JamesRandiFoundation YouTube suspended

I see that The James Randi Educational Foundation channel at YouTube has been suspended. I suspect YouTube has screwed up again. I am watching the situation with the expectation that YouTube sees the error of their ways and fixes this. The JREF is one of the bastions of clear thinking on the internet.

20th March 2009 11:44 UTC – Vernal Equinox

Today at 11:44 UTC (roughly the same as GMT).

The center of the Sun crosses the equatorial plane from south to north. On the equator the sun passes directly overhead. At the poles the Sun is on the horizon the whole day. On this day the Sun spends roughly the same length of  time over and under the horizon so day and night are roughly equally long at all places on Earth.

Vernal equinox  comes from the latin ver = spring, aequus = equal and nox = night (day and night of equal length).

15th March – The Ides of March

The Ides of March is the fifteenth day of March in the Roman calendar. Ides comes from latin and means half division.

A bad day for one: on the 15th March 44 BCE Julius Caeser was assainated by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, Decimus Junius Brutus and several other Roman senators. He was stabbed to death. Beware the Ides of March.

A triumphant day for another: on 15th March 1493 Christopher Columbus returns to Spain after his first journey to the Americas.

An innovative day for technology: on 15th March 1985 the first internet domain name (symbolics.com) is registered.

14th March 1835 – Giovanni Schiaparelli born

Giovanni Schiaparelli was born on this day in 1835. He is perhaps best known because, as noted in Wikipedia:

he observed a dense network of linear structures on the surface of Mars which he called “canali” in Italian, meaning “channels” but mistranslated as “canals”.

Interestingly (or not) Google celebrates his birthday with this logo:

14th March – Pi Day

Happy Pi Day everyone.

13th March 1781 – Uranus discovery announced

From Wikipedia’s post on Uranus:

Sir William Herschel announced its discovery on March 13, 1781, expanding the known boundaries of the solar system for the first time in modern history. This was also the first discovery of a planet made using a telescope.

Sir William Herschel was not the first person to observe Uranus – John Flamsteed beat him to it. But Flamsteed did not recognise Uranus for what it was. The credit for the discovery therefore goes to Herschel.

12 February 1809 – Charles Darwin born

Today we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Robert Darwin’s birth.

Happy Darwin Day.

Earlier posts on Darwin day here and here.

Darwin on Wikipedia.

7th January 1610 – Galileo observes Jupiter moons

Utklipp fra Wikipedia’s entry for Galileo Galilei:

On 7 January 1610 Galileo observed with his telescope what he described at the time as “three fixed stars, totally invisible by their smallness”, all within a short distance of Jupiter, and lying on a straight line through it. Observations on subsequent nights showed that the positions of these “stars” relative to Jupiter were changing in a way that would have been inexplicable if they had really been fixed stars. On 10 January Galileo noted that one of them had disappeared, an observation which he attributed to its being hidden behind Jupiter. Within a few days he concluded that they were orbiting Jupiter. He had discovered three of Jupiter’s four largest satellites (moons): Io, Europa, and Callisto. He discovered the fourth, Ganymede, on 13 January. Galileo named the four satellites he had discovered Medicean stars, in honour of his future patron, Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Cosimo’s three brothers. Later astronomers, however, renamed them Galilean satellites in honour of Galileo himself.

The significance of the above is the following…
This was one of the earliest known astronomical observations using a telescope. The discovery that Jupiter had moons orbiting it was pivotal in displacing the Aristotelian Cosmology which held that all heavenly bodies circle the Earth. This discovery supported the  Copernican model of the Solar System where the Sun and not the Earth is at the centre. Galileo’s discovery in September of the same year that Venus displayed phases like the Moon  showed that Venus orbited the Sun, not the Earth.

Read 21/2008 – Rainbows End

Book: 21
Title: Rainbows End

Author: Vernor Vinge
Genre: Science Fiction
Why did you get this book? It was a birthday present. After reading a review of Vernor Vinges Rainbows End over at From a Sci-Fi Standpoint I asked for any book by Vinge.
Did you enjoy the book? Yes. His vision of the near future was most interesting for someone like me who has worked on mainframe computers for over thirty years.
Was the author new to you? Almost. I have read his essay on the coming technological singularity.
Would you read something by this author again? Yes.
Are you keeping it or passing it on? I am keeping it.
Spoilers? The tale of a famous poet who loses twenty years due to Alzheimer’s. Fortunately for him medical advances cure him. Now he has to catch up with twenty years of technological advancement. In this strange new world computer power is built into your clothes and contact lenses add multiples layers of virtual reality over everything you see. Everything and everyone is connected and communicates using these multiple layers.  Technology has made it possible for marginal groups to gain weapons of mass destruction – our nightmare come true – and the need for security dominates society. People who can not adjust to this technology are cut off from sophisticated social interaction. Our poet has to relearn many things in order to adjust. The ending was rather abrupt and disappointed some. Vinge’s description of our near future compensates for this. I like this kind of hard science fiction. Its object is to speculate, to warn, to show options and to raise the important question – is this really how we want our future to be?
Number of pages: 381
Total pages for the year: 5541

27th December 1571 – Johannes Kepler born

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) played a major role in the scientific revolution. He is best known as the discoverer of the three Laws of Planetary Motion. He did this by studying the observations made by Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) of planetary motion.

Kepler was instrumental in replacing our Geocentric – Earth centered -  view of the Universe with a heliocentric – Sun centered – view. This heliocentric view would later fall. Two major mileposts on our way towards a modern view of our Universe.

Kepler’s three laws are stated in our times thus:
First Law:
The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus.
Second Law:
A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.
Third Law:
The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the third power of the semi-major axis of its orbit. Moreover, the constant of proportionality has the same value for all planets.

The first law describes the shape of a planet orbit. The second law tells us that a planet moves faster when closer to the Sun than when further away. The third law tells us that the length of a planet’s year depends on its distance from the Sun. The further out a planet orbits the Sun; the longer its year is.

Isaac Newton was later able to derive these laws using his Theory of Gravitation.

Start rant…

Did you notice that a Scientific Law describes how natural phenomenon behave?

A Scientific Theory on the other hand explains why things follow the laws they are observed to follow.

The scientific use of the words law and theory differ from the common use of these words.  In common use a Law is a rule agreed upon by common agreement and a theory is an untested idea that has not been proved. In common use a theory is weaker than a law. In science the opposite is true.

Note that scientific theories are never proved to be true. Theories can either be proved false (rare) or (more commonly) replaced by a new theory that explains natural phenomenon even better.  Newton’s Laws of Gravitation have not been replaced by Einstein’s General Theory of relativity. Relativity is just more accurate than Newton’s Theory in extreme situations.  When sending a probe to the Moon; Newton’s Theory of Gravitation works just fine. Sending a probe into orbit round a black hole on the other hand would require use of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity because the velocities in question are much closer to the speed of light and therefore more extreme.

…end rant.