Astronomy: “The Universe” TV Series (from the History Channel) December 31, 2010

Over the last couple of years one of my main interests has been astronomy. It’s a huge field that could be approached in many ways. For now I’ve been trying to learn the key points and that has been very helpful in filling out my philosophical perspective on life.

One easy way to learn about astronomy is to watch the various TV shows available on the ‘knowledge’ channels. However they are generally very basic and often dated (astronomy is a field that has made amazing advancements in the last decade or two). The one series that has impressed me is “The Universe” as shown on The History Channel. It started in 2007 and strikes a reasonable balance between entertainment and science. I purchased the first 4 seasons and am slowly making my way through them.

I will caution that the series is often very sensationalist. I suppose that’s done for the ratings. Those of us that like our science to be serious have to be patient – it’s the price for getting an overview in an easy to consume form (TV). 

Here’s some notes, in case you’re interested:

Season One – Disc 1

Secrets of the Sun

• The episode goes into a lot of the mechanics of the Sun but also includes lots of scary scenarios. And I doubt any of the details are “secrets”, other than to ancient man.
• It’s a yellow dwarf, 1 million times the size of the earth
• In 1 second the sun produces as much energy as humanity has used in all of our history
• Photons takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years to get here, including 10 days on the outer layer and 8 minutes to cross space
• The sun can only produce elements up to iron (the rest have come from other astronomical sources) 

The End of the Earth

• Lots of sensationalist graphics and scenarios, as you probably expect, often repeated before and after the commercial breaks though there are no such breaks in the DVD
• Some interesting details about near earth object and the history of the solar system

Season One – Disc 2

Alien Galaxies

• This one is all about galaxies, which are admittedly simply amazing, but there’s nothing alien about them
• The universe is 13.6 billion years old and the Earth is 4 billion years old, so much of what we see is from before when the earth was created
• Galaxies around generally about 100 billion stars, all very far from each other
• If the Sun is a dot of an “i” on a page, and then size of the Milky Way would be the size of the USA
• Examples are Sombrero, M51, Centaurus , Andromeda, and most are very old
• There a great but quick video of flying along the Grand Canyon
• Galaxy types are: spiral, elliptical, and irregular
• The uniformity of the expanding universe means we can’t tell where the center is
• There are maybe 30 galaxies in our local group
• Small and Large Magellanic clouds are galaxies that are visible without a telescope
• Adaptive optics give ground-based telescopes good detail

Season 2 – Disc 4

Gravity

• Gravity is the most universal of forces – it works at all scales
• Things fall at the same rate, regardless of mass (of course)
• They tried to do a roller coaster demo but the wind didn’t cooperate and so it was really useless
• Traveling through the Earth between any two points would always take 42 minutes, by the straight path
• Time/space is gravity, by definition
• 97 miles per second is earth’s escape velocity
• Potential energy vs. kinetic energy
• Those zero-G flights are detailed at http://zerog.com, but are $5k
• Einstein: acceleration = gravity (as in e=mcc)
• But weight varies depending on the size of the masses involve – why is that? Mars vs. Earth. They didn’t really clarify that
• They said “gravitational  waves are just like oceans waves”, but they aren’t because ocean waves are 2D and gravity waves are 3D
• The LIGO labs are attempting to detect gravity waves, including one at Hanford here in Washington state: http://www.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/

Biggest Things

• Earth is 100 million billion times smaller than the biggest stuff
• The cosmic web is the biggest thing but not gravitationally bound
• Galaxy super clusters are the largest entities. Shapley Supercluster is the largest (4k times size of Milky Way) or more
• We’re in the Local Group and then the Virgo Supercluster
• Other huge structures:
• Boötes Void. Large but very little there
• Lyman-alpha blobs (early galaxies?)
• The largest galaxies, but what is the limit of a galaxy? Cluster diffused (CD) are often 10 to 20 Milky Way size (for example IC1101 is 60 times the size)
• Radio Lobe galaxies are huge in mass
• Hyper-giant stars
• Black holes are common amongst galaxies

Why program electronics from Windows? November 21, 2010

That’s a fair question – if you need a device with certain features then chances are you can buy it. The Windows market is huge and thus practically everything has been addressed by some vendor, or soon will be. But there are a few counter-arguments:

• it’s fun and a good way to learn programming, but a challenge can be to find fun things to program. The world is full of games, web apps, gadgets, etc. so you can easily search for something that will almost certainly do a better job of whatever you might try to program. So it’s hard to feel ‘instant gratification’ in the sense of doing something new from normal programming efforts. But if your program controls something physical, like an external display, accelerometer, other sensor, or robot, you really feel like you’ve done something special
• for reasons beyond this blog, most computers don’t include sensors or other hardware that even smartphones have. So you might feel like you’re PC is missing out even though it’s amazingly easier to use and more powerful. So why not supplement your hardware and program the PC to use that supplemental hardware?
• you might invent something useful! To start with you’ll be pleased to toggle an LED, but you can soon evolve to more interesting things. Eventually you might combine an interesting set of sensors and/or displays and/or interfaces to do something actually practical. And since it works with Windows it can amplify the value of the great programs and scenarios that are used with Windows
• electronics are amazingly powerful and cheap these days. You can do some cool stuff for very little cost
• anyone can program a cute window, but how many programmers can get their programs to interact with the physical world?
• if you love electronics and want to do sophisticated stuff with them you would normally have to use microcontrollers and microcontroller programming techniques. That’s great if you’re going to be an electronics engineer but otherwise you’ll spend most of your time slowly developing arcane skills that aren’t beneficial beyond your hobby. However, if you can program the electronics from Windows then you get all the benefits of the electronics but also learn lots of general-purpose Windows programming skills (in my case .NET Framework, related languages, WPF, Silverlight, etc.). So you’ve got skills that you can use at work or elsewhere as well.