The best summary is on this page, which at the top says “it’ll be interesting watching this comet flame out as it passes through the million-degree corona of the sun.” As it gets close the discussion talks about new and interesting things about this comet and what it can show us about the sun, then suddenly the author says (mildly paraphrasing here), “Holy shit! It came round the other side!” A decent video of the comet shooting out the other side is here.

The comet actually left its tail behind as it whipped around the sun, and there’s really cool footage of the comet streaking toward the sun, leaving a trail (probably) whipped around by magnetic storms. It’s all pretty cool.

Part of what’s interesting to me about all this is just how many devices were available to observe the course of comet Lovejoy. In the coming days, as more data comes in from other observers, we stand to learn a lot about our home star. You know I’ll be checking in.

[Edit] Let’s try embedding this youtube video, shall we? It’s a little wider than my format, but I think that will be all right this once.

(I actually started writing this episode a few weeks ago, when commentary on this year’s awards was actually timely, but the partially complete episode has been sitting, waiting for a time when I don’t have anything better to say. Welcome to November.)

This year the august panel that dispenses these awards honored a paper titled “Apples and Oranges: a comparison.” It turns out you can compare the two, and now there’s science to back it up. Keep that in mind next time you’re accused of arguing in bad faith.

In other news, A Japanese team was honored this year for a study of just how much wasabi was the right amount to emit from a smoke detector. Not enough, people don’t wake up and burn to death. Too much, people burn to death while crying their eyes out.

“A wasabi smoke alarm?” I hear you say, “What a waste of science!” The whole thing sounds pretty stupid, until you give your smoke detector to a profoundly deaf person. Wait a minute, this thing is genius. That’s how you win an Ig Nobel. Discoveries that make you laugh, then think.

With a little funding, I think I could rack up a dozen of the damn things.

I’m linking to an article at ars technica, in which the one real breakthrough of the year is taken quite seriously: The theory of structured procrastination. The author postulates that, to be a high achiever, one must always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid something even more important. Now I ask myself: Can I be wasting my life more effectively?

This principle has already had a positive effect on my life. (Although, to be honest, this last week I’ve slid a little bit.) I ask myself “can I be wasting my time better?” and the answer is almost always yes. Some of the alternative procrastination options are frighteningly close to productive.

I was young, and perhaps naïve, but I didn’t think relativity was a candidate to be part of a belief system. “What do you mean, you don’t believe in relativity?” I asked. Here was a chance, I thought, to explain the principle to someone who didn’t understand it.

I failed. I failed and got very frustrated, angry at myself for not explaining things better. Angry that I had not even put doubt into the non-believer. It went like this: He explained something he called “the inertia problem.” I assumed he’d picked it up from a book by some ‘rogue’ physicist (more on them later). He described the inertia problem. It was nonsensical and even if you helped it along a bit with incorrect terminology, it still had absolutely nothing to do with relativity.

In retrospect, I enumerated a few options how to proceed:

• Ask, “What does that have to do with relativity?” and address the incorrect linkages specifically.
• Say, “Look, relativity has been measured over and over, in different ways, from the orbit of Mercury to clocks in the Apollo capsules. The work my own father does would simply break without it.”
• Ask “Do you believe in gravity? Because that’s a hell of a lot more mysterious than relativity.”
• Say, “Fortunately, relativity doesn’t need your faith to work.”
• I could treat the “inertia problem” as a credible theory, work my ass of to recast it in terms that actually meant something, then demonstrate that my construct was, in fact, not in disagreement with relativity.

I think you can guess which course I took. Perhaps all of the above would have failed (more on that later, too), but just mentioning personal experience and giving a taste of the enormous pile of things that have verified relativity in the past century might have provided enough skepticism that at least the Unbeliever would not spread his Unfaith as fervently. (I wonder if he uses a GPS now? I wonder if he knows he’s using relativity?)

This guy thought of himself as a skeptic, as someone who didn’t just believe what everyone else did. In fact, he was not a skeptic at all. He was Rogue wanna-be. The way to convince him of something was to start with, “The establishment doesn’t want me to say…” and then say something that implies special knowledge that no one else has. Some idiot whose concept of physics is mired in the 1850′s writes a book saying that relativity is bogus, and members of the Rebel Dalliance hoist him on their shoulders. Stick it to the man! Believe a quack for no other reason than he says the establishment is wrong!

There’s never been a moon landing! Never mind that the junk is up there, in plain sight. For some reason Russia and China continue to cooperate with the US to perpetuate a hoax forty years later. Why do people believe that? Because it’s fun to style oneself as a rogue. As long as you only talk to other members of the Rebel Dalliance, you don’t have to discover that you’re an idiot.

Which brings me to evolution. Lots of people in this country don’t believe in it. As I could have said to the guy who didn’t believe in relativity, evolution doesn’t require their faith to work. The part that sticks in my craw is the large number of anti-evolution salesmen who claim that there are other scientifically-viable theories. Intelligent design and whatnot. A handful of ‘rogue’ scientists have done well for themselves proposing plausible-sounding stories and selling them as science. People will pay you to tell them what they want to hear.

Those theories are not science. In fact, they’re not even theories. A better name for ‘rogue scientist’ is ‘salesman’. Anyone who claims to be a scientist must always be ready to listen to more evidence and modify or scrap his favorite theory. It happens. But in science, even the guys who are wrong are improving the process, bringing up proposals and, most importantly, new tests to challenge the status quo. Sometimes (well, often) pride gets tangled up in things, but even then they are not rogues, they are stubborn scientists.

Science is about letting go. People who say science is messed up because people used to believe one thing but now believe something else are in fact demonstrating the strength of science. We learn. We grow. We change.

“I believe God made Adam from clay,” is perfectly all right with me. I have no difficulty with faith; it’s about the unknowable, about the places science can’t reach. Just don’t try to clothe faith in science and wedge it into the science curriculum at my local school.

If your theory can’t be tested, it’s not science. This is currently a hot topic at the most esoteric level of physics. The math works, but it’s hard to test without exploding suns to get the energy required. There are a lot of folks, promoters and skeptics alike, searching for planet-earth size experiments to test the math.

So, scientific theories have to be testable. Even that’s not enough, though. How many times have you started a sentence with “A study showed that…?” A bunch of times, right? Me, too. And I will again. Some of those studies are pretty crazy. But while you do it, remember this: A study has never shown anything. Ever. A single study is so vulnerable to mistakes and misinterpretation that you can never draw broad conclusions. The study has to be replicated, by someone else, using methods that answer questions raised by outsiders about the first study.

Remember cold fusion? Some guys were so excited about the result of their experiment that they bypassed normal science channels and went mainstream. The economic implications of their study were so world-changing that the entire scientific community dropped what they were doing to try to replicate that experiment in a hundred different ways. Turns out, the original experiment was flawed. (Somewhere, there’s a ROGUE SCIENTIST selling books telling of the coverup of cold fusion.)

Scientific evidence has to be repeatable. Predictably repeatable. Every measurement has to have an estimate of the likelihood that it’s wrong.

The biggest problem with teaching creationism alongside evolution in schools is that it clouds what science even is. Creationism as an ‘alternate theory’ totally confuses the definition of ‘theory’. When discussing science, creationism is most certainly not a theory. It can’t be tested. I don’t care what you think about dinosaurs; you could leave them out of the curriculum and I wouldn’t mind that much (the kids will supplement their own education on that score), but please, please, teach what science is, and even more importantly, what it isn’t.

Sooner or later our government will be filled with people who don’t even understand the nature of science, its strengths and weaknesses, yet they will be making critical decisions based on science. Ah, shit. That’s happened already.

If we all knew what science was, then when some oil-company-funded pundit comes on TV to ‘debunk’ global warming with feel-good talk about economic growth, the token scientist in studio to rebut could simply say, “that’s not science,” and the nation would nod and disregard the previous bloviations. “Now,” the anchor will say, “We can get to the real debate: what to do about it.”

I looked a little more at the table, and saw a pattern. Many of the ridiculously precise numbers were conversions of fractions. 13/16 (itself suspect in my book) becomes 0.8125; a measurement rounded to the nearest sixteenth of a light year is suddenly represented as being accurate to 0.0001 light years.

Way to set an example, Jet Propulsion Laboratory! I hope the guys in charge of this table aren’t expected to do any actual science over there — although surely the guys who discovered the planets drop by to check the list now and then. Someone should have said something by now, you’d think.

The public-facing aspect of the scientific community needs to be careful what example they set. If the rocket scientists at JPL don’t care enough to get it right, no wonder the public accepts advertising claims with ridiculous precision. (51% of your fiber for the day!)

Granted there are many plants that are much better candidates for creating biofuel than corn, the main crop used now, and even corn production could be made more efficient and less destructive to the soil. Still, perhaps it’s time to step back and look at the actual problem we are trying to solve. A better solution just might present itself.

What we are trying to do is make solar energy portable. Plants do that using photosynthesis — they put some carbon dioxide and some water next to each other and wait for a photon to whack the system just right, and out comes an energetic molecule, and some nice free oxygen to boot. It’s a pretty slick system. What we are doing now is using plants as solar collectors. We set them out in the sun, give them access to (lots of) water and carbon dioxide, and later we chop them down and collect the energy. Of course, the form of the energy isn’t quite right (sugars aren’t good fuel), so we have to process the result, using up some of the energy we collected.

The goal, then, is to turn sunshine into gasoline, alcohol, or some other handy hydrocarbon.

Flash back to when you were in grade school science class, watching a movie about how plants work. We zoom down into the animated land beneath the surface of the leaf where the magic is happening. A little wizard is hard at work, gathering the ingredients, then… at the critical moment he gawps at the camera, eyes round, and pulls a screen in front of his workbench. “We don’t know what happens back there,” the narrator says in his happy-narrator voice, “but what comes out is…” (I don’t remember exactly what comes out. ATP? You can look it up.)

Bumblebees. Photosynthesis. Great mysteries when we were kids, but not anymore. (Did no one mention to you that bumblebees can fly now? They have tiny horizontal tornadoes raging just above their wings. Sometimes the explanation is even cooler than the mystery.) Anyway, photosynthesis. Somehow, films made before DNA had been discovered still have us convinced that some things are unknown. I’m no photosyntholigist, but I only have to glance at wikipedia to know that the process is pretty well-understood today.

So I ask you: Do we really need the plant? We know how that stuff works, and we can reproduce it. Can we not create a solid-state device that captures solar energy and puts out an energetic molecule – the exact molecule we want as an end product? We could use such a device to create fuels with absolutely no impurities (no sulfur, for instance), and no net carbon footprint. The system does not have to be very efficient to easily outdistance existing plant-based methods, and it would use land that has much less value in terms of ongoing human prosperity. Farms could go back to growing food.

Picture a gas station on the highway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Behind it there is an array of dark panes stretched over the desert floor. From the array a pipe leads to a holding tank which holds the highest-quality gasoline money can buy. And the cost to the dealer is fixed – he just has to pay to maintain the system.

There would be environmental impact, of course. Vast tracts of desert would be shaded, and somewhat cooler as a result of energy being removed from the system. Although our machine would use a lot less water than a living plant, (or perhaps another source of hydrogen?), there would still be some demand. Overall, though, I think environmentalists would see it as a lesser evil.

I’ve been kicking this idea around for years, now, but apparently I haven’t ever written about it here. The plan is filed under get-poor-quick, but man, if anybody got something like this working, they could become some kind of ridiculously wealthy. As well they should.

The Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow.

You remember Lite Brite, don’t you? It is a backlit frame into which you can stick translucent plastic pegs. The colored pegs glow merrily. Lite Brite! You can paint with light! the jingle went (approximately).

I had given the Lite Brite a lot of thought back when I was roughly four years old, and occasionally thereafter. I only remember little bits and pieces of the kids’ program Captain Kangaroo, but I remember the Lite Brite ads that supported the good Captain and his loyal sidekick, Mr. Greenjeans. I remember the ads very well, because it was one of the earliest engineering challenges I ever tackled. How the heck did the dang thing WORK?

Lite Brite Masterpiece: Ducks

In the ads, the pegs are pushed into a black surface and light up. Sweet! obviously there is something backlit and when a peg is pushed in it glows. At first I tried to come up with a system where pegs could be placed anywhere, and stay in place. And then came the real engineering challenge: making the holes close back up when the peg was removed. This last feature was obvious—otherwise the toy would not be reusable, and the smallest mistake meant you ruined everything.

After more careful observation, I saw that the pegs were always in a grid pattern on the board. So, I realized, there was a grid of holes that the pegs could be punched into. With that knowledge, I imagined a system with little spring-loaded doors for each hole. Push the peg in, the flap opens and light comes through. Pull it out, and the flap closes. I watched the ads closely for any sign of the doors. There was none. The black surface seemed completely uniform. Perplexing. Over the years I mentally fiddled with different designs for the Lite Brite doors that would not be prone to light leaks.

Fast-forward forty years, when I came to live with someone who owns an honest-to-God Lite Brite. At last the Engineering mystery would be resolved.

The answer: black paper. No doors, no flaps, no self-repairing gelatinous layers. You mount opaque paper over the grid and punch holes in it with the pegs. There is no undo. The black papers that come with the LIte Brite have little letters printed on them, for color-by-numbers fun. And really, can you imagine how long the delicate little mechanisms I had been imagining since my very first days of TV watching would have lasted? In my gut I knew that there had to be a simpler answer, but I never let go of my assumption that you could take the pegs back out again.

We sat on the floor, my sweetie and I, taking turns punching in the little pegs (I had trouble differentiating the pink and orange ones before punching them in), and had a good ol’ time. When we were done we kept the Lite Brite plugged in to bask in the glory of our masterpiece. And it was good.

I woke up early, but not as early as I had planned. Outside our porthole the sun shone brightly over calm seas. By gum, it looked like it would be a good eclipse-watching day.

Astronomy buffs prepare for the upcoming eclipse as the boat passes Iwo Jima

My plan called for breakfast first, a big meal in case the excitement later took precedence over meals. When I got up on deck, I changed my plans. Pictures first. On the port side was Iwo Jima, about as close as tourists can get to it these days. It is hallowed ground, dedicated to the memory of the blood shed over a few square miles of rock in the middle of the ocean. I thought about the marines who had looked over the waves at the same island so long ago, knowing that soon they would step ashore there. I took a couple of pictures in cooperation with Stereoptic Pete, who I have not mentioned yet in these chronicles, but I’ll get to that another day.

The island behind us, we set course for the center of the path the eclipse would take, balancing the longest possible totality with the occasional banks of clouds. “We’re good for Plan A,” the organizer said over the ship’s PA system. I went for breakfast and to make sure that I was as ready as possible for the main event. memory chip cleared, battery (and backup) fully charged, no funky settings on the camera. I went over in my head what I would do for the six and a half minutes of totality. 1) Look at eclipse 2) take pictures of eclipse. I reminded myself to get the priorities right. There would be plenty of pictures to share among the family, but there won’t be another eclipse as long as this one for more than a century.

Also, before I took my position on the sunny deck, I needed better sun protection. My hopes of finding a decent sun hat were thwarted, but the gift shop on board had baseball caps, and one of those would be better than nothing. I sprang for the hat, slathered on the sunscreen, and headed topside.

Sun goggles on! Sunscreen on! Hat on (for now)!

I took up a position on the patio at the stern of deck 10. It was less crowded (most of the patio is covered by an awning) and it was close to the beer. It also had the benefit of having a good view to the rear, and I hoped to see the cone of the shadow overtake us as second contact approached.

It wasn’t long before first contact – the moment when the disk of the moon first impinges on the sun. I pulled out my sun-looking-at shades and watched. Near me was a German couple and their cute-as-a-button daughter. The eclipse was going a bit slowly for a girl her age, so I took the daily newsletter, unfolded it, and punched a pattern of holes into it with my pen, creating the largest array of cameras on the boat. We had a good time looking at the dozens of crescent shapes projected onto the table top, projecting them on each other, and generally goofing around.

The day grew dimmer, and cooler. The ship adjusted course to run right down the center of the track, prolonging the totality by a fraction of a second. (“Because we can,” the director explained.) Unfortunately, due to poor math on my part, I had positioned myself directly under the ship’s exhaust on our new heading. As the deck became crowded with the ship’s crew, I crossed over to the other side of the boat, pausing to get a beer on the way. I found a spot on the rail, introduced myself to my new neighbors, and made another check of the camera. I was shooting with a big ol’ zoom lens and it seemed like about halfway zoomed would give the best results. I checked ISO, focus, shutter speed, and aperture. I was ready. The plan was to not spend too much time thinking, but just step through a whole bunch of settings, assuming at least one would give good results.

Second contact, the photo shaken as I grabbed in futility for my runaway hat.

The cone of darkness appeared behind us as the world dimmed. The temperature, cooling steadily for the last hour, dropped abruptly further. The light took on an odd twilight aspect. I looked up, and saw the last flare of the sun vanish behind the rugged lunar terrain. Second contact, they call that moment in the biz. I raised my camera, almost vertical, and lined up my first shot. Shoonk went the slider for the zoom, pulling me back from the image. Fwip went my brand-new hat as it tumbled off my head, over the rail, and into the sea far below. I took the picture.

You’ve seen eclipse pictures before, better ones than these. Probably you’re read descriptions of the time spent in the shadow of the moon. Twilight in the middle of the day. Sunset-pink clouds on the entire horizon, 360 degrees. All I can add is “spooky”. Venus appeared, then elusive Mercury and some of the brighter stars. The whispy streamers of the corona cast an eery glow over the sea, and the sky was a color I’d never seen before.

I raised my beer to sun and moon and corona and speedy little Mercury and I silently toasted the spectacle.

The inner corona of the sun, with streamers and stuff

I took some more pictures, pausing now and then to take it all in, not thinking about anything but the thing itself. Well over six minutes passed that way, then came the first peek of the sun through a valley on the lunar surface, a flash known as the diamond ring that means that we have reached third contact and the magic is coming to an end. I quickly made an adjustment to the camera and fired up at the emerging brightness. And waited as my camera beeped off ten agonizing seconds before taking the picture. It turns out I had adjusted two things. Maybe I was lucky, however; the picture came out right nice.

I hadn’t taken any shots of the crescent sun before totality, but afterwards I found a piece of solar filter blowing across the deck and held it over the lens with one hand while shooting with the other.

The "diamond ring" as the sun peeks through a valley on the moon, while the corona is still visible.

Eventually it was time to abandon my post and find the rest of my group, in the more crowded areas forward of my position. “Did you get good pictures?” people asked as I moved around. “I don’t know,” I said. I hadn’t gone back to look at them. It didn’t even occur to me until later. I was pretty sure that I was moving the camera too much anyway.

Before fourth contact, while the moon was still slinking back into obscurity, the moon geeks began to break down their fancy telescopes and clever moon-watching devices and the party atmosphere began. The ship hoisted the official ‘successful eclipse’ flag and cheering ensued. Our boat shared horn blasts with other boats that had come to the ideal viewing spot. My cousin sweet-talked the head of bartenders on the boat to slide me a free Eclipse Cocktail.

The central lounge on the boat was packed this afternoon, filled with clusters of people (like us) reliving the experience, checking photos, and partitipating in the traditional cruise activities for the first time in days.

As the eclipse geeks below begin to celebrate, the moon slowly moves along.

Tonight after dinner (celebrating fuego’s mother-in-law’s birthday) I followed my nephew out to the foredeck, kept dark for this cruise only, to allow people a place to see the stars. There was the Milky Way and a buttload of stars, along with the fiery trail of the occasional meteor. I stayed out there for quite a while in the dark and quiet, listening to the low conversations around me and thinking about how big it all is, this universe measured in time, and how tiny was the little island we had passed that morning.

Sun and Moon collide
bound by ancient formulae
meteors are free

The best place for viewing this eclipse will be at sea, and happily there are enough moon geeks to encourage a cruise ship or two to make a special trip out to the middle of nowhere so people can spend a few hours risking eye damage. Our boat will be aiming for optimum totality time, modified by where clouds are at the critical moment. We eclipsists don’t like clouds so much. The boys steering the boat will have all sorts of gizmos to tell them about the weather (sailors have always been funny that way) and will try to put us in the ideal spot.

When the moment comes, we will be able to look almost straight up and see the moon eat the sun.

With only a couple days’ prep time left, I really should think about packing. I even went out and bought a pair of long pants just for the trip. Actually, most of the credit for that goes to my sweetie; left on my own I would have procrastinated on the slack-buying mission (slack slacking? Am I a slack slacker?) until just about now, then rushed about in a panic trying to find some. Apparently onboard and around and about in Asia, “semi-formal” doesn’t include cargo shorts and aloha shirts. What the heck?

Which brings me to the item that now I have to rush around in a panic to find. A suit jacket of some sort. Not only are we out there to ogle astronomical phenomena, we will be celebrating my parents’ fifty years of wedded bliss. There will be a dinner celebration on the boat, and it will be a fancy (on the Seeger scale) affair. I’m pretty sure I have a tie around here somewhere, and I have button-up shirts without flowers or martini glasses printed on them, but the coat is going to be tricky. Anyone have a spare they can loan me? Something in a meduimish size? I can roll up the sleeves if they’re too long.

Other than that, I’ll be packing a camera, lenses, laptop (but which one? the one that can edit photos or the one with a working battery?), a smaller camera, battery chargers (what plugs do they use over there and on the boat?), shampoo, and a toothbrush. Ooo, and a swimsuit. Snorkel and corrective diving mask? Probably not. Oh, and shoes. They’ll probably come in handy for that formal dinner thing.