm a physicist groupie. Once saw Freeman Dyson give a lecture on set theory of which I understood not a word, just drank him in.
Heh heh . . . in Disturbing the Universe Dyson said that the jester character in The Seventh Seal (I've had one too many to recollect the character name) reminded him of Feynman: everyone thought him crazy because he saw things they couldn't.
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Post by afriendlychicken on Jun 20, 2013 19:23:55 GMT -5
I'm a physicist groupie also. I think the only astronomer alive today I can name is Harlan Arp and his wonderful peculiar galaxies. I was thinking Neil deGrasse Tyson, oh wait, astrophysicist. John Gribbin! Darn! There's that Jupiter thing he's blushing about & he's an astrophysicist. Freeman Dyson...aw man! Gregory Benford? Writes SF and is a...crap! (typing list of astronomers in wikipedia...) Aha! John Wheeler. Kip Thorne. Martin Rees. Phil Plait...okay, how did I forget about The Bad Astronomer? Roger Penrose. I'm getting embarrassed now since I own books by Penrose. Queen's Brian May. Oh yeah, that's right! David Levy...I'm starting to think I should hide behind the couch. Yoji Kondo. Stephen 'bleeping' Hawking. Fred Espenak. Frank Drank. Hiroshi Abe. Okay, that's the last time I use wikipedia. Embarrassing me like this... Much later edit: Since half of those are still astrophysicists I blame it all on fun. Heck, at least they had something to do with astronomy.
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Post by nondescript spice on Jun 20, 2013 22:31:44 GMT -5
check it out, nerds! i was sitting in the dark and noticed the light coming in from my door and knew it was la luna.
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Post by afriendlychicken on Jun 21, 2013 4:08:57 GMT -5
check it out, nerds! i was sitting in the dark and noticed the light coming in from my door and knew it was la luna. Hey! Who you calling a...nice, cool picture. Your phone camera's about as good as mine. I walked out to check after I saw your photo and it's dark out there, which goes without saying. There's very little street lights around my area. They're only placed along the main thoroughfare at the beginning of each street and the nearest major light source is 20 miles away. And it's over cast so I know why it's so hot. The humidity must be in the high 80%s right now. I can just make out where the moon is by a tiny light patch in the clouds. Did you ever see Bertolucci's movie "La Luna?" It's a pretty disturbing film.
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Post by nondescript spice on Jun 21, 2013 8:53:22 GMT -5
no, i've never seen it, but i've wanted to.
when i went outside to take the picture, i sat on my front steps for a couple of minutes, watching the clouds pass over the moon, but the humidity here is settling in for the summer, so i didn't linger. the air felt solid.
you read in books about moonlight coming through the windows, but how often do you actually see it? it's mesmerizing. there was the teenaged werewolf - maybe i'm the middle aged werewolf? team nondescript spiiiiiiice!
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Post by Phantom Engineer on Jun 21, 2013 17:07:28 GMT -5
This blog snuck up on me. I'd like to be a joiner inner and read it all cuz chicken is my Hawaiian brother but there's just too much to read. Too bad.
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Post by nondescript spice on Jun 21, 2013 17:21:14 GMT -5
yer such a diva!
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Post by Phantom Engineer on Jun 21, 2013 17:25:52 GMT -5
Oh sure, and so much more!
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Post by spackle on Jun 21, 2013 17:30:06 GMT -5
Lookit, yer string o' pearls is slipping.
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Post by Phantom Engineer on Jun 21, 2013 17:34:28 GMT -5
Wait a minute, are we usurping chicken's blog? I hope so!
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Post by nondescript spice on Jun 21, 2013 17:37:29 GMT -5
party at chicken's! woo!
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Post by Crowfan on Jun 21, 2013 17:49:34 GMT -5
The keg is on its way.
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