Author: bobg

Geekier than thou

Here is the background image from the main page of IndianaJones.com, the website promoting the upcoming film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:

Obviously the crate is meant to be the same as the one in which the government’s “top men” squirreled away the Ark of the Covenant in an enormous warehouse at the end of the first film.

Only look: the number on the crate in the new picture is 9906573. Could I have been the only one to notice immediately that this does not match the number on the crate in the first film, 9906753?

No, I know one more person who immediately spotted the (apparent) error: my equally film-geeky sister Suzanne.

Raised ’em right

A moment while I indulge in a little parental pride: last night Jonah and Archer were at a birthday party that included the obligatory piñata. After withstanding some unbelievably motivated bashing by six-year-olds (and Archer, who actually managed to score the first piece of candy out of the thing), it finally spilled its guts onto the cement floor of our friends’ garage. (For reasons of good taste I’ll omit any description of the brief carnage that then ensued other than to liken it to a pack of hyenas tearing at a fresh carcass.) In the aftermath, Jonah and Archer compared their respective hauls. Archer, holding a week’s worth of candy in his bag, lamented morosely, “I didn’t get as much.” Without missing a beat, without any hesitation whatsoever — indeed, with eagerness — Jonah immediately put a smile on Archer’s face with, “I’ll share mine with you!”

“Blue” movie

[This post is participating in South Dakota Dark’s Deeply Superficial Blog-a-thon.]

In the summer of 2002 I was briefly, wonderfully unemployed, and a stay-at-home, first-time, brand-new dad. Of course even the happiest parent (me!) needs a break once in a while, and one day, in between feeding, burping, bathing, changing, cradling, playing with, and otherwise tending to my infant son, I read a film review that said, in part:

The best moments […] give you the peculiar joy of feeling that, for a few moments at least, you’ve escaped the laws of gravity.

and

You can take all the shots of rolling surf the movies have given us and not find anything like what you see here. The camera enters into the curl of waves so that the rising wall of water looks like rippling blue-green glass.

and

The visual beauty of the movie can be enough to make you laugh with pleasure.

and

The movie was shot entirely on the north shore of Oahu, and the outdoor scenes are suffused with an unusually clear light. You feel as if you could just walk up to the screen and breathe in the ocean air, or feel a fine spray of mist on your face.

all of which was exactly what the doctor ordered. So my wife gave me an afternoon off and I went to see Blue Crush. It was just as thrilling as the review led me to expect, even if its story was a conventional one about a self-doubting potential champion risking it all for the big prize. I talked it up to everyone I knew.

Oh, incidentally, the film stars a group of athletically built beauties who spend most of their screen time wearing very nearly nothing.

Now, not everyone to whom I enthused about the film was in the same mental space I was; they weren’t primed for a cinematic beach-vacation-by-proxy, and they hadn’t been buttered up by a rhapsodic online film review. Instead, when one or another of them finally saw Blue Crush it was, “Oh I see what you liked so much about that movie <wink>.”

It wasn’t like that at all, honest! I mean, sure, a couple of hours of tanned and vigorous young ladies in swimsuits is not exactly hard to take. But the superficial pleasures of Blue Crush are many and they are not all prurient.

The fat lady sings

[Cross-posted at DailyKos.]

John Edwards has ended his presidential run.

I would like to jump straight to the final of Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, “acceptance,” but it’s probably unhealthy to skip right over the other stages, so please bear with me as I race through:

  1. Denial. Edwards has obviously made a deal with one or both remaining Democrats to be the VP nominee, so at least some of his agenda still has a chance of moving the country forward.
  2. Anger. Welcome to America, here’s your shit sandwich. Enjoy your next media-conglomerate-approved president, be it the warmonger, the religious nut, the focus-tested corporatist machine politician, or the kumbaya guy who talks a great game but has yet to exhibit a single actual act of courage.
  3. Bargaining. Edwards supporters, let’s band together and make Obama promise to adopt some of John’s most important policies before we throw our support to him!
  4. Depression. Only Edwards’ plans were bold enough to fix America’s problems in less than a generation. Now it’s going to take a lifetime — my kids’ lifetime! — of excessively cautious half-measures to straighten out Bush’s mess.

There, OK. Now I can do acceptance.

In truth, either Obama or Clinton could get the job done, but as I’ve written before (and as others have written, and I’ve highlighted): it’s not just the person, it’s the narrative. America urgently needs to turn the page on its recent past and make a fresh start. Hillary may have the best intentions, but rightly or wrongly she’s still an indelible symbolic link to the past. Only Obama represents real change, and the world needs to see real change in America.

On the bright side: even if nothing else progressive happens in the next administration, we still have the fact that the handsome, rich white guy couldn’t compete with a black guy and a woman. We’ve come a long way, baby.

How I wonder what you are

Often when I’m gazing at the night sky I will focus on a very dim star and marvel at its ability to shine steadily. No matter how long I look, and no matter whether I move a few inches to the left or right, it keeps right on shining. (It may twinkle a bit, but as you probably know, that’s due to our fluid, shifting atmosphere causing the starlight to refract slightly differently from one moment to the next, not due to anything about the star.) Photons emitted by that star hundreds of years ago poured out in such numbers that, even as they fanned out across unimaginable distances, there are still enough of them landing continuously in the tiny target of my eyes that the star remains a constant point of light.

Knowing the distances involved, it seems implausible that enough photons would be headed in my exact direction — of all the other places in the universe they could have gone! How implausible? Let’s figure it out.

We’ll start by estimating that the area of my dilated, night-sky-gazing pupils is about one square centimeter, or (to keep all measurements using the same units) one ten-thousandth of a square meter.

Thanks to Wikipedia I know that a single photon of visible light carries about 4×10-19 joules of energy which is just enough to excite a photoreceptor in my eye. How many must arrive each second for me to perceive a continuous image? I know that movies, projected at 24 frames per second, are good enough to trigger the persistence-of-vision effect. Since a distant star has far less detail than a frame of movie film, I’m guessing that it can appear steady at even fewer than 24 “frames” per second. Let’s guess 10 photons per second must arrive in my eyes to perceive a steadily shining star. 10 photons delivering 4×10-19 joules every second is 4×10-18 watts (because one watt is equal to one joule per second).

Now, how far is that star? A bit of googling reveals that a typical faintly visible star is 200 light years away (though many are much closer and many are much farther). 200 light years is 1.89×1018 meters.

From the perspective of that star, what fraction of its “sky” is taken up by my eyes? If you imagine a gigantic spherical shell centered on and surrounding that star, with a radius of 200 light years and my eyes on the inner surface, then the total area of that inner surface — the star’s “sky” — is 4×π×200light-years2, which is 503,000 square light-years, which is 4.5×1037 square meters. My pupils, one ten-thousandth of a square meter, comprise 1/2.22×1042 of that “sky.” That’s two millionths of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth — not like that’s going to make my big ego feel small or anything.

So if 4×10-18 watts of visible light is delivered to 1/2.22×1042 of the star’s sky, then the total power delivered to its full sky is that first number divided by that second, which is 1.8×1024 watts, or 1.8 trillion terawatts. Is that a plausible number?

Yes it is. Our own sun has a visible-light output of 3.8×1026 watts. Which means, incidentally, that (using my guesses from above) it would be visible as a steadily shining star to a distance of 2.7×1019 meters, or about 2,900 light-years. Future criminals exiled from our galaxy will lose sight of their home star while barely a thousandth of the way to their new home in Andromeda.

300


Tonight we blog in hell!
(The tumbling figures are the
victims of my withering rhetoric.)

This post marks two big gee bobg milestones: the 300th post and the first day with more than 200 pageviews — and that’s after subtracting all the hits from bots, spiders, and my own obsessive checking and rechecking of my content.

In honor of this momentous occasion I thought I’d turn over the writing duties to my first guest blogger: the Bob-o-matic. The Bob-o-matic is a Perl script that examines all the posts on my blog and then constructs a new post at random using the same vocabulary and the same phrase patterns (technically, via a Markov chain). If you’d like to understand exactly what the Bob-o-matic does, here is its source code, with no helpful comments or documentation (for extra pedagogical rigor).

Without further ado, the first gee bobg post by the Bob-o-matic!

Today is iconoclasm, which was my cue that it’s harvesting laughs instead of writing letters to Senator Dianne Feinstein expressing disappointment in one shot as quickly as possible. I bought some rope and, for better or worse, he shouted, pee! By the AP and appeared far and wide in the shadow of Primadonna’s wonderful hearty food and jovial, though I understood a little media savvy can recognize TV’s propaganda and soothing pap for what it goes on to a willing patron and would not stop the car overheated and we still don’t know exactly why this might be. Tell me. There’s my street, Tom said out of my head into his hotel. That’s when they saw us run from the Star Wars a couple of hours on the Millennium Falcon is sidetracked into an intelligent, multilayered byplay that gets its point across indirectly. Take this scene are Atia’s that is far preferable to hearing nine months of 1986 were a hit the crowd getting into the story better than most? In short, if elected, to the seas to be sexually active when you can imagine we are deeply disappointed with the peroxide and a wide variety of capes, masks, and those who did the exact same thing goes for sushi… If the President deems them hostile to U.S. Senator in a boxing ring notably body and the structure of the weather yesterday, as there was David, Julie, and he throws a tantrum? None of us found Greg crashed out on a wide selection of vintage candy from yesteryear, and exhibit a journalistic integrity that they included him in happier times? July 1999. Mr. Spock Uhura Uhura uniform 60 Star Trek Technical Manual. Bless her, never over the years I have not been true at all those southern dialects myself, what could George Bailey, who doesn’t like tits? That means there is not a place full of them. I forget what it looks like a beggar he couldn’t bag ‘er for want of a web page I created with this system it was time to time. Dozens of feet it’s a smell, smell world after all it’s a way to explain the observable world without invoking God.

Bob the Dad knows his b’s and d’s

I’m pleased to report that after a brief plateau, Jonah’s reading skills are burgeoning beyond our best expectations. It’s amazing to see him power through his reading each week, mentally correlating (ever more quickly) the occasional unfamiliar printed word with its familiar spoken counterpart.

However, he still occasionally mixes up his lower-case b’s and d’s, and who can blame him? So to help him, I devised this little mnemonic.

I’m all set with a mnemonic for lower-case q’s and p’s if he should need it, though it doesn’t seem like he does:

Q and U are friends, so the stem on the q wants to be close to the u: qu. But P and U? Pee-yoo!

I’ll be concept, you be execution

I need someone to do the guerilla-art installation project that I dreamed up a few years ago:

All around the country, put up speed-limit signs that look just like the real ones but give speeds in crazy units. For example, 55 miles per hour is:

  • 7.3 furlongs per minute
  • 13.4 fathoms per second
  • 0.2 light-seconds per lunar month
  • 478 stadia per hour
  • 9.2×1041 planck lengths per week
  • 29,740 kilometers per fortnight

Are you in?

Do the abortion math

It’s the thirty-fifth anniversary of the famous Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that affirmed the legality of abortion.

Of course abortion remains a fantastically polarizing subject. It seems like the country is divided fairly evenly in favor of choice and opposed to it (and not necessarily along traditional party or ideological lines); and that most opinions are strongly held.

I for one believe that Bill Clinton got it exactly right when he said that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” but why do I believe that? No opinion is worth having if it can’t be examined, challenged, and defended, so here is my defense.

First we must determine whether it’s possible to attack or defend abortion dispassionately, without appeal to emotion. Most people who oppose abortion do so because they believe that it is murder, a naturally emotional subject. We could try to remove or distort the emotional component (e.g., by confining ourselves to a discussion of costs and benefits — as routinely happens in cases of state-sponsored murder such as executions and wars), but I think there’s another way that sidesteps the question of murder altogether.

Whether or not abortion is murder depends on whether or not a life exists to terminate. Indeed that’s what it came down to in the Roe v. Wade decision:

We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.

Nearly everyone agrees that life does not exist prior to conception. Nearly everyone agrees that life does exist upon birth. So where, in between those two events, is the switch flipped? We don’t need medicine, philosophy, or theology to decide; just simple math.

Life may not exist the entire time, but what does exist is an ever-increasing probability of life — more precisely, a probability of being born alive. The appearance of a fetal heartbeat at about eight weeks after conception improves the odds. “Viability” (a minimal ability to survive outside the womb) at about 22 weeks improves it some more. The chances of being born alive continue slowly to climb as the fetus develops, until finally it reaches 100% at the moment the baby takes its first breath.

Can we scientifically choose a probability threshold before which we say abortion is OK and after which we say it isn’t? Sort of. A threshold very close to 100% would be unacceptable to most people, even pro-choice advocates, for emotional reasons (although this has not been true at all times or in all cultures, some of which routinely disposed of unwanted infants simply by exposing them to the elements). It makes no sense to talk about a threshold of 0% as some extreme anti-abortionists might prefer it, because the probability is higher than zero even before conception — especially if Barry White is playing and the lights are turned low. Any other choice between 0% and 100% would be arbitrary, so the best we can do is to choose the least arbitrary number in that interval: 50%. As it happens, in modern America a 50% chance of a live birth appears to be reached, on average, between the 22nd and 28th week of pregnancy.

So that’s my position: abortion should be legal (and safe and rare) before about 22 weeks, and illegal (with the usual pragmatic exceptions — rape, incest, health of the mother) otherwise. Your emotions aside, I think I’ve shown that no other position on this subject is more rational than that one.