When the first planet outside our solar system, an exoplanet, was discovered, I was amazed. I think most people think of astronomy as being about building bigger and bigger telescopes, just like blowing up a photograph. But just like in the movie, it doesn’t work that way. Just in the most basic sense, imagine looking into a very bright light and how difficult it would be to see a small dark object right next to it. That ought to give you some idea of the problems.

The first confirmed exoplanet discovered was orbiting around Gamma Cephei. It was detected the same way about half of all exoplanets have been detected: Doppler spectroscopy. This is an amazing bit of science. But there are actually too many things to explain it all like centers of mass (stars aren’t stationary in their solar systems) and Doppler shifting of light (the color of light from objects moving towards or away from us gets changed). But the main thing is that the star sends out visible light and the planet sends out infrared light. Based upon the shifts, we can find out a certain amount about the planetary mechanics of the system.

A more obvious technique for locating exoplanets is the transit method. This is very simple, but it doesn’t always apply. If the planet crosses between the star and us, it blocks out some of the light. By seeing the difference, we can determine what the radius of the star must be. For example, the exoplanet that circles the romantically named HD 209458 star was first discovered with Doppler spectroscopy. But then other scientists went back and measured the brightness of the star and found that it decreased by a tad less than 2% every 3.5 days. Thus they could determine its radius to be about 30% greater than Jupiter.

This is all amazing stuff, but I read something today that shocked me, Length of Exoplanet Day Measured for First Time. I couldn’t imagine how they managed that feat. The reason it is possible to measure this value is because the planet, Beta Pictoris b, is one of the few exoplanets that we have managed to take direct pictures of. It’s a huge planet, of course: 65% larger radius than Jupiter’s and a mass between 5 and 10 times. Plus, it orbits about twice the distance from Beta Pictoris than Jupiter does from the sun. All of these things make it easier to see.

And now we know it rotates about twice as fast as Jupiter: about 100,000 km/hr at its equator. It likely spins so fast because it is a very young planet: just 20 million years old. The rotations of planets slow over time because of the gravitational pull on them by the sun, which eventually locks them so that the same side always faces the sun. This has happened to Mercury. And the same mechanism explains why the same side of the moon always faces the earth.

I’m not clear on exactly how they determined the rotation speed. I know the basics: they looked at the star light reflected of the planet. Since the planet has a lot of carbon monoxide in its atmosphere, they looked at the band of light that wasn’t there: the CO absorption line. But that band was broadened, again because of Doppler shifting. Based upon that, they could determine how fast the CO molecules were moving when they were reflecting the light.

This stuff amazes me. We little humans on our little planet are able to determine what is happening 63 light-years away. Of course, it’s still true that when it comes to terrestrial matters, we aren’t any more evolved than chimpanzees. But when we gaze at the stars or doodle our ideas, we are at our best.

Last year I highlighted Bartolomeo Cristofori for the birthday post. He was the inventor of the piano, and so I discussed how it was different from the harpsicode and the clavichord. It’s quite interesting. If you haven’t read it, I recommend checking it out.

On this day in 1825, the great biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was born. He was a comparative anatomist—someone who looks at similarities and differences in species. What has long fascinated me is how people like Huxley were able to classify different species so accurately. When we started doing genetic work, it didn’t much upset what we already knew about species’ relationships.

Huxley was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” because of his public support for evolution. He was a prominent part of the 1860 Oxford evolution debate. So prominent, in fact, that it is often referred to as the Huxley–Wilberforce debate. Wilberforce was Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, arguing for the Bible. In the most famous exchange, Wilberforce asked Huxley if he descended from monkeys on his mother’s side or his father’s. According to Isabella Sidgwick some time afterward, “He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous.” Booyah!

What is perhaps most interesting about Huxley is that he was skeptical of natural selection as the mechanism for evolution. Note that natural selection is what is important about Darwin’s work; the idea of species’ evolution was not new to him. But Huxley’s skepticism was scientifically based. He was an empiricist and rather typical in not accepting anything until it was fully proven. And just like now, the religious zealots who would not accept evolution under any circumstances grabbed onto his doubts.

It is clear that Huxley and the others won this debate. And indeed, in the United Kingdom they did where roughly 80% of the people accept evolution through natural selection. But in the United States that number is only 40%. That is so embarrassing. Check out this graph:

And now we have people like Ken Ham who dress up their religious dogma in the clothes of science. But they don’t do science. Their entire effort is meant to stop debate—to stop science. And I’m not at all convinced that they won’t be successful. Certainly we need Huxley today more than ever.

Happy birthday Thomas Henry Huxley!

I am not one to claim that catastrophe is “opportunity!” Bad things happen and they suck. But that shouldn’t stop us from relishing inspiring stories that come out of catastrophe. And so it won’t stop me from related two stories of wonderful pet rescues. Being kind to pets is probably the only thing we all agree on. For example, even Nazis were nice to pets. They put “undesirables” to death but they saved their pets. At least, I assume they did. It doesn’t matter how evil you are, you still take care of pets. Or so I want to believe. Jesus! This is getting depressing. Let’s get onto the stories!

Chuck and Elicia James are a nice young couple who live in New Jersey with their three children. After Hurricane Sandy, their dog Reckless escaped from their backyard. They looked and looked, but they could not find him. Of course, they were somewhat limited. Because of the damage to their home, they’ve been living in a hotel since then—for 18 months! Well, their eldest daughter’s tenth birthday is coming up so they went to the local SPCA looking for a new dog. And the first dog they were shown was… Reckless! You can read all about it at New York, Dog Lost in Hurricane Sandy Miraculously Reunited With Owners 18 Months Later.

Chuck James said, “The dog was licking us to death, he was jumping three feet in the air. He was home. He knew the ordeal was over.” Of course, they are still a family of five living in a hotel room. But clearly New Jersey is stronger than the storm. But that means a whole lot more for Reckless and the whole James family than it does for Chris Christie and his family.

In a story totally unrelated to Hurricane Sandy but related in regards to the fact that it is about a catastrophe and a pet, we move across the border to Crown Heights, Brooklyn where, Two Garages Collapse after Retention Wall Fails. It was a big crash, but no humans were around to be harmed or even trapped. But such was not the luck for the Felis silvestris catus community. An unidentified cat was caught beneath the debris. Fortunately, the Fire Department, City of New York was on the job. They spotted the cat and released it. One of the firemen tried to carry the cat to safety, but clearly, the cat was better able to navigate the rubble than mere humans. Watch the video:

So a little good news to get you through the weekend!

H/T (dog): JoyfulA
H/T (cat): Digby

A more factual synopsis of the Reagan presidency might read like this: that Reagan was a transformative figure in American history, but his real revolution was one of public relations-meets-politics and not one of policy. He combined his small-town heartland upbringing with a skill for storytelling that was honed on the back lots of Hollywood into a personal narrative that resonated with a majority of voters, but only after it tapped into something darker, which was white middle-class resentment of 1960s unrest. His story arc did become more optimistic and peaked at just the right moment, when Americans were tired of the “malaise” of the Jimmy Carter years and wanted someone who promised to make the nation feel good about itself again. But his positive legacy as president today hangs on events that most historians say were to some great measure out of his control: an economic recovery that was inevitable, especially when world oil prices returned to normal levels, and an end to the Cold War that was more driven by internal events in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe than Americans want to acknowledge. His 1981 tax cut was followed quickly by tax hikes that you rarely hear about, and Reagan’s real lasting achievement on that front was slashing marginal rates for the wealthy—even as rising payroll taxes socked the working class. His promise to shrink government was uttered so often that many acolytes believe it really happened, but in fact Reagan expanded the federal payroll, added a new cabinet post, and created a huge debt that ultimately tripped up his handpicked successor, George H W Bush. What he did shrink was government regulation and oversight, which critics have linked to a series of unfortunate events from the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s to the subprime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 helped paper over some less noble moments in foreign policy, from trading arms for Middle East hostages to an embarrassing retreat from his muddled engagement in Lebanon to unpopular adventurism in Center America. The Iran-Contra scandal that stemmed from those policies not only weakened Reagan’s presidency when it happened, but it arguably undermined the respect for future presidents for the Constitution because he essentially got away with it. Over the course of eight years, the president that some want to enshrine on Mount Rushmore rated just barely above average for modern presidents in public popularity. He left on a high note—but only after two years of shifting his policy back to the center, seeking peace with the Soviets rather than confrontation, reaching a balanced new tax deal with Democrats, and naming a moderate justice to the Supreme Court. It was not the Reaganism invoked by today’s conservatives.

On this day in 1469, the great political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli was born. I’ve been amazed over a very long time that a lot of people seem to be under the impression that he was some kind of bad guy like Vlad the Impaler. I’ve always found The Prince to be the work of a wise older man just explaining how the world works. We tend to think of the recent history of the British monarchy where power (such as it is) flows peacefully from father to son. But in Machiavelli’s time, a monarch was much more likely to be someone who stole the throne. It is the first important contribution to realpolitik.

There is most likely another side to The Prince. Machiavelli was an important government official in the Florentine republic up into his forties. Even though he had much success after that (most notably as a comedic playwright), he saw those earlier times as the best of his life. The Prince was likely intended as an implicit argument in favor of republicanism. So maybe it is all of us who are the cynical ones and to him it was obvious that he was lampooning the monarchy by showing the best case for the latter.

What Machiavelli brings to my mind is the duty of citizenship. Here in America, we mostly think our republic is something that we are entitled to. It simply is and we get the benefits of it. But that’s not true. It is something we constantly have to fight for. And if we don’t, it will devolve into an oligarchy, as it pretty much has. As Chris Hedges discussed in Death of the Liberal Class, it used to be that the upper classes (minus the rich) paid for their privilege by managing the state and not letting the oligarchs take over. But they have really fallen down on the job and now have almost no more power than the lower classes. Now our only hope is that all the citizens will bind together and use their democratic power, although even if that happened (doubtful), I’m not sure the oligarchs would allow it. Things haven’t changed much since Machiavelli was writing. He sees America today as clearly as he saw Medici Florence then.

Happy birthday Niccolo Machiavelli!

I am hopelessly mono-language. But I find I am constantly dealing with other languages, so I always have my Latin, Spanish, and French dictionaries close by. And, of course, I use Google Translate because it is one of the very greatest things about the internet. Often, it is so good that I don’t even have to use the books. About the only time it isn’t enough is when I’m translating very old Spanish or French, which is more common than you might think.

But I am constantly amazed at just how terrible Google Translate is at detecting languages. It basically never gets it right. I understand that it has a lot of languages, and if I entered large chunks of text, it would doubtless do a better job. But it really is pathetic.

I took a little bit of Horce’s famous Ode iii.2, “solvat phaselon; saepe Diespiter.” I don’t think you have to be a genius to realize that this is Latin. But what did Google Translate think it was? Afrikaans. Really. And not only that! It translated it into English as, “solvat phaselon; saepe Diespiter.” That is to say: it didn’t recognize a single word as Afrikaans, but it still said it was an Afrikaans phrase. If I go in and manually select “Latin,” it translates the phrase correctly, “pay to the boat; often Jupiter.”

Now if we put that English phrase into Google Translate and ask it to translate into Afrikaans, we get, “skenk aan die boot; dikwels Jupiter.” If you are really drunk and you squint really hard, that kind of looks like the original Latin. So I’m willing to admit that the Google Translate auto-detection is as good as a drunk squinter.

The system is just as bad with obvious phrases. Put in “cri de coeur” and Google announces, “Romanian.” And again, it translates it into English as, “cri de coeur”! But this time the English, “cry of heart” gets translated into Romanian as, “strigăt de inimă.” That doesn’t look anything like it, although it does have the same “de,” so there’s that.

I suspect what is really going on is that the program to do auto-detect just doesn’t work very hard. But you would think that for default English speakers, it would try French and German first. I get that Latin might be the last thing it checks. But not getting “cri de coeur” is really amazing.

I like to think that I don’t lose perspective on things. Despite my rants and ravings, I know what is important and what is not. And yesterday, a really important article flashed across my screen. It was by Joseph Stromberg over at Vox, How to Use Science to Win at Rock-Paper-Scissors. You may be one of those ignorant people who think that the game is random. But I know from years of experience that people are very poor random rock-paper-scissors generators. Bad players (which in practice means most players) repeat the same kinds of patterns over and over again.

There was one bit of news in the article that blew me away: there is an official league for rock-paper-scissors competitors. It is called the US Association of Rock, Paper, Scissors. I’m sure that these people would crush me like a pair of scissors. After all, I don’t take this stuff any more seriously than I do any of the hundreds of other odd fascinations I suffer from. And clearly, these are very serious people because some of them have actually systematized the game.

The only absolute rule that I knew, was the first one they mentioned: throw paper first. Actually, they say that you should throw paper first against guys. This is because guys tend to subconsciously think that nothing is as strong as the rock. This is not my thinking at all. Rock is the default throw. The first time that people go, they are kind of disoriented. There’s the whole counting thing (1-2-3…) and then you have to change the shape of your hand. It isn’t natural. So a lot of people panic and do nothing, which is the same as throwing rock.

The second rule is quite clever, although they do a bad job of explaining it. The essence of this rule is that people predict the future by looking at the past—but it works differently for winners and losers.If they just lost to rock, they will assume (without knowing it) that they are going to get rock again; so they throw paper. But if they just won with rock, they will go with it again because they assume their opponent will throw the same thing. So if you just lost to rock, throw paper; if you just won with rock, through scissors. And when you win, laugh maniacally. (Of course, if you both do this, the last winner will win again.)

The third rule is a classic from statistics. If you toss a quarter a hundred times, there is a very good chance that it will come up heads six times in a row. People’s ideas about randomness do not brook much actual randomness. The truth is that three heads in a row will happen one out of eight times when you toss a coin three times. So it isn’t surprising that most people won’t, for example, throw scissors three times in a row. So if you opponent has thrown scissors twice, they are very unlikely to throw scissors a third time.

The article provides a fourth rule, but I think it’s a pass: close your eyes. This is based upon one study, so make of it what you will. There is a related issue, however: decide what you are going to throw before you start! Not doing that is what makes most players bad.

Of course, all of these rules will only improve your chances. I haven’t been able to find any competition results, but I assume that players aren’t doing more than a couple percent better than others. So if anyone wants to do a rock-paper-scissors with you to decide something, make sure you make it the best out of a hundred.

Afterword

There are many freaks like me. That is why some people developed the game rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock. It has more interesting rules like, “Scissors decapitate lizard” and, “Paper disproves Spock.”