Very Basic Astronomy

This is harder than I thought… trying to find a very basic astronomy video or web site.  Easier to just write it out.  And trying to not be condescending.

With the exception of eight things, every light in the sky you can see with just your eyes is a star.  Including the sun.
1. Planet Mercury (hard to see unless you know where and when to look)
2. Planet Venus
3. Our Moon
4. Planet Mars
5. Planet Jupiter
6. Planet Saturn
7. An occasional comet or meteor
8. Airplanes/Satellites/Space Station/Shuttles (man made stuff in the sky)

The sun is a star.  It is our star.  It is really really close to us, compared to any other star you can see which is the only reason it looks different.

Other stars all seem to have planets in orbit around them, but we, with our eyes cannot see any of them.

The order of things is: Earth is a planet in orbit around the Sun.  The Sun is a star in orbit around the center of the galaxy.  Our galaxy is one of billions in the universe.

Our sun is an average star, born from dust and gasses that coalesced about 4 billion years ago into our solar system, destined to burn out and explode in another 4 billion years.  All of the elements in our solar system heavier than Helium were created in the fires and deaths of previous stars in the previous 10 billion years. The carbon in your right hand was probably not created in the same star that created the carbon in your left hand.

The stars we see with our eyes in the sky are all in our galaxy, a fat disk of billions of stars, 100,000 light years across, with a massive black hole in the center.   We are about 2/3s of the way from the center to the edge so there are stars from our galaxy all around us.  Looking towards the center of our galaxy is what the Milky Way is, looking towards where most of our galaxy’s stars are from our point of view.  If a model of our galaxy was made 100 yards across, our entire solar system, including Pluto's orbit, would be smaller than a grain of sand at that scale.   The light from most of the stars at the center of our galaxy is blocked by clouds of dust and gasses, otherwise the Milky Way would be nearly as bright as the sun.  Infrared and x-ray telescopes can see through that dust and show us the structure at the center.

100,000 light years distance = 6 × 10¹⁷ miles = 600,000,000,000,000,000 miles.

There are billions of galaxies in the universe, each with billions of stars.  They are faint and impossible to see without a telescope with one exception, the Andromeda galaxy which can been seen from a dark location on a moonless night.  If you hold a dime at arm’s length against the darkest, emptiest, part of the sky, in that direction the Hubble space telescope saw thousands of galaxies.  Each of these are millions of light years from each other now.  The Universe is expanding, all of the galaxies are moving away from each other.  Someday, a future civilization in our galaxy will not be able to see the light from any other galaxies or of the background radiation from the Big Bang. They will not be able to derive the true history and structure of the universe.

We are far more insignificant than you have ever imagined.

3D Movie

Liz and I went to see our first 3D movie yesterday. Star Trek Something Something 3D. Very sad. Liz is one of those people you sometimes wonder which eye to look at when she's talking to you. Her brain doesn't use both eyes at the same time, she normally wears one contact for far vision and the other eye can see near. She just switches between them as necessary. Her glasses are the same, one eye has a prescription to see far, the other has no correction. No bifocals necessary! Lucky girl! So... of course the 3D effect in the movie... totally lost on her. She had to wear the glasses to avoid the blurring on the screen, but no 3D. I didn't think the effect it was worth watching through the narrow field of view with scratched and fogged lenses. Only with large clean lenses will I try this again. We had fun anyway and got to see the planets later that evening.

Take the test | Pharyngula

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/12/25/take-the-test/

Translate this joke please...

From: Khaghani, Mojan [mailto:mojan.khaghani@lmco.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2011 12:13 PM
To: Khaghani, Mojan; Hail, Tom
Subject: Conversation with Khaghani, Mojan, Hail, Tom

Khaghani, Mojan [12:02 PM]:

merry xmas

Hail, Tom [12:03 PM]:

poor puppies... to be made to pose for a mythical event like that.  animal abuse.

Khaghani, Mojan [12:03 PM]:

J

Hail, Tom [12:04 PM]:

Am I terrible?

Khaghani, Mojan [12:04 PM]:

no

some one sent me a joke

the title is farmers joke

all the people cc'd thought it was funny

but I did not get the joke

can you translate for me please?

> Cletus is passing by Billy Bob's hay barn one day when, through a gap in the
> door, he sees Billy Bob doing a slow and sensual striptease in front of an
> old green John Deere.
>
> Buttocks clenched, he performs a slow pirouette, and gently slides off first
> the right strap of his overalls, followed by the left. He then hunches his
> shoulders forward and in a classic striptease move, lets his overalls fall
> down to his hips revealing a torn and frayed plaid shirt.
>
> Then, grabbing both sides of his shirt, he rips it apart to reveal his
> stained T-shirt underneath. With a final flourish, he tears the T-shirt
> from his body, and hurls his baseball cap onto a pile of hay.
>
> Having seen enough, Cletus rushes in and says, "What in the world are ya
> doing, Billy Bob?"
>
> "Good grief, Cletus, ya scared the bejeebers out of me," says an obviously
> embarrassed Billy Bob.
>
> "But me 'n the wife been havin trouble lately in the bedroom d'partment, and
> the therapist suggested I do something sexy to a tractor."
>
> (Don't make me come splain this to you!)

Hail, Tom [12:06 PM]:

Ha ha ha!

Khaghani, Mojan [12:07 PM]:

I really dont understand anything

Hail, Tom [12:08 PM]:

Billy Bob was supposed to do something sexy to attract his wife.  But he misunderstood, being the country hick he is, and thought he was told to do something sexy "to a tractor".

Khaghani, Mojan [12:08 PM]:

why did he miss understood?

Hail, Tom [12:08 PM]:

an old green John Deere is a tractor.

Khaghani, Mojan [12:09 PM]:

I understood the same thing....

Hail, Tom [12:09 PM]:

"to a tractor" and "to attract her" sound the same in english.

Khaghani, Mojan [12:09 PM]:

ohhhhhhhhhh

Hail, Tom [12:10 PM]:

J

Khaghani, Mojan [12:10 PM]:

man that was hard

Hail, Tom [12:10 PM]:

LOL!

FW: Funny

Stupidity isn’t illegal.  It isn’t a disability either.

Yum!

So after dinner Liz says she has some special desert and she'll bring it to me.  I pause the Dexter.  After some noises and bottle openings she brings me a coffee mug of ice cream and IBC root beer.  Mmmm... root beer float!  :-)  She goes back into the kitchen to make her's.  More mug rattling and bottle opening and...  "Hey!  Does yours taste all right?"  "Yeah, mine tastes fine!" I say.  "This tastes like soap!"  She pours it out and gets a clean mug, scoops more ice cream and more root beer into the mug and comes in to sit next to me so we can continue to watch Dexter.  "This still tastes like soap!  What is wrong with this?"  That is when Liz notices that she had opened a bottle of Fat Tire.  We laughed and laughed.  :-)

Storm

Yay! Storm (The Movie) is out!

Cobert... very funny on Royal Wedding

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

It gets funnier and funnier! OMG! Help me, I am peeing my pants!

No recent posts.

For some reason this cracks me up.  I didn't make it up.  Maybe I shouldn't laugh, there are 3.5 million people who like it.  And poor Katie is too young to like it.  

A little time with PZ Myers

Allena, her roommate Heather and I got to listen to PZ Myers at DeAnza college today. He talked about the things Creationists do to try to argue against evolution and science. Is that it? Mostly is was list of adjectives you could use to describe creationists. Obtuse is my favorite one.

Obtuse: lacking in insight or discernment; dense: slow to learn or understand; lacking intellectual acuity;

Actually, I think creationists like Ray Comfort isn't obtuse, I think he is deliberately lying for his own gain. He has a lucrative gig with his creationist character and is milking it for all it is worth.

After the talk was an even longer Q&A session that was wide ranging and quite interesting. I had a couple of questions but held them to myself... hard to break the shyness barrier. I did at the end get PZ to desecrate (sign) Allena's copy of the Comfort edition of Origin of Species. That was pretty funny.

At the post event beer and pizza at BJ's in Cupertino, there was too much noise from the football game to hear what was going on at PZ's end of the table, but we had some great conversations at our end with some young people. Very nice time!

blithering batshit imbecility

"Is there some theoretical limit to how fucking stupid Sarah Palin can be?
You know…some mathematical formula which describes the absolute limit of stupid, beyond which not even thought can escape…the event horizon of brainlessness. If there is, I have little doubt that Sarah Palin would laugh as she demonstrated that she can shrink her brain beyond infinitely small and infinitely dense, and utter a new string of blithering batshit imbecility that would make drool seem smart."

This cracked me up. I had to send it to everyone.

The Don't Diss Darwin Institute

The Don't Diss Darwin Institute: "Comfort's confused polemic, disguised as an informational Introduction but full of mistakes, half truths, untruths, muddled logic, old creationist arguments, misleadingly excerpted quotations, and ill-framed analogies — plus a good dose of fire and brimstone at the end — will do a severe disservice to anyone who takes it for an entryway to Darwin's great book."

Cute Kitties

This is best seen in full screen mode... enjoy!




And this cat is in trouble!

Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run! | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

"Run! Run! It's making reasonable, fact-based arguments!

Quickly! Hide behind self-righteousness! The ad hominem rejoinders—ready the ad hominem rejoinders! Watch out! Dodge the issue at hand! Question its character and keep moving haphazardly from one flawed point to the next!

All together now! Put every bit of secondhand conjecture into it you've got!"

Obama Gal

I love my Liz!

'Heat the Hornet' by Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net

'Heat the Hornet' by Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net:

"A scientist arrogantly asserts that thunder is not the triumphal sound of God’s balls banging together, nor is it Thor’s hammer. It is, instead, the reverberating echoes from the electrical discharges that we see as lightning. Poetic (or at least stirring) as those tribal myths may be, they are not actually true. "

"Coyne is right to identify the most widespread misunderstanding about Darwinism as the idea that, in evolution, “everything happens by chance”. This common claim is flat wrong – obviously wrong, transparently wrong, even to the meanest intelligence (a phrase that has me actively restraining myself). If evolution worked by chance, it obviously couldn’t work at all. Unfortunately, instead of working out that they have probably misunderstood evolution, creationists conclude, instead, that evolution must be false. This one misunderstanding, single-handed, accounts for much of the uncomprehending opposition to evolution that made it necessary for Jerry Coyne to write his book in the first place. The need was great; the execution is superb. Please read it."

I am reading this book (Why Evolution Is True, by Jerry Coyne) and am enjoying it a lot. Every High School Senior should read it before going to college. :-)

"You're afraid to look at both sides"

I've always wondered how to attack that statement. This helps me a lot! Don Quixote! Of course! They might be dragons! There might be a god! The obvious has to have some say. Teach the controversy? What controversy? There is none. Ignorance of a subject doesn't make a crazy alternate any more likely.

Ignorance Meets Intolerance

This cracked me up!