The New Horizons spacecraft is just two months away from Pluto, so I find myself checking online compulsively for photographs. As of now, they are still pretty crummy: it’s still just about ten pixels on a side. I know: it’s small, it’s dark. But I’m excited. I’ve been waiting close to fifty years to get a good look at this over-hyped piece of space debris. I would think that we would get better and better pictures each day. But instead, I assume they aren’t taking pictures all the time because it takes power and they want to save as much of that as they can. The picture there on the left is about the best we have, which dates from last month.
But I learned something really interesting from an article by Alan Stern, Pluto: The Last Picture Show. Pluto and its relatively large moon Charon constitute an actual binary system. Now up until now, I’ve always been bugged by this term. The reason is that all planets with a single moon are technically binary systems. Take, for example, the Earth and Moon. The Moon does not orbit around the Earth. Rather, both the Earth and Moon orbit around the center of mass of the two objects. (Actually, it is far more complicated than that because technically, every other object in the universe is effecting the orbit — but don’t worry about that.)
With the Earth and Moon, the system is so dominated by the Earth that the center of mass is inside the Earth. The Moon has a mass of only a bit more than 1% of that of the Earth. But they are far apart: roughly 400,000 km. That puts the center of mass about 2,000 km inside the surface of the Earth. Charon, in contrast, is really large compared to Pluto: almost 12% its mass. On the other hand, it is close to Pluto: less than 20,000 km, or 20 times closer than the Moon is to Earth. But this puts the center of mass about one Pluto radius above the surface of the dwarf planet. That’s why you see Pluto in the image above moving in a circle. The same kind of image of the earth would show the same kind of thing, but the Earth would just be circling around itself — displaced, not really orbiting.
I don’t actually know of any other pair of objects in our solar system that exhibit this behavior. The truth is that the Moon with 1.2% of the mass of the Earth is highly unusual. Moons are usually far smaller than the planets that they orbit. For example, Phobos is just 0.00000002 times the mass of Mars. So the fact that Pluto managed to grab onto something as large as Charon is incredible. Of course, it probably was not the case that Charon was just sailing past and got captured by Pluto. It might be something more like how the Earth and Moon formed with a collision that resulted in two bodies. Or something else entirely.
Alan Stern summed up my feelings about this whole thing, “So, we’re just two months out — it’s nearly show time. What will we find? Not to tweak you, but I don’t know. No one does. That’s what makes this distant exploration so very exciting, so suspenseful, and so wonderful!” The truth is that we know surprisingly little about Pluto. And in just two months, New Horizons is going to come within 10,000 km of Pluto. That’s closer than Charon ever gets to the dwarf planet. It ought to be very exciting indeed!
What do creepy pseudo-sexual torture and Micky Mouse have in common? They are both results of the creative American mind! Those two sides of America came together in the case of Omar Khadr. He is Canadian, but his father took him to Afghanistan where he made the boy a soldier for al-Qaeda when he was just 15 years old. At 16, he was captured by US special forces. He was eventually sent to Guantanamo where he was sadistically tortured — apparently because the 16 year old boy was one of the “bad guys,” rather than a victim of war. If you want to know the gory details of the sick American mind that we have institutionalized, read Jeff Tietz’s Rolling Stone article, 
Eventually, Khadr pleaded guilty to something that he apparently didn’t do so that the United States government could save face and so Khadr could be transferred to the Canadian government. As an American, that makes me feel so ashamed. I’ve been arguing about this for years, but it still stabs at me. As a child, I was taught that one of the reasons that America was great was that we, unlike other countries, didn’t torture people. I’m sure that wasn’t even true then. Regardless, now we know: (1) that we do torture; (2) that we do it in ways that show we have sick sexual fetishes; and (3) that we do it to children.
President Obama is acting more and more like a drunk friend who is embarrassing himself in public. I want to put an arm around him and get him safely home before he can hurt anyone or embarrass himself any more. Most recently, he was talking to Matt Bai, 
Will sent me a French language documentary about Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. I’m very fond of them both, but I must admit to being more of a fan of Reinhardt, even though my understanding is that it was Grappelli who really influenced Reinhardt. Sadly, there isn’t much on YouTube featuring Reinhardt. Part of the problem is that he died so young. Grappelli lived to be almost 90 years old, and he was performing almost to the end.
On this day in 1935 — Exactly 80 years ago! — the two most famous drunks in history met and formed the most successful cult in American history. Those two drunks were, of course, Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith. I don’t think these guys really meant to do evil in the world. But that’s what they did. Rather than approach alcohol addiction as a health or social problem, they approached it as a religious problem. They explicitly when back to the Oxford Group — a movement of people who considered themselves sinners and who wanted to purify themselves. This is where the vaunted “Twelve Steps” comes from.