Totally Blowing Shit Up Tuesdays: This Is Why It's So Effing Hot

I probably should not be whining about this, since it's not three million degrees in North By God Carolina...yet. Or again. Or however you'd like to put it. However, I've said it before and I'll say it again: the coinpurse is hanging mighty low.

I guess the price to pay for one very nice weekend is that we'll soon be thrust deep into the bowels of a very certain fiery hell. Some people (Texans, mostly) call it "summer". It's summer, so let's crank the motherfucking heat all the way to 11, right Mother Nature?

Who knew Mother Nature was such a fan of Nigel Tufnel?

Anyway, this whole ungodly heat wave that has been melting butter all across the Midwest and Great Lakes region--and which is headed straight for the east coast--is just more fuel for the fire for the global warming crowd. Any stretch of hot weather causes them to scream about carbon footprints and cow farts and such. Just like balls-deep snow causes the extremists on the other side to squawk just as loudly against global warming. Whatever it is, global warming or not, I know that I have to wring my pillow out around 4:20 every morning, and that's just not good eats.

I need to slow down my typing: my knuckles are sweating.

Anyway, global warming, celestial alignment, God's hot little prank on all of us--whichever reason you can come up with for this ball-saggingly hot streak, there's no denying that the temperatures are cranked up. Grab yourself a cool glass of ice tea or iced water or scotch on the rocks and check this shit out:

By the way, when I hit 45, scotch on the rocks is all I'll be drinking. You've been given ten year's warning, Scotland! Time to up the manufacturing process!

As you can see in the video, the sun doesn't get along too well with Thai food, either. That big, galactic fart was a solar flare coupled with a massive ejection of charged plasma particles. Fortunately, that was pointed anywhere but toward the Earth. If it had been pointed here, well, we wouldn't be having the conversation, now, would we?

Here's another clip, a closer view but also viewed at a slightly different wavelength of light so you can see the shit falling back into the sun. It's pretty awesome to see the light flaring when the sun's own ejecta lands back on its surface.



Now, run that back and pay special attention to the place where the flare originates and watch it as the flare erupts. Did you see that dark circle running away from the epicenter of the explosion? That's a blast wave. On the surface of the sun. From where part of it blew out.

*takes hat off head and fans self*

Pardon me. I need to catch my breath.

Here's something cool, though. If you look at your keyboard right now, everything you see--the carbon that makes up your flesh and bones and the plastic keys to your keyboard, the aluminum that forms the frame, the hydrogen and oxygen that makes up most of that delicious cup of coffee sitting on your desk, even the calcium and phosphorus that makes up the ceramic of your coffee mug--all came from shit like this. The sun--or any star--burps out the atoms that make up pretty much everything (elements heavier than iron, though are made when the sun truly gets surly and goes supernova) when it ejects material out of itself like this. Most of that stuff fell back to the sun's surface, it's true, but some of it went floating off into the deep, dark nether regions of space and may, someday, turn into the coffee mug or ballpoint pen of some future denizen of Earth. Or it could go further out and be incorporated into some alien life form's civilization.

That's pretty fucking beautiful, if you ask me (and I know you did...why else would you be here if you didn't want to know?), even if the sun could, tomorrow, point one of those blasts directly at the Earth. If it happened, we'd have about eight minutes to call our loved ones and hurry to the shelters where we can bend over and kiss our asses good-bye.

Kind of warms the heart a little, right? Well, good. Now that your heart is warm, it matches the rest of this hellish weather, doesn't it?

Where's my damned scotch and water?

Mars 3-D: A Review

Today is Earth Day, so I find it fitting that I do my review of Mars 3-D by Jim Bell. This was another Christmas present from my wife because I loves me some astrogeekiness. Unfortunately, I decided to kill my brain cells with beer when I was in college rather than putting them to good use by unraveling the mysteries of the universe and thus--oh look, a squirrel!

Anyway, the author, Jim Bell, is a professor at Cornell (I'll let the irony sink in for a moment) and has been a very active contributor to several NASA missions (he did a post-doc with NASA's Ames Research Center before joining the staff at Cornell). As such, he was one of the leaders for the imaging teams for the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

The first part of the book discusses some of the preparations the Earth-bound teams faced when planning the rather daunting task of putting the two rovers on the surface of the Red Planet. After that, the home team was tasked with developing a system to guide the robots around the surface of Mars, sample the soil, take pictures, and try to piece together some of the geologic history of Mars...and do all this from anywhere between 55 and 400 million km away (oh, metric!). While this seems like a boring read, Bell does a good job of writing in a way that does not alienate someone who isn't overly familiar with the source material.

The last three quarters of the book are all pictures taken from Mars along with explanations as to what the pictures are showing. The book comes equipped with a pair of red-and-green 3-D viewing glasses (on a bifold front cover, so they're plenty sturdy) to give the pictures in the back a better sense of depth and dimension. This is pretty cool...when it works. Unfortunately, sometimes the pictures don't line up real well, so only parts of the picture are in 3-D. Also, I would have enjoyed seeing more pictures with the "false color" (taken with a UV camera) so that everything doesn't look overly red.

That being said, the pictures taken on the edges of some of the more spectacular craters are stunning. There are also a few pictures where the rover has taken a picture behind it, so that you can see the trails left in the martian soil by the rover's wheels, which I thought was pretty damned cool. Also, there were some pictures when one of the rovers got stuck and its wheel dug down into the soil far enough to expose this shiny, pearlescent layer beneath the red dust and soil. The white mineral was chemically very similar to opal, so you can imagine that there could, potentially, be an opal the size of a continent hanging out just under the surface of Mars. Effing cool, if you ask me.

Some of the coolest pictures, I thought, were of the holes left by the boring tool. The camera worked well enough that you could see the grains of sand and dust left in the wake of the auger as well as the texture and shape of the parts that make up the hole. This, of course, fascinates me because I like geology and shit like that, and looking at some of the layers of the rock as they were formed in Mars' past is really awesome to me.

Anyway, a couple of weeks before I read this, I watched a special on National Geographic about the two rovers. I think Jim Bell was interviewed. Often. It was an entertaining and informative documentary. I really enjoyed it. Though it's not written to be, Mars 3-D serves as a nice companion piece to this show. If you're into space stuff, I'd recommend the two together. If you can only pick one, I'd go with the National Geographic show.

And, there you have it: how to turn today's green celebration red.

Happy Leap Day, Everyone!

Today is February 29th, which signifies that this year has both a Summer Olympics and a Presidential Election! Oh, yeah, and it's Leap Year, one of those years when February gets to shuffle off its inferiority complex for a single day, which only happens 25% of the time.

Historically, this is the day that Columbus convinced the Native Americans that he had the power of a god and could make the moon disappear from the sky for a few hours. He then tossed several blankets filled with small pox at the natives and took their gold and anything else he could find (like their dignity).

Also, Hattie McDaniel won an academy award in 1940 for her roll in Gone with the Wind, making her the first African-American to win and Oscar.

A few years later, Dwight D. Eisenhower announced on February 29th, 1956 that he would seek a second term in office. People around the country declare that they like him. Again.

Not much else seems to happen on this day. It's like it pops up once every four years or something. Sheesh.

Also, today is the birthday of my childhood friend, Chris Long (not the dude from UVa also known as "Howie's Kid"). Happy Birthday, Chris, you're 8 years old. Hope you get that bike you've always wanted. Take heart! In another 32 years, you'll be old enough to drive! In 40 years, you can buy smokes, lottery tickets and porn, and in 60 years, you can have a drink.

He shares a birthday with Carolina Hurricanes (ah, local flavor) goaltender Cam Ward, New England Revolution forward and U.S. Team stud Taylor Twellman, sax man Jimmy Dorsey (not to be confused with Texas gunslinger Jimmy Dorsey), and Pope Paul III, who rocked a seriously badass beard.

So go out, enjoy the day, and be sure to tell February you love it, because it needs this propping up from time to time.

When Darkness Falls

There's a full lunar eclipse tonight. Being an astrogeek, I'll be out there watching it, probably through my little telescope that Santa brought me. Totality is supposed to start around 10:01 pm EST and last until about 10:51 pm. If you want to scare your children into thinking the moon has gone away and/or that you have the power of a god and can summon it back into the sky, that would be the time to do it...especially if your kids are 6 and 3 and don't really know any better. Adjust accordingly depending on your time zone.

Also, in case you care, Saturn will be the bright star to the left of the moon and Regulus to the right. I think I have that right. If you have a telescope, check out Saturn, too.

Eclipses are cool. So cool, in fact, that the climax of the action in the first book of The Hundred Kings Saga, titled King of Shadows, revolves around an eclipse (ahhhhhh...it's starting to make sense now!). Without giving away the ending, something big happens when complete darkness falls over the land, and several people die. This was actually difficult to pull off, considering my world has two moons. However, one of my moon's faces is always full while the other moon has traditional phases, like our moon. I realize this is scientifically inaccurate, but I really don't care. It serves my purpose. So there.

Well, today, while I was pouring test tubes full of deliciously impure fractions back into a 500 mL flask (and rinsing them with methanol to get all the juicy bits off the inside of the glass), one of my characters got a reprieve. As Joel has already read the story, and I don't want to give away which character just got a second life (Joel's smart and can figure it out, I'm sure), I won't reveal too much. I had, for a while, though, been thinking this over and debating whether I wanted to do it and if so, how.

Well, for some reason, inspiration struck me today while recollecting my impure fractions for further purification (or, more likely, they're going to be tossed into a flask and hammered on until the reaction proceeds to completion). I suddenly figured out how I could save this character and make it believable, work it seemlessly into the story, and how this character's role would change and impact the endgame. Awesome. I even came up with a clever nickname for the character after going through this life-altering event. Fab. You. Luss.[1]

The character also has a sister that will also get a new outlook on life. The sister will play an increased role in the endgame of the story, as well. The other night, while going through my character lists, I realized that I didn't have a lot of good female characters [2], and so I'm trying to fix that. All the while, I'm going to strive to avoid making them all the same character (like Robert Jordan or David Eddings). We'll see how I do.[3]

In the meantime, hopefully you have clear skies tonight for eclipse viewing. Skies here are supposed to cloud up during the overnight hours, and I am not happy with that. I put a work order in several weeks ago to keep tonight clear, but apparently my request has fallen on deaf ears. I blame the local weather people. Greg Fishel, I'm looking at you.

Oh, and for geeky trivia that you probably already knew...a lunar eclipse can only happen when the moon is full. So there you go.

[1] Not the character's nickname.
[2] Good as in "likeable", not good as in "not evil"
[3] Probably badly