I imagine the recent negotiations to have gone something like this. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I like to imagine that Uncle Bill threatened Kim Jong Il with a Roman spatha.

I for one am glad that Bill Clinton gets a little attention. He gets to be the goddamned hero for once. And you know what? Despite everything that anyone says, the right thing happened. Two innocent women were freed from a very bleak future.

This is vitally important. It is not possible to see this as a bad thing unless you are a terrible person.

So anyway, NASA has released an image that was captured by the Spitzer telescope. I like Spitzer and I am a huge fan of the things that we get to see because of Spitzer. And this new image is not a disappointment. It’s an interesting spiral galaxy with a strange eye-shaped structure at its center. I think the most notable feature, however, is smaller galaxy that appears to caught up in orbit around the larger galaxy’s nucleus. It makes a lot of sense from a physics standpoint. The moon orbits Earth which orbits the sun which orbits our own galactic center. Why not have larger, binary galaxies? All around pretty sweet.

The thing that I wanted to focus on, however, is not the image itself, but rather, the language used to describe the image. And exerpt:

• “The ring around the black hole is bursting with new star formation. An inflow of material toward the central bar of the galaxy is causing the ring to light up with new stars.”

I know that I’m not the first person to point this out, but if we want to be perfectly accurate with our language and consider that this galaxy in the image is about 50-million light-years away, shouldn’t the above quotation be phrased more like this:

• “The ring around the black hole was bursting with new star formation. An inflow of material toward the central bar of the galaxy was causing the ring to light up with new stars.”

I mean, really. The image is of the state of that galaxy fifty million years ago. I’m not an astronomer, but I am a linguist. When astronomers discuss these things, do they use past-tense language? I’m really curious about this, because it seems to me that by using simpler language to ease communication, then some information is lost in the discussion. By using present tense, you must make the (to be fair, usually accurate) assumption that the reader understands that “is” actually means “was the case fifty million years ago.”

On the one hand, I’m curious about the type of language that professional astronomers use. On the other, I feel like I ought to lobby for the use of accurate language when describing celestial objects like distant galaxies.

Perhaps the most viable solution would be to take Rush Limbaugh, freeze him, stick him in a pod and launch him to that other galaxy so that he can report back to us about what it’s doing. With any luck, we’ll miss and he’ll be lost in the inconceivably vast void between galaxies forever.

Would it be easier to just send him to North Korea where he would be forced to do hard labor for ten years?

Singen Sie mich adieu.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I am, in fact, totally pumped that we’re finally getting back into legitimate space exploration. The thing is, there are perfectly justifiable reasons for going to the moon aside from the obvious intrinsic merit–the “cool” factor that I’ve talked about in the past.

It’s all a test. If we as a species wish to survive more than a few thousand more years, we need to get off this planet. The only way to do that is to learn how to survive in the absolute harshest of situations: the moon. If we can establish a permanent base on the moon, Mars should be a breeze. If we can do Mars, then I don’t see any reason why future technologies like the “ark” ships of science fiction aren’t reasonable.

What I’m talking about is pushing the limits of what humans are capable of.

Athletes are interesting because they push the limits of what a single individual can do. Tremendous feats of physical prowess. Competing over hundredths (thousandths) of a second. Scholars, poets, writers, and intellectuals push human thought to its extreme limits. They tear apart the tiniest ideas and expose their inner workings, oftentimes giving us insights into the world and ourselves that we never thought of before.

The great monuments of the world are testaments to what the combined human effort is capable of. Nobody considers what the Colosseum cost to build. Or the pyramids. The cathedrals scattered about Europe. We value these things beyond their price tags.

The Apollo program was a testament to what combined human effort is capable of and maybe, to this day, stands as perhaps the greatest human achievement outside of art. And so going back is a matter of course. We must go back to the moon because if we don’t, we are, in essence, stuck in a rut. Absorbed in our consumerism, our trite and meaningless wars, we can look at our current world situation as a symptom of a sort of species-wide depression. We did something amazing 1969 and it didn’t last long. And it’s over. And we’ve been trying to best it since then. We’ve discovered incredible new things, but we haven’t taken the next step. We haven’t gone to the next level.

My only problem is, as I’ve said in the past, just how damned slow it all happens. I’m just glad that something’s happening. I’ll be even more excited if they find the ice they’re looking for.

On the plus side, sun spots are back!

Au revoir.

The word for the day is bureaucracy. NASA is in the final stages of assembling the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Part of the machine’s purpose is to search for evidence of the existence of anti-matter by reading the cosmic rays. Since not all rays on planet Earth are, by their nature, cosmic, the gadget needs to be mounted on the International Space Station, sort of like a satellite dish bolted to the top of a mobile home. Sort of high-tech white trashy.

The problem with this whole thing? Despite the fact that they are almost done building this thing, there’s no guarantee that it will launch. You see, we only actually have three space shuttles. That’s right. Three. Five were built. Two blew up. The nature of science is such that most projects take a very long time to complete. So this spectrometer project has been going on for a while, but when Columbia disintegrated in 2003, they had to alter the launch schedule. I mean, we have been pushing these ships to the limit. It’s a tough job. They are old! Older than my crappy Beretta and that thing is on its last legs. With only three space-worthy shuttles, that puts the US in a pretty awkward position. The entire world depends on our shuttle program, and the entire fleet (such as it is) is going to be retired next year. It’s pretty sad, honestly. So they finish building the spectrometer and hope that they can launch it.

Part of the AMS’s mission is the search for evidence of anti-matter. And, as anyone who has read a Dan Brown novel knows, anti-matter is pretty tricky stuff. It’s exactly like normal matter except that if it comes into contact with normal matter, both substances “annihilate” which is, they cease to be matter and are transformed into pure energy, mostly in the form of heat. In layman’s terms: big freaking explosion. Pretty cool, huh? The question is, since our galaxy is made of normal matter, is it possible that there are entire galaxies, solar systems, planets, or even intelligent life forms made entirely of anti-matter? It sounds like a plot from a bad comic book, but the fact remains that it’s entirely possible. The crazy of it is, that we could never actually meet these beings because if we tried to shake hands, we would blow each other straight to oblivion.

How much energy is released in one of these explosions? Remember the famous equation, E=mc². You take the mass of the two beings–one made of normal matter, the other, of the anti-variety–and add them together. Probably 180kg, assuming they are about the same size as we. You know, it doesn’t matter, because no matter how much mass they are, you end up multiplying it by c². What does c stand for? The fucking speed of light. That’s right. And you square it, which means that an incredibly huge amount of energy is locked up in matter. But we all knew that, right?

Wouldn’t it be ironic if NASA never got the funding to launch this machine, so we never discovered whether or not there were anti-matter galaxies, and then, say, a few years from now, some amazing energy source is found that allows us to travel between galaxies, and, wouldn’t you know it, the first galaxy that we travel to is made entirely of anti-matter? It could happen, people. It could happen, and won’t we all feel like dorks for not giving NASA their measly two billion dollars?

In other news, soon, the internet will be able to answer all of your questions. Finally! I’m so sick of the internet being totally useless. At long last, I never have to wade through google and wikipedia to find just about any information I could possibly hope for. I jest, of course, this thing looks totally keen.

Last but not least, since I’m a little strapped for time, let’s see if I can toss two stories into one sentence. Soon, you’ll be able to use your brand new, silicon invisibility cloak to avoid spiders that want to inject sperm into you with hypodermic penises. That is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.

Discuss.