Archive for October, 2009
It’s not just Jack who names the planets
Oct 24th
An artist's impression of Gliese 667c. Connected to, but definitely not, Ganymede in Lyra's naming system. Photo (c) Nasa.
Wladimir Lyra‘s following in the footsteps of Jack in his arXiv paper Naming the extrasolar planets. Currently planets are tagged after their parent star, so if we found a planet around α Ceti, it would be called α Ceti b. The b in lower case is used for the first planet to be found, c for the second and so on. a is not used to avoid confusing a planet with a star. Unfortunately in the case of some double stars a capital B would be used for the second star, so names could get confusing. So why not name the planets? Lyra gives a couple of reasons why he thinks this would be a good idea. One is that names like Bacchus are more beautiful than names like HD 128311. One person’s beauty is another person’s mess, so I’m not convinced by this. However, he also proposes that names for extrasolar planets aren’t just decorative, there’s also the Copernican principle.
“Mercury – Venus – Earth – Mars is a sequence of equals. Sol b – Sol c – Earth – Sol d would More >
Meanwhile in the Lifestream today
Oct 20th
Science of the Invisible: How I learned to stop worrying and love FriendFeed After reading this post I’m thinking about how I use FriendFeed. I think there are differences in how AJCann and I would use FriendFeed. There’s a large and active Life Sciences posse on FriendFeed, no so much for the Humanities. Still there’s better ways to hook up Twitter and FF. And I’ve never been happy with using Twitterfeed to announce posts. FriendFeed (or even RSS!) can do that much better. I’m also experimenting with hooking up the ‘Fresh from FriendFeed’ plugin for WordPress to the system. That may work, or it may be unplugged rapidly.
BBC NEWS | Landscape photo of the year 2009 Some amazing photos here. I particularly like the Aberdeen and Kilnsey photos and now have a huge urge to get a wide-angle lens.
This was an experiment with a plug-in which pulled in posts to FriendFeed. It’s not really working well for me, so I doubt I’ll be using it in the future, but I’ll be blogging about it.
Will the Okhta Center make or destroy a skyline?
Oct 20th
Work continues into winter on the Okhta Center in St. Petersburg. This is a new commercial centre being built by Gazprom, the Russian natural gas company. When it’s finished the Okhta Center will have all the mod-cons necessary for a major commercial centre like monuments, desks and a large glass tower which will stand around 400m tall looking over St. Petersburg. No one is complaining about the desks and monuments, but there is a controversy about whether a large glass tower is really necessary. The tower will be over twice as high as anything else in the city. St. Petersburg’s current spires are a World Heritage listed site, but UNESCO has threatened to withdraw that listing if the skyscraper is built.
There are archaeological digs at the site, like the one photographed above, but I’m not sure what they’ll find. The centre is built built over part of a 17th century Swedish fort and an earlier 14th century fort. I don’t know how extensive those ruins are or if there’s anything else. One of the reasons for building the city was the Peter I wanted a blank canvas to build a city on at the start of the 18th century. Since More >
Damage at Fajada Butte?
Oct 19th
I’ve had a go at setting up an archaeoastronomy channel on Youtube. Jsefick’s account is a bit of a goldmine for that as he has plenty of videos with interesting archaeoastronomical content. Searching for videos to favourite today, I found video above that there was an unauthorised landing at Fajada Butte. I found it extremely helpful as it taught me two things.
1) Fajada Butte is a restricted area. That’s very handy to know as I’m the sort of person who would drive out somewhere on the off-chance of seeing something. If I ever visit the southwestern USA, then Fajada Butte is the sort of place I’d try and take a trip to because of a petroglyph site famous for an effect known as the sun-dagger. This is a spiral behind a couple of rocks. There’s a gap between the rocks so that on specific days of the year a shard of light shines onto the spiral, like a dagger.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know how much of this is coincidence. Still, there’s plenty written about it by intelligent people, so it’s the sort of thing I’d like to see. However, as the guide mentioned in the top video, Fajada Butte is so More >
The extraordinary research of the BCA
Oct 13th
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and you think it's a duck, then maybe you're just not being open-minded enough. Photo (cc) RealEstateZebra
I sent an email to the British Chiropractic Association’s enquiries email account recently.
Dear BCA,
I read with interest that the use of manipulation is documented ‘as far back as 2700-1500 BC in China and Greece.‘ Could you point me to the documentation for Greece? I’m researching the use of ancient history in justifications for complimentary medicine and I’m not familiar with any such documents. It would be helpful to know about them in my search for other medical texts.
Yours,
Alun Salt
I got a reply. There’s not a lot of evidence.
One possibility is that a fourth century BC tablet from Piraeus might show chiropractic-style treatment. The BCA’s enquiry person kindly linked to a page showing the tablet, which you can find listed as Votive relief to Asclepius, Piraeus Museum, catalogue number 405. As for documentation, I’ll quote: “Greek documents on manipulation from pre-Hippocratic times are more difficult – I don’t know of any (but that does not mean that they do not exist).”
This is interesting because the British Chiropractic Association have quietly announced the ancient history story More >
Time to ditch the press release?
Oct 7th
This entry is part of a series, Bypassing the Press?»
Fixing the newspapers. Photo (cc) Evil Erin.
At the National Astronomy Meeting in 2004 I listened to Dr David Whitehouse, who I think was then Science Editor at the BBC, give advice about feeding science stories to the media. He made quite a few points, but there are three I remember.
- Don’t push a story on the grounds it’s the biggest / oldest / shiniest / crumbliest etc. thing found. It’s a cliché and it’s dull.
- Don’t waste people’s time with the formula for ‘x’ where x is anything which really shouldn’t have a formula.
- Don’t use press releases.
At the time he really didn’t convince me. The biggest, oldest and so on remains a staple news item. Likewise Cliff Arnall has shown you can make money from nonsense formulae. What really undermined him though was the newsroom run by the RAS at the meeting. I could wander in there and see the press releases. The next day I could see the same stories, often with little editing, in the national press. If he were to give the same talk today he might find it even harder. I can go to Eurekalert and pick up a sentence from any press release. If More >
Congratulations to Afarensis!
Oct 4th
Afarensis is celebrating five years of blogging. What makes it worth celebrating is that he’s still going strong with things like this defence of our much maligned cousins, rather than limping over the anniversary.
I also should have linked to his edition of 4SH earlier. My plan was to blog about whether or not carnivals should go the way of blog memes (remember them?) in response to a post by Sharon Howard, but the recent 4SH and the ongoing Carnival of Space show there could be life in the format yet.
If you’re interested I was going to argue that something closer to instant aggregation along the lines of Pligg or Reddit might be better than a carnival with a two or four week turnaround. But I was underwhelmed with my experiments with Pligg, so I don’t have an answer yet.
Libel, Censorship and Blog Comments
Oct 31st
Posted by Alun in Politics
3 comments
I hate the idea of a comment policy. The regular readers are all intelligent enough to make any policy redundant. The tiny minority who are delusional enough to cause a problem wouldn’t seriously stop to read any comment policy anyway. But occasionally a perfectly good comment will either disappear or fail to appear. Here’s why.
- – -This is about as close as I'd like to get to a barrister. Photo (cc) Steve Punter.
I’ve been busy recently. Hopefully you’ll see the fruits of some of that work shortly, but it means I haven’t had time to write much here. One of the side-effects is that I get email pointing to something that I should blog about from a few people. For example an artefact has turned up somewhere which is really dodgy. I’d guess there’s some sort of illegal activity in its sale, but I don’t have the time to research where. Now if I had a forum I could leave it and half-a-dozen other people could have been talking about this on site. One problem though is libel.
If you’re running an auction house, Ponsonby’s for the sake of argument. If you routinely sell unprovenanced antiquities then you really rely More >