Links: 2015 — 8 (with a request or two)

I have, regrettably, been too busy to blog lately. But I’m here now.

There are two personal items I’d like to discuss, so I’ll begin with the first, follow it with selected links from around the Web, and finish with the second item. Both involve some kind of appeal for assistance, although one more so than the other.

The first concerns a card game I invented, and that we playtested at my birthday party last month.

[Update: This first request has been answered. I have shortened the text below to reflect this.]

My birthday was June 12, but for reasons pertaining to Dad’s recent retirement, it was one week later that a small celebratory gathering took place. There were five people present: a friend, an uncle, my parents, and myself (unfortunately, the uncle had to leave early). I left most of the organising and decision-making to my parents, but playtesting a card game was my one explicit request.

The game was one that I invented and blogged about in 2011, but at the time it was a work in progress and the rules yet to be fully refined. But recently I took it off the backburner, made a few small adjustments, and updated my original blog post accordingly.

The twist is that this is not a game you can play with the familiar deck of hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs. Rather it is designed for Ganjifa — traditional playing cards from India that are typically circular rather than rectangular with at least 96 cards per deck. Regrettably they are used for only a handful of games and even those are dying out. I don’t care too much about the traditional games, but it’s a pity that the cards themselves lack a living tradition of new games being invented. The world could do with more Ganjifa games, and the game I’ve invented is my contribution to that end.

Here’s where my appeal to the Internet comes in — because the one thing I have not managed to do is decide on a name for the game. Since it is played with Indian cards, I feel that giving it an Indian name would be an appropriate tribute to the culture that created them, and have been appealing for help from people who know Indian languages and are interested in helping to name a new card game.

If you can help, or know someone who probably can, I would greatly appreciate it. I’ve suggested the name केंद्र कड़ी (crudely: Kendra Kari) for reasons outlined in my Google Plus post, but I really require informed human feedback and not just the results of automated translation tools.

[Update: I’ve now received a response to this query and have updated the game.]

Now that you’ve read this far, here are some links:

• What to expect on the approach to Pluto.
• If no alternative presents itself, some flatworms inject themselves with sperm.
• I think having my viruses analysed might be quite interesting.
• Google’s neural network hallucinates. Two of my favourite images are here and here.
• The winners of the Earth and Sky Photo Contest are worth ten minutes of your time.
• Google Earth fractals by Paul Bourke, published 2012. Via Stan Carey on Twitter. Direct links to selected images: [************]
• I’ve been using the Planets Close-Up theme in Firefox for years now, but recently downloaded the Oriental Spring in the Canyon theme, with the intent of alternating between the two themes as the mood strikes me.
• This article on Cracked is good, but I’m really recommending it for the links, some of which are very worth your while. (Should I tell you which, or should I just let you read all of them? Hmmm.)
• I’ve known about these fake bomb detectors for years, but had not understood the scale.

Now to the second personal item.

A while ago, just for fun, I decided to see if I could guess an approximate formula for time dilation in general relativity. I didn’t expect to be right, but using a combination of high school physics, Ockham’s Razor, and a few elementary facts, I gave it my best shot.

So I was genuinely delighted to discover later that my result checks out against real-world examples!

This page on Quora has a couple of obvious faults (the biggie is that the altitude of the ISS varies between 330 and 435 kilometres according to Wikipedia, so calculating a result to so many significant figures makes no sense), but the relevant formula corresponds closely to mine. Moreover, plugging their result into my formula puts the ISS in the right range — at about 375 kilometres. Another example I found is that time goes faster by 10 nanoseconds per year for every floor you go up in a building; again, my formula checks out, putting the difference between floors at a very reasonable three metres.

I am no genius (trust me on this), but in all the popular science I’ve read, I have never seen anyone mention that an approximate but workable formula for time dilation in general relativity is astonishingly easy to guess. Feeling that I’d stumbled on an angle that popular writers have missed but would be useful to others, I decided to write up my results as an article of my own. Please remember this is an un-factchecked draft, and I am no more an expert than the target reader, but you learn by doing. It’s written in the style of a popular science article, and is 1000 words long.

If any real popular physics writer reads this — I would love to hear your feedback. Also, you are welcome to take inspiration for your own blog posts, and I hope you will be so kind as to send me a link if you do. A tweet to @GoldHoarder will do nicely.

(Incidentally, I used a free PDF converter, so the links don’t work, but since they’re fully spelt out they won’t slow you down very much. Since it’s a draft, I find this acceptable.)

[Update: I linked to my relativity article in a comment here.]

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Winning Cosmos

This is the story of a competition I recently won.

In an episode of the Skeptic Zone podcast published while I was in Sydney, Richard Saunders announced a competition: to take a photograph on the theme Billions and Billions for a chance of winning a DVD set of the recent Cosmos remake.

Being on holiday I wasn’t planning to enter, but I did spend some time thinking about what sort of photograph one might take (it also made a good conversation topic). I decided that hundreds and thousands should feature somehow, and my best idea — given the time, resources and skills to pull it off — was as follows. (1) Bake a cake in a small, hemisphere-shaped bowl, and ice it to look like (half of) a giant hundred-and-thousand. (2) Choose a background for the photograph that represents the void of space  — perhaps a dark cloth laid over some surface — and sprinkle hundreds and thousands all over it. (3) Place the cake amidst the hundreds and thousands; and on top of the cake, place a lego figure with a telescope.

I don’t have the resources to create this, but obviously there are people out there who could pull it off, and probably do something even better that I hadn’t thought of. So I didn’t think I had any hope of winning the competition, and was just hypothetically contemplating what I would do.

Then I went along to the August 7th Skeptics in the Pub (as described in my Sydney report), and chatted to some people from the Skeptic Zone podcast. The photograph competition came up in conversation with Jo Alabaster, who strongly encouraged me to enter, saying that there had been very few entries, and that even a diagram of my idea would be worth sending in.

My original idea might have been at the edge of possibility given enough time and borrowing of resources, but with a deadline just two weeks after the original announcement (more like one week by the time I got home from Sydney), it was completely impossible. Still, by now I knew that a simpler photograph was in with a chance, and the Cosmos DVD set was a pretty alluring prize. Then — as I was contemplating what resources I might find on an upcoming grocery shop — I hit on an idea that was easily within my grasp, and a multi-layered interpretation of the challenge. All I needed to buy was one bag of icing sugar.

At some point I looked up the other entries on the Skeptic Zone facebook page, and indeed there weren’t many. This surprises me: the much-talked-about Cosmos series is surely an attractive prize, and not something many Australians would have seen already (people who subscribe to non-free-to-air TV are a small minority); I saw one episode on Youtube before it was taken down.

You can find my entry here, and I’ve also replicated it below. Here is the photograph:

And here is the explanation I sent with it. (A note on the calculation: if you google the size of an icing sugar particle, you’ll find figures between 10 and 100 micrometres. I used 100 cubic micrometres for my estimate … wait, that’s wrong, isn’t it? A cube 10 to 100 micrometres across is actually 1,000 to 1,000,000 cubic micrometres … call it 100,000 cubic micrometres … and a billion particles that size would take up a tenth of a litre … whoops, now I’m embarrassed.)

It’s a pair of equations, one horizontal, the other vertical, like a crossword. Physical objects stand in for quantities

The first equation reads: “100s & 1000s cubed is less than icing sugar”.

If hundreds and thousands (the famous confectionary) are called hundreds and thousands, then icing sugar could very reasonably be called billions and billions. In fact, I calculate that just one millilitre of icing sugar contains more than ten billion grains!

The second equation reads: “earth multiplied by icing sugar is less than universe”.

This ties the photograph to a cosmological theme, asserting that the universe contains the equivalent of billions and billions of earths.

By the time the deadline arrived I was expecting to win (although I liked the elegance of Jon Frary’s entry), and throughout the next day, tension was high. I checked the relevant links over and over, and as time passed I thought maybe I hadn’t won after all.

Then — about 31 minutes into episode 304 of the Skeptic Zone — the official announcement … I won!

I look forward to the DVDs. I’ve read enough reviews to know that the series is flawed — just like everything else in the real world — so I am not expecting perfection. I do, however, expect it to be very good, and that its strengths will outweigh its flaws by a considerable margin. Perhaps I will tell you what I thought.

Incidentally, long time readers will know this isn’t the first time I’ve won a science-related online competition. Last time I wrote a limerick.

Miscellaneity from my desk drawer

Over the years I’ve been blogging, I’ve found that leafing through the contents of my desk can be a rich source of inspiration. My desk drawers contain records of my own creativity from the past, as well as other sorts of memories, and I’ve written many blog posts based on that material.

But there is a tendency for miscellaneity to fall through the cracks. If something is particularly significant there’s a good chance I’ve already blogged about it, whereas other items have always seemed too trivial to share even though they’ve been in storage for years.

Today I’m going to share three of them. They may be trivial, but there’s no telling what will resonate with the interests of readers and inspire an interesting conversation in the comments. That would make them well worth including on the blog.

1. A querying language invented while at university.

At university I majored in computing, which naturally included a subject or two about databases — SQL, relational algebra, and all that stuff. Elsewhere in the course I learned to read and write in EBNF notation.

For my own amusement I sometimes toyed with inventing my own programming languages — not implementing them (inventing and implementing are two very different things), but figuring out how the syntax would work and writing documentation for them as though they actually existed. In a sense it was my way of consolidating what I was learning, especially about trade-offs between different programming languages and things like that.

One of my inventions was a querying language with the same functionality as SQL, but a syntax based more consistently on relational algebra. I’ve uploaded a copy of my documentation. It may be complete rubbish, but over a decade later it hardly matters.

2. An email exchange about sensory integration.

This is another item from my university days, but not connected to my studies.

At an autism conference many years ago, I bought a textbook on sensory integration, which interested me enough to write an email to one of the authors. I described some of the games I played as a child, and speculated that (to paraphrase for the blog) there may be a correlation between people who are prone to motion sickness and people who find it hard to keep a tidy room.

My hypothesis was that since picking items off the floor involves continual head altitude changes, people who struggle with it might often be those who find it hard to modulate vestibular sensations while simultaneously concentrating on a goal-directed task.

The textbook author replied, saying: “I was also interested in your comments about tidying up and vestibular/modulation difficulties. I have certainly noticed that tendency in children but none has ever explained it quite so graphically. I certainly will think about that.”

Or, as I once paraphrased it in a comment thread, she said that the idea was plausible and consistent with anecdotal observations.

3. A shortlist of aesthetically selected Arabic male names.

I’ve browsed the baby names website behindthename.com on numerous occasions. One time, on a whim, I decided to browse the section on male Arabic names, just to see what I liked the sound of. I was particularly looking for pairs of names that sound good together, consciously ignoring the fact that Western naming practices (first name plus middle name) are not usual in Arabic culture.

The three double names I liked best were:

• Rafiq Faruq
• Shihab Rashad
• Suhayl Amal

I suppose these could be of use if you ever need an Arabic character for a work of fiction.

Navigating the night sky

Which stars do you recognise when you look up at the night sky, and how do you find them?

I’ve been planning to re-introduce shorter, lighter blog posts on random topics, and one topic that seems fit for that purpose is to describe how I personally find my way around the sky at night. This is not meant as advice on how other people should navigate the sky; it’s just a description of how I do it, and you are welcome to reciprocate in the comments. It is also only a summary and not a guide, so please look things up if you need more information. Bear in mind that I’m in the southern hemisphere.

When the sky is not yet dark and only a few stars are visible, I like to identify those stars as early as I can. This requires being familiar with the shapes formed by only the brightest stars, without relying on dimmer ones for context.

I start by looking for the triangle formed by Sirius, Rigel, and Canopus, which is back-to-back with the triangle formed by Sirius, Rigel and Procyon. All of these stars are among the brightest in the sky, and Sirius is the brightest of all, so once you’ve identified Sirius you know that anything brighter is not a star. The angles between these stars can look quite different depending on whether they’re overhead or near the horizon, but I can usually identify them quickly. (From Sirius, the line to Canopus is longer than the line to Procyon, so I find it helpful to remember that this is the opposite of what you’d expect given that pro- invokes words like prolonged.)

Once I’ve identified Rigel I can easily find Betelgeuse, and thus predict where the belt of Orion will appear even before it is visible (good party trick). If the sky is dark with little light pollution, I also look nearby for the Hyades (a.k.a. the horns of Taurus) and identify Aldebaran.

My usual next step is to follow the zigzag line from Procyon to Sirius to Canopus and then take one more zag to Achernar. Achernar is the only bright star anywhere near its vicinity, so you don’t need much precision to find it. The line of best fit through these four bright stars I have nicknamed the false ecliptic, because if you didn’t know your way around the night sky you might assume they were planets.

We’ll come back to Achernar in a moment, but let’s now turn our attention to the stars of the Southern Cross (featured on the flags of many Southern Hemisphere countries) and the adjacent Pointers. These are easy to find, and not hard to identify individually. The Pointers are Alpha and Beta Centauri (also known as Rigel Kentaurus and Hadar, but I prefer the former names) and the stars of the Southern Cross are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis. Telling them apart is easy when you know that the sequence from brightest to dimmest proceeds clockwise, and that they are named in that order.

The classic way to find the South Celestial Pole is to draw a line through the long axis of the Southern Cross and another line passing between the Pointers at 90 degrees, and to find the point where those two imaginary lines meet. An alternative method — slightly more accurate but less often practical depending on what clouds and the horizon obsure — is to identify Beta Centauri (the lesser Pointer) and Achernar (which I promised we would return to), and find the point halfway between the two. It’s no bad thing to have two different methods for finding the Pole, because then you can verify one against the other and also use this as an alternative way to find Achernar.

In total, I can point to and name 14 stars in the night sky — Sirius, Rigel, Canopus, Procyon, Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, Achernar, plus the seven stars of the Pointers and Southern Cross. I’ve never made the effort to memorise any more. It’s perhaps worth noting that I live in a fairly light-polluted city, but spent most of my childhood on a farm with many more stars visible.

That’s about as much as I can say from a personal perspective; most other details are things you can look up. If you have a perspective you’d like to share, it is now your turn.

Some thoughts on synaesthesia

I’ve been planning to post about synaesthesia for some time, not because I have a lot to say, but to share the little I do have. This is part of a plan to write shorter posts about smaller topics, but hopefully more of them.

I’ll assume the reader has some idea of what synaesthesia is. One important aspect is the distinction between projective vs associative synaesthesia, which I first read about here. Usually when people think of synaesthesia, they think of the projective type, in which a literal experience of one sense is triggered by information detected by a different sense. In the associative type — which has less of a ‘wow’ factor and gets less press time — what is triggered is an abstraction rather than a literal sensory experience. It’s the difference between seeing the colour blue and thinking of the colour blue.

I am no synaesthete, as such. But people sometimes make the case that there is a continuum from the average person and a clear-cut synaesthete, and for the associative type I am inclined to believe this. I can certainly point to experiences of my own which might be dubbed ‘sub-synaesthetic’, in which I detect a certain rightness in complementing one sensory experience with the thought of another, even if I can’t say that one triggers the other. My impression is that most people can do the same, to differing degrees.

If you have either true synaesthetic or sub-synaesthetic experiences, please share them in the comments. Below are some of mine.

• I have long felt that if written Dutch were a colour, it would be hot pink. There is just something inescapably hot pink–ish about written Dutch.

• I’ve been known to connect music with certain tastes. For example this piece harmonises with the thought of soft toffee from an old-fashioned sweet shop, and this one (Ebb Tide by John Coleman) evokes a glass of chardonnay. Given how French the latter sounds it probably doesn’t surprise much, but there you have it. Other music evokes more complex associations, but that’s outside the scope of this post.

• Certain vowel sounds seem best complemented by certain colours, if I think about it at all. I’ve long felt the only colour that properly belongs with the eeee vowel (that’s [i] to linguists) is yellow — possibly because yyyyellow — tending through orange to red as more open front vowels are considered. Sometime last year I asked myself whether I could similarly associate colours with the back vowels, and while this required a deliberate effort I found I was able to consider a candidate and say, “Yes, that’s the one”. Here is my sub-synaesthetic (and interpolated) vowel diagram:
  

• That’s all I can think of, but I have a nagging feeling I’ve forgotten something. If so I can always add it later.

Your turn now.

P.S. I used this colour interpolating tool to make the above chart. Note that it has a bug that means it won’t work if the Red value is set to BB, but apart from that it’s a very nice tool.

Astronomy in conjunction with more astronomy

I’ve recently done two very exciting things that are both of astronomical significance.

One of them — which has just happened as I begin writing this — was attending a public lecture by Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, on his Australian tour. More on that later. The other was the opportunity to design a logo for an astronomical organisation.

About a month ago, there was a crowdfunding campaign to help import a digital planetarium to Kenya and train operators in its use (I donated a small amount of money). Shortly after the campaign succeeded, there was a Facebook update asking if anyone had ideas for a new logo for the Amateur Astronomical Society of Kenya — which is recently formed, and will be taking charge of the planetarium for the benefit of Kenyan students. (The Society uses astronomical and astronomy interchangeably, but officially it’s the former.)

I got in touch by email to express my interest, supplementing this offer with a rough draft.

Now, I work at a graphic design studio at which most staff are trained on the job, and my manager was very happy for me to develop my skills by working on this project, and to offer it to the AASK for free. Some people hold the view that public design competitions are bad because they take work away from professional designers, but that is not the attitude of the company I work for.

[Edit: I have substantially abbreviated the details on my workplace during a 2020 blog review.]

Here is the logo I came up with, which has been accepted by the Amateur Astonomical Society of Kenya [update: link added]. Click to see it large. I would say this is the highest profile design that I’ve ever personally been responsible for, and I’m very pleased with it.

My original idea — practically all of which survives in the final design above — was as follows. As an equatorial country, Kenya has an unobstructed view of both northern and southern hemisphere skies — a point well made on the crowdfunding campaign page — so I represented this with an iconic northern hemisphere constellation (Big Dipper) on the left and an iconic southern hemisphere constellation (Southern Cross) on the right. I put a giraffe between them because I imagine giraffes get a good view of most things, so this helps represent the notion of a good view of the sky. The colour scheme was based on the Kenyan flag, plus a little yellow to add a sunset effect.

Below is the original draft. Note that I accidentally represented the Little Dipper instead of the Big Dipper because I’m Australian and cannot be expected to know the difference (I picked up on the error myself, eventually). Also, at this point I had not yet given any thought to orientation.

The feedback from the AASK was very positive. Requests included adding the tagline “We Explore”, making the letters AASK stand out, and — if possible — including an outline of Kenya somewhere on the design. As you can see I succeeded, but not before mulling it over for some time.

At first I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to include the outline of Kenya. In my design, as you’ll remember, left represents north and right represents south, and I was worried that a map — with the conventional west-east orientation — would conflict with this. But once I hit on the idea of representing the green earth at the bottom of the logo, everything fell into place. (The map I used is freely available here.)

One suggestion was to use star colours (blue, white, yellow, orange, red) to make “AASK” stand out. I put the letters on the giraffe’s neck instead, but I liked the idea of incorporating star colours into the design, which is why the spectrum around the edge includes bands of blue, white, yellow and orange, taking the place of the sunset effect in my draft.

My AASK contact person noted that the font I chose for the “We Explore” tagline is reminiscent of the solar analemma. This was entirely unintended: I just liked it because it contrasted with the main font and filled up the space nicely. But I did choose my main font on the basis that it looks like the sort of thing a spaceship’s name might be written in.

I made the logo mostly in Adobe Indesign, with a touch of Adobe Illustrator for the stars. Feel free to ask technical questions if you think you can learn something from the answers.

OK, now let’s talk about Phil Plait.

I’ve been reading Phil’s blog and following him on Twitter for years, and also have one of his books. When I heard he was visiting not only Australia but Adelaide (which, as a small city, all too often misses out), I jumped at the chance and acquired two tickets, one for me and one for Dad (who is also a scientist).

Dad and I arrived early and got good seats. On the way in I introduced Dad to Paul Willis, director of the Royal Institution Australia — which was responsible for the Adelaide event — and no small name in Australian science communication.

I enjoyed the show. Having watched videos of other talks Phil has given I had a good idea of what to expect, but it is better live. I kept half an eye on Dad’s reactions and he clearly enjoyed it too.

After questions it was time for the signing queue, which is the bit I had really come for. That was where the two astronomical events — the logo and the talk — came together, because my work on the logo meant I had something specific to share. The point of a celebrity signing queue, as I see it, is the opportunity to give them a brief moment of pleasure in return for the years of pleasure they’ve given you (having something to be signed is not important at all; anyone can use a pen).

It was an interesting experience; the word “awesome” feels about right. Most of what I said consisted of pre-rehearsed lines strung together, because that was the only way I could handle the pressure. I introduced myself with a cheeky “Very nice of you to come over from … um … you know … that place on the border between Mexico and Canada” — but he didn’t react to the national slight, being more interested in saying how happy he was to be in Australia. We talked about my AASK logo (which he liked a lot) and then the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast (because I did one episode for it, back in 2011).

Then comes that moment when you’ve said as much as you dared hope you’d have the chance to, talking to an internationally renowned arch-geek and aware of the queue of people behind you waiting their turn. There is literally a universe of topics I could have raised (like, I dunno, my memories of the first Hubble pictures, to pick something at random), but I felt it was time to go.

It is now almost the end of the following day. I’ve lent Dad my copy of Phil Plait’s book “Death from the Skies” (see, I told you he enjoyed it), and spent most of the day with family. The highlight was seeing my niece Elke (previously blogged about here), which merits another blog post — but meanwhile here are two pictures with Elke and Death from the Skies in the same shot.

Maybe some day she’ll read it.

Visit to parents’ (also, podcast announcement)

First, an announcement: I’ve previously mentioned having recorded an episode of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, based around a song I wrote earlier in the year. Well, that day has arrived and you can go listen to it! Unfortunately, the audio quality of the song excerpts has suffered during copying, so I encourage you to listen to the song via the first link above.

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I spent some time recently at my parents’ place. Quite a lot happened, but let’s start with photographs of dinosaurs just to get your attention.

 

General updates 2011: July (with Renaissance coffee mug for sale)

Everything’s going well in preparation for my upcoming holiday and computer upgrade.

I’m also planning to buy a laptop to with me. Mum will be staying home while Dad, my sister, her husband and myself go overseas, and the plan is to communicate via Skype — except that none of us have actually got Skype yet, so that’s the next thing to look at after I get the upgrade done. The plan has always been to upgrade sufficiently in advance of the holiday to make time to practice in between.

Renaissance coffee mug

I recently published a new product on Zazzle: a renaissance mug! The story behind this is that while I was browsing the web for a project at work I came across this book of Renaissance collages. My production supervisor thought it would be worth me creating a similar collage of my own, if not for the project then at least as an exercise, and this is what I came up with:

General updates 2011: Apr/May

I would like to welcome @Fossilcrox to Adelaide. That’s the Twitter handle of Paul Willis, palaeontologist and one of Australia’s best-known science journalists. He’s best known for his contributions to Catalyst (and its predecessor, Quantum), but has recently moved to Adelaide to become director of the Royal Institute. I hear that Paul enjoys meeting his fans, and I’m hopeful of getting my turn soonish. Will be watching for opportunities through his Twitter feed (e.g. public speaking events, etc).

[Various other updates removed during blog review, including details of a computer upgrade I was preparing for at the time]

Links:

• Small, working versions of Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests are for sale. One for the Christmas shopping list.
• The latest in computer input devices involves a direct link to your brain. And they say science fiction isn’t real.
• Some cosmologists think our universe was once Flatland, but fattened up. (I don’t pretend to understand it.)
• New ideas on the formation of galactic spiral arms.
• Article all about the world’s longest-running scientific experiments, loosely defined.
• What it takes to get very young children to look in the other box.
• No museum should ever be without dinosaurs.
• Armadillos spread leprosy in America.

Flock of Worlds

In the January 14 installment of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, Bob Hirshon challenged listeners to write a solar-system-related song, with plans to showcase the songs received in a future podcast.

[UPDATE: My song was featured in the August 14, 2011 episode of the podcast, which I recorded. Pity that the audio quality suffered so much in copying/converting: the version below is much better.]

I decided to give it a go, and at the time of writing sent Bob the link to my mp3 file about 24 hours ago.

Here is my submission. I hope you like it, and please tell me if you do. [download]

Lyrics follow, and then technical info.