A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Phil Plait reports on an unconfirmed image from a Hawaiian telescope that appears to show a planet in orbit around a remote yellow star. Whoa.

We've been discovering extrasolar planets for many years now, but unless I'm mistaken, we have yet to actually snap a discrete piccie of one. This would be hella cool.

Edit OK, was msitaken: we've shot a planet around a brown dwarf before. But yellow stars are more exciting.

Congratulations to Phil "Bad Astronomer" Plait for accepting the position of James Randi's intellectual heir, and the presidency of the JREF. This puts him at the head of one of the oldest and most dedicated organizations focused on stemming the tide against the world of pseudoscience, hokum, and self-delusion. They lead the fight in never giving an inch to creationists, global-warming deniers, and others who would reverse the flow of science for their own purposes.

I used to read of Randi's weekly column at randi.org regularly, and was familiar with his ongoing concern of not having any clear candidate for passing his torch on to. Recent shifts in my online newsreading habits led me to start reading Plait's stuff without getting around to re-subscribing to Randi, so learning about his new role was an unexpected but welcome surprise this morning.

Plait's explosive enthusiasm, which he's maintained over a solid decade of science (and anti-anti-science) blogging, makes for quite a counterpoint with Randi's grumpy curmudgeonliness. I look forward to seeing what emerges. (I don't know how much their age difference is a factor in their relative personalities, since I have only been familiar with the online writing of the elderly Randi. But based on what I know of his many decades of service to the skeptical cause, including his celebrated string of appearances on The Tonight Show during Carson's era, I suspect he's always rather been like this.)

My favorite comment from the Making Light thread on Arthur C. Clarke's passing, by Paul Duncanson:

Tonight, if it's not overcast, go out somewhere you can see the sky clearly. Look up for long enough and you'll be bound to see one or more of the points of light moving. It's full of stars and, my god, we put some of them there.

Then take the phone from your pocket and call someone who lives on the other side of the planet.

There is magic here already and it's in no small way because of him that we have it.

After I wrote that last subject line I thought I bet that isn't actually true, and lo.

Zarf lent me Hofstadter's new I am a Strange Loop yesterday. Between him and the reviews I've read the consensus seems to be "Eh... it's worth reading." It covers the same ground as Gödel, Escher, Bach, examining how consciousness can emerge from unconscious material, but is both shorter and much more explicit about it - GEB is often seen and even loved by its readers as an almanac-style funhouse of art and logic not arranged around any particular topic, and though the book helped set him for life Hofstadter has always regretted its unintended ambiguousness. I read two chapters of the new book in bed last night and am already convinced that if nothing else it contains enough new angles to stay interesting throughout, so I'm cool with it.

The review I read suggests that I can expect him to spend a lot of ink alternately and mourning his dead wife and thrashing John Searle's anti-AI arguments, which I've already seen him do years ago in Le Ton Beau de Marot (highly recommended reading, by the way, if you haven't heard of that one). But this time he's doing it in a GEBby context and not a linguistic one (though these are certainly related to begin with) so we'll see. If I trust any author, I trust this one.

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I touched base with my client on Sunday evening, reminding them that they gave me zero hours of work last week but adding that this was OK given my webclient push, and I wouldn't complain if they chose to withhold for another week. The response has been uncharacteristic silence, such that I've been peeking in on their ticketing system just to make sure that I hadn't missed anything. Well, I'm getting what I asked for.

I don't think that I've overtly noted here yet that doing paid web work on the side of Volity has been good for my own project. Facing and overcoming challenges that don't originate from my own needs forces me to learn new web programming and styling techniques, broadening the arsenal I bring to Volity webwork. In June, for example, paid work encouraged me to get up to speed with CSS - all the books I own on the subject are from 2003 and therefore nearly useless - and for this reason the web client has a beautiful layout without a single <table> involved (except for the actual tables).

Yes, I still have to see how badly it fails on MSIE6. If it is full of fail I will be tempted to just lock that damn thing out and require MSIE7, or the non-shitty alternative browser of your choice. We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

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Speaking of 2003, I've been thinking lately that as of this summer I've been working on Volity for the length of a typical American undergraduate education. All that time on a single project! It makes me feel a little panicky until I look at it sideways and figure: yeah, that's about right, actually.

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I can't wait to show y'all the webclient prototype. I can't until daerr builds a proxying solution that will let the webserver freely make AJAX calls to my Jabber connection broker daemon. For the time being, I have been having the daemon itself serve all the static HTML bits as well as the Jabber stuff, and just hit itself with the AJAX. This... does not scale. Heh, it might scale actually but it would be utterly unmaintainable and I don't even want to feint in that direction, not even for the sake of a demo.

My voice of experience speaks here. This is how paranoid I am of a "oh, we'll just do it this way for the time being" hack becoming the permanent solution. No, I'm not giving that an inch.

I have been threatening to just shoot a video of the alpha running, and I just might resort to this if I can't do anything else this week.

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Heh, the Diesel finally put up polite-but-firm little placards in its booths asking that they be used only by parties of three or more during "busier hours". It's 10am now and I see only couples and singles-with-laptops. Wonder how well this works when it's time. Oh, here comes a guy now... and he reads the card... and he keeps walking! Wow.

I used to stretch out in the booths by myself all the time, but at some point I lost the ability. The last time I did, earlier this year, I thought I could feel waves of resentment beating down on me from everyone else. I might have even picked up and moved to a table before I left!

Twice, attractive young women I do not know have asked to share the booth with me, and this always gives my day a little lift but it's probably a weak reason to seek to sit in the giant booths alone. I wonder whether mutual strangers might now recognize the look of argh-I-can't-sit-anywhere in each other as they wander around the cafe, and propose to become one-time Booth Buddies.

Don Herbert, TV's Mr. Wizard, has passed away. LA Times obit, with photo gallery.

I mist up a little, not of sadness but of good memories from my childhood. I watched him on Nickelodeon in the mid 1980s, and his show was a bright spot during a very patchy time. He didn't make me into a scientist, but he did help wedge me onto a trajectory of permanent curiosity, which has turned me into whatever the hell I am today. I like to think he had the same effect on many other kids, too. Cheers, Don.

Righto, I'm starting to see why all my friends were getting tweaked by season 2 of the new Who.

Look, if you want to imagine that the future of humanity 5 billion years from now looks like it's maybe only 500 years from now, fine. If you want to conjecture that aging and death is intrinsic to humans and literally incurable, okie dokie. I may grumble at your conclusions but I accept that you may wish to simplify and streamline things in order to write popcorn SF (and produce it within a reasonable TV budget).

But don't say that it's impossible to orbit a black hole, when in truth that notion is no more preposterous than orbiting an ordinary star. They're both just gravity wells, man. Just stay out of the Swartzchild radius and you're fine. A black hole is actually not some sort of capricious space monster that arbitrarily pulls in and gobbles up matter from an indefinite distance away. Seriously, you could have replaced it with an Classic Trek-style Giant Space Amoeba or whatever and the whole thing would have been far more reasonable.

I feel that this is a more legitmate complaint that WHAT that's not how computers work or whatever. It's one thing to make shit up about how physics works (time machines? warp drives? bring em on, I love em) but to present known things as matter-of-factly and utterly wrong is just beyond the pale.

Story from New York Magazine about a Calorie Restriction diet subculture. That is, people who eat as few calories per day as they can, carefully measuring out exactly the nutrient quantities their body needs and not a scrap more, with the hope that it will add (all things being equal) decades to their lifespan.

I had heard about the experiments with lab animals, where it's proven to work, but didn't know that people were doing this. I imagined that nobody would want to live in a state of constant hunger.

This sounds exactly like the sort of thing I'd jump into wheeee and then forget about two days later. Still quite intriguing.

Went to hear Richard Dawkins read from his new book The God Delusion at the, uh, church that Church Street (I assume) is named after at Harvard Square. With dougo and the dictator555.

Ha ha ha... I just now discovered that the introduction that the introducey person introduced him with was taken word-for-word from his Wikipedia page.

Anyway, it was OK. The first half was fiddle-dee-dee about what a total bastard the pre-Christian biblical God is, and I do declare I've heard that all before, and so have you. He gets marks for not trotting out everyone's favorite story of God summoning bears to eat naughty children, but that's the vein he was in.

There were some nice bon mots in there but for the most I rolled my eyes at everyone else's laughter and applause at his Old Testament exposé. Haven't any of you ever read a weblog ever? And some of it, frankly, was like a lame comedy routine, at one point basically going So this Trinity thing, is that three gods or one? Make up your minds! [LAUGHTER] Blat.

Then, uh... I dunno. It didn't really leave much of an impression on me. I might end up reading the book anyway for guilty-pleasure reasons, and/or the hope that it surely must contain some new insights I haven't already been exposed to.

tahnan will be disappointed to know that he again invoked the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

A guy during the Q&A session asked if he could give him a hug, but the introducey lady wouldn't let him.

Then we ate Bibim Bap at Seoul Food on Mass Ave and the nice lady said WHY AREN'T YOU EATING IT RIGHT and picked up my spoon and mixed up my bibim bap for me because I hadn't bothered. I told her it was because I was lazy. When I finished eating it she said GOOD JOB!

Here is me lighting a candle for the untold numbers of people the president doomed today in order to please his unevolved base. For all I know, I'm one of those doomed. For all I know, so is he.

Most of Congress stood against you this time, you son of a bitch, and it will be even more with the next bill. The allies of fear and ignorance cannot hold back science forever.