Titan, the Liquid Moon

Close observations of Saturn's moon Titan show that as it orbits it is deformed by Saturn's gravity. Here's an animation of what is seen, only slightly exaggerated:



Embedded video from


NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology

This means that somewhere, deep down, Titan is a different phase of matter. It is a liquid moon. And where there's liquid flow could there be life?

Right now, who knows? The great part about this is that it's close enough that we can imagine taking a jaunt out to see. Of course, kind of hard to call it a jaunt when it's probably a one-way trip for any humans ...

[More information on this observation found here.]

How to Pitch a Perfect Game

Baseball is the best sport for after the fact analysis. Yesterday, after more than 5000 games for the Mariners franchise, a Mariners pitcher threw a perfect game. (If you know the Mariners at all, you don't even have to ask who it was.) But how did Felix do that? The game is broken down in this incredible piece of analysis, which shows very clearly just how the game changes as it wears on and players change their approach. Almost like an immunological arms race of pathogen vs. immune system. You can even see where the opposing manager argued a called strike, got thrown out of the game ... but then the umpire changed his strike zone as a result. So there IS a point to managers getting thrown out of games. I think I could teach a whole math and strategy class on this one game. 

Tolkien in the Sky with Diamonds

If you're ever hanging out on Mercury, now you can find Tolkien there:

See him? Right there, between Goethe and Mendelssohn.

According to Tolkien's own writings, the half-elven seafarer Earendil (you know, Elrond's papa) carries the shining Silmaril on his brow as he crosses the skies. Now, the little bit of Mercury that we can see shining, chasing the sun, is Tolkien's vessel. He shines like a diamond ... explaining the rather bad pun in the title above.

More on why Mercury has craters named for artists on it can be found here.

An 11-Set Venn Diagram

You're probably used to 2- or 3-set Venn Diagrams:

Apparently mathematic explorers have been searching for how high they can go. It took a long time to get the number of sets up to 7. And now they've found an 11-set diagram, which is just beautiful in its slight asymmetry:

Hopefully this news can inspire new apprentice math explorers to search out these virtual lands and find new species like this flower diagram. It's like Alice in Wonderland, but it's real ...

Greece's Problem, South Africa's Solution?

Could the answer to Greece's problems lie in a South-African style amnesty and starting fresh, with an economic rather than racial focus? The idea is more fully explained in this blog post by Dan Ariely. I'm intrigued by how the general idea of reconciliation (and jubilee) applies to both cases. It's worth noting that Ariely is a behavioral economist and so the economic angle is not far from his mind, yet he's making what's ultimately a moral analysis. What I appreciate about Ariely is how seamlessly he integrates the economics and the morals, more successfully (and less preachingly) than most, and with a solid experimental foundation to boot.

Book Review: Shada (Doctor Who)

You need a TARDIS just to be able to understand the entire title of this book. Best I can tell it's officially Doctor Who: The Lost Adventure by Douglas Adams: Shada by Gareth Roberts. But Roberts' name isn't on the spine. There's a reason for that: Shada was originally a TV script written by Douglas Adams (of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame) for the Fourth Doctor, even partially filmed but cut short by a strike. Roberts rewrites and expands the story as a novel, which is a particularly inspired choice because he's written at least two episodes for the new Doctor Who series that are both funny and thrilling in about the same ratio as Douglas Adams himself. He does a good job, in that it's a good story.

The end result is that it's about what you would expect. Some funny moments, a decent enough plot (a bit overstuffed and understuffed in parts), about the same as watching an average episode of Doctor Who, so I can't complain about that. It's not as sublimely funny as Hitchhiker's Guide or even as funny as "Closing Time" (my favorite episode by Roberts, you know, the one with the baby Alfie who in his own mind is named Stormageddon the Dark Lord), but it has its moments and works rather well for being patched together and spread out over time. That in itself is what makes it seem to fit into the patched together universe of Doctor Who. For those who can't wait for the next season to start in the fall, this is a fine substitute and good airplane reading too.

Book Review (2012): The Hobbit

Just two years after I read and reviewed The Hobbit, another boy's ready to read it aloud. At this rate there will be another review in 2018 and finally in 2020, and then I'll be out of boys to read it to.

What stood out to me this time was the sheer inventiveness of Tolkien's narrative. It's not enough to kill the dragon, there's a battle after. It's not enough to have two or three, you have to have a Battle of Five Armies. And the importance of having Dain the Dwarf manning the Lonely Mountain instead of Smaug the Dragon is not really spelled out here, but you can argue that the events of The Hobbit are important to making the world "savable" in Lord of the Rings. Maybe it's just Peter Jackson's impending movies in the back of my mind, but this time through the parallels between the children's book and the adult's trilogy stand out to me. It seems to fit together better the more times I read it.

It gives me hope that The Hobbit movie trilogy will be up to snuff ... more than the Star Wars prequel triology, at least.