Resonant Constellation

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, view this video:
Captain Picard Day

Now, a bunch of geeks have computed from the stardate in the episode that Captain Picard Day actually takes place on June 16, meaning yesterday! This is yet another amazing day in my ever-growing list of geek holidays. To recap:

• Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19th)-also a religious holiday for the church of the FSM.
• Pi Day (March 14th) (not to be confused with pi approximation day, July 22)-also Einstien’s Birthday AND also Steak and a BJ day.
• Gravmas/Apple Day (December 25th)-Newton’s Birthday (in the pre-Gregorian calendar)
• Towel Day (May 25th)- Always have your towel, so people know what a hoopy frood you are.
• Star Wars Day (May 4th)-May the Fourth be with you.
• Hobbit Day (September 22nd)-Frodo and Bilbo’s Birthday
• Evolution Day (November 24th)-Date of publication of On the Origin of Species
• National Dark Sky Week (First Week in April with a New Moon)
• International Dadaism Month (in true Dadaist tradition: 4 February, 28 March, 1 April, 15 July, 2 August, 7 August, 16 August, 26 August, 18 September, 22 September, 1 October, 17 October, and 26 October)
• And now, Captain Picard Day (June 16th)

I suggest now that we set up a Commander Riker Day, as in the TNG clip. This day will be exactly one month after Captain Picard Day, July 16th. I know it’s a little late to celebrate Captain Picard Day, but here’s some youtube links to make up for that:
THAT Jean-Luc Picard
PicArt
Bridge Buffoonery
Goodnight, Sweet BEEP
Picard Sings
The Picard Song
Picard Goes Crazy
Picard’s Night at the Roxbury–Be warned, this last is incredibly surreal.
There are so many more at youtube, I recommend them all.

I have gmail for my personal email, and as such, I often get unobtrusive ads on the side of my email messages relating to the subject of the mail. Since I’m going observing this weekend, I was corresponding with my colleagues about certain technical details of our impending observations. I saw a link on the side near the bottom-one I’m sure most people out there have come across once or twice-a service claiming to be able to sell you the ‘rights’ to “name a star!” Oh boy.

Since I had just discussed how idiotic just such a practice is with my friend Pete a few hours ago, I decided to click the link to remind myself of the idiocy. They claim that there is only one star registry which is copywrite protected with the US patent office (theirs, of course). The go on to further claim that the International Star Registry has allowed thousands of people to name their own stars. The price they charge for this is between $50 and $500. What do you get for this? A certificate and a star chart. The different framing options make up the order of magnitude price difference.

Okay, first of all, I hope I don’t have to tell you that this so-called ’star registry’ is completely bogus. It is entirely meaningless and certainly not worth $50 (much less $500). Secondly, there are only a few thousand stars which are visible to the human eye. Most of these have popular names, and all of them are named in more than one catalog (names like GL 436, LHS 310, 2MASS J11421096+2642251, etcetera. By the way, those are all the same star, which has at least 30 different catalog designations). I’ve got to assume that they’re going just a bit deeper into the magnitude scale and assigning people stars that they can’t actually see. Fair enough, I can see no fault with that, but most people (especially ones gullible enough to fall for this) will probably be expecting to be able to look up and point at “their” star.

My favorite part of this idiocy, however, was their last sentence:

There are still a few stars left to be named but you must act quickly to secure a good one before they run out.

(emphasis in original)

They run out. Nevermind that there are more stars in just our galaxy than there have been humans who ever lived, more stars than you could possibly imagine-roughly a hundred billion. Clearly, stars are a limited commodity. Sometimes, I feel like time spent educating people might be better spent banging the instructor’s head on the wall. At least they’d have a big bruise to show for it.

If you REALLY want to name your own stars, do what my friend Dave did before he learned the names of the stars and constellations. He went outside, looked up, and made it all up himself. If you really want, you could make your own certificate and draw a star chart of what you see to remind yourself of where the stars you named are. In all honesty, though, I’d simply suggest leaving out the naming stuff and just stargazing. To paraphrase Feynmann, names don’t tell you anything useful about the object, they sometimes just get in the way.

I haven’t been a Penguins fan long-only since I heard about defenseman Rob Scuderi (who shares my last name) a few years ago-so to be able to watch my team win the Stanley Cup as a newly-minted hockey fan has been a great experience.

Just around the corner in the sports world, however, is a world I am eminently familiar with. That’s right, it’s NBA Finals time, and lucky for me, my team is also in the finals here. I’ve been a Lakers fan since before birth (this is a hereditary thing), and watching the NBA Playoffs is an annual must for me. With the Lakers just one game from the title, I am understandably excited. If they do win, this year will pretty much have turned out to be the exact opposite of last year in terms of my sports teams victories. Unfortunately, it looks like the Clare inter-county hurling team aren’t doing so great this year, though. Oh well, I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

I believe I have discovered a project for the summer: making different types of bread. Last night, I had a great time making a rosemary bread (this was a yeast-intensive recipe that allowed me to get my hands dirty kneading), which turned out surprisingly well for my first attempt. Emboldened, I am now baking something called “Beer Bread.” With a name like that, how can I resist? I used Sam Adams Black Lager-we’ll see how it turns out. It already smells AMAZING and it has about 30 minutes left to go in the oven. If you are interested, here’s a link to the recipe:

BEER BREAD!

Om nom nom.

UPDATE: The bread is delicious beyond all expectations. I highly recommend it.

I ride the bus often-especially during the hot Tucson summer. This means that I am eminently familiar with the ability of public transportation to completely not work. This is especially frustrating when I’ve gotten up early in the morning to get to work and discover that the bus driver has decided that even though he is already seven minutes early, he will just blow right by my stop. This usually leaves me waiting at the stop, not knowing if I actually missed the bus, or if it is incredibly late (I have known busses to be as late as 17 minutes before). Usually, it is the former. This gives me a lot of time to become familiar with my surroundings, and it was thus that one day last year I noticed a few words stenciled into the concrete on the sidewalk in front of my usual stop:

Life
Could
Be
Worse

I have found this sage advice oddly comforting at times when I am unbelievably pissed off at Tucson public transportation. If only somebody had thought to write that on the chalkboards in the physics classrooms, maybe life wouldn’t seem so bad.

Well, it could be worse.

My most recent adventure has just concluded. It all began on Thursday morning, when I received a letter on my door from my landlord asking to confirm that I was indeed moving out of my apartment on the 31st. As this was not supposed to be the case, I quickly went to the office to correct this misconception. I found out in due time that my landlord had mixed me up with another tenant (the guys living below me) and that she had already scheduled a married couple with a baby on the way within the next week or so to move in right after me. This precipitated four days of me running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

I first asked my new landlords if the apartment could be ready in time-thankfully it could. Next, I had to get a cashier’s check from the bank to pay the first month’s rent and move-in-expenses. This involved me walking nearly two miles before giving up and calling a friend Trevor to come pick me up in his car. Trevor was the first person this weekend to save me from my own stupidity. When this idiocy was over, I began packing and moving my things.

On Saturday, I began the day by moving one box at a time, with a ton of stuff in my large backpacking pack. Since the apartments are close to each other, this was not too hard, but it does take a lot of time this way. My friend Chris arrived in due time, however, and brought his truck, which considerably speeded things up. By the end of the day, we had about 2/3 of my stuff moved and all of the heavy things done.

I awoke early Sunday morning to go pack and prepare for Chris’ arrival at 10. We spent an hour moving things, but then had to leave for an appointment. Chris was back by 5, and we made a few last trips for the big stuff, and Chris left by 6. At this point, it was back to me lugging my stuff by myself. There turned out to be a lot more stuff than I had thought, so I took a break at 10 to order a pizza. This was finished by 10:40, and I resumed my lugging.

At this time, the stars were out, and I could look up at the familiar constellations as I hulked things back and forth. This was a great comfort to me for some reason, and it kept me going for quite a while. I finally brought in the last things just before midnight. I then took a shower.

So I’m done. Now what do I do? What is that thing you do when you’re exhausted and feel like you can’t walk another step? Go get more boxes?

Oh, yeah, sleep.

Read about his “book” by clicking on this link.

That is all.

I went back to New Mexico for a weekend and a bit, and as per usual during the summer. Also as per usual, I had a fit of allergy attacks. It seems that New Mexico is a breeding ground for every type of pollen that ever bloomed, and then some. Most times, I recover in a couple of days, but I spend those days completely miserable and unable to function. This time was incalculably worse, as my entire six day stay at home was effected this time. At the time of this writing, back in Tucson, I am still entirely miserable. The pilot on my plane flight was none-too skilled with the cabin pressure controls, and as a result, my right ear has completely (and painfully) blocked up. To make it worse, my sinuses are still suffering from extreme spasms. I have resolved that I am never going back to New Mexico during the summer, no matter how much I love the green chile, I am inevitably miserable for a lot longer than I can enjoy the spicy food.

Bleh.

I was supposed to be up on Mt. Bigelow, observing right now. Instead, I am at home, impotently shaking my tiny fists at the sky. Why, you ask? Because of my arch-nemesis, clouds. We still accomplished our most important goal, which was to get certified to operate the telescope on our own. Basically this involves learning how all of the systems work, how they break, and what to do when they do break. Most of the instruction seemed to actually be tips on quirks of the system and ways to get around them. In fact, most of the operating procedures seem to be clever/desperate ways to get around the fact that most of the equipment doesn’t, in the strictest sense, work. There’s a hell of a lot of components that make a big telescope run, and keeping them all straight was a significant task.

As we were driving up, Jared and I heard and saw lightning, which already made us doubtful about our night of observing. While the rain and thunder moved on, the cloud cover refused to lift and with the prediction of thunderstorms in the morning we decided to stow the telescope and take emergency lightning precautions before leaving (this includes airgaping every single electronic device on the premises, which takes about a half an hour to complete). We were back down by 9:30.

Oh well, at least I’ll get some sleep now.

Every once in a while, I entertain myself by learning about random math stuff. A recent example is my foray into Fibonacci sequences which I mentioned in a previous post. This time, my friend Pete mentioned a peculiar number, called Graham’s number. As far as I can tell, this is the largest number to ever be used in a serious mathematical proof.

I know what you math-nerds out there are thinking: larger, even, than a Googol? (), or a Googolplex? (). Yes, my friends, Graham’s number is inconceivably big. It makes a Googolplex look like a mere handful. Interesting note: when I was little, no more than five, I remember writing out a Googol on an etch a sketch and trying to explain it to my grandparents. I was a weird kid.

Graham’s number is so absurdly large that there are not enough particles IN THE UNIVERSE to express it via any standard notation. Think about that-go outside to a high place and look around. Then think that everything you can see is made of inconceivably tiny particles which are so small, they cannot be seen by the human eye, nor any optical magnifier that has ever, or will ever, be made. Look at your hand-there must be millions, perhaps billions of particles in your hand alone. And yet including everything you can see, much less the entire friggin’ universe, there aren’t enough of these unfathomably tiny particles to write out this number, even using a series of exponents. Wow.

So how do you write it down? Well, mathematicians are relatively creative people (if not entirely practical), and they’ve come up with intriguing ways of expressing large numbers. One way is called “Up-arrow notation,” in which the number is expressed by a series of rows including numbers and arrows which signify computational steps to arrive at the number itself. Each higher row is predicated on how many arrows are in the last row. This is the only way to express Graham’s number. To show just how depressingly large this number is, you still can’t even express just the first row of up-arrow notation with all of the particles in the universe. There are 64 total rows.

What I can tell you about it is that it ends in the string “…262464195387″, where the … represents a whole lotta other numbers. So why would anybody in their right mind need such a comically large number? Were these mathematicians perhaps compensating for something (say, the budget differential between their department and a useful department like Astronomy)? From wikipedia:

Graham’s number is connected to the following problem in the branch of mathematics known as Ramsey theory:
Consider an n-dimensional hypercube, and connect each pair of vertices to obtain a complete graph on 2n vertices. Then colour each of the edges of this graph using only the colours red and black. What is the smallest value of n for which every possible such colouring must necessarily contain a single-coloured complete sub-graph with 4 vertices which lie in a plane?
Graham & Rothschild [1971] proved that this problem has a solution, N*, and gave as a bounding estimate 6 ≤ N* ≤ N, with N a particular, explicitly defined, very large number; however, Graham (in unpublished work) revised this upper bound to be a much larger number. Graham’s revised upper bound was later published — and dubbed “Graham’s number” — by Martin Gardner in [Scientific American, "Mathematical Games", November 1977].
The lower bound was later improved by Exoo[2003], who showed the solution to be at least 11, and provided experimental evidence suggesting that it is at least 12. Thus, the best known bounding estimate for the solution N* is 11 ≤ N* ≤ G, where G is Graham’s number.

Wow, that’s so useful (/sarcasm). It must have been a profoundly depressing result: “So, Ronald, how’s that proof you’re working on coming? Did you ever get a result?”
“Yeah, it’s somewhere between 11 and wharrgarbl.”

Even as an astronomer (a field which is known for large numbers, even coining the term ‘astronomical’), I’d probably just call it “effectively infinite for all foreseeable/sane purposes.” No wonder it was published in “Mathematical Games.”

In all honesty, stuff like this is probably good for the math departments-it will keep them at their desks during the inter-departmental war. I for one know that the physics department has long desired to vaporize the chemistry department with a large laser array. The mathematicians will likely be too busy coming up with crazy stuff like Graham’s number to be bothered by such events.

Last minute note:
I have just discovered that there is a larger named number, called TREE(3). It is part of a sequence of numbers: TREE(1)=1, TREE(2)=3, TREE(3)=Makes the word big seem hackneyed. Apparently, Graham’s number is “unnoticeable” next to a lower bound to TREE(3), which is itself unnoticeable next to TREE(3). I hear TREE(3), will anybody go to TREE(4)? Sold to the man in the straightjacket.

There are even bigger numbers yet, obviously, including “Totally Indescribable Cardinals,” (yes, that is the formal name), Transfinite numbers, and all sorts of made up names (Bajillion, Frumptillion, etcetera). For an incredibly humorous article on made up, unspecified numbers, look here.

Of course, infinity puts all of these so-called large numbers to shame. Compared to infinity, they might as well be 0. Maybe you should be careful next time you use the word “infinite” in casual conversation. You probably doesn’t mean that many.