Orion's High in the Southwest Sky

....as the song says. Except last week, when we were in Buenos Aires on vacation (short version: we got a cheap opportunity to spend a week in an exotic-sounding place, so we took it). And one clear night it occurred to me to have a look at the southern stars. Which was kind of hard, being in a big city with tall buildings and light pollution, but I managed to find Orion pretty quickly -- only somewhat higher in the sky than I'm used to and upside down. And of course Orion is closely followed to the southeast by his hunting dog, Canis Major, with the star Sirius -- the brightest star in the sky, and easily visible even through the city's sky glow.

So far, these are still things visible from southern Ontario where I've lived my whole life, just shifted to an unfamiliar angle (Buenos Aires is at 35 degrees south latitude). But continuing a little further south from Sirius I found another bright star: Canopus, or Alpha Carinae. At -52 degrees declination, it is never visible from home.

We spent a while mucking with Google Sky and trying to find a spot with a good southern horizon to check out the circumpolar stars, but never managed to identify anything. Unlike the case in the northern sky, there aren't a lot of bright stars around the south celestial pole, and it's too hard to make out constellations when you can't see a big swath of sky all at once. So we contented ourselves with having "bagged" Canopus.

Back home, I went for a walk about 9pm the other night -- and there was Orion back where he usually is, half-way up the sky, and with his sword hanging below his belt. And for some reason, more than any amount of exotic architecture, foreign money, or a different language, that made me realize that I'd been to a far-off land.

Seeing the Forrest

Readers of talk.origins may have run across a poster called Richard Forrest, a British palaeontologist specializing in plesiosaurs, and also author of a hilariously, um, revisionist history of evolutionary science.











Now you can see the man himself, enthusing over the skull of a monster pliosaur recently discovered in Dorset.

That's a lotta money!

I learned a new word yesterday: "yotta". Strictly speaking, it's not a word; it's the SI prefix indicating 10 rasied to the power of 24 (abbr: "Y"). That's a thousand times bigger than the largest SI prefix I previously knew about (zeta), and is currently the largest official prefix. Really, it's a useful unit to have. For example, the power output of the Sun is 383YW. By comparison, the province of Ontario consumes about 25GW on a hot day when everyone is running their air conditioners. Which means the Sun is equivalent to about 15 peta-Ontarios.

Borderline-Asperger geeks like to know these things. We'd be loads of fun at cocktail parties, except we never go to any because we hate people. (That, and no one ever invites us more than once. I don't care; you're all boring. Yes, all of you.)

The way I found this out is weird: it seems that, in what has to be the record-holder for ridiculous damages claims, someone is suing the Bank of America for 1784 billion trillion dollars. Yes, that's 1.784 yotta-bux.

That's a lotta bux (as in: waaaay more than are in the picture at right).

OK, just to raise the intelligence quotient of this post above of the yocto-level, here's Monty Python's Money Song. Enjoy:

One Small Step....

If I've done this right, this post will appear at 20 July at 20:17 UTC -- 40 years to the moment from when a manned spacecraft from Earth first touched down on the surface of another world.

I was 12 years old and my family was on vacation, camping at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, right up by the continental divide. We had been into town for something -- I don't recall what, maybe a restaurant dinner; I don't even recall which town -- and on our return in the evening, stopped at a little country store to pick up whatever. I stayed in the car while my parents went inside.

A few moments later my Dad re-emerged, beckoning frantically at me to come inside. In the store, I found a crowd of people gathered around a dutch door at the back that gave into the owner's living quarters. The upper half was open, and everyone was watching a small black-and-white TV perched on the kitchen counter. On that screen was Neil Armstrong taking his first few steps on the moon. Not that I could see much: by the time the low-bandwidth lunar signal had been received, converted to broadcast format (by pointing a TV camera at the slow-scan monitor in Mission Control!), been broadcast by the networks, filtered through the local weather (as I recall it was raining, maybe even thundering) and made its way to the rabbit ears of this little receiver way up in the Rockies, all that was left was a bunch of monochrome blobs that moved every so often.



Back at camp, I fell asleep in our tent trailer that night listening to the radio coverage. Before turning in I made a last visit to the washroom. At our altitude it was pretty cold for July; but the weather had cleared and the sky was crystal clear as only a high mountain sky, far from any city, can be. The moon was full and dazzlingly bright in my memory.

And a 12 year old boy looked up and realized: that's not just a light in the sky. It's a world -- and there is a man walking on it!

Compact Paradox?

So: We're all replacing incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescents, thereby saving electricity, thereby reducing carbon emissions, thereby saving the planet, right?

Or are we?

A comment on another blog prompted me to check that truism. The point is made that, during the heating season (which around here runs from about October through April, depending on how tolerant you are to wearing sweaters indoors) we derive some benefit from the waste heat of electrical appliances like light bulbs. If we switch to more efficient bulbs, that heat must be made up by the furnace, which is presumably burning a fossil fuel.

So the question is: which is more efficient in terms of carbon emissions? Burning carbon-rich stuff for heat, or using electrical heat which includes a component generated from non-fossil sources (dams and nukes)?

Let's do some arithmetic:

I have a recent-model natural gas furnace which is advertised to be better than 95% efficient (ie: out of every joule of heat generated in the burner, 0.95 joules winds up warming the house). How much carbon does my furnace emit to deliver, say, 1 megajoule of space heating? First, to get that 1 MJ delivered, we need to burn about 1.05 MJ worth of fuel. Natural gas is mostly methane, the heat of combustion of which is 55.5 MJ/kg, so that 1 MJ of heat-made-good requires 1.05/55.5*1000 = 19 grams of gas. Methane (CH₄) has a molecular weight of 16, only 12 of which is carbon, so the net carbon emission is 14.2 grams.

What about electrical heat?

The biggest loss in thermal-source electrical generation is right at the turbine. The maximum theoretical efficiency of any apparatus that converts heat into work is limited by the temperature difference between the input and the output. Given available materials, this means that the process that turns boiling water into electricity can never be more than about 40% (and that's generous). Knock off a little for transmission losses, and let's say that the overall efficiency -- from burning the fuel to lighting the bulb -- is 35%. That looks pretty bad until you consider that, in a typical power grid not all the electricity comes from fossil sources. Ontario Power Generation (to use the locally relevant example) gets only 27% of its power from fossil fuel plants (mostly coal, though with some contribution from oil or gas).

(Aside: That OPG page is pretty cool. The big number at the right shows the amount of power currently being generated in the system, continuously updated. As I write, Ontario is running on about 11.5 gigawatts. During summer heat waves, it gets up around 25 GW or more. Clicking on the hydro, nuclear and fossil links at the left lets you see how much is being contributed by each source. Really, engineers are fascinated by this sort of thing. That, and my late father worked for OPG's predecessor Ontario Hydro, so I have a familial interest in the old place. I've been in some of those stations, when he would take me out on a job.)

But back to the arithmetic: Anthracite coal yields 27MJ/kg when burned. So generating 1MJ of electricity emits (1/27)/35%*1000 = 106g of carbon. However, only 27% of OPG electricity comes from fossil sources, so we can discount that amount down to 28.6 grams.

Which is still twice as much as just running my furnace. You'd have to be using a crappy old furnace that was only about 50% efficient to be as bad as electric heat. And in the summer of course, there's no question: every watt of heat you don't produce in the house is one watt your air conditioner doesn't have to scavenge up and move outside.

Conclusion: Even when you allow for the space heating contribution of incandescents, compact fluorescent bulbs still win by a good margin.

[Note: to keep it simple (translation: I'm too lazy to do all the research) I've ignored a lot of upstream carbon contributions here, such as: manufacturing light bulbs; building the different kinds of power plants; mining, processing and transporting coal or uranium. Also, the generation mix I used is the cumulative figure for 2007, which does not necessarily reflect what OPG might be running on a typical cold January night.]

Three Scientists, Two Great Talks

....and one grandstanding git.

It's been a very biological week here.

The Chimp Lady

On Wednesday night, Jane Goodall spoke to a packed Centrepointe Theatre. I remember stories about Goodall in National Geographic, back in the 1960s, but sort of lost track after that. Her talk was largely autobiographical, covering the period from her childhood to the Gombe years. She told one amusing anecdote about how, at the age of about five, she hid in the hen house so she could see for herself that, yes, that big egg really did come out of the chicken. She also talked about the formation of the Root and Shoots program, which attempts to bring together conservation and development concerns, so that there is not a continual confict between the two.



The Finch Folks

Tonight was Peter and Rosemary Grant at Carleton, giving the final Darwin Week lecture (if it seems this is a little late for Darwin Week, that's because the Grants spend February in the field. I can see how the Galapagos is probably preferable to Ottawa in February). Their talk centred on mechanisms of speciation and adaptation in their study of Darwin's finches on Daphne Major and Genovesa.

The Galapagos finches are famed for their wide variety of beak shapes and sizes, each adapted for exploiting a particular food source in the sparse environment of the islands. Peter Grant talked a little about two genes (bmp4 and CaM, if I recall the names) that control respectively, beak length and thickness. Then he talked about how rainfall variation from year to year affected average beak morphology among two smaller finch species Geospiza fortis and G. scandens, by affecting the abundance of their preferred seeds.

Rosemary took over to talk about hybridization and genetic diversity. G. fortis and G. scandens differ in beak size, but are otherwise fairly similar. Though hybridization is possible, they are mostly kept separate by mating preference, which is based partly on morphology, but even more on having different songs. Now here's the fun part: the song an individual finch will sing throughout its life is learned as a nestling, from its father (when asked just now whether this constitutes cultural inheritance, our household social anthropologist looked very thoughtful, but refused to commit himself on the question). Female finches mate only with males that sing the right song. However, once in a while a nestling will imprint on the wrong species' song. When it grows up, it will most likely mate with the other species, producing hybrid offspring having an intermediate beak size.

Field surveys show that hybrids are just as fit as either parent species. So what keeps fortis and scandens from merging into one species? Answer: the fact that a hybrid will only backcross to the parent species that sings its father's song. However, even this small amount of gene-flow helps to maintain genetic diversity within each species.

It was a great talk -- straight-up science from the people who did the work. Stuff you had to pay attention to. Unfortunately, just as Rosemary Grant got down to the last few slides, the fire alarm went off, and the Q&A had to be adjourned to the courtyard . Which brings us to.....

....The Grandstanding Git

Before the talk started, we noticed an old acquaintance sitting a few rows back -- Jonathan Cucan, from CORE. After the evacuation we were all just standing around outside (fortunately, it was a pleasant night), he made a bee-line for Peter Grant, so I hung back within earshot. I didn't catch everything that was said (let alone remember even that much), but the exchange went something like this:

Cucan said polite things about the Grants' talk, then asked whether "he agreed with Dr. Einstein and Dr. Hoyle" about the complexity of the cell (or something along those lines -- Johnny's current schtick seems to be about biochemistry). When Dr. Grant worked with these marvelous organisms, didn't he see the hand of God? Grant shook his head, no he didn't, and went into an explanation about molecular biologists having theories which they are testing of how to form DNA and cell membranes etc, and gradually build up complexity. Cucan came back that "Dr. Hoyle" had proved that it was impossible to form a cell spontaneously....at this point, one of the organizers came to Grant's rescue and pointed out that other people probably wanted a turn to talk. Cucan left, no doubt satisfied that he had successfully delivered his payload of weapons-grade sanctimony into the enemy's stronghold.

I must confess I was disappointed: I was sort of hoping Cucan would at least try to argue something relevant to Grant's talk (my Inner Creationist managed to think up a couple). But our boy Johnny has a bit of a one-track mind.

I do like how Cucan specifically used the full titles for Einstein and Hoyle -- like, waving around a doctorate is supposed to impress someone who has one themselves. And a GIGO calculation by an astronomer (several decades ago, IIRC?) is supposed trump actual experts working on that specific problem? Pack it up, folks -- Fred Hoyle has spoken, and Johnny Cucan is his prophet! A lovely case study in creationist's slavish devotion to intellectual authority.

Darwin Week in Ottawa

Just because we don't worship Charles Darwin doesn't mean we will refrain from celebrating all those round numbers: Carleton University has a series of lectures planned next week (plus one in April) to celebrate the Darwin anniversaries.

http://www.carleton.ca/fass/darwinweek/index.html

Monday Feb 9th
"Darwin and the Evolution of Reasons" – Daniel Dennett
(Reception following this event is sponsored by the Humanist Association of Ottawa)

Tuesday Fed 10th
"Darwin's Landscape Vision" - Michael Summerfield

Wednesday Feb 11th
"Putting Darwinism and Religion in their Place" - David Livingstone

Thursday Feb 12th
"The Struggle for Existence in the World of Climate Change" Charles Krebs

Friday Feb 13th
"Killing Time: An Explanation for the Contrivances of Males for Seizing and Restraining Females that Darwin Did Not Attempt to Explain" - Dr Patricia Gowaty

Day 12 - Merry Newtonmass

It's Newtonmass, and as is our annual tradition, we will share our favourite Newtonmass carol, with a new verse for 2008:

God rest ye merry, physicists
Let nothing you dismay.
Remember Isaac Newton
was born on Christmas Day!
His gravity and calculus and "f" equals "m" "a"!
Oh, pillars of physics and math, physics and math,
Oh, pillars of physics and math!

A factor of big G - the same
for flea and giant star.
Then multiply the masses
and divide by square of "r".
The force that keeps us on the earth and orbits moons afar!
Oh, pillars of physics and math, physics and math,
Oh, pillars of physics and math!

Rants & ROMinations

The day following PZ's talk at CFI found us back at the Royal Ontario Museum (along with a few additional family members). Aside from just wanting to visit a museum (and see the diamonds exhibit), I wanted to see whether my earlier negative impression of the shiny new Michael Lee-Chen Crystal would hold.

And it's official: I still hate it. So did everyone else in our party. Previous comments on the architecture of the Crystal still hold, only even more so. The damn thing looms angrily over the sidewalk. The corrugated exterior siding is just ugly: stand it all up straight and square, and it would be right at home in any suburban industrial park. Skewing the walls at funny angles doesn't magically make it clever: it just makes it look like a suburban industrial building that's falling down. Inside, the walls lean at crazy angles and cock-eyed pillars shoot through the space.

I toured the paleo galleries again, and got even more annoyed. There is a serious lack of interpretive material to tell the viewer what they're looking at and why it matters. In one display case is a series of Jurassic fossil insects, each one accompanied by a similar modern bug skewered on a pin. They're all nicely identified, but so what? What exactly is this display telling me? Is it about relationships among ancient and modern insects? About insect taphonomy? Or should I take from it the creationist lesson that grasshoppers are still grasshoppers, and they all got buried in the Flood? I have no idea. And across from that there's another case in which dead bugs ancient and modern are jumbled together with no order, identification or explanation at all. And no, the video displays don't replace decent placards: only one party can use them at a time, and I don't see why I should wait in line to see if the TV has the answer to whatever question I have. And speaking of placards: would it be too hard to add a little graphic to each one, showing a schematic of the geological timescale, and a marker saying "this critter comes from here"? That would beat just saying "Jurassic", for those who don't already know that it comes between the Triassic and the Cretaceous (geek that I am, I've known since I was about 8yo -- but my FIL pointed out that he didn't). There's no obvious "path" guiding you through the exhibits, and the overall impression is less of a museum gallery than of a storage room. And how much money did these copper-clad monoliths cost, that might have been spent instead on the displays?But enough kvetching already. It is, at any rate, still a museum full of neat stuff.

That's one mean sardine:

Hey, he's chomping an ammonite! Bad mososaur! Bad!

Poor Bruin here looks a bit disconsolate about all these new-fangled changes to his abode:

This camel on the other hand, just looks smug:

A Fall of Marsdust

This is very cool: the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter just happened to capture this photo of an avalanche in progress, on the Martian north polar icecap. What are the odds? The article at the MRO site is worth reading for the details, so I won't bother summarizing it here. If you have high-speed internet (or lots of patience), have a look at the high-res version.

To me, it brings home that Mars is a world, not just a red dot in the sky. And unlike the moon, it's a world where stuff happens -- landslides, weather, erosion -- and happens now, not just a billion years ago. By complete coincidence I just happen to be re-reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red/Green/Blue Mars SF trilogy, which covers the first about 150 years of Martian colonization. It's a great story, with strong characters, strong social and political themes, with the planet itself -- its environment, its geology, its history -- being overwhelmingly present throughout.

I want to know: when are we sending humans there to explore the place? When are we sending humans there to live?

Merry Newton-mass!

God rest ye merry, physicists
Let nothing you dismay.
Remember Isaac Newton
was born on Christmas Day!
His gravity and calculus and eff equals em-ay!
Oh, pillars of physics and math, physics and math,
Oh, pillars of physics and math!

Did they find his armour, too?

I seem to be the only one (or else the only one whose mind is trivial enough to care) to notice this coincidence: In the same week as the opening of The Golden Compass, comes the announcement of the finding of the fossil jawbone of a polar bear -- on Svalbard, the arctic island home of Lyra's ursine friend and protector, Iorek.

The significance of this find (I mean, other than amusing me with the "life-imitates-art" schtick) is that it pushes the fossil record of polar bears back about 20000 or 30000 years earlier than was previously known -- back out of the Wisconsin glaciation and into the previous interglacial. This raises hopes that polar bears, having survived warm periods before, may not be as vulnerable to gloabl warming as feared.