Why I don’t like the Caveman Diet

A few years ago I was introduced to the ‘Caveman Diet’.

The theory goes like this. Civilisation is an eye-blink in our history, and we’re not adapted to the things we eat today, which make us ill in consequence. We should be eating the same food that Ugh Ugh the Cave Man scoffed in 35,000 BC – raw nuts, grains, fruit, vegetables.

To which I said then – and still say now – rubbish!

Not only are humans geared to eat cooked food, we look like we do because of it. If we had to munch raw nuts, fruit and grains all day (and it would take all day to get the calories), we’d have jaws like an orang-utan. (I had breakfast with one once, but that’s another story…)

The science is clear. An ability to control fire – which may have begun 700,000 years ago – allowed early hominins to cook. Cooking reduces the energy needed to digest food, increasing the yield. One side effect was the drop in tooth and jaw size. It was also reflected in biochemistry.

As for the ‘cave man’ diet – well, there wasn’t one. A  lot depended on where people were. Even today, African hunter-gatherers have a wider range of foods available than people living on the edge of the ice sheets.

Neandertal family group approximately 60,000 years ago. Artwork by Randii Oliver, public domain, courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The diet near the ice sheets was typified by that much maligned character, Cucu! the Neandertal. About ninety percent of the Neandertal diet was meat, and big game meat at that. Get this – Cucu! the Neandertal would head out armed with a heavy thrusting spears, and go into combat with mammoths and rhinocerii. Seriously. Skeletons have been found with upper body injuries identical, in form, to the ones rodeo riders get while steer wrasslin’. (What’s Neandertal for ‘yeeee-haaw!’?)

I’ve ridden elephants. There is no way I would want to go into combat with one, armed only with a spear. As for rhinos…well, uh…

The other issue is that there’s no return path to Ice Age foods for us.  We’ve selectively bred everything we eat today, and studies have shown that our biochemistry has adapted to suit. Today’s main wheat strain didn’t even exist 100 years ago (the guy who bred the super-wheat we use now only died recently).

The ‘cave man diet’, in short, is fantasy. Paleo-nostalgia.

So why does it work for some people? Part of the reason is that modern foods contain additives. Commercial chicken, for instance, is full of antibiotics, so if you’re intolerant to penicillins, it won’t do favours. All sorts of issues follow from immune system dysfunction – so, on the cave man diet, some people feel healthier.

So does this mean we’ll eventually adapt to being able to lie on couches with our Game Boys and TV remotes, surrounded by the detritus of chips, pizza and cola drinks?

Well, maybe, but something tells me not.

What are your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

We live in a totally awesome universe. I like it. Do you?

It never ceases to amaze me how awesome the universe has become in the last thirty-odd years.

The Horsehead nebula, Barnard 33, as seen by Hubble. Wonderful, wonderful imagery. NASA, public domain.

Take astronomy. Back in the late twentieth century, half the stuff we know now was a pipe dream. Even sci-fi authors didn’t imagine what we’ve actually found. Exoplanets? In 1994, stuff of science fiction. There was a slight indication that one might exist around Barnard’s Star, (V2500 Ophiuchus) - now disproven – but nothing else.

Now? We’ve found hundreds – 877 as of the end of April 2013, in fact. With hundreds more lurking in data already collected. And do these planetary systems obey Bode’s Law? No they do not. They include super-Neptunes. Water worlds. ‘Eyeball’ worlds tidally locked so one face forever faces their sun. Hot Jupiters. Planets whose very atmospheres are boiling into space. We’ve even directly imaged some of these extra-solar worlds, around Formalhaut (Alpha Piscis Austrini). How cool is that?

Hubble picture of the planet around Formalhaut. NASA, public domain.

Planets are only the half of it; we’ve also found detail in nebulae that we never thought could exist. And black holes. I won second prize in a regional high school science contest in 1978 with a display on black holes – in which I outlined how the event horizon works as a direct consequence of Einsteinian physics, for which I did the math and plotted graphs. Not that I had learned any of this at my high school. I missed out on first prize – explicitly because I’d presented theoretical physics and the judges were looking for kitchen chemistry experiments. It was a high school science contest. Yes, I know that sounds like a Sheldon answer, but it’s true.

The point is that back in 1978 nobody had seen a black hole. Theoretically, they could have been just that – black. Invisible, maybe, apart from the possibility of picking up a lensing effect from the way they distorted space-time.

Now we know different. They’re amazingly visual. Dynamic, exciting – shrouded in violent clouds of swirling hot gases and debris which belch X-rays as tidal forces crush and heat them.

The PIllars of Creation – star nurseries in M-16, the Eagle Nebula. Click to enlarge. NASA, public domain.

We’ve even integrated quantum theory into the mix – which was done by Stephen Hawking. Thanks to him, we know that black holes themselves radiate at particle level (it’s a consequence of superposition). Small ones radiate away to nothing, which is why the CERN supercollider won’t create an earth-swallower.

In just thirty years we’ve realised that it’s all out there – this amazing, dynamic, ever-changing universe. It’s totally different from the rather bland void, possibly populated with clones of our own solar system, that we imagined in the mid-twentieth century.

And there is so much more to learn. I think that’s pretty wonderful. I hope you do too.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

More Martian dumbness: NASA drew a giant WHAT on the red planet?

The other day my wife ordered a latte – which she then had to photograph because of the way the coffee and soy happened to mix, a kind of ‘ooer, that looks a bit rude’ shape, if you looked at it the right way.

The point being that NASA has been getting stick for apparently drawing the same thing. Thing, I did say ‘thing’, didn’t I? A sand drawing, with its Spirit rover, right there on the Martian pud, I mean pug.

Of course, by the time I went to check the JPL site, the pic had been replaced by this one… Public domain, NASA.

Purely accidental. Honestly, officer. (“Pfft, chortle, ooer, that looks a bit rude“).

OK, so if ”paredoilia’ is seeing faces in random patterns, what’s the word when people perceive what in old Devonshire dialect was a ‘tallywag’, outlined in Martian tyre trails (but only if you look at it sideways).

The good news? In 2023, four lucky people will get the chance to see NASA’s – er – artwork in person. Maybe. A Dutch fellow is looking for people to go on a one-way trip. Unlike Denis Tito’s  plan for a couple to spend a 501-day marital sojourn in a Dragon capsule, lining the walls with their own excrement, this one will involve landing on Mars. Also in modified Dragon that, I suspect, would be like living in a 1960s police phone box which, alas, wasn’t bigger on the inside.

Taking off again? Uh…no…

Conceptual artwork by Pat Rawlings of a Mars mission rendezvous from 1995. NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia.

Which means the life support system has to last forever. I expect it’ll be made of duct tape. Eventually. Oh – and the voyage’s going to be turned into reality TV.

Would I go? Plus side…

1. I’d be on a different planet from Justin Bieber and his monkey.

2. It would get me on TV along with re-runs of The World’s Greatest Loser.

3. You don’t have to line the walls with your own excrement like Tito’s crew.

4. If I wanted to be called the next Jeddak of Barsoom, I’d be in the right place, unlike now when they all look at me funny.

5. I’d get a front row seat for the next ‘NASA drawing’ on Mars.

But I have to say that the green hills of Earth are looking pretty good about now.

Would you go on a one-way trip to Mars? And what do you think NASA should draw next on the Red Planet?

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

A small tribute to the world’s greatest geek

In 1902, when Guglielmo Marconi broadcast the first radio signals across the Atlantic, Hungarian-American scientist Nicolai Tesla smiled. ‘Nice effort,’ he reputedly said. ‘Pity he’s infringed 19 of my patents.’

Nikolai Tesla with some of his gear in action. Public domain, from http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/monument-nearly-forgotten-genius-sought

Next time you flip on a light or use your smartphone or listen to the radio, watch TV or do just about anything in today’s teched-up world, spare a thought for the guy that made it all happen. Tesla. The world’s greatest geek. And the archetypal mad scientist – eventually complete with lab coat and shock of unruly hair.

Tesla flourished in the late nineteenth century and was responsible for discovering alternating current – with all that this implies. He explored everything to do with wave-forms, which are the basis of just about everything we do today with technology. He also figured out applications for what he learned – he had hundreds of patents to his name.

He didn’t always get it right, but that was part of the territory in this infancy of electricity. His key discovery was that high-frequency alternating current can be broadcast, wirelessly. That’s how transmission works – we give it many names, radio, TV signals, wireless, Bluetooth, but it’s all the same thing; high-frequency electromagnetic signals, broadcast in a wave.

The problem is that the power it carries isn’t high, compared to the power needed to transmit, and thanks to the inverse-square law it drops off pretty quickly with distance (double the distance, quarter the power). I have vivid memories of watching a bare fluorescent tube held inside a 25,000 volt AC field, less than a metre from the transmitter. It lit up, wirelessly – but not brightly.

Nikolai Tesla in 1895. Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.

Tesla thought the issue might be solved. He also thought it should be possible to harness the difference in electrical potential between ground and upper atmosphere –and his kudos by the 1890s was so great he was able to get hardware built – including a huge tower soaring into the skies above Long Island.

That didn’t work either. Nor did his earthquake machine.

But we can’t condemn him for that. The basis of everything we take for granted today – AC electrical systems, everything based on any broadcast from wireless computing to radio to TV to radar to microwave ovens, all came out of Tesla’s pioneering work. All? All.

Today his name is commemorated in an electric car. And the ‘Tesla Gun’ out of Wolfenstein, which could turn Nazis into small slices of steaming salami with one zap. Cool. Well, hot, actually. And all without a power cable. Wish I knew the trick.

Tesla thought he did. And for some reason Thomas Alva Edison apparently didn’t like him.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Lamenting the lost hopes of a past future

These days we live in the unimagined future – a twenty-first century of micro-tech miracles that only Arthur C. Clarke actually predicted.

On the way to Mars, concept for 1981 flight,via NASA.

We don’t have universal flying cars, or interplanetary passenger rockets, or moon bases, or any of the things we were supposed to. What we do have is even more wonderful – gadgetry that lets us communicate anywhere, with anyone. Phones with more computing grunt than NASA’s mainframes during the Apollo programme. The social impact is being felt in all fields of endeavour, not least of them the entertainment business.

And yet I cannot help lamenting the future we lost.

Does anybody remember the Six Million Dollar Man? Seventies sci-fi TV about an astronaut rebuilt with uber-tech after an air crash.  You knew when he was invoking his powers because he’d drop into slow-mo, backgrounded by annoying ‘bip-bip-bip’ noises and Oliver Nelson’s soundtrack (yes, that Oliver Nelson – the guy that wrote the best jazz album ever made, The Blues and the Abstract Truth…sigh….)

Wonderfully lampooned by Spike Milligan, and perhaps rightly so – the whole thing was, after all, very silly. Not least because you don’t just use legs and an arm to lift weights. (‘I’m sorry, Mr Austin, it’s not an extra bionic bit, it’s a hernia.”) The plots devolved to secret agent stuff, or plain silliness where the bionics became brute-force answers to problems that had simpler solutions. It hasn’t aged well.

Still, it summed up the optimism of the day. In 1973, when the pilot aired, humanity had just been to the Moon. Our future was a heroic, optimistic future of big engineering answers. Got an astronaut mangled in an accident? No problem – we can rebuild him. Things that worry us now didn’t enter into the calculation – I mean, the bionics were nuclear powered.

It’s this optimism – call it naïve, wide-eyed, sure – that we’ve lost. Swallowed by a wave of cynicism, cost realities, the collision between dreams and the immutable laws of physics.

Sure, today’s world of small-scale tech is wonderful. But I can’t help lamenting that lost age when we dreamed big and had every expectation that those dreams would come true. I lament it not because we missed out on those wonders – but because, when we found we couldn’t do them, we lost that sense of hope, too.

That’s what I miss. We need it. What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Celtic history conspiracies, anyone? No? Good.

As humans, I fear, we suffer from an uncanny ability to intellectualise ourselves into believing things that are really, really stupid.

Take the crackpot theories about secret history that have become popular ever since Charles Fort was a lad. Every country seems to have their variations – ‘ancient astronauts’ building pyramids, hidden past civilisations in the Americas, even Atlantis discovered in Google Maps, having eluded everybody on the planet including Google’s mapping teams.

Never mind that the ‘city’ on the Atlantic floor was actually an artefact of Google’s digital mapping process. Or that the ‘Atlantis’ legend itself has been shown to have come from Egypt, and was really about the destruction of Santorini (Thera) and the Minoan civilisation by volcano.

Here in New Zealand, crank ideas have included efforts to ‘prove’ that that everybody from Phoenicians to Celts arrived before Polynesians (always, wrongly, called ‘Maori’ in these accounts). The ‘proofs’, as far as I can tell, pivot on assigning human patterns to natural rock formations, or identifying boulders shifted by a county council during excavations as an ancient observatory. Literally joining the dots, though in a peculiar way.

Like overseas theories of similar ilk, these tell us more about the people proposing them than anything real. What’s more, some of these ideas – Celtic especially – float on a repugnant racial agenda, underscoring what’s actually going on.

New Zealand is far from alone. All this begs the question. How do these ideas gain traction?

Unconscious incompetence plays a part; often these theories are presented by people who are flat ignorant of the state of understanding of the field – so ignorant they don’t know how ignorant they are. That’s coupled with the assertion that ‘I don’t know myself, therefore nobody can know.’

A friend of mine argues it’s the result of people trying to fit the universe into their heads, it’s just a pity their heads are so tiny. It’s to do with their own sense of place, of identity; with constraining the wild unknowns of the world and controlling them – with, in effect, feeling secure, in their own way.

The other tack these fringe theorists try is claiming deliberate deception, a ‘conspiracy’ among ‘the establishment’ to ‘hide the truth’.

I’m part of that establishment, so any denial I make isn’t going to wash. Apart from one small point. Here in New Zealand, certainly, my experience has been that academic historians loathe each other – most of the ones I’ve run across regard the work of their peers as an assault on their own personal self-worth that must be avenged in kind. There is no chance whatsoever of a ‘conspiracy’ even being agreed on – still less sustained – in this viciously hostile intellectual environment.

Again, I think, the ‘establishment conspiracy’ notion is part of that phenomenon of the fringe thinkers keeping the universe small – of cutting the ‘system’ down to size.

Ultimately I don’t think there’s much point arguing against any of the crank theorists. They won’t accept rebuttals; and for every theory that is exploded – sometimes by simply falling out of fashion - a new idea always seems to arise to take its place.

But I still think it’s a pity. As I always say, the real world -  including its history – is wonderful and amazing enough, and still full of great and awesome things to discover, without us having to create fantasies about it.

What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Why go for woo woo when we have science? Checking out New Zealand’s amazing Moeraki Boulders

I am often amazed at the way perfectly explicable – if unusual – parts of the natural world get layered with what, politely, we might call ‘woo woo’.

Here in New Zealand we have a few – the ‘Kaimanawa wall’, for instance, a few ‘stone blocks’ that are meant to be part of a pyramid and therefore proof that a ‘pre-Maori’ nation existed in New Zealand, despite a total lack of any other evidence, including the rest of the supposed ’pyramid’. Actually the wall is part of an inigbrimite outcrop, naturally formed about 330,000 years ago and since cracked.

Best of them all, though, are the Moeraki boulders, which have attracted enormous speculation, probably because they are well known and easy to get to.

Back in 1848, early settler land buyer and moa enthusiast Walter Mantell – the man whose father, back in England, found the first ever dinosaur fossil – reached Kohekohe beach in New Zealand’s deep south. And beheld an extraordinary sight.

I took this photo of the Moeraki boulders in 2007. They fact that they are not perfect spheres is evident. Note the septarium (split) visible across the top of the boulder in the foreground.

It was strewn with boulders, some up to 3 metres across, weighing 7 tonnes or more, all roughly spherical. Just what they were – and how they got there – has been one of the more remarkable stories of New Zealand’s history.  Not because there is any mystery – but because of the way so many people seemed to think there should be.

Maori explained them by allegory; they were the remnants of calbashes and other cargo held by an ancestral canoe which, legend put it, piled up on this part of the coast.

Settler scientists had the physical origin pinned by 1856; the boulders were natural formations that had eroded out of the bank bordering the beach. That did not stop speculation from people who either didn’t know, or wouldn’t accept, the scientific explanation.

One of the silliest notions was that they were counter-weights for raising sails on 1200-foot long Chinese super-junks. Alas, there was not a shred of evidence, such as any sign that such vessels ever existed. (Technically, a wooden vessel that long would break in the first swells – it’s to do with the required strength of hull girder vs the tensile strength of wood. That is why even short sailing ships had a distinct sheer line, and really big ships had to wait on iron and steel – but I digress.)

Even sillier is the notion that they are alien eggs, some of which have hatched. Or some sort of alien dropping, anyway. Scarily, 27.2 percent of those who responded to an online straw poll thought this was the actual answer.

The reality? There’s no mystery. Spherical objects aren’t common in geology, but they occur. Similar boulders have been found on the Hokianga Harbour in northern New Zealand. There are other formations in Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota and also ‘Bowling Ball’ beach in California, among other places.

In fact the Moeraki boulders are septarian concretions of sand, clay and mud, held together with calcite, which formed in mud about 60 million years ago.

The shape – which is not perfectly spherical – is an outcome of the way this material diffused. It was an imperceptible process that took about four million years – maybe 55,500 human lifespans. To put that in another perspective, to make a 3 metre boulder in that time the calcite need have diffused at only 0.00075 mm a year.

This natural origin makes those boulders utterly ancient, utterly precious – and explains why it’s illegal to damage or deface them.

To me this is way cooler, and way more interesting, than silly explanations involving mystery ancient civilisations or aliens.

What’s more, spherical objects on a smaller scale – much like grapes – have been found on Mars by the Opportunity rover – evidence of past water flows. How cool is that?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

The truth behind the moon landing conspiracy – the real hoax was Soviet

I posted last week about the claims that NASA faked the Apollo programme.

Buzz Aldrin and the LM, 20 July 1969. Photo: NASA

This idea is so stupid it doesn’t deserve dignifying by engaging. Apollo happened. A demonstration of what can be done when political will, technology and funding come together, buoyed on a wave of popular enthusiasm.

Besides which, if there had been a hoax of this kind, the Soviets would have known at once - they were actively tracking American activities – and yelled long and loud. After all, the Soviets lost – and that highlights the real moon hoax. The Soviet pretence, after 20 July 1969, that they had never been in the race in the first place.

Actually they were in it, for real – they’d spent billions of roubles on everything from spacesuits to rockets to lunar spacecraft. The problem was that their programme started late, was under-funded,  and ran foul of in-fighting. Most of the top designers hated Sergei Pavlovich Korolev (1907-1966), the man responsible for the amazing R-7 rocket (still used today as the “Soyuz booster”) and who was behind the early Soviet space spectaculars.

It was Korolev who got the Soviets so far ‘ahead’ in 1957-61 that US President John F. Kennedy laid down the moon gauntlet.

What the Americans didn’t know was that the Soviet spectaculars were only possible because Korolev was a brilliant engineer. He could do stuff nobody else could. Then, in 1966, Korolev died – tragically – during botched cancer surgery.

The Soviet LK lunar lander (NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia).

His OKB-1 bureau carried on under Vasili Mishin. Efforts were made to send a manned 7K-L1 (‘Zond’) spacecraft on lunar flyby using the UR-500 ‘Proton’ booster, spurring NASA to send Apollo 8 into lunar orbit in December 1968, lest they be upstaged. Meanwhile the gigantic N-1 booster – the Soviet equivalent of the Saturn V -  was made flight-ready, but there were problems balancing the thirty first stage engines. The initial test flight, in early 1969, ended with a first stage failure.

If Korolev had lived, this might have been resolved. Alexei Leonov, first man to walk in space, certainly thought so. However, by early 1969 the best estimate was that the N1 would not be man-rated before 1974. There was hope that a disaster on the US side might set Apollo back – but it never did; and so, in mid-1969, the Brezhnev administration began insisting they had never been in the race, turning to a crash space station project which, they insisted, had been their goal all along.

Actually, it hadn’t. What’s more, they kept pushing their moon programme along – it wasn’t cancelled until mid-1972. And they kept working on the N-1, which flew (and failed) for the third and final time in November 1972. Back then it was a deadly Cold War secret; today the video, inevitably, is on YouTube – here. New bureau chief Valentin Glushko decided to cancel the N-1 on the back of that failure. And so the Soviet moon dream ended. But politically the cosmonauts probably wouldn’t have been allowed to go in any case.

The truth didn’t emerge until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Today the Soviet LK (Lunar Cabin) lander and space-suit are on public display, monuments to the Cold War – and to the real moon hoax, the Soviet denial that they’d ever been in the race.

All of which points to an interesting counter-factual. As matters stood the Soviets came close to beating the Americans on fly-by around the Moon, anyway, in 1968. If Korolev had lived, the race could have been very, very close indeed.

Sounds like fodder for a Stephen Baxter-style novel to me. Thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

The truth behind the Moon landing conspiracy

This week Jeff Bezos fished an F-1 motor from an Apollo mission out of the Atlantic. The biggest rocket engine ever used. That’s seriously awesome.

There is a reader of this blog whose Dad was pad safety officer for Apollo 11 – who was brought up in the middle of the whole project. Ultra cool (I am sooooo jealous!).

I still recall sitting in front of TV aged seven, while a shadowy, black-and-white Neil Armstrong descended to the lunar surface. It was an unforgettable moment. Armstrong – along with Aldrin, Collins and the other Apollo astronauts – were heroes in the truest sense.

Neil Armstrong in the LM, after the first moon walk, 20 July 1969. His face says it all. Photo: NASA

That was the real space age. Even New Zealand was seized by the dream; we had Apollo hardware kits in our cornflake packs, there were moon ice-creams. Humanity was doing what it does best -stretching the limits, pushing the unknown. Publicly, spectacularly. It was an exciting time to grow up.

Not that any of this has stopped lunatic claims that the whole lot was faked by NASA. The argument rests on a trawl for supposed consistency errors and gaffes perpetrated by the top scientific minds in the US, yet easily discoverable by enthusiasts. What’s more, the whole deception has, we are told, been kept secret for decades by tens of thousands of government and private-sector employees, officials, and others involved in the lunar programme, including international scientists such as New Zealand’s Sir William Pickering, who ran JPL at the time.

Quite. Needless to say, most of the pro-hoax arguments pivot on flat ignorance of the science involved. The claims are trivial to debunk – check out here and here.

Buzz Aldrin descends to the lunar surface, 20 July 1969.Photo: NASA, public domain.

I can show you a disproof myself. Check out Armstrong’s photo of Buzz Aldrin descending to the Moon. Notice how he’s lit on the shadowed side of the Lunar Module? That, hoax-advocates insist, is the smoking gun. Dumb old NASA had to add a second light to get around the fact that they’d lit the wrong side of the LM on their sound stage.

The reality?  The ladder was in shadow because Armstrong and Aldrin landed with the sun behind them soon after lunar dawn. No second light is needed in this photo; Aldrin is lit by reflected light from the regolith behind Armstrong, the photographer. You can see this principle for yourself. Here’s a photo I took of the Tom Parker fountain in Napier, New Zealand.

A photo I took of the Tom Parker Fountain, Napier, January 2013.

The shadow side of the fountain (facing the camera) should be as dark as the shadows under the topiary. Actually, it’s as bright as the sunlit side.  Yet the sole illumination is the sun, from top left. Sunlight reflected from the water on the side of the fountain to the right is illuminating the shadow side. The atmosphere makes little difference – it scatters the light, but not enough, evidenced by density of other shadows. Here’s how it works:

I made this myself. Oh man, I love being a geek!

What I’m showing here is the principle. Water reflects light in specular fashion, and at this angle it’s reflecting 90-95% – rendering the fountain’s shadow side over-exposed. By contrast, lunar regolith reflects about 2% light. And if you check out the moon photo, you’ll see not much light is reflected on Aldrin; Armstrong has set the camera to expose on that shadow. The regolith beyond (as bright as what’s illuminating Aldrin, from the other direction) is grossly over-exposed. That nails the point. Aldrin looks well lit. Actually, he isn’t – and that’s as you’d expect from lunar dirt reflectivity.

I have often wondered why something as stupid as the moon hoax claim could gain traction. Part of it is that we never went back – Apollo ended 40 years ago. Today it seems like a dream. But it also occurs to me that the hoax idea proxies one of the key aspects of the human condition. Humanity, it seems, likes to see patterns where none exist and attribute meaning without reference to context – or by referring to a context that isn’t the one shared by others.

The hoax traction is also, I think, derived at least partly from powerlessness - wanting to find explanations within bound of what the individual knows, as a way of asserting control over a huge and frightening world around. If we assert what we think we know, over what we don’t know, we regain a sense of control. It’s how conspiracies work – the detail of the hoax claim itself is merely symptomatic at this level.

It’s impossible to argue against such people, because what they assert is tied into their sense of self-worth.

What are your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Next week: the real moon-landing hoax – Moscow style. And coming up, more how-to posts on writing, more fun stuff, and – well, you’ll see!

Unleashing the inner geek put me into a comet coma, I think

I tried photographing Comet C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) last week. No joy. It was so close to the Sun there was only a short window to see it in New Zealand, right on sunset, and – it turns out – masked by hills.

Oh well, it’ll be back in another 110,000 years. It was kind of amusing, I suppose – standing on the beach with tripod and camera at dusk. Every so often I’d glance up at Orion to check that Betelgeuse hadn’t exploded yet (one day it will).

Wellington harbour – Port Nicholson/Te Whanganui-A-Orotu, at sunset from Petone beach. The odd colour of the beach shingle is caused by the sodium-vapour street lights behind me, coupled with a 2-second exposure. I was meant to be taking a picture of a comet…

A woman on her evening walk turned up and said to my wife, ‘You a photographer widow? My husband does that too.’

After a while I packed up the inner geek and we went home.

I’ll have another chance with C/2012 S1 (ISON), this November. And in mid-October 2014, ‘Siding Spring’ C/2013 A1 will skim past Mars. Or hit, creating a fireworks show the like of which we haven’t seen for a while – the last was in 1994, when Hale-Bopp ploughed into Jupiter.

We’ve come a long way since comets were seen as harbingers of doom. Or maybe luck. Back in 1861, Gabriel Read, the man who found gold in Otago, thought it a good omen when he looked up with the nuggets in his hand and saw the ‘Great Comet’ of 1861, Not so in America, where the comet appeared just as the Civil War brewed up.

Astronomers took a while to figure out what they were. The key figure was Edmund Halley, a prodigy who became a Fellow of the Royal Society as a nipper, age 22 (the youthful rotten swine!). He paid to have Isaac Newton’s work published, and in the 1690s proved that some comets have closed elliptical orbits. The comet he used to prove the point now bears his name.

Back them, nobody knew what comets were. Now we know they are chunks of ice and rock that usually originate in the Kuiper Belt or Oort cloud, on the edges of our solar system. Every so often, gravitational interferences tip one into an orbit that skims towards the inner solar system, sometimes coming close to the Sun.

Cometary orbits displayed via my trusty Celestia installation. Clockwise from left: Hale-Bopp, Ikeya Zhang, and Halley. The two planets are Neptune and Uranus.

Along the way, an encounter with one of the planets – typically Jupiter – can bend the comet into a shorter period orbit. After a while, the ice and volatiles are burned off by close passes to the Sun, and the comet breaks into trails of gravel. Or it can be broken by tidal forces. There are a lot of variables.

Earth often ploughs through these trails. It’s where regular meteor showers come from, such as the Leonids. These are associated with debris spewing off Comet Tempel-Tuttle, and which we mow through every November.  Usually the chunks are so small they burn up in the atmosphere. But every so often a larger chunk comes through, like the one that burst over Tunguska in 1908. Or over Russia just a few weeks ago.

Have you seen a comet lately? And do you see them as 0mens – or cool science?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013