Adopt a star

Everyone should adopt a star, and I recommend choosing yours with the aid of planetarium software such as Starstrider. Choosing it from the sky at night without a telescope is more limiting, obviously.

I expect many people (probably the more extroverted sort, on the whole) would gravitate towards the biggest and brightest stars such as Betelgeuse, whereas people who are more like me would try and go for a star that nobody else would choose: just another star in the crowd whose significance lies simply in the fact that you chose it. (Well, you might have some other reason that guides your selection, but in the end that’s what it boils down to.) Either way, you shouldn’t rush into the choice; it has to be a star you can live with.

Of course, my star is HIP 20740. From a terrestrial perspective it’s about 400 light years away, slightly to the Orion side of the Hyades, and has an apparent magnitude of 9.2 (in other words well and truly invisible to the naked eye).

Some more Australian vocabulary

This is the final installment in the series of posts inspired by comments I left in the archives of Lynne Murphy’s blog (previous installments here and here). I won’t mention everything that I mentioned there, and I’ll mention some things that I didn’t mention there too.

Words that mean different things in different dialects can be fun.

Television links

I’m currently in the process of reviewing early posts on this blog, which I do once every few months to make sure that everything on the blog is worthy of staying on the blog. I see no sense in keeping something in the archives forever just because it was worth writing at the time. During these pruning sessions, I edit, augment, merge and delete my old posts whenever it seems appropriate to do so.

When this blog was newer I wrote some material about television programs which took up three seperate posts, but now I feel that it would be best to take what’s worth preserving from those three posts and summarise it in just one post.

Skeptics’ convention

The Australian Skeptics have recently announced the date of this year’s national convention, to be held here in Adelaide in October. I plan to attend, with the hope of meeting some interesting people.

I’m advertising the convention on this blog for two reasons - one, because people who read this blog might be interested in the convention, and two, because people attending the convention might be interested in this blog. Between now and then I intend to write more frequently than I otherwise would about topics of interest to sceptics, but two important points about this should be borne in mind.

Time for a revolution

I’ve always thought that our way of telling time doesn’t fit our culture very well, particularly the way that a day officially begins at midnight. What sense does that make in a culture where people so often stay up beyond that time? Below is my idea for a better system.

Let the day be divided into four sections: morning (6:00am to midday), afternoon (midday to 6:00pm), evening (6:00pm to midnight) and night (midnight to 6:00am). It seems to me that these definitions are very similar to the way people already use these terms, but under my proposal it would be official.

Let night be known as post-evening and also as pre-morning, so that “post-evening Saturday” is synonymous with “pre-morning Sunday“. This should be thought of as analagous to the fact that in music, “C Sharp” is synonymous with “D Flat“. Thus the six hours from midnight to 6am would belong equally to both the day before and the day after, and during that period you could please yourself how to use the terms “yesterday” and “tomorrow” (just as people do now after midnight, but without the uneasy feeling of being technically incorrect).

More Starshots: The location of Heaven

Using Starstrider (the software I mentioned in my previous post), I have found a G-class star with a really nice view. I’m choosing to believe (at least in jest) that it is the location of Heaven. The star in question is about four hundred light years from Earth, and is known to astronomers by such inspiring names as HIP 20740 and HD 28113. Here are links to its web pages on Simbad and Wikisky.

What do I like about this star (apart from the fact that it’s a yellow G-class like the sun)? Well, for one thing, the Pleiades are about 100 light years away and perfectly aligned with the gap in the Milky Way which contains the stars Deneb and Sadr. Exactly 180 degrees across the sky, the stars Betelgeuse and Rigel guard opposite sides of another gap in the Milky Way. I happen to think these alignments look cool, and would probably give rise to interesting mythologies (the only snag is that you generally wouldn’t be able to see both from a single location on a planet).

Our place in the sky

Have you ever wondered what significance our Sun might have in alien astrology? This post contains pictures of imaginary constellations from the night skies of hypothetical planets orbiting real stars. All stars in these constellations are real, and in each case one of them is always our very own Sun.

I created the images using the shareware program Starstrider. It’s an excellent program in theory (and mostly in practise, too) but I’ve always felt it’s a little too buggy for the $50 US asking price. However, I’ve now decided to buy it, for two reasons. One, the exchange rate right now is such that it probably really is worth the price. Two, I expect that the next release of the program (which might fix some bugs) will not be compatible with my computer.

First of all, the the view from Alpha Centauri shows our Sun to be the very tip of an animalesque constellation’s snout. Compared to Delta Persei, which is quite a different orifice of the same beast, we may consider ourselves fortunate.

Magic and maths

This is for people who enjoy reading about recreational mathematics (not necessarily doing it) and also like a bit of magic. Basically, some folk over at the magic discussion group Talkmagic liked the way I explained a certain mathematical card force, and I thought my blog readers might enjoy it too.

For more information: The trick in question is the one described here and simulated here. All presentations involve minor variations on the rules, which is to be expected. The original Talkmagic thread is here.

If you enjoy magic, check out my other blog, the “Invisible Hoard“.

Calculator

If you designed your own scientific calculator - nothing too fancy or revolutionary, there are no bonus points for breaking with tradition nor for seeing how many buttons you can fit on - where would you place the buttons to make the calculator most pleasing to your mind’s eye? There is elegance and intellectual beauty in a layout whereby buttons adjacent to each other implement similar functionality and there is a reason for every button being situated exactly where it is, but how exactly would you maximise the elegance of your calculator? In this post, I will consider my own answer.

The man in the moon

Wikipedia has the audacity to tell us what the man in the moon looks like (at the time of writing, at least). In truth, of course, the man in the moon has many interpretations, none of which can really be called official. It is reinvented over and over again. Various sweeping claims in the Wikipedia article ought to be prefixed with “One popular interpretation is …“.

A quick Google lead me to a blog post where someone’s illustrated the man in the moon as it is seen from here in Australia. I agree, broadly, with this interpretation (that is, it approximately conforms to the man in the moon as I have seen it since I was five years old). “Broadly”, however, is all very well but I wish to be pedantic about the details.