Jupiter, George Carlin, God, Joe Pesci

11/25/11 — For Thanksgiving yesterday, we visited Linda and Ralph in Baltimore. Dinner was late in the day, so it was nighttime after we ate, and Jupiter was high in the eastern sky. Ralph has a reflecting telescope which he took outside to amuse the guests. The scope has what looked like a 6- to 8-inch mirror. While the other guests were looking at Jupiter (you could see three of the four Galilean moons AND the clouds, it was the best view I've ever had) I tried to show off my general knowledge by telling about how, around 1670, the first order-of-magnitude measure of the speed of light was determined by a Dane named Ole Roemer. Mr. Roemer had noticed a several minute variation in the ~45 hour occultation of the innermost moon, Io. (Occultations of the moons of Jupiter were used in those days as a kind of cosmic clock that could be used to determine longitude here on earth.)

Later last night, at home, I looked up Mr. Roemer and how he got the measurement. Turns out he didn't measure the speed of light, but rather determined that the speed of light was, first, finite and, second, that it moves fast enough to travel a distance equal to that between the earth and the sun in 10 to 11 minutes.

Since the distance to the sun was not known in those days, Mr. Roemer's measurement was actually a ratio of two unknowns, the speed of light and the radius of the earth's orbit around the sun. BTW, if you don't know how the distance between the earth and sun was determined, it's neat to try to figure out how it was done. Me, I had to Google it.

As I was reading up on Mr. Roemer, I remembered this about light: When you see something, you're looking back in time; the farther away something is, the farther back in time you are looking. For instance, if you see a person standing, say, 100 feet away, the light from that person, when it enters your eye, contains information about that person's condition one-tenth of a microsecond previous, or if you look at the moon, you see it as it was 1.3 seconds previous. And so on. When you see the moon-sized smudge of the Great Galaxy in the constellation of Andromeda, you see it as it was some two million years ago.

More locally, when you see the sun and get a sense of its position in the sky, you are, more accurately, seeing it as it was 8 minutes and 19 seconds earlier. In that period, which is 499 seconds, the earth has rotated such that the actual location of the sun is four solar diameters farther to the west.

In the case of Jupiter, which is relatively close to the earth right now, it is ~35 light-minutes away, which means that when were were looking at it last night, the telescope was aimed in the direction of Jupiter's location 35 minutes previous, when actually Jupiter was located ~9 degrees farther to the west.

I'm pretty sure my calculations are close to accurate, even considering the impediments to clear brain function at yesterday's feast.

So why is George Carlin's image posted above? Three reasons: First, the late Mr. Carlin, whose commentary has eternal applicability, had been awarded the Mark Twain Prize at the Kennedy Center, and the show was run on PBS. Among the video clips shown were Carlin on Stuff, the Seven Dirty Words, and Religion is Bullshit, wherein he gives a view similar to the one in my essay, God the Sun.

The second reason: My friend Ralph with the telescope looks, to me, just like George Carlin.

As for God and Mr. Pesci, watch the Religion is Bullshit video.

The third reason: George Carlin and the foregoing seemed to me like a good lead-in to mentioning that I've just posted my entire essay on a way to think about how conscious awareness arises in this material world, Light and Matter: A Speculation on the Material Basis of Consciousness, inspired by Mr. Feynman and Capt. Picard's Holodeck Horse. It's my best yet.

NOTE: To repeat: I write the hypertext codes for this site myself. I tailor it for Firefox so it might look distorted on other browsers.

As always, thanks for the email.

[Colors codes from HTML Colors]

11/04/11 — The little green dots near the top of the image are particles of what is commonly called "steam" — i.e., "aerosol particles" which, in this instance, are tiny water droplets rising from water that is boiling off of the hot electrical resistor. This comment is Seeing Small Things with a Cheap Laser.

11/03/11 — God the Sun — and The Wealth Argument for a Space Program.

11/01/11 — There are lots of good reading lamps on the market, even LED ones. Still, I had to make my own Massively Brass LED Lamp, which came out pretty good.

10/17/11 — Does it really take ~2,000 lbs to push two uranium nuclei right up against each other? I'm still not sure I did the calculation right. Check out my two electrical charge calculations, show me where I'm wrong, and stop me before I calculate again, please.

9/10/11 — Photons and Electrons: A Speculation on the Material Basis of Consciousness, Inspired by Mr. Feynman and Captain Picard's Holodeck Horse. What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. – Anon

7/15/11 — It looks like I'm still making vaporizers — if the price is right. Specifically, I'm open to making Tobacco Master units. Check out my latest creation. Contact me, Bob, if you want to talk vapor and means related thereto.

5/16/11 — The water just keeps coming and coming. Click on the image for a link to an amazing tsunami video.

5/12/11 — A comet heads in toward the sun, then a billion tons of mass come come flying off a nearly a million miles an hour. Was there a connection? Probably not, but the videos are worth a few moments of contemplation.

3/14/11 — Terms like "million tons" and "billion tons" are sometimes mentioned in the news. How much is a million tons of something? Here are some visual perspectives for Thinking about Big Things to get a grip on the millions of tons of canned tuna, coal, corn and other things produced annually by 375 million tons of living human tissue.

3/7/11 — Latest Project — Vertical Lift. This is a diagram of what I thought was a great idea, when I was 11 years old in 1953, and flying saucers were hot items in the news. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of aerodynamics and Newton's Third Law of Motion should see the silliness of the thing.

3/7/11 — APOD Solar Flare for today.

2/28/11 — Need Money? Check out this proven, free, money-making idea.

2/26/11 — Uncle Harry's good friend Bill explains Barney Frank's scheme to "transfer wealth" by giving mortgages to poor people who have no hope of paying them off.

2/25/11 — A correspondent whose name is Jesse says he believes the idea global warming is fiction. He wrote to ask if I believe in it. I said no, the idea of Global Warming is Unbelievable — but 'tis plausible.

2/24/11 — God's Sex Joke

2/22/11 — A Pneuma owner and long-time correspondent asked if I'd ever experienced a thrown connecting rod in a car engine. Here's my write-up on a Thrown Rod, which will I hope provoke me to describe how ol' buddy Ron patched up his 1951 BSA Goldstar in Chapala, Mexico, when his piston disintegrated when we were there in the summer of 1964. There's also a link to a neat video of motorcycle accidents.

2/22/11 — The New Yorker's image of what an in-coming asteroid would look like (February 28 issue) is different from the one I have in my thoughts on certain details of an asteroidal impact.

2/17/11 — Most fossils we see represent the remains of plants or animals. But some fossils are different, such as the 3.5-million year old Laetoli footprints of ancient humans. I found an Unusual Fossil near Hancock, Maryland, some years ago. Took me a few minutes to figure out what it was. Others might see what it is immediately.

2/16/11 — Slow-Motion view of Saturn V Liftoff

2/13/11 — Within the past year or so it became clear that if a person presents something to the public, some personal creation such as, say, Andy Warhol's art or the movies of Tom Cruise or John Travolta, A Lot of People will like it and want more. A comment on two articles.

2/8/11 — Uncle Harry and the Big Picture

1/29/11 — Fear, Terror & Marijuana -- The word "fear" in the title of today's comment refers to the "uneasiness" I feel when I use marijuana.

1/26/11 — Fast Brains

12/24/10 — A Comment of Portable Vaporizers

9/15/10 — I didn't learn to read till I was 31. What's funny, sort of, was that, by then, I had got a degree in mechanical engineering and taught AP math and physics. Marijuana was involved in learning to read. Check out my write-up on Marijuana and Reading.