Don't Panic

When I was a kid, the solar system was simple. We were told in school that there were nine planets, with an asteroid belt in the middle that was mostly composed of debris. Past Pluto, there was nothing. Void. Emptiness all the way till you get to the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, currently thought to be the closest neighbouring galaxy to our location in the Milky Way.

But all that really mattered was our basic nine planets, sailing together like a family through space in our happy little boat called the solar system.

Times have changed. Up is down, black is white, night is day. Everything we knew about the solar system was wrong.

After the advent of the Hubble Telescope, scientists began to realize that many so-called asteroids were actually very planet-like. And then as we learned more about the planet Pluto, they realized it was much more like an asteroid. As new "minor planet" discoveries started pouring in at an unprecedented rate, our entire system of nomenclature became confusing, self-contradictory, and irrelevant.

The general public was briefly outraged over Pluto being "demoted as a planet" in 2006 by the IAU the before they forgot about it and moved on to the next distraction. But what most missed is that simultaneously, a new category of celestial object was also officially coined: the dwarf planet. This is seemingly part of a concerted effort on the part of organized astronomy to obfuscate the Heavens with unnecessary sub-sub-subcategories, and it only confuses the public - after all, when you get right down to it, a "dwarf planet" is still obviously a planet. A "minor planet" is still a planet of some sort.

Many astronomers know in their hearts that the 2006 IAU restructuring left a bigger mess than the one it was intended to clean up. Many objects are now classified as being both an asteroid and a planet. Others have attributes of those two and attributes of comets as well, creating a real quandary for those who are obsessed with making the Universe fit a series of pre-created boxes. Their solution? Create yet another hastily-contrived subcategory: "Centaurs".

Had this obsessive-compulsive zeal for classification been as prevalent in the past, they might have declared Earth to be the only "true" planet, and reclassified everything else - maybe calling Mercury a "Near-Sun Object", and relabeling Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus to be not quite planets but "Gasoids".

So what are these minor planets and dwarf planets that have turned the textbooks upside down since my college days? Let's take a tour of just a few, shall we?

Pulcova

You've never heard of the planet Pulcova? Well, here it is in all its shiny glory, seen here with its moon - to which no one's bothered to give a real name so far. Pulcova was actually discovered in 1913 and classified as just another chunk of asteroid belt debris, but in 2000 astronomers realized it was relatively spherical and had a moon of its own.

Varuna

Say hello to the planet Varuna, named after the Vedic/Hindu deity Varuna. Depending on which astronomer you ask and at what time of day, it's referred to as a minor planet, a dwarf planet, a Kuiper Belt object, a Trans-Neptunian object, or even all of the above. We say, it's big, it's round and it orbits the sun - just call it a planet, leave it at that, and be done with it.

Makemake

Makemake is the third-largest known dwarf planet in the Solar System, about 3/4 the size of Pluto. Originally nicknamed "Easterbunny", it eventually was named after the creator deity of Rapa Nui, a.k.a. Easter Island. (For some reason, they were certainly determined to keep an Easter connection to the naming of this planet!)

Eris

Shown here in a NASA artist's rendering based on all available data, is the planet Eris and its moon Dysnomia. Covered in a layer of grey methane ice, Eris is approximately 1489 miles in diameter and has an orbital period of 557 years. Discordians cheered and partied in the streets when their favorite chaos deity, Eris, was honored with the nomenclature.

The discovery of Eris is actually a key part of what sparked the IAU to rush their ill-advised definition-parsing for planets. "2003 UB313", as it was called then, was heralded by leading astronomers as being a historic discovery of the 10th major planet in our solar system - until the IAU's new rule put the kibosh on that.

Sedna

And then there's the planet Sedna. For this, I quote from a recent space.com article about the increasingly accepted idea that our sun has an invisible dark nemesis twin:

A recently-discovered dwarf planet, named Sedna, has an extra-long and usual elliptical orbit around the Sun. Sedna is one of the most distant objects yet observed, with an orbit ranging between 76 and 975 AU (where 1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun). Sedna's orbit is estimated to last between 10.5 to 12 thousand years. Sedna's discoverer, Mike Brown of Caltech, noted in a Discover magazine article that Sedna's location doesn't make sense.

"Sedna shouldn't be there," said Brown. "There's no way to put Sedna where it is. It never comes close enough to be affected by the Sun, but it never goes far enough away from the Sun to be affected by other stars."

Perhaps a massive unseen object is responsible for Sedna's mystifying orbit, its gravitational influence keeping Sedna fixed in that far-distant portion of space.

Chariklo

The planet Chariklo is orbiting the Sun between Saturn and Uranus, and infrared observations indicate its surface is covered in water ice. Its exact size, speed and period of rotation are still unknown, but it's been estimated as being only 161 miles in diameter. The montage above shows Chariklo and Pluto side by side to illustrate the guesstimated relative sizes between the two.

Chariklo was discovered on February 15, 1997 - 13 years ago - and almost no one on the street even knows this planet exists.


Haumea

Haumea, pictured here with its two moons Hiʻiaka and Namaka, is thought to have formed billions of years ago from icy debris after a large impact disrupted Haumea's ice mantle. Hiʻiaka is of especial interest because it has large amounts of pure water ice on its surface.

Haumea is the third brightest object in the Kuiper belt after Pluto and Makemake, and is easily observable with an amateur telescope.


Ceres

It's the most Earth-like planet out there and they're not even allowing it to be designated an "official" planet, just because other objects share its orbit (this arbitrary technicality is how the IAU avoided the nightmare of having to allow dozens or even hundreds of minor planets to become major).

Ceres has plenty of water on its surface as well as carbonates and clays, making it the most likely candidate in the search for extraterrestrial life. It is even suspected to have a bonafide liquid water ocean. The Dawn space probe will tell us for sure when it does a fly-by in 2015.

Like Pulcova, the planet Ceres got a raw deal historically - it was discovered in 1801 and for half a century was actually in the textbooks as an official ragin' full-on planet before being demoted.

Want more? Check out Wikipedia's List of Minor Planets: "As of January 2010 there are 231,665 numbered minor planets, and about as many yet unnumbered."

We're going to need a bigger boat.

World Brain

The internet, or something like it, was first proposed by Victorian author H.G. Wells. In his little-known 1937 book World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia, he spoke of an "information highway" in which all the world's information, great or trivial, would be placed on microfilm and dispatched on demand to anyone requesting it. He predicted that "any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica".

He also foresaw that the information would become a synthesis because of the interaction of all the world's peoples coming together to learn at this universal trough of data.

Considering that technologies like the Telephone, the Telegraph and even the Fax Machine were already in place, it's surprising no one attempted to create a rudimentary primitive internet long before even Wells' book.

Fun Fax Facts

When do you think the first Facsimile Machine was invented? Go on, guess.

1970s? 1960s? Wrong.

1930s? 1920s? Not even close.

Try 1846.

From Wikipedia:

Scottish inventor Alexander Bain worked on chemical mechanical facsimile type devices and in 1846 was able to reproduce graphic signs in lab experiments. Frederick Bakewell made several improvements on Bain's design and demonstrated his device at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. However, Bain and Bakewell's systems were rudimentary and produced poor quality images. They lacked synchronization between the transmitting mechanism and the receiving mechanism. In 1861, the first practical operational electro-mechanical commercially exploited telefax machine, the Pantelegraph, was invented by the Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli. He introduced the first commercial telefax service between Paris and Lyon in 1865, some 11 years before the invention of workable telephones.

In 1881, English inventor Shelford Bidwell constructed the scanning phototelegraph that was the first telefax machine to scan any two-dimensional original, not requiring manual plotting or drawing anymore. Around 1900, German physicist Arthur Korn invented the Bildtelegraph, widespread in continental Europe especially since a widely noticed transmission of a wanted-person photograph from Paris to London in 1908, used until the wider distribution of the radiofax. Its main competitors were the Bélinograf by Édouard Belin first, then since the 1930s the Hellschreiber, invented in 1929 by Rudolf Hell, a pioneer in mechanical image scanning and transmission.

The Hellschreiber machines, by the way, still have their enthusiasts today - check out the Feld Hell Club's website.

The image at top is an actual fax sent in 1865 by Giovanni Caselli. According to this site, Caselli instituted a fax service between Paris and several other French cities, and sent almost 5000 faxes in the first year alone.

"Something is not right about Phobos"

Phobos has always been a bit mysterious, but the website for the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission comes right out and says what a lot of people have been thinking for a long, long time:

Something is not right about Phobos. It looks like a solid object but previous flybys have shown that it is not dense enough to be solid all the way through.

The same people who scoff at the idea of a Hollow Earth, or even small hollow pockets deep in the Earth's mantle, are now faced with possibly being forced to accept a body in the solar system that is largely hollow.

The ESA article again:

“Phobos is probably a second-generation Solar System object,” says Martin Pätzold, Universitat Koln, Cologne, Germany, and Principal Investigator of the Mars Radio Science (MaRS) experiment. Second generation means that it coalesced in orbit after Mars formed, rather than forming concurrently out of the same birth cloud as the Red Planet. There are other moons around other planets where this is thought to have been the case too, such as Amalthea around Jupiter.

Some researchers think Phobos might be riddled with vast caverns; the Mars Express spacecraft has been making a series of close flybys of Phobos this month, and high-resolution photos could be available any day now.

Phobos, which figures in numerous science fiction stories and real-life conspiracy theories as possibly being the site of an inhabited base (alien, CIA, Soviet, or Nazi, depending on which conspiracy theory you read) has a number of peculiar features that set it apart from other solar system bodies:

Extremely irregularly shaped

One of the least reflective objects in the solar system

At only 5,827 miles from the center of Mars, it's far closer to its planet than any other known planetary moon.

Images from Mars Global Surveyor indicate that Phobos is covered with a layer of fine-grained regolith at least 100 meters thick; it is believed to have been created by impacts from other bodies, but it is not known how the material stuck to an object with almost no gravity.

The Stickney Impact Crater on Phobos is so huge, many scientists are astounded such an enormous impact could have occurred on Phobos without its being destroyed. Especially if, as all tests show, it is not solid.

Vintage Printable

Praise be for the Public Domain. Vintage Printable is a jaw-dropping website that heroically compiles and redistributes old forgotten dusty copyright-free graphics from bygone eras, so that you and I can recompile and redistribute them for our own sinister purposes.


The image galleries are not only archived by subject - dentistry, mythology, holiday, juvenilia, ephemera, etc. - but by color. And I say to myself, what a wonderful world.

The Nebra Sky Disk

In 2001, this mysterious artifact showed up on the international antiquities market, and the man attempting to auction it off foolishly and naively made it no secret that it had been dug up from a Saxony-Anhalt gravesite in Nebra by amateur treasure hunters in 1999.

What the man apparently didn't realize was that what he did was illegal. But even if he had obtained the disk by legal means, all archaeological artifacts are the property of the state in Saxony-Anhalt. The disk was seized by police and placed in the hands of the state archaeologist, Dr Harald Meller.

Wikipedia:

As part of a plea bargain, the illicit owners led police and archaeologists to the site where they had found it together with other remains (two bronze swords, two hatchets, a chisel and fragments of spiral bracelets). Though no witnesses were present at the first discovery, archaeologists have opened a dig at the site and have uncovered evidence that support the looters' claim (in the form of traces of bronze artifacts in the ground, as well as matching earth samples found sticking to the artifacts)...

The discovery site identified by the arrested metal detectorists is a prehistoric enclosure encircling the top of a 252 m elevation in the Ziegelroda Forest, known as Mittelberg ("central hill"), some 60 km west of Leipzig. The surrounding area is known to have been settled since the Neolithic, and Ziegelroda Forest is said to contain around 1,000 barrows.

The enclosure is oriented in such a way that the sun seems to set every solstice behind the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz mountains, some 80 km to the northwest. It was claimed by the treasure-hunters that the artifacts were discovered within a pit inside the bank-and-ditch enclosure. The signifiance of the site to prehistoric dwellers is underlined by the proximity to the much older Goseck circle.

Like Stonehenge and the Antikythera Mechanism, the Nebra Sky Disk appears to be an astronomical instrument that demonstrates greater knowledge of the solar calendar and stellar movements on the part of its creators than previously supposed.

A documentary about the artifact, Secrets of the Star Disc, airs Monday, March 1, 1pm on the National Geographic Channel.

Darcy James Argue

Great article on Darcy James Argue in the Boston Herald, all about his DIY jazz orchestra that plays a conglomerated metachronistic music he labels as Steampunk:

“My approach has been to take this very old-school instrumentation and hack it to try to force it to play music it wasn’t really designed to do, and use it to re-create electronic music effects acoustically,” said Argue, who studied with NEC orchestra guru Bob Brookmeyer and earned a master’s degree in 2002. “I am definitely inspired by steampunk ideas about our relationship to technology (and) the whole do-it-yourself aesthetic.”

See video clips of the Darcy James Argue Secret Society here.

Mardi Gras 1941

Spotted this on Dieselpunks tonight: great color footage of the 1941 Mardi Gras. 1941 was the first year a female krewe paraded (Krewe of Venus), although Les Mysterieuses, Carnival's first female organization, staged its premiere ball in 1896.


Click here to view it!

Post-Avatar Depression

Yeah, I saw this one coming from a long way off.

First this story started taking shape on the woo-woo circuit, and now it's hit the big time: the phenonemon of Post-Avatar Depression is real enough that even CNN is taking it seriously.

Thousands of people are experiencing severe depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the controversial James Cameron blockbuster film. Some have become so immersed in the film's reality that they find themselves obsessing over it. CNN quotes one unfortunate soul as saying:

"That's all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about 'Avatar.' I guess that helps. It's so hard I can't force myself to think that it's just a movie, and to get over it..."

Other moviegoers, according to CNN, have expressed feelings of disgust with the human race because of the film's effect on them. Others report a disengagement with reality. Still another said:

"When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed ... gray. It was like my whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning. It just seems so... meaningless. I still don't really see any reason to keep... doing things at all. I live in a dying world."

What these people are reporting are exactly what many others have reported after undergoing various epiphanies and satoris, hyper-lucid dreaming, induced eidetic imagery, remote viewing, scrying, astral projection, past-life regression, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and other practices best not spoken of here.

It's also akin to something I've always called "The Narnia Effect". When I read The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe as a child, even then I thought how unrealistic that the children would enter the magical land of Narnia and stay there for years, then return through the portal in time for supper at home, where only hours had elapsed. It was immediately evident to me that the children would have become so matured, so changed by those years of experience in faraway magical lands, that their parents and peers would have immediately noticed the drastic personality change. More to the point, the children would most likely be unable to function in their humdrum old normal schoolkid lives. Not after having the adventures they did. Not after growing up for years in a time-compressed track of an alternate reality.

That's precisely what these people are apparently feeling, so dazzled and bowled over are they by the fascinating and beautiful 3-D world of "Pandora" that Cameron has crafted. Another quote from a sufferer:

"One can say my depression was twofold: I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world, what we have done to Earth. I so much wanted to escape reality."

If there is a solution, it's to try to learn to spiritually multitask - to hold these different realms in your head at the same time, keeping your feet in multiple worlds 24-7. Sure, it'll make you seem erratic, cloudy, foggy, bipolar, inconsistent, self-contradictory, confused, vague, disassociated and absent-minded - just like your humble chronicler - but hey, it's better than having your body sit here in a near-coma of mopey unfunctionality while you're traveling in that land which lies an inch behind your forehead.

The Sound of Space

"In Space, no one can hear you scream."

That was the tag line for Ridley Scott's film Alien, and it's generally assumed to be an absolute truth, since we've all been taught that space is a vacuum in which sound does not travel.

However, the actual truth is more interesting. While it may well be that humans cannot hear another human screaming in space (assuming they didn't die instantly from exposure to space anyway), sound waves do travel through space. Space is actually not the total vacuum it's made out to be, and atoms of gas that pervade the entire universe give it what might be defined as an atmosphere of sorts - albeit a very, very thin one.

Even if a human could live unprotected in space long enough to listen for that scream, they still wouldn't hear it, though. Not enough atoms would strike that person's eardrums to perceive the sound. But that doesn't mean the sound waves aren't there.

In 2003, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory announced their discovery that the Perseus galaxy cluster, some 250 million light-years away, was emitting a constant B-flat tone. That note has been sounding, the researchers said, for about 2.5 billion years. It's extremely low and bassy - 57 octaves below below a piano's middle C, to be precise.

The Radioplane

One of the first major unmanned drone planes was the Radioplane, invented by Hollywood actor and remote-control toy plane hobbyist Reginald Denny.

Denny was well known for screen appearances in the 1922 production of Sherlock Holmes, George Cukor's Romeo and Juliet, Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, and the Cecil B. DeMille musical Madam Satan (a film noted for, among other things, an amazing zeppelin sequence, as seen below). But he soon found himself wearing the hat of a major military contractor when the idea of his Radioplane took off - literally - during World War II.


15,000 Radioplane drones were manufactured by Denny's company for the Allied Forces during World War II, and there was an young woman working at the Van Nuys Radioplane factory named Norma Jeane Mortenson (pictured above). In 1944, Army photographer David Conover took her picture in the assembly plant for Yank magazine, and told her she had star potential as a model.

He was right. After a bleach job, a makeover and a name change, Mortenson went on to worldwide fame as Marilyn Monroe.

Spiderweb Pocket Watch

I want this!

"Straight out of Wild Wild West! A silver-plated alloy mechanical (wind-up) pocket watch with a fabulous spiderweb filigree front cover, elaborate scroll relief design on the back, and clear glass windows on the inside face and back which reveal the moving brass gears inside. Gold-tone Arabic numerals and elegant black hands. Press top button to open, pull up grooved ring to set time. To wind, roll grooved ring back and forth between your fingers until resistance begins to change (1-3 times daily). No batteries required."

Now that's a watch!

Only $33.99 from Art of Adornment.