Funny numbers

I was asking stupid questions over at Cosmic Variance today, trying to learn a thing or two about dark matter, when I had to look up the ratio between an astronomical unit and a light year in order to prevent myself from seeming even stupider than I usually do. The number, according to the internet, is 63,240. This struck me as familiar, somehow. I’d seen something very similar in my distant American past, so I did a double check, just to make sure. And yes indeed, it was very similar to the number of inches in a mile- 63,360. They differ by less than 0.2%

If you’re a numerology-worshipping monarchist, then this is proof positive that the British monarchy is endowed with the divine right of Kings, as Elizabeth I put her official stamp on the English mile and inch specifically to make sure they had astronomically meaningful ratios.

For the rest of us, it is a good excuse to teach Americans the relative distances for planetary and astronomical objects.

For example, since a scale of one inch=1au means that 1 mile is pretty damn close to 1 light year, you can construct the galaxy like so:

Go to the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington DC. Put the sun on the tip your nose.
Mercury is across your nostril.
Purse your lips, and Earth is in the corner of your mouth.
Smile, and Mars is.
Jupiter in in your voice box.
Saturn is in your heart.
Neptune is in your pants.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is about 9 feet away.
The farthest known dwarf planet, Sedna, circles around your feet and out to the top of the steps.
The Oort cloud starts at your knees, and stretches out to the Washington Monument.
The closest star, Alpha Centauri, is in the parking lot behind RFK stadium
The brightest star, Sirius, is on the college park campus of UMD, just over the NE border of the district.
The brightest northern hemisphere star, Arcturus, is in Baltimore.
The bright red star in Orion, Betelguese, is in Boston.
The bright blue star in Orion, Rigel, is in Memphis.
The bright star in Cygnus, Deneb, is in southwest Ireland.
The Milky Way galaxy is 12 times the diameter of Earth, or a bit larger than Jupiter
The Small Magellanic Cloud is as far away as the moon.
The Andromeda galaxy is 10 times as far.

And the best part? Metric Nazis can’t do this trick.

Arrr, that be my warning buoy

Meteorologists are concerned that automatic tsunami warning buoys might be nicked by pirates.

From the article:

we've found [one of our] automatic weather stations for sale in Hong Kong.

Hopefully the Australian plate will have the good manners to stay still while the Australian government gets its act together.

Forget the worm...

At the moment, the early bird gets the inner solar system.


Here's a picture of Earth in the foreground (5 km), Mercury in the middle distance (130,000,000 km) and Venus in the background (220,000,000 km).

The exposure is too short for any stars to show up, but they were certainly out- dawn was still 20 minutes away, sunrise an hour. Mercury is currently brighter than both Mars and Saturn, which means that the three brightest planets are all visible in the early morning sky.

Mercury can be quite difficult to spot, as it moves quickly and is usually washed out in the glare of the sun. But for the next few weeks it will be high in the sky and close to Venus, so anyone with limited astronomical skills (like me) should be able to find it without too much trouble.

Science is not in Australia’s future

The Australian Prime Minister announced today that it had picked the steering committee for its “Australia 2020” meeting- a long term brainstorming meeting to be held here in Canberra later this year. Having caught bits and pieces of it (mostly criticisms of the 10-1 gender imbalance) on the radio, I started to compose in my head an entry on how to mount a blog-based populist campaign to get at least some young researchers into the conference. Australian academia in general, and geology in particular, is shockingly inbred, so from the snippets I heard on the radio, it appeared that the conference was shaping up to be an establishment, closed shop sort of thing. I figured that there would be one, possibly several crusty old scientists designated with the responsibility of guiding the country’s research goals for the next 12 years. The reality was far grimmer, though.

Science is not even on the agenda. None of the focus areas address Australia’s brain drain, stagnant research funding, inbred university system, or educational deficiencies. There is no mention at all of primary research. And the areas for which applied science is relevant are run by non-scientists. There is a sustainability area, but it is headed by a former public servant. The head of the technology area is politician.

There is only one scientist in the selection committee. Professor Michael Good is a malaria specialist who now heads the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. But his area of scientific expertise has little to do with his focus area, which is, “A long-term national health strategy.” Neither are there public figures who happened to study science in college before becoming famous for unrelated reasons (e.g. Colin Powell).

There is also nobody from the resource industry represented, despite the fact that mining constitutes about 6% of the economy and 35% of the country’s export market. But that is not such a huge problem. We know how to find and dig stuff up already. The question is how the government thinks it can transition from a resource-based economy to a modern one, while ignoring science. When the conference was announced, Kevin Rudd said he wanted the "best and brightest". Obviously people who unlock the secrets of the universe for a living don't fall into that category.

The committee members, and their focus areas, are listed here:

• Professor Glyn Davis - Chair
• Dr David Morgan - Future directions for the Australian economy
• Warwick Smith - Economic infrastructure, the digital economy and the future of our cities
• Roger Beale AO - Population, sustainability, climate change, and water
• Tim Fischer AC - Future directions for rural industries and rural communities
• Professor Michael Good - A long-term national health strategy
• Tim Costello AO - Strengthening communities, supporting families and social inclusion
• Dr Kelvin Kong - Options for the future of indigenous Australia
• Cate Blanchett - Towards a creative Australia
• John Hartigan - The future of Australian governance
• Professor Michael Wesley - Australia's future security and prosperity in a rapidly changing region and world

And if you wanted to know what they studied in college, it is:

• Professor Glyn Davis – Political Science
• Dr David Morgan - Economics
• Warwick Smith - Law
• Roger Beale AO – History and Law
• Tim Fischer AC – none (Vietnam campus of Hard Knocks)
• Professor Michael Good - Medicine
• Tim Costello AO - Law
• Dr Kelvin Kong - Medicine
• Cate Blanchett - Drama
• John Hartigan - ?Journalism? (no web biography, AFAIK-WTF)
• Professor Michael Wesley – International Relations

Twenty20 summit web page

Geohmms (Accretionary Wedge 6)

Welcome to the 6th thrust-repeated section of the Accretionary Wedge. The theme this time was “Hmm.” Things about our planet that intrigue y’all. Geologists have a tendency to work on all sorts of scales, and this is reflected in this month’s entries. Sadly, though, the smaller scales were conspicuously underrepresented. Nobody is dying to know about crystal defects, space groups, or microinclusions. We are, apparently, macroscale thinkers or larger.

In fact, the smallest scale object that interesting people this month was a word. A recent GSA Today article made a new case for the Anthropocene, and the digital cuttlefish, not merely satisfied with a hmm, wrote an entire poem.

Despite the lack of comments there, the rest of the GBS had plenty to say, and none of it was hmm.
Callan offered a detailed explanation of the paper. BrianS calls it “more of a PR stunt than a rigorous scientific idea.” Andrew quotes Walt Whitman. Greg Laden says no. Chris gives some background and perspective on subdividing geologic time before suggesting that renaming might be premature. Maria calls the Anthropocene unbearably narcissistic, shortly before claiming to be partial to the term. BrianR expressed exasperation that semantics can get everyone is such a tiff. And Tom simply notes the news without comment. Note that Apparent Dip and I, both isotope geochemists, made no comment. After all, ages are properly measured in numbers, not names.

For all the hubbub, you’d think it was a four letter word, not a four syllable one.

Moving on, we scale up from the word to the student. Sciencewoman wonders- and expresses concern (more of a HMm that a hmMm) about the lack of racial diversity in her upper level classes.

Looking at the population as a whole rather than in his class, MJC Rocks wonders why people in general are not fascinated by geology. His post in accompanied by a classic field photo.

And that is it for the language/ people / culture scale hmms. From here, we step back down to the mineral.

Silver Fox wonders about some blue quartz that she remembers from her youth. Unfortunately, her favorite outcrop seems to have been covered by a leach pit.

On the laboratory scale, Maria is curious what, if anything, a neutral buoyancy experiment tells her about real systems.

Now, step up to the outcrop.

Sandstone, Interrupted! has Hypocentre puzzled by the discontinuity of his favorite bed.

Ron is wondering if his fault might swing both ways, but only preserve the medial sandstone on one side.

And the bigger faults are also intriguing. Harmonic Tremors is interested in the pre-periodic period of the Parkwood section of the San Andreas fault. He’s even lucky enough to have gotten a reference in the comments.

On the volcano scale, Chris wonders why Mt. Taranaki is so far west, relative to the rest of New Zealand’s volcanoes. I’ve only seen Taranaki from the plane, and my reaction was more of an Oooo than a Hmm, but I see his point, and suggest that he read up on Japanese volcano locations, as I seem to recall northern Honshu has two rows of volcanoes, and many run-on sentences. While the distance from the subduction zone will in part explain the increased alkalinity (deeper melting zone), it doesn’t explain why there is only one such volcano, nor why it is so pretty.

But I’m not the only one to look out a plane window. Mel said hmm all the way to her ski holiday, while traversing the snow-covered NW United States and SW Canada.

And anonymous Chris wondered about “rivers of stone” reported by Darwin in the Falklands.

Moving up to the plateau scale, Andrew presents new research on the Colorado River prior to the grand canyon formation.

And Chris Rowan wonders about the crinkly microplate style tectonics that happens where plated are grinding past or under each other.

On the hemispherical climate scale, Kim wants to know why an excessively sinuous jet stream is bringing her so much snow, while Callan wonders about global climactic and chemical implications of the hypothetical snowball Earth.

Dropping back down in size by a factor of 2 to a smaller planet, Jeannette is curious about magnetic anomalies on Mars, and what the tectonic implications are. Luckily for her, Chris Rowan blogged about this very topic, back before hmm was a fashionable thing to say.

Finally, on the galactic* scale, I’m curious about what makes our home planet the way it is. And how different planetary formation can be before it produces something completely unrecognizable.

So, there’s the list. Several people have already been lucky enough to get replies in their blogs. So if you are also intrigued by any of these things, wander on over, and see if you can help out a fellow geoblogospheroid.

I think the next installment of this carnival is Geology in the Movies by Magma cum Laude, but we should probably get her to confirm that before we bury her in rants.

[edit: two new late entries added]

*e.g. data-poor.

What makes Earth Earthlike?

As astronomers get ever more precise in their measurements of stellar wobbles and light curves, the date of terrestrial exoplanetary discovery is slowly creeping up on us. There will no doubt be a big to do when the first one is found, and the press will undoubtedly make a huge deal of it’s Earthlike nature. But as a surface dweller, I have to wonder. Sure, an iron core and a magnesiosilicate mantle will give a bulk composition broadly similar to Earth. But will the planetary surface be anything like the one we have here? And how similar does it have to be to be considered Earthlike?

Do we need an ocean? A moon? A magnetic field? A thin crust that can be easily subducted? A carbonate silicate cycle? And what about the more subtle things?

If the Earth had a composition that produced dominantly alkali basalt instead of tholeiite, would we still have sialic crust and quartz beaches? If star formation was triggered by something other than a supernova, would there be sufficient heat-producing elements to melt planetesimals and allow for early differentiation? What happens to the inner solar system if your gas giants aren’t as gentle as ours are?

I’m ignoring the question of life on purpose, because there are lots of people already obsessing over that. It may be that there are billions of inhabited planets that are completely unearthlike in any meaningful way. It may be that there are millions of terrestrial planets indistinguishable from the Archean Earth except that they’re dead. What I want to know is how much variation there can be in an iron-silicate ball of 10²⁴-10²⁵ kg in mass, and what are the important factors in determining that variation.

Because ultimately, the question, “Is there anywhere else much like this place?” is an obvious corollary to the fundamental one of, “Why are we here?”

Planet Party, 5:30 am

For those of you who don’t often see the morning sky, there are a whole bevy of planets to observe there at the moment.

Jupiter and Venus are both bright in the morning sky (Jupiter high, mag ~-1.5 Venus low, mag ~-3.7), and for the next few weeks, Mercury is joining them (mag ~0). As the innermost planet is currently near aphelion, the sky is still pretty dark when it first rises, so it is easy to spot. Mercury and Venus will be getting closer together until the 28th or so, and they’ll still be close when the crescent moon swings past on the 6th of March. If you care to grab a pair of binoculars or a small telescope to ogle Jupiter’s moons, just remember that the outer two of them are about the same diameter as Mercury.

Don't get subducted!

There is still time to scrape into the accretionary wedge. But hurry. If you don't underplate your entry by midnight of Feb 23 your time, you may find yourself on the slow train to the mantle, holding a one-way ticket to the CMB. Post links here, in any of the other carnival announcements on this site, or email me using the address described in the sidebar (note that you need to read and think, instead of just copying and pasting the email address).

[edit] I've dropped the security on comments so that anyone can plug their entry here. Please don't post any shameless adverts during this lull.