Things That Make Me Happy -- #4: Stargazing

Every Friday I'll be posting about one thing that makes me happy in order to complete goal #82: Identify 100 things that make me happy.

Today's topic is: Stargazing

(WALL-E ©Disney/Pixar)

When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut. True, I also wanted to be a firefighter, a teacher, a cop, a secretary, a paleontologist, an ice skater, and Alexi Lalas. But nothing has kept me as fascinated or as in awe as the stars have. Some of my happiest moments have been spent looking up at the night sky, wondering at the beauty of the universe and marveling at the awesomeness of science.

My grandfather took my sister and I to go look at Hale-Bopp in '97 and I can remember being ridiculously excited as I peered through the binoculars at the trail of the comet. Much later, when I was in college, he and I went deep into the country and pulled over to the side of the road to try and catch a meteor shower. Even though we didn't see any meteors, the sheer magnitude of stars in the sky was breathtaking.

It isn't just stars or comets that fueled my passion for looking at the sky. In high school my family took my friend Kristy to Beaver Meadow's observatory so that we could all use a telescope to see Saturn and Uranus. It's humbling to know that there are objects orbiting around our sun that are so large that your own puny planet could fit inside of them...several times.

The universe is staggering and staggeringly beautiful. Wherever I am, whether it's in the middle of a light-polluted city or standing in a field in the middle of nowhere, I like to look up at the stars and see how many I can find/identify. It's a peaceful sort of feeling and an exciting one. I don't need a religion or any other outdated mode of explaining the world to appreciate what I'm seeing. I think it's even more impressive that the universe had no creator and that natural, scientific processes are responsible for the beauty around us.
________________

Woah, one full week of posts. Can I do it again next week? Only time will tell. :)

-J

Stay Classy, Fox News

Via Original Skrip

I have a hard time taking Faux Fox News seriously even on their best days, but sometimes they do things that drop them even lower in my estimation, which is saying quite a lot.

A recent paper in Current Biology has compared the methane production of modern cows with the projected methane production of ancient sauropods to look at just how much these massive dinosaurs may have contributed to the warmer climate of the Mesozoic. For anyone who's not sure what that sentence means, it's basically saying that flatulence on the part of dinosaurs may have been a factor in the climate of that age. Notice that I said "may have been." This paper is not stating that as a fact, merely reporting that it may have been a possibility.

So, what does this have to do with Fox? The headline for their article on this paper reads as follows: "Dinosaurs 'gassed' themselves into extinction, British scientists say." If that wasn't enough of a gem, here's the first line of the article:

Dinosaurs may have farted themselves to extinction, according to a new study from British scientists.

Okay, there is so much wrong with this. First, if they had actually read the paper (or even the summary of the paper), they would have seen that this is not an article about extinction. In fact, the only mention of extinction comes at the end of the paper and it's not even about dinosaurs:

Although dinosaurs are unique in the large body sizes they achieved, there may have been other occasions in the past where animal-produced methane contributed substantially to global environmental gas composition: for example, it has been speculated that the extinction of megafauna coincident with human colonisation of the Americas may be related to a reduction of atmospheric methane levels.

The second issue I have with this article is the absolute classlessness of it all. Apparently bathroom humor is seen as journalism at Fox. Where I come from, farts are funny, but they aren't exactly what I want to read about in my news. Thirdly, the writer of this article seems to assume that the issue of the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs is now solved, as he states that:

Until now, an asteroid strike and volcanic activity around 65 million years ago had seemed the most likely cause of their extinction.

"Until now?" One paper gets written about dinosaur farts and automatically you think that that overthrows a few dozen years of research that has already developed a plausible explanation (i.e., that dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid)? Seriously?

All these researchers were trying to say is that there is possible evidence that one of the reasons why the globe was so warm was because of methane produced by dinosaurs. There's nothing in the paper to assert that dinosaurs were killed by flatulence, which doesn't seem to have stopped Fox from publishing an article that blatantly states that. Of course, only last month they were saying that it was egg-laying that caused them to die out. What'll be next month, Fox? Dinosaurs were getting too many abortions? Gay dinosaurs destroyed the sanctity of heterosexual dinosaurs' mating rituals?

Here's a good rebuttal to Fox's stupidity from io9: "No, Fox News, dinosaurs did not fart their way to extinction."

Also, just because I can't resist it:

Via Hide Your Arms

-J

Black Hole: 1. Star: 0.

Sometimes I wonder why people tend to tune me out from time to time when I talk to them. Then I remember that it's because I find things like black holes interesting and I like to lecture talk about them.

This article from Discover Magazine caught my eye yesterday. It's the story of a wayward star whose orbit wandered too close to a black hole and became the stellar version of dinner. Let that be a lesson to you. Not sure what the lesson is, exactly, but I'm sure it's there somewhere.

I've always regretted not studying math and science harder in school. Part of it was that I had teachers who weren't all that great; part of it was that I wasn't really engaged in the material. I have a basic understanding of science in general and an above-average understanding of the earth sciences in particular, but I'm pretty sure that Koko the Gorilla has better math skills than I do. Alas, this means no ridiculously awesome career involving telescopes, lab coats, or watching black holes "eat."

 *le sigh*

-J