santiago, chile

rachel and i took an overnight bus to santiago last weekend with no particular plan. it turned into an amazingly fun trip!




i bought two fantastic paintings from this contagiously happy man!




we happened upon a fun parade.




on mothers day we walked into plaza de armas to find los bomberos doing flips off their firemans truck onto a big inflated cushion. on an impulse, rachel asked them if we could jump too. much to my surprise (and everyone in the square i think)... they said yes!




green beans seem to be a popular topping on sandwiches.



the most intriguing theme restaurant i've ever been in! every inch of the place was covered with "viking" stuff. they served a yummy traditional chilean meal!

Carnival of Space

Carnival of Space #3 is up and running today at UniverseToday.com. the carnival of space collects recent writings about space and astronomy from all corners and crevices of the internet.

i'm very excited to be included this time around with a post i wrote about observing with gemini-south!!

burning bits of rock

ever wonder what would happen if a super huge meteorite hit the earth?

this picture shows the "meteor crater" in arizona which is 180 meters deep and 1.2 km in diameter with an eroded rim standing 30-60 m high. this crater is believed to have been made 50,000 years ago by a 46-meter wide meteorite composed of nickel-iron rock.



billions of objects enter earth's atmosphere everyday. they are mostly small things that burn up as they pass thru the atmosphere (we call these meteors). the objects that reach all the way to the earth's surface are called meteorites.

this video (7 min) shows a cool japanese-produced simulation of what could happen if a gigantic impact occured on earth....



i'm not intending to scare everyone by showing the fatal effects of that impact. in reality, an object that huge only hits the earth once every 100 million years or more. thats a very long time! the chart shows the frequency with which meteorites of different sizes are believed to reach earth.... and thats not even counting all the cosmic garbage!!

according to this chart, an impact like the one that made the meteor crater above should happen about every 5,000 years or so... and that one was 50,000 years ago! looks like we might be over due! good thing groups like the near-earth objects (NEOs) program and the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program are constantly monitoring the skies in search of potentially approaching objects!!

futbol

how is this even possible??



awesome!

painting the clouds...

what do you see in the clouds?



link

more life in the universe

i believe life... in some form... exists somewhere in the universe other than just on earth. the universe is just too big for us to be the only life!! we developed on one planet, among nine eight planets that orbit around one star in the milky way galaxy which harbors ~400 BILLION other stars. the milky way is only one galaxy among the BILLIONS of galaxies in the universe, each containing BILLIONS of stars. any of those stars could have planets, but planets are really hard to find!

i'm certain life exists *somewhere* in that vast volume of space, but that's exactly the difficulty in finding life.... there are so many galaxies and stars so where do we look? what do we look for? since we live on a planet, we can easily deduce that the best place to look is on other planets! as of today, we've detected 233 planets outside of our solar system and its cool that we finally found an earth-like planet that exists in a region around a star with a temperature to support liquid water!

life on earth has existed for 5 billion years but the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. some life out there could have just began in the last billion years or less, or some planets could have harbored evolving life forms for twice as long as the earliest known life forms believed to be on earth! that raises interesting questions about what life on earth might look like in another 5 billion years (assuming life survives this destructive period in human existence)! consider that only 65 million years ago, dinosaurs dominated earth's surface!

communication with extraterrestrial lifeforms is a whole other issue. our chance of "communicating" with anything out there (in my opinion) will result from another civilization communicating with us. we've been sending off electromagnetic signals for, lets say, 100 years. the earliest signals are now 100 light years away from earth in all directions. within that sphere there are only ~30 stars. the new planet we just found is about 20 light years away... so it has received our earliest transmissions and has had ample time (over 20 years) to send a light signal back our way. We havent received any signals from this or any other planet accoring to the SETI Institute. our (unintentional) early electromagnetic signals have only reached a few dozen stars among the buhzillions that exist in the universe... and thats traveling at the speed of light!

so.... thats why i say our best chance for communication is from another life form having sent out a signal at some point in the past. let's say there's intelligent life on a planet on the other side of the milky way... about 40,000 light years away. if we receive a signal tomorrow from this distant planet, the signal will have been traveling from that planet for 40,000 years! we are ready with our return signal (of course!), which we send out immediately. that planet will start receiving our original signals in 39,900 years and then in 40,000 years, they will receive our response specific to their message. then it will take them 40,000 years to respond to us, etc....

another (more hopeful) option is that they will have detected our presence thru light detection or exploration of our neck arm of the milky way, in space vehicles that travel very very fast!!

my point is not to lose all hope of ever detecting another civilization... on the contrary, i think it is super exciting that we are detecting so many planets so rapidly right now!! my real point is that there *has* to be life out there somewhere is this unfathomably large universe of ours. probability says there should be life considering the volume and the fact that the chemistry that makes life possible on earth is extremely abundant throughout the universe. so let's keep looking and doing our best not to destroy our own successful and immensely special civilization while we are actively searching for those signals!!

kaboom, indeed

i have to brag a bit about a good graduate school friend of mine, robert quimby. not only was he the first of our class to graduate (thus making the rest of us look bad), but he was the first (and only so far that i know of) to be mentioned by name in the New York Times (thus making us all very proud)!!

Robert got involved with a cool project at McDonald Observatory using a relatively tiny 18-inch telescope. using nifty software that robert developed, the telescope automatically scans galaxy clusters for signs of change... explosions indicative of stellar deaths called "supernova"! when he wakes up in the morning he looks for these new spots in his images. he's so dedicated to this project that he has his cell phone set up to ring every time a new supernova is discovered! hahaha! i used to make fun of him for that, but i secretly thought it was pretty cool (uh-oh... now the truth is out!)!

the big news revealed yesterday is that Dr. Quimby discovered a very interesting explosion last september while he was deep in the haze of writing his phd dissertation. his collaborator's follow-up observations revealed that they dont really know what caused this explosion to happen! it's 100 times more powerful and has lasted longer than any other supernova explosion resulting from stellar death ever seen!

that's cool!

what's even cooler is that i have all kinds of pictures of the doctor to reveal to the public! bwah ha ha ha!!! dont let him fool you here... astronomers dont drink no stinking water!



here he is with my adoring little sister. another little-known fact is that he used to be in the band reel big fish way back in the day... which is my little sisters alltime favorite band. she got so mad at me the first time she came to visit and i didnt introduce her to robert. so here's their meeting... in all its glory (water again!?)!


from our first astronomy meeting together... awe....


oh yeah... and he's a big-blocking volleyball super star!



ok, thats all for now. congrats dr quimby!!

las empanadas chilenas

rachel and i spent most of saturday making empanadas! we each made our fillings friday night in preparation. i made pino (meat filling) and she made chicken filling and apple filling. preparing the dough.....


rolling and cutting it into circles (using wine bottles and pot lids for lack of better tools!)


placing the pino filling on the dough.... the meaty concoction, an olive and a slice of hard boiled egg. i still havent been able to discover the origin of the olive in the meat empanadas, other than it tastes good, which is reason enough!


folding over the dough and securing...


poking holes.


and enjoying the (cooked) yumminess....


... for many many meals to come!!

sick of this

"sick of this" - hometown baghdad

solar systems

our solar system is a pretty cool place. not only does it harbour the only life that we know to exist in the universe.... it has lots of planets, moons and millions of asteroids and comets. this is one reason that the recent discovery of the most earth-like planet found yet (see a great discussion by phil plait, the bad astronomer) is exciting!

regardless of the way we've adopted to define a planet in our own solar system, there are lots of BIG objects in it! check out this cool site to see all known objects in our solar system bigger than 200 miles across!.


and somehow i'd never noticed this before... hee hee... but saturn's moon, mimas, looks amazingly like a certain sci-fi famous... death star... eventhough this image of mimas wasnt captured until many many years after the release of star wars

you gotta list?

lists, lists, lists... magazines love to create lists! the current big list is the
Time Top 100. Time magazine claims that these are the people whose "power, talent or moral example is transforming the world". wow! people are chosen (in equal number) in these five categories...

* Artists & Entertainers
* Scientists & Thinkers
* Leaders & Revolutionaries
* Builders & Titans
* Heroes & Pioneers

here's my list.... of some things i noticed about their list:

- king bush the W is not on the list.

- a coach of an american football team, Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts, made the list - is he really that influential in the entire world?

- the egyptian televangelist, Amr Khaled, made the list - i had no idea.

- the russian chessmaster, Garry Kasparov, made the list - awesome, although i admit i dont follow the world of chess too closely!

- Ken Lewis, ceo, Bank of America made the list - that bastardo sure has been negatively influencing my monthly income by charging me so many ridiculous fees!

- Tina Fey, actress, is on the list - very happy to see her... she's great!

- Youssou N'Dour - senegalese musician! - yeah! see video of him below

King Bush the W

april was poetry month, but i failed to post anything. so now i share robert greenwald and poet steven connell's bold short, marking the fourth anniversary of "Mission Accomplished," the infamous 2003 assertion by president bush that "major combat operations have ended" in iraq.


tell us the mission .com

kinetic sculpture

where design and engineering overlap: meet theo jansen.

kucinich

the best thing to come out of ohio in a long long time (except for me of course... hee hee) is dennis kucinich!

not only has he passed a resolution to impeach big dick cheney, but i also agree with a lot of what he says in this interview.

go dennis! woo hoo!

cerro grande!

yesterday i explored a main feature of La Serena... by bike. inland from the city lies a looming, steep, tall hill appropriately named cerro grande ("big hill").

en route....
rachel and the path up. i'll admit that i was pretty intimidated at this point, especially considering how difficult it was to gain any traction on the rocky dirt trail. i'd never done such an up hill climb on bike before. at this point we'd been riding for 30 minutes and i was already a bit fatigued.
nice view of the valley from pretty close to the top.

woohoo! we made it... just in time for lunch! :)

it was a sunny, yet hazy day. on a clear day you could see La Serena in the foreground, the beaches and all the way across the bay to coquimbo before losing a sense of distance to the vast horizon of ocean.
all geared up and ready to head back down.
the downhill was actually pretty scary. for some reason i had a very bad feeling.... but i managed to only skid once and we all arrived at the bottom safely... and quickly... without any falls or injuries!

weightlessness

one day i really hope to experience weightlessness. the zero gravity corp. is now making this possible for thousands of people... if theyre willing to pay $3,750! the zero-g corp. flies its passengers up to 32,000ft and performs the "parobolic flight" maneuver where they tip the nose up at a 45 degree angle then follow a parabolic trajectory up and over the curve... like a roller coaster without the wind or the harness... or that feeling you get in your stomach as youre driving over the little bumps on a country road. You're not achieving complete weightlessness in such a case, but you can definitely feel yourself lightening as your stomach "rises" (by the way, these country road bumps are way more common in ohio than they are in texas). the plane falls for about 30 seconds while all the passengers experience weightlessness... blocked from the forces of the wind thanks to the body of the plane.

stephen hawking, who has been in a wheel chair for almost 40 years due to lou gehrig's disease, just got to experience this feeling. i wanted to share this picture because i think it's super cute! i'm glad he could experience such a thing... and i hope that one day i do too!

to the moon!

NASA has been getting a lot of bad press lately, which i wont remind you of here, but i finally found something positive (thanks to the bad astronomer)! we're going back to the moon!

here is a cool animation from NASA about the constellation program trip to the moon:



if you have patience... load the high resolution version.

i'm pro-choice.

i thought i'd be less than subtle with the title of this blog, especially after the recent supreme court decision to ban abortion in the second trimester.

i share with you now a very personal account of how this decision affects the health of women: disgusted beyong belief... my views on abortion.... a must-read in my opinion.

i like trees. let's keep 'em!

so much for the top leaders of the US representing the american people. karl rove, george bush and dick cheney are such bastards in my mind. they act like big, defensive bullies that are ridiculously set in their ways. yesterday was earth day, but here's an article where rove gets defensive and dismissive with sheryl crow on the topic of global warming. why?

on a more positive note... here's an article where bill maher reminds us why we should treat every day like earth day! the earth is our home, the only home any human has every known, it provides food.... and it will until we destroy it.

homeless

this group produced little snippet documentaries about 6 homeless people from 6 different cities around the world.... really interesting... homeless

up, up, down, down, left, right...

if you know what the heck that means, then you played the nintendo game contra many many years ago! i spent many many hours playing this one. when you first turn the game on, you press a series of buttons... up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, etc (cant remember the rest).... and you get special weapons abilities... or something like that.

i just found this painting by david chung that i really liked....

then i looked for more of his stuff and realized this painting is contra-inspired and titled "up, up, down, down, left, right... WHAAAAA!!" cool stuff.