Note of the Living Deb

The second lecture of Nerd Nite was "A Planetarium for Austin; an Historical Perspective," by Torvald Hessel.

The oldest planetarium that is still working (although it's now called an orrery rather than a planetarium) was built in 1774 in the Netherlands. A wool comber built it in his attic. He wanted to base it off a 24-hour clock, but the pendulum required for such a clock was too long to fit in the attic so he had to cut a slot in the floor. Then the pendulum swung right over the bed, between him and his wife, and his wife nixed the idea. So, he switched to an 18-hour clock, which could use a shorter pendulum.

He built this orrery to prove that the forthcoming alignment of the planets was not, in fact, going to mean the end of the world, because our solar system is actually heliocentric rather than earth-centric. It's a model of the solar system with all the planets rotating the sun with the same periods as they do in real life.

Our speaker explained that once again, the world is predicted to end in the near future (12/21/12), and he tried to debunk the evidence, thus:
* Yes, the Mayan calendar ends. Just like ours does every year.
* The so-called lethal alignment happens every year.
* Niburu, the sister shadow planet set to collide with earth, should surely be detectable by now, but it's not.
* The planets are not actually aligning.
* Although the earth's magnetic field probably will flip, there's a little thing called inertia that will keep the earth spinning.
* Nostradamus said a lot of things.

[Hmm, not particularly convincing. Maybe we should have a party on the Saturday night preceding this date. Just in case.]

The speaker said that Austin is the largest city in the United States (#15) with no planetarium and no science museum. He said in fact all the top fifty cities in the US have planetariums except Austin. Dallas has 13 planetariums. Even Oklahoma City has a good science museum.

He said planetariums are based on a dome shape, which he feels is beautiful and does not need to be disguised, like the one in Midland (Texas) shaped like an oil drum. There's one in Valencia (shaped like a big eye). There's even one on the Queen Mary 2 (cruise ship). So surely Austin could have one.

And we should want one. A study in Houston showed that a planetarium led to a 24% increase in related test scores. Even more importantly, it lead to an 11% increase in the interest in science careers. (A study in England showed a 20% increase in such interest for girls.)

Our speaker grew up in the Netherlands and worked in a planetarium in Amsterdam. When he moved here, he started working to get a planetarium built, though he knew nothing about nonprofits and fund raising. But now he's getting companies to support the idea.

The UT Center for Space Research (old MCC building) has donated office space. There's a proposed design (click on "Austin Planetarium"). There's a proposed location (the little-used parking lot in front of the Bob Bullock Texas History museum). And there's a proposed projector. Right now Goto in Japan and Zeiss in Germany make projectors; these cost about $4 million. A new Japanese company makes $400,000 projectors that are so good that you can use binoculars and even telescopes inside the planetarium to see more. You can guess which one of these is proposed.

If want to help, he recommended the following:
* become a subscriber of The Austin Planetarium Newsletter -- this helps them show interest.
* Become a fan on Facebook.
* Make a donation.
* Ask Torvald to speak at your company or other group.

(I actually sent an e-mail proposing Highland mall instead of the parking lot I actually use when I'm watching IMAX movies at the History museum. And I proposed that in addition to working with the UT College of Education like he mentioned, he also work with the UT College of Natural Sciences which has more money and which actually houses the program to education future science teachers.)

Who knew a planetarium might be in our future? Cool.

Bad News in Chocolate - The Godiva store in Highland Mall is closing on Wednesday, April 7. Prices are now 25% off on everything (40% off on Easter stuff). Indigo Rose says this is the only local Godiva location that serves the icy chocolate drinks. I plan to try to get one last one on Wednesday. The inventory still looked completely full this evening. [Interestingly, their big containers of hot chocolate, which are always $10, everywhere, are suddenly (25% off of) $11.]

There are two big north-south routes in my town. They are too wiggly to be perfectly parallel to each other. I live just east of the easternmost one, near the center of town, and my sister lives just west of the westernmost one, pretty far south.

There are also two big east-west routes, one of which is perfect for going to my sister's house but terrible for coming back because of all the construction on the northbound side of the easternmost north-south route. The other is north of my place and actually runs northwest and southeast.

The question: Is it quicker to take that northern road, going out of the way but staying out of stop-and-go traffic, or is it quicker to take 15th Street, one of the shorter routes between the two north-south roads, but with lights at most of the intersections?

I've always wondered this so I decided to--can you believe it?--pay attention. I tried both routes and timed myself and now have one good data point for each route. Traffic conditions were perfect for both routes, and I actually remembered to look at the clock both at the very beginning and at the very end.

I feel these two data points are enough to answer my question when traffic conditions are good. (Extrapolating my results to rush hour conditions would be risky.)

Oh, enough with the suspense already?

The answer: The longer northern route took 30 minutes; the other one took 22 minutes. The latter route required me to stop at two lights on 15th, but the previous time I tried, the lights were perfectly timed for me, so I'm going to assume that having only two red lights is not biasing my conclusion for that route to be too short. (I forgot to check the time when I pulled in that time, though.)

It is possible that the construction reduced the traffic density on the part of the easternmost north-south route I was using (north of the construction) enough to make it significantly faster than it would normally be. But since the difference between the two routes was so huge, I feel sure that 15th Street will remain the quicker route when construction ends.

(And then I'll test the normally perfect east-west route.)

I decided to research stingrays in preparation for hanging out with some of them in the Caribbean. I thought it might give me ideas of things to pay more attention to.

It turns out that it's not so easy to learn about stingrays. I could not find any books that are about nothing but stingrays, for example. Still I did learn a few things.

The easiest thing to learn is that stingrays almost never attack people, and if they do it's almost never a bad wound and the wound is almost always in your foot or ankle and the incident with Steve Irwin was a total fluke.

It's also pretty easy to learn that they are flat and like to hide by lying still on the bottom surface, even flinging sand over themselves to become less noticeable. If you step on it, it may reflexively attack with its stinger, which may then come out in your ankle. This does not kill the stingray, and it can grow a new one. This teaches people who find themselves around stingrays to do the "stingray shuffle," which is to drag your feet through the sand as you walk so that a surprised stingray will run away (which reaction also lets it live and even lets it keep its stinger).

I've been thinking that the stingray might be one of the most alien life forms I will ever interact with. But maybe it's not quite as alien as I thought. It's very closely related to the shark, with whom it survived the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction. (I did find two books on sharks and rays.) Like the shark, it has a simple endoskeleton of calcified cartilage and it's a fish with gills. The big round parts are really just large pectoral fins. So, like me, it has bilateral symmetry and a backbone and it can swim underwater using its appendages and lie at the bottom of the pool, surprising people. It even has pretty good vision, although the top eyelid is fused to the eyeball (the bottom eyelid works fine).

However, its eyes are on top and its mouth is on the bottom, so it can't see what it's eating. That's weird, huh? Only I just realized that I can only see to within about a half inch of my mouth, unless I deliberately stick my lips out. So maybe that's not so odd anyway. Plus it has lips and can feel what it's looking for. And it has a good sense of smell and, from what I can tell, it can even sense things electrically. Electric eels do this sort of like bats use echolocation--they send out something and feel how it bounces back. So maybe they have something like that.

Another odd thing is that it is covered with tooth-like scales, like sharks are. Instead of little hairs. The same sorts of things are what grow into teeth, and it has more than one row of teeth, like sharks do. And one of them is what evolved into the stinger. Robin says that shark skin is like sandpaper, only it hurts more. I'm guessing that the stingrays we are going to be hanging with have a less sharp version. Still, it is more than a little strange that we are paying to hang around sharks that evolution has squashed into the cute and nonterrifying shape of pancakes.

So, while I am there, I'm going to pay attention to how sharp the skin is, what the eyelids look like, and how many fins and gills I can see, in addition to what I would have been paying attention to before, like how they swim, and what it feels like if they eat out of your hand.