Brian Hoover's Blog

So I’ve found a good way to remember when my kids were born, and my wife’s birthday. Suzanne and I met in 1999, the same year Star Wars Episode 1 was released. Ashton was born in 2002, same year as Star Wars Episode 2. Jett was born in 2005, same year as Star Wars Episode 3. Not only that, but Suzanne’s birthday is the day after Star Wars Day. Am I a complete nerd or what?

Quite a funny ditty. Well done.

This is what two large boulders smashing into each other at 11000 mph looks like. A couple days ago NASA released this photo observed by Hubble. It would have been great to see “live”. The asteroid belt isn’t exactly quite like what you see in movies like “The Empire Strikes Back”; there isn’t a dense ring of rocks in a seemingly random, chaotic orbit and you can’t stand on one and wave to your friend on a neighbouring rock. There’s thousands, millions of kilometers between sizable objects so this type of collision has never been observed before. The Imperial TIE Fighters would be quite safe following Han Solo into our asteroid field, and I’m pretty sure there would be no giant space worms to gobble them up. The closeup in the lower right looks bad-ass, like some sort of evil talon spaceship streaking through the sky.

During the middle of last week I revisited a site I haven’t browsed to in a while. Heavens-above.com can be used to, among other things, determine when the International Space Station is visible in your part of the world. You plug in your lat and long (or choose your city from a menu) and the site will tell you when you can see the ISS float by with tables showing the time, the direction, the azimuth etc. I used to do this more often a few years ago; I’d grab Suzanne and we’d rush outside and watch this bright dot go overhead. I’d marvel, and Suzanne would pretend to be interested. It was more interesting to watch it magically appear or disappear in the middle of the sky as it came out of or went into the Earths shadow. I also used this site to predict Iridium flares which are awesome. Should do this again sometime…

Anyhow, this week I saw that on Friday night it’d be visible for a good 10 minutes going from horizon to horizon with a maximum altitude of 60-odd degrees (not too bad on the neck muscles) and an amazing magnitude of -3.2. Very bright indeed.

So, when I got home Friday night I had about an hour to give Jett and Ashton a quick lesson in orbital mechanics and an even quicker history on the construction of the ISS. I’m pretty sure they got the gist of it all; that the ISS goes around the Earth, it’s a joint project between the Russian, American and European space agencies, that it needs to be around dawn or dusk if you want to see it etc.

So, with that in mind I thought we’d bring up NASAs own tracking map so we could see exactly where it was, and so we could run outside at the right time, but unfortunately that map is turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate at the time. Not sure why, maybe it misread the time/timezone from my system clock but it seemed to be way out. So we made do with the map at Heavens-Above.com which was fine. We saw that it was flying right over London, England and its path would bring it over Perth via India all in about 35 minutes. Pretty fast!

So, at the appointed time which turned out to be about 5 past 8 we wandered outside and turned it into a competition to find the space station first. It wasn’t hard. We all knew it was coming from the north-east. When it came it was easily the brightest thing in the sky besides the moon. Ashton asked me if I was really serious about Sirius being the brightest star. Haw Haw.

So, yeah we watched it for a few minutes. A silent, bright light floating by. I think Ashton lost interest pretty quickly but Jett stayed the whole time.

The thing is, for the rest of the night and for most of the next day Jett would ask, “Dad, where is the space station now?” and he’d demand to get back into the computer to use the “space map” to find it. This would happen about every half hour. Once he found out where it was, he’d run around the house and give status updates to Suzanne and Ashton. “Mum, it’s over Japan now!” He asked me to find pictures and the names of the current crew too. I wonder why this has captured his imagination so much? And I wonder how long it will last.

Next weekend I plan on breaking out the old telescope and pointing it at Mars which is currently close to opposition. Moons’s a bit bright now, so we’ll wait a week.

Nothing pisses me off more (well, ok, lots of things piss me off more… I’m easily pissed off. But for the sake of agument let’s go with this) than people who either seriously or jokingly say “So much for Global Warming, it’s so cold outside today!”

Listen up and I’ll explain:

Increases in the amount of greenhouse gases make the world warmer. They are called greenhouse gases because they trap heat, being transparent to sunlight coming into the atmosphere, and opaque to various wavelengths of infrared radiation emitted by matter warmed by the sunlight.

The atmosphere becomes more energetic, and thus more active. Heated objects expand, so does heated air and water and land.

Now, there is a temperature gradient from the equator to the poles because of the angle at which the sun’s rays strike the Earth.

The Southern hemisphere has more water and a continent at its pole. The Northern hemisphere has most of the world’s land, and a small ocean at its pole.

Thus the two hemispheres heat unevenly. The Northern hemisphere heats faster because it has more land and because that’s where most of the human-caused emissions occur–it’s like dumping feathers–they spread out eventually, carried by the wind or water, but first they pile up.

The continent of Antarctica is surrounded by a circular current of water and a circular current of air that helps to keep it cold, even as the southern hemisphere warms. It is also very high. It is the highest continent. Much of it is more than two or three miles high–because of all that ice.

Antarctica is a very conservative mass. Since it takes vastly more energy to melt ice than to warm air or water, it is taking a very long time to warm the high plateau of East Anarctica.

At the other pole, however, the ice is floating on water for the most part. Heat dumped down the temperature gradient is melting this ice. Thermal expansion and heat absorbed by open water is melting this ice from below.

This makes for a much more variable and turbulent system. The land in the Northern hemisphere is warming, while the sea warms more slowly. Except in the North. The land and the sea are both warming there because they are the bottom of the temperature hill.

Canada and Australia have warmed twice as fast as the world as a whole, for example, They are near the bottom of their respective temperature gradients. The West of the USA has warmed at close to the Canadian rate. It is cut off from the sea by the Rocky Mountains.

Now, when you pump more heat into an unstable system, like the Northern Hemisphere, it becomes more unstable.

Think of a lot of hot air–it flows upward and pole-wards. Cold air has to flow the other way to make room. Thus, the more you heat the tropics (and the land), the more hot humid air flows northward, and the more likely the cold air is to dip southward, especially in the American and Canadian West.

It normally does this. In a warming world, it can be counted on to do this more.

Thus, this year you have a jet stream which has dipped down as far as Florida and Arizona. There is a high pressure area over the North Atlantic which is helping to lock this dip into place. Europe is also cold because it has its own dip of the jet stream. Siberia is not that much colder than usual.

Last year was exceptionally warm. All years have been exceptionally warm for the last decade. But it has been exceptionally cold in North America. This is something that happens normally sometimes, but you can expect more of it while the world warms. The cold air and the hot air have to mix somewhere and somehow.

In other words, you can expect more blizzards in odd places and at odd times. Warm humid air is a good way of carrying heat and water. But eventually it has to dump its heat and its water. If the place is cold enough, whumpfff! you get a massive amount of snow, or hail, or rain.

While the global warming deniers have been clipping the charts to focus on the last ten years, claiming that it’s getting colder, and on the USA, where it IS colder than elsewhere, but not that much colder than winters were like when I was a kid, the world as a whole has continued to warm.

It’s a kind of tunnel vision, or horse-blinkers, that horses who don’t want to be distracted by where they are going put on, so they can pretend they’re not going any where.

Last year was one of the warmest on record globally. This year is likely to be another.

And take note: it doesn’t matter how much snow falls or ice forms in the winter if the summer melt is greater than can be replaced. You can have very cold winters or normal winters, but the ice gets thinner every year. The area may yo-yo almost up to “normal” for the last few thousand years, but it’s going, going, gone! –at least in the summer.

We don’t have to worry about Antarctica because the bulk of its ice is protected by the sea bed, which has a sort of bowl like “lip” that keeps water from flowing under the main bulk of East Antarctica ice.

Of course, when water warms enough to melt the ice back off of this lip, it will pour into the bowl and then the East Antartica ice sheet will be threatened with unbelievably rapid collapse (over centuries, all the same).

This is unlikely to happen in our lifetimes, but is one big wildcard hidden in the deck for our species as a whole.

In short, the human race is living in a fool’s paradise. The long-term effects of things we are arguing over now could really, really do a lot of damage 10,000 years from now, or for that matter in 500.

The precautionary principle says we should be careful, even about the unknown unknowns, let alone the known unknowns, the known knowns and those rara avis, the unknown knowns, the stuff we know is true but don’t know we know is true, such as the fact that global warming deniers are completely full of BS and a lot of them know it. How many BSers know they are BSing? We don’t know. A lot. I am assuming all the people with a vested interest know that they are pursuing their vested interests, not the truth. That would be anybody with a vested interest (or mental or emotional investment) in coal, oil, natural gas, the wrong sort of bio-fuels, planes, trains and automobiles, not to mention the consumption society and mass affluence Euro- or American-style.

Well, that would be nearly all of us living in Fools’ Paradise, wouldn’t it?

And the Lord God spake unto Moses, saying:

For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me.
And by the word of my power, have I created them, which is mine Only Begotten Son, who is full of grace and truth.
And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose; and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten.
…
The heavens, they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine.
And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words.
For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

This is awesome.

Just some quotes I ran into a couple days back. This kind of stuff makes me think.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
Joseph Goebbels (1897 – 1945)

Naturally the common people don’t want war . . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
Hermann Goering (1893 – 1945)

You gotta keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propoganda.
George Bush

I’ve always loved Hummers, especially the first 1992 civilian release of the original military model. It was big, boofy, chunky and said “Don’t mess with me”. I’m not that much of a fan of the H2, and the H3 not cool at all; I would rather push my Toyota than drive an H3. I’ve bought a small collection of Hot Wheels Hummer which Jett has taken over, and I realise that this is the closest I will ever get to owning the real thing.

From the first time I saw it I thought that it’d make a killer limousine. I started seeing them on TV in around 1995, and I thought that if I could get one out here to Perth it’d make a great business and make me oodles of money. Unfortunately I was never in a position to get the idea off the ground. Still I think it took to about 2004 before I first saw a stretch Hummer limo on Perth roads.

Suzanne made me  insanely jealous a few weeks ago when her school-mum friends got together as a going-away party night activity when ours and another family left our old suburb. She lauded it over me, too. “Guess where I am?” she texted. And every time we’d see a Hummer on the road after that she’d casually mention “I’ve ridden in one of those, you know”.

But, this ride of hers planted the seed of an idea in her mind. This would make a great 40th birthday present for me. I have an aversion to parties and such, especially those in my honour, so this would be a good low-key affair. It took a few weeks of meticulous planning in secret to pull this off without me knowing. And I am so impressed that neither of our kids divulged the secret. I knew something was up about a week ago, but Suzanne made me promise not to pump them for information. I’m pretty sure I could have made them crack, but I was a good sport and didn’t really apply myself.

So we turned up at her parents place and I find a bunch of family there too. OK, good. I knew this much already. Actually, a few things were going through my mind on the way there… perhaps it was a bungy jump; I even thought she might have somehow gotten me onto the show “Wipeout“, but they probably don’t film in Perth.

Anyhow, the limo pulled up and I must say I was really surprised and happy we drove around Fremantle and Perth eating sushi and listening to cheesy rock music videos. See the photos below

… or why Avatar seemed so familiar to me, a follow-up to a post I made after I saw it.