K9 stars

I purchased a Sky and Telescope magazine today and read an article about the brightest red dwarf star in our sky, a rather obscure star named Lacaille 8760. It has a spectral type of M0. What does that mean? Astronomers long ago classified stars according to the spectrum that their light produce when passed through a prism. The classifications are now mostly by temperature, and some rearranging of the types were needed as more facts were discovered about stars. Today the sequence from hottest to coolest is O, B, A, F, G, K, M, with L and T added recently for brown dwarfs. A red dwarf star is of type M; it is cool as far as stars go but still a star. The types are subdivided into tenths; e.g., an F9 is hotter than a G2 is hotter than a G8 and so forth. Our sun is a G2 star.

The faintest red dwarf is interesting as there is a natural boundary at the faint end - between star and non-star. But there is no such boundary at the bright end. So saying the brightest red dwarf tends to make it a middle of the pack type of star. In fact, the next type up from M0 is K9. Now this reminds me of the Dog Star Sirius.

Sirius is the brightest star in the sky. It is bluish white and astronomers say that its spectral type is A1. But since it is the Dog Star I think the type should be K9 instead. Indeed, some legends of the past had Sirius as being a red star. I tried looking up K9 and Sirius in Google, and got an article about a K9 police dog named Sirius who died when the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11. He was the K9 star of the day.

So what's the type of Sirius? Well, given that it's the Dog Star, I would say that its type is K9.

Contradictions

Today I went to my last class of Front Page. I told the class, populated with people I work with, about some of the problems with Front Page, namely that if you make non-Front Page edits to your web pages and then run Front Page again, it will mess up those pages. They thought that Front Page was a good package, however. My church is revising its web page, and they feel the problems of Front Page are too great and so they are going to use ASP and Dreamweaver. So I am a part of two web pages who contradict each other on the worth of Front Page. I will want to stick with them both and learn both Front Page and Dreamweaver, so I can use the best of both. But contradictions do annoy me. Logically they imply anything. That is, if Austin is in Texas, then if Austin is not in Texas, then Mickey Mouse is God. P -> (~P -> Q) is how it is written in logical notation. What they really mean is that at least one of the contradicting statements is false. I have to decide which.

I designed a wallpaper today for the month of June. What color should June be? February is red, December is red and green, March is green, January is white and so forth. That leaves cyan for June. This did not look like a likely color for the month. But I put together something based on cyan, and the result is quite attractive to me. The shades of blue-green that it has reminds me of a swimming pool, and of course in June is when the pools are first open for the entire month. I came up with this scheme:

White January snow
Red February valentine heart
Green March St Patrick's day shamrock
Purple April flowers
Yellow May sun
Cyan June swimming pool
Red White Blue July US Flag
Orange Red August heat
Blue September blue skies
Orange Black October halloween pumpkin and night
Brown November leaves and dying vegetation
Red and Green December holly and poinsettia

There are six primary and secondary colors and six tertiary colors for a total of 12, the same as the number of months. What if each month had to have a different one of these twelve colors? I came up with this:

Red February
Red-Orange August
Orange October
Amber November
Yellow May
Chartreuse September
Green March
Turquoise or Cyan June
Blue July
Indigo December
Purple April
Magenta January

where now I have indexed it by color rather than by month. So June is turquoise, just as above. So remember these when you design something for a given month.

Warning

I took a course on a data system at my workplace last Friday, and looked at some of the course materials today. The first page of it was a poem by Jenny Joseph entitled "I shall wear purple". I looked it up on the Web and found it was really titled "Warning"; one site for it is http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/716.html. The poem seems to speak of what this woman will do when she is old and what she now feels she has to do. It seems to say to live you life when you can and don't wait. It reminds me a little of the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, by TS Eliot.

I got intrigued by misspellings on the Web. A search for netwrok in Google, for instance, produces a huge list of netwroks. I also get lots of netowrks, newtorks (what's a new tork?), and entworks. All of these asked if I meant network. I tried "new tork" and got a list of new torks, including the New Tork Times. "Newtork" got me a question of whether I meant network, even though New York is just as plausible. I tried "net york, net york", and this time it suggested New York, New York. Finding New York and network to be so close was interesting, as a lot of things are networked to New York. It all goes to show that the Spell Checker can still be effectively used more than it is.

Keep it or nuts

My attic has reams of paper. Old Toastmaster and astronomy files back to the late 1970's, hundreds of books, income tax for every year since 1969, and all my paycheck stubs for all of the places I have ever worked. I need to throw much of this stuff out. They say you can throw out tax returns after 7 years. Then today I find that I needed a piece of paper from the year 1993! It seems the social security people say my Medicare wages were zero in that year. I worked in that year just like any other. I call them and they tell me I have to send them a copy of my W2 for that year. Well fortunately I kept all my tax records from way way back. I got it out, as well as my paycheck stub since the W2 was marginally readable. But this puts a question into my cleanup desires. I want to get rid of that old stuff, but you never know when you will need something.

I gave a talk on mathematics and religion today and convinced people that study too much of either will take you away from the real world. I wanted to convey to people the "just add one" philosophy, that no matter how far you have gone, you can go farther, and that there is always something to learn. No matter how huge a number you pick, I can pick a bigger one. I'll just add one to yours. This is why I believe in the Unitarian Universalist Fourth Principle: the quest for truth and meaning is never-ending.

I eat out every night this week, because of nightly activities. At least one of these meals will be paid for.

I revised my blog

I revised the format of my blog just now - added links and widened the text field.

Forbidden subjects?

I installed IIS on my computer today to see how web pages that I am developing with ASP or Front Page will work when installed. One problem is that I am using Windows XP and IIS 5.1, and the site I want to go to uses Windows NT 4.0 and IIS 4.0. Therefore, I could expect some problems, since the two are out of sync. This is a problem of our times. We keep upgrading and upgrading all the time, and then you find you have to learn everything all over again because they've changed everything. That holds especially true now with all this .NET stuff going around.

I prepared a talk on mathematics and religion and found while researching for this that mathematicians that go in for religion-related subjects, such as infinity, have a tendency towards mental illness, as though they were entering forbidden territory. Certainly studying such mathematics will take you out of the real world, and cause problems because of that, but then I found mathematicians that managed to handle it OK without mental illness.