Some Astronomy Hacks

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Read the book Astronomy Hacks: Tips and Tools for Observing the Night Sky

Even though this came out 19 years ago, it was still interesting to see what kind of tips and tricks I might be able to glean from the 65 hacks that they provide. The book is from O’ Reilly, and while they typically have computer based books, they delved into other technology topics, since they know that they have geeky readers.

Some of the hacks that I found most interesting were:

#9 on choosing the best telescope was quite lengthy. It was about 29 pages. Most of the other hacks are a lot shorter. They do a good job of covering the basics, but they steer people away from apo refractors.

#11 covers eyesight and vision. I don’t think I’ve previously learned about the chemistry of the rods and cones in the eyeball. I did not know that there are L, M, and S cones. I thought all cones were the same.

I learned of the book because the DAS linked to hack #45 on dark adapting your vehicle. Other parts of the book are also online, such as this segment on barlows.

The section on eyepieces at #49 was just ok, and they seemed focused on Tele Vue and Pentax eyepieces to consider. Celestron and Meade were mentioned as well as some other makers, such as Orion, University Optics, and Vixen. They skipped other makers such as Baader, Brandon, RKE, and others. I guess Explore Scientific was not around yet – the company formed in 2008.

The review of 1x finders was good at #53. I will have to see if I can find a Rigel QuikFinder.

I did not like that he only called the Moon — Luna. I’m sure that was done to not confuse Earth’s Moon with other moons of the solar system. Still, it was a little jarring. It was also a little weird to have the authors use the term binocular for a single instrument instead of binoculars or let alone the phrase — a pair of binoculars. Really? We all know that a pair of pants is a single garment that one wears. It is not a pant. One wears pants, or a pair of pants.

End rant. The book is still a useful read 19 years after first publication.

The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, etc., etc., etc.

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Ok, the whole book title is The 4-Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. This book documented the process of how two different teams of scientists discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating back in 1998. If you are interested in the sociology of how different scientific disciplines do their work, this would be of interest. The author explained how the astronomers did group-based work quite differently from the physicists.

For example, on page 229, one can read this. “The core of White’s argument was that astronomy and particle physics constituted two different cultures. Astronomers, White said, were ‘generalists,’ exploring the complexities of the universe on a case-by-case basis. Particle physicists were ‘fundamentalists,’ wringing the complexities of the universe in the hope of squeezing out an ‘ultimate foundation’—a ‘Truth.’ ‘Dark Energy,’ he wrote, ‘is a unique link between them, reflecting deep aspects of the Fundamental Theory, yet apparently accessible only through astronomical observation.'” (From https://millstonenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/panek4PercentUniverse.pdf)

The book covered dozens and dozens of scientists, and I got lost trying to keep track of them all in my head. I probably should have taken notes. Pictures of the scientists involved might have helped me keep track of them all.

Overall, if you are interested in learning more about dark energy, and how different scientific teams work together (or not), then this book would be a worthwhile read.

Two more books that I’ve read or skimmed

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And, here they are.

The Evolution of Useful Things. This was by Henry Petroski, may he rest in peace. I don’t know if I would call in fascinating, but it was an interesting look into how very simple things have been designed over the last couple of hundred years. Some of the examples included forks, paperclips, zippers, and more. He did circle back to forks in different parts of the book, so it seemed like he wandered in the topics sometimes. I may have skimmed or skipped some pages, since it was less than thrilling. But, I am looking forward to reading his book about — The Pencil.

Do Numbers Exist? A Debate about Abstract Objects. This was a philosophers pissing contest between Peter van Inwagen and William Lane Craig. I should have looked at the author list first, since I’ve known that William Lane Craig was a theistic apologist. They both brought up god even though I don’t see what god would have to do with the philosophy of whether numbers truly exist or not. They tried to get very deep into the philosophical weeds so that they could impress the readers with how much they know about how to use philosophical jargon over most people’s heads. In the end, I sided more with Peter van Inwagen, since he seemed to be of the mind that numbers actually exist. Most of the book was not really about numbers, but more about the existence of abstract objects in general. I liked the segment starting on page 211 about the concept — do chairs exist? It reminded me of the line by John Oliver — Do Owls exist? Are there hats?

I skimmed the vast majority of the book, but It did get me thinking about the existence of numbers. I think that the number pi exists. If there is an intelligent life form that has studied mathematics outside of our solar system, it also knows how to calculate pi, and it knows that it has an infinite number of digits (in whatever number base it uses). The fact that it is reproducible and exactly calculated in another part of the universe makes it exist. Also, why would god make a number such that it can’t know the last digit. It can’t know everything, since it can’t know every digit of pi. While a theologian might say that God knows the infinite, how does he or she know that god would know every digit of pi and e and all irrational numbers? Numbers just exist, and they were not created by a god. For some reason, these two debated about whether or not god created numbers. As uncreated things, they are still things. Hence, they exist.

Book by Dr. Kate Russo – Being in the Shadow

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The full title is Being in the Shadow: Stories of the First-time Total Eclipse Experience. I picked up the book at the Mile High Astronomy store a couple weeks ago. It is a very quick read, even for me.

It is essentially self-published, and it is pretty well done. Since she is a psychologist and an eclipse chaser, she wrote about the experiences of six non-amateur astronomers to see how they planned to see and experience the Total Solar Eclipse (TSE) of NE Australia on November 14, 2012. She was able to get their experiences before, during, and after the eclipse event. The names were changed so that the people in the book could remain anonymous. I found the stories from the first person, Cara, who was recently married, and the last person, Rose, who is a teacher, to be the most interesting of the lot. Of the six, I am glad that Terry, the festival goer, had a great eclipse experience, but I could not really relate to his partying and dancing vibe.

For more about the author, check out her website. Dr. Russo has written the primary texts when it comes to community planning for cities and communities in the path of totality. Here is the Community Solar Eclipse Planning – White Paper (PDF) which covers the 2024 TSE in the United States, Mexico, and Canada this April 8th.

Another book — Do Dice Play God?

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This book is by Ian Stewart. No, not the 3rd baseman who played for the Rockies and the Cubs about 15 years ago, this Ian Stewart is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick.

Thus, the book has a British focus, and some of his examples are based in the UK, but that is ok.

The subtitle is the Mathematics of Uncertainty. The title is a play on the statement by Einstein, “God does not play dice with the universe.” While god may or may not play dice, do dice ever play god?

Ian says that there are six ages of uncertainty, and he does not cover them in the order that they were found for various reasons. Chaos theory was discussed out of order from when it was found by humans.

  1. The first age of uncertainty involved gods, prophets, fortune tellers, seers, and the like. They could try to predict the future. They could supposedly explain what was going on in the world.
  2. The second age of uncertainty came about during the scientific advances in the 1500-1700s. This is when Newton’s laws defined how gravity works, and it explained how we could predict where the planets will be in the future. If we could predict the movements of planets, would it be possible to predict everything, including human behavior?
  3. The third age came with greater understanding of mathematics and probability. Gamblers, astronomers, mathematicians, and many others would like to know the odds of a future event happening.
  4. The fourth age came with quantum mechanics, and our understanding of never really knowing the location or the momentum of atomic and subatomic particles. These ideas took off in the early 1900s.
  5. The fifth age is when chaos theory was developed.
  6. The sixth age is our current situation. He said that it is “characterized by the realisation that uncertainty comes in many forms, each being comprehensible to some extent.” (page 10.) Mathematics can help us understand the universe a fair bit, but much of the world and the universe is “still horribly uncertain.” For example, we are better at predicting the weather about 5-7 days out, but predicting the weather 10-14 days out is still a crap shoot. Predicting climate change is different matter.

One thing I found fascinating was an oil droplet experiment that made teeny oil droplets behave like both waves and particles. This made Newtonian sized objects behave more like atomic particles. (See pages 233-235.) I had not heard of this experiment since I left physics back in the 1980s. But, it looks like that has been debunked as of 2018. Oh well.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, and I found it interesting. It would probably be best for people who have already had some college-level math or physics.

The book – Imaginary futures: From thinking machines to the global village

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This is another book that was recommended by Alison Macrina of the https://libraryfreedom.org/ project. It was listed in the further reading section of one of her talks.

I thought it would cover artificial intelligence and cybernetics a lot more than it did, but it was more of a book on the politics of the US and Russia, and on the cold war race to develop faster and better computing that supported military applications. I hoped that the final chapter would be a better conclusion to tie things together, but lo, it did not.

Sooooo much of the book covers political theory, especially capitalistic systems vs socialism and communism in particular. One should be familiar with Marshall McCluhan and the book Understanding Media, but I had not read that.

The final chapter gushes over Wired Magazine, as if that presents the final word concerning society and the internet. There were a ton of reference to Wired Magazine, but not many (any?) other periodicals that cover the internet as a social tool. It was like he was cherry picking quotes from Wired Magazine to show a point, and he did not explore other sources that might challenge that point.

The author did talk about the academic gift economy (p. 277 for example) and the way academics share information more freely, but the concepts of open access, and the problems with academic information hidden behind paywalls was not mentioned at all.

It is noteworthy that the book came out in 2007, and it got some things right. It mentioned that YouTube was a growing source of media viewing (p. 285), and it was pretty new in 2006/2007. It only mentioned the word blog once, and it is not in the index. Social media was not really covered or predicted.

Here are some specific things that jumped out at me.

Very soon, when the Net was ubiquitous, everyone would be equal within cyberspace. The rule of the few over the many was only a temporary condition. (p. 275.)

Ummm. What? The internet is not going to make the world an egalitarian place.

Of course, Napster was mentioned.

Anyone who distributed unauthorized copies of copyrighted material over the Net must be punished. Anyone who invented software potentially useful for on-line piracy should be criminalized. The courts and police had to stop consenting adults from sharing information with each other without permission. (p. 281)

Academics have been getting around this problem and issue for decades and decades. There are ways to get copyrighted material (journal articles and other bits of research) from others through email. This was not discussed at all. Napster made it easier for people to share songs with each other, and the music industry did not like that.

Overall, the book was a hard slog, since I was not expecting a book about communism vs the capitalist system. This review in Goodreads hit the nail on the head. “The book provides a lot of historical insight, really interesting, though it’s written in a such boring manner it’s really hard to go through it.”

I do agree with this statement from a different review of the book.

Barbrook has an amusing take on our distorted – if not delusional – relationship with technology, but his underlying point is serious: future visions of technology are used to distract us and also control us, and if we forget these imaginary futures, we are likely to repeat them.

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

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The whole book title is Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor.

This was a real eye opener for me. I grew up in a working class family, and we did have a time when we were quite poor, when my dad was on strike for about a year back in the 1970s, and we did not have much money. Also, my mom and dad divorced, and I was lucky to get scholarships to attend college with my mom being a single parent effectively. She did get income from my dad until I turned 18 I think.

Here is a good review of it. I first heard about the book from a talk about information privacy and AI and libraries by Alison Macrina of the https://libraryfreedom.org/ project. It was listed in the further reading section of her talk.

Anyway, the author, Virginia Eubanks, covers three case studies. The first is in Indiana, the second is in Los Angeles, and the third is in Pittsburgh. Chapter 5, The Digital Poorhouse, does a fine job of summing up the previous chapters. Essentially, the United States does a great job of using technology to track and police poor people. The system criminalizes poverty to keep poor people in that state. The system is designed to be opaque so that people can’t see how it really works.

Chapter 6 addresses ways to dismantle the digital poorhouse. I don’t see her recommendations coming to fruition any time soon. She brings up rhetoric from Martin Luther King, Jr., but technology has its claws so deep into law enforcement and in social support systems all across the country, I don’t think people will listen to the words of MLK, Jr. to dismantle those systems. She presents an Oath of Non-Harm for an Age of Big Data on pages 212-213. It will take a lot of work to convince companies to agree to that Oath. (While Google used to use the phrase — “Don’t be evil,” but that is now a former motto.)

I see it as a collective action problem. Even though she shows that the majority of people use social services as a temporary or full-time poor person, most people don’t see that Big Data has harmed them in any way. They might be convinced that Big Data has harmed some or many people, but it has not hurt them, yet. There needs to be more and better stories that get people to understand that Big Data hurting their neighbors is also hurting them. (People react better to stories than they do to plain old evidence and data, ironically.) That is when the voting public will act to change laws and policies when it comes to Big Data and the monitoring and policing of poor people in computer systems.

This book came out in 2017. It would be interesting to see how systems have changed with the Pandemic in the last three years.

Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel

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Here is another book about mathematics. In this book, the author talks about his absolute love of the beauty of mathematics, and how it explains physical properties, such as features of subatomic particles and in quantum physics. For example, mathematicians postulated the existence of some particles before they were even found based on symmetry in the underlying mathematics.

I was particularly interested in this book, since the author attended college right around the same time I was going to college (he is one year younger), and he experienced the changing world at the same stage that my wife and I did. Even though he is one year younger, he graduated from his high school one year earlier than me at age 16.

In the book, he explains how he was singled out in the mathematics test to attend Moscow State University (or MGU) as a Jewish person. When he went in for his math test, the testers grilled him, and they found a reason to reject his application even though he is brilliant. Moscow State University does not accept people who are even just one quarter Jewish. He ended up going to the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas (also called Kerosinka and officially called the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas) which has a pretty good applied mathematics program. They accept Jewish people. This allowed him to attend some lectures (first by jumping a fence, then getting an ID card) at Moscow State University, even though he wasn’t a student there. (See Chapters 3 and 4.)

In 1989, he received a Harvard Prize Fellowship to attend Harvard for a Semester to learn from some of the best mathematicians in the world. Most of the other recipients had graduate degrees and/or PhDs, while he just had an undergraduate degree from Kerosinka. He worked hard to prove that he belonged there with the fellowship.

He ended up staying in Boston for longer than a semester. He was able to get his PhD in just a year between 1990 and 1991. Below is his dissertation.

Frenkel, E. V. (1991). Affine Kac-Moody algebras at the critical level and quantum Drinfeld-Sokolov reduction.

After he gets his PhD, he works on the Langlands Program. This attempts to be a grand unified theory of mathematics. As noted at Wikipedia — “The Langlands program consists of some very complicated theoretical abstractions, which can be difficult even for specialist mathematicians to grasp.” Frenkel tries to explain some of the math in the program, and I caught some of it, but not very deeply. At the end of the book, he talks about the movie that he worked on, The Rites of Love and Math. The book was published in 2013, while the film came out in 2010, so the film preceded the book.

American Eclipse by David Baron

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While this book came out 6 years ago back in 2017, it is still a good fascinating read as we prepare for the 2023 annular eclipse in October and for the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. It looks like a new edition or version will come out February of 2024.

Much of the book is focused on the July 29, 1878 eclipse eclipse as it happened through Wyoming and Colorado. It was interested to read about how Maria Mitchell and her group observed the eclipse at a residence (Dr. Avery) at 20th St. and Champa. There is a nice drawing of the house on page 131. I drove by the location the other day, and it appears as if the house is no longer there. I spied two office buildings and two parking lots.

It was also interesting to see how involved Thomas Edison was in the event. He was trying to see if his “tasimeter” could be used to measure the heat of the Sun. It never really worked as expected. I also learned that Edison started the journal, Science.

The proposed planet Vulcan was supposedly observed during the eclipse, but it must have been some less bright field stars in the constellation of Cancer. The astronomer, James Craig Watson, from the U of Michigan was sure he spotted the planet, but after claiming his observation, he held on for some time before admitting that he did not see a new planet. Even though he was discredited, there is a medal awarded by the NAS as the James Craig Watson Medal, so his name lives on.

Overall, it was a nice read. It showed how far the US has come in scientific research in the last 155 years, and how the US scientific community was held in low regard by the European establishment at the time. But, the eclipse showed the world that scientists in the United States were getting better and better.