The video depicts what should be a GLOBAL CATASTROPHE the likes of which have never been seen before. Continents moving at hundreds of kilometres per second and slamming together. Good things the ocean water has no need to obey fluid dynamics, for one thing. (Notice how water materializes out of the Pacific coasts and just disappears from the Atlantic?) And there’s no way the two groups of partiers would happily end up on the same beach. There’d be a lot more than a couple cracked streets and some bouncing sand. That’s all I’m saying.

However, this precession of the signs does not necessarily mean that astrology is complete nonsense. One can imagine a world in which astrology really did work, despite the fact that the signs don’t match up anymore. It’s not hard. In fact I’ll do it right now.

It’s not hard to imagine that the time of year of one’s birth actually did affect one’s behaviour. Maybe our gestation period was more heavily influenced by ambient temperature, such that a developing embryo’s body chemistry was altered in specific and predictable ways. Isn’t there some species of reptile in which whether you become a boy or a girl depends on the temperature at which your egg develops? That’s what I’m talking about here. Even less crazy would be that a child’s first few months of development influence their behaviour. You might imagine a person born in December would be tougher than someone born in May because of various environmental things. I think there have even been proper studies on this kind of thing. Early childhood psychology and the like.

People would notice this kind of predictor. Except instead of noticing that the changes in behaviour are correlated with seasons, they notice that they’re correlated with the position of the sun at birth. These are really pretty much the same thing, and it seems like seasons would be an easier connection, but hey, everybody loves astronomy, right? So, instead of saying “babies raised in the first month of winter tend to be tough and have a high threshold for cold” (or whatever) they say “people who were born under Capricorn (Dec 23 to Jan 19) tend to…” etc.

And this system works. The people who have worked it out have just made a mistake in assuming that correlation equals causation (which it does not). But that doesn’t really matter since their mistake takes many lifetimes to become obvious, and by that point astrologers have stopped bothering to check if the Sun is in the same place it’s been in for the last hundred years. Another simple mistake.

But before you know it, the Sun has moved quite a lot, and the constellations don’t match up very well anymore, just as we see today. The seasons that caused this whole mess, on the other hand, are still right where they were before. People born in the first month of winter are still tough and cold (or whatever), and that still matches the description of Capricorn even though the Sun isn’t in Capricorn anymore. The system still works, we just have an outdated naming scheme.

So the claim that astrology is complete rubbish because the names of the signs don’t match up with the sun anymore is fallacious. You might as well claim that modern electronics can’t possibly work because current actually flows the other way. Unfortunate naming conventions don’t invalidate the thing they describe.

However, all of this is not to say that we live in a world where astrology is true. There are, I’m sure, dozens of other reasons why your newspaper horoscope can’t possibly be true, but I’m not going to address them here. The point is, astrology may be nonsense, but it’s not necessarily a priori nonsense.

Soon, the spacecraft started overheating due to the intense summer heat on the Moon. Isro scientists say it was deft mission management that saved it from a total burnout.

I’ve got news for whoever wrote that: summer in the northern hemisphere is not summer in the whole solar system. It’s not even summer on the whole planet. There is no such thing as “summer heat” on the Moon. There’s just heat. The same heat, all the time, from the same sun, all the time. The Moon doesn’t have a large enough tilt relative to the sun to have significant seasons, nor the atmosphere to support them if it did, and they wouldn’t affect a spacecraft in orbit above it anyway.

It’s not really clear from this whether it was the BBC or Isro, India’s space agency, that associated the heat with summer, but it’s wrong either way. It’s not a good justification for the failure of the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft and it shouldn’t have made it into the article.

—–
Edit: I emailed the BBC about this, they promised to send the message to the editor in charge of the article, and by the time I got around to checking it they had removed the word “summer” from the offending sentence.

As an astronomer, I was eager to find out what the night sky was like. There’s little hope for any observing in downtown Toronto to begin with, but I thought with this view away from the downtown core there might be a chance of seeing a thing or two with my very meager 2 inch refracter. Unfortunately, (1) after sunset the western sky remains quite bright, and (2), this is still downtown Toronto. I can barely make out the bowl of the Big Dipper.

On top of this, the northwest sky in the evening is about as boring as it gets right now. While I did make out the binary pair Mizar and Alcor, what I really want to see is either Saturn or Jupiter, but I have yet to even figure out when either of those may make an appearance in just the right direction.

What I really need is a rooftop penthouse and a nice big 12 incher.

That’s what she said.

All of which I’ve done.

But as I was thinking this, I was flipping through a presentation overviewing some of the early evolution of the universe, when I hit a slide that presented, without any explanation, this parable:

The Emperor of the South Sea was Fast, The Emperor of the North Sea Furious, the Emperor of the center was Primordial Blob. Fast and Furious were discussing how to repay Primordial Blob’s bounty.

“All men have seven holes through which they look, listen, eat, breathe; he alone doesn’t have any. Let’s try boring them.”

Every day they bored one hole, and on the seventh day the Primordial Blob died.

- Chuang-tzu (c. 350 BC)

Would any Taoists in the audience care to enlighten us? I’m no expert in ancient Chinese philosophy, but suddenly I don’t feel so eager to poke my nose into the primordial plasma of the big bang anymore.

Take this guy, for example, who is happy to have more daylight savings time:

Jerry Smits, who runs his own painting company in Southern California, says that he can get more work done with the time change. Since exterior paint has to be applied by 3 p.m. to dry properly, Smits can squeeze in another job during daylight saving time.

– “The new daylight saving time: Will it really work?“, Columbia News Service

Listen, Jerry. Putting the clocks ahead does not actually make the sun set an hour later in the day. There are no more hours of sunlight than the day before. If you want to get more work done, just wake up when the sun wakes up. You can call it three in the afternoon if you want and work until midnight in bright sunshine, but the sun’s going to set at the same time regardless.

Same goes to you farmers. Cows do not observe daylight savings time. They do not set their clocks back or forward an hour and expect you out in the barn to do the milking when the big hand and the little hand are wherever they like the big hand and little hand to be when being milked. If anything they probably get confused when you start showing up an hour early in the spring.

The people who tend to think daylight savings matter are actually the ones to whom it matters the least. If you require daylight to do your work, you’re working with animals who know no time, or doing anything else that depends on the day/night cycle, then the arbitrary numbers on a little display don’t change anything about what you do. For the rest of us, all that changes is how bright it is when we happen to leave our classrooms and offices to venture into some other builing.

The only thing that actually changes the number of hours in the day is the tilt of the Earth’s axis and its orbit around the sun, and no act of the US Congress is going to change that.

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She does everything with exponentials.

More fun holidays:
March 14th – Pi day
October 23rd – Mole day (we even got a cake once)

The topic was this: Why is the universe just right for life? There are various approaches one can take in an attempt to answer it. One speaker broke it down into three possibilities:

1. The universe must be the way it is, and it’s just lucky that it supports life at all.
2. There are an infinite number of universes, so one suitable for humans was bound to show up eventually.
3. God did it.

The discussion largely ignored the third option, which was fine by me. As for the first two, though, there were some interesting points made. As many people see this question as being highly controversial, especially with you involve intelligent design, I found the most significant statement of the night to be “There is no controversy, only questions,” from Leonard Susskind.

Fine tuning of the universe is a significant part to the problem, and is often used as proof of intelligent design. One of the scientists on the panel (I forget which) made a good analogy to water. We often talk about how if ice were heavier than water (as is the case with most other substances) all the oceans and lakes would be frozen solid and life wouldn’t be able to survive here. Whether that’s true or not, it’s based on the idea that the densities are parameters we could have arbitrarily set. However, now that we have more knowledge of atomic physics than a hundred years ago, we can see that water and ice density is not an arbitrary parameter at all but a consequence of something more fudamental. Thus, it’s quite likely that the many arbitrary parameters people point to to claim fine tuning are just manifestations of something deeper that may yet be explained and nothing special at all.

Similarly, one panelist (either Susskind or David Gross) provided an example that two years before the discovery of DNA, someone published a paper proving that there was no way enough information could be coded in a cell to be passed on to create new generations. With a little more understanding this biological miracle isn’t so miraculous afterall. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the water molecule analogy is apt here as well, to explain the supposed irreducable complexity of biological systems. Yes, proteins and their functions are incredibly complicated, but it’s all just atoms and fundamental forces scrammbled together in chemical reactions. As Douglas Adams said of evolution, “We may never know precisely what steps life took in the very early stages of this planet, but it’s not a mystery.” No controversy, only questions.

However, I noticed a complete lack of addressing the question of (in the case of number two) where the infinite number of universe came from in the first place, or why, if there is a single unified theory (as implied by number one), it’s that particular unified theory and not some other. Well, Paul Davies did address it for a moment, but only to acknowledge the problem — that no matter which position you took there still seemed to be a appeal to something outside the universe.

It actually boils down to the question of why there’s something here at all and not nothing. A few weeks ago my dad posited at the dinner table that the most important question people ask themselves is “who am I?” or something of that ilk. My reply to that wasn’t a well formed philosophical question and nothing interesting could come from asking it. I still believe that. Interestingly, the response David Gross gave to the question “why is there something and not nothing?” was that it wasn’t a well formed physical question and nothing could come from asking it. “What is nothing?” he asked.

Originally, I posed that question as being much more important than simply “who am I?” and it probably is the biggest question there is, in a sense, but I realise that Professor Gross is right in his suggestion that there’s no point in thinking about it yet since it is so far outside the realm of what science can say. Perhaps sometime it will be within reach, but not today, and probably not for a long time.

A farmer is having trouble with a cow whose milk has gone sour. He asks three scientists—a biologist, a chemist, and a physicist—to help him. The biologist figures the cow must be sick or have some kind of infection, but none of the antibiotics he gives the cow work. Then, the chemist supposes that there must be a chemical imbalance affecting the production of milk, but none of the solutions he proposes do any good either. Finally, the physicist comes in and says, “First, we assume a spherical cow…”

Physicists use the phrase to poke fun at themselves for all the simplifications we tend to make. Another McGill prof, Cliff Burgess, was heard to say, “Life is either a free particle or a harmonic oscillator,” and I think most physics students would believe it, even though most things in everyday life are neither free particles nor harmonic oscillators. What does everyday life have to do with physics, anyway?

But it’s not all crazy talk, for I did see a spherical cow yesterday. Metaphorically at least. I’ve heard it said a couple times that many things, even non-fluidic things, can be modelled as fluids. In particular, people, physically speaking, behave like fluids. Not an obvious jump, sure, but it works.

I was coming down to the Milton gates just past 17h, when the majority of people are walking home through the ghetto. The light changed from red to green and a massive hoard of people surged ahead to cross Rue University, each one darting around obstacles and jostling for a position among the other pedestrians. On one side of the corner a stream of people splashed onto a car turning right, some people being diverted away from Milton and up University, others flowing down the middle of Milton. As people spread down the street they spread out, the pressure that had built up at the stop light releasing. Faster people passed others on the inside by skipping along the curb or going into the street, while the average paced people were buffered from the buildings by the occasional group of people who had stopped at the side to talk, mimicking the way water moves down a pipe. We were all just molecules in the same fluid.