Star Collision

I have seen some terrifying, apocalyptic images as of late: the burning towers of Planeattack, the destruction of cities in the movies Armageddon and Independence Day, and in numerous artist renditions of the times billions of years in the future when the sun heats up and becomes a red giant, turning the Earth into a lava ball. I saw some more horrifying images yet in the current issue of Scientific American. The 2002 November issue shows what looks like a bright shining yellow lava asteroid about to collide with a dark, reddish Earth. But it was no asteroid. It was the Sun, distorted into the shape of an elongated bird egg by the approach of a white dwarf star from nowhere. Stars are so far apart that the chance of them colliding is remote, but maybe not that remote, as they attract to each other through gravity. The article says that if a white dwarf star, as massive as the Sun but in the volume of an Earth, were to collide with the Sun, it would ignite the entire Sun and blow it up leaving behind a nebula. There is a painting in this article that shows this. These two paintings are among the most striking I have ever seen. They do leave out a few points; for example, the mere approach of the white dwarf would have swung the planets into weird orbits or flung them out altogether, and the Sun is pictured as a normal-colored yellow object, whereas if this were to really happen, the Sun would have been blazingly bright, as it is now, and no reasonable picture could reflect this.

The article does give an "arithmetic" table for saying what happens if stars of different types were to collide. For example, if two red giants collide, they would throw off their outer envelopes and become a pair of white dwarfs. If two main sequence stars (such as the Sun) were to collide, the result would be a bigger main sequence star, and so forth. This gives an arithmetic of sorts. White dwarf + black hole = black hole (with disk). Red supergiant + neutron star = white dwarf + neutron star (with disk) and so forth. This operation is clearly commutative, since, for example, the Sun and a white dwarf are the white dwarf and the Sun. Is it associative? I thought at first yes, since there are ranks of objects and the same things always happen to them; for example, a red giant encountering any kind of star will turn into a white dwarf. However, (red giant + main sequence) + main sequence is not the same as red giant + (main sequence + main sequence), as in the former, one of the main sequence stars would get annihilated by a white dwarf, but in the second this does not happen.

The Silliness of Evil

The word "evil" is used more often than it used to be. Evil hijackers, axis of evil, Saddam is evil and so forth. I really don't believe there is such a thing as evil, and I believe that more often or not it means what the "other guys" are. The word has even got a connotation of being comical. There's Evil Kneivel, for instance. "Evil Empire" has a silly sound to it, as in "Press Button to Destroy Evil Empire". Synonyms for "Evil" also sound silly, for example, wicked, sin (as in "sinful chocolate"), and misdeed. By far the silliest is the German word böse . I saw one web site, for example, say "Simpson ist böse". The word sounds funny to me, perhaps because when I learned it, it was in a story about children and their parents. When the parents get angry with their children, the story refers to the parents as "böse". So I came to regard the word as similar to "mad" in English, but the difference is that to say someone is angry, informally, in English you say that they are crazy ("mad"), whereas in German you say that they are evil ("böse"). So I suppose Brits and Americans go crazy when they get angry, and Germans become evil. The whole idea of evil is crazy anyway.

Columbus Day

Columbus Day is coming up. This holiday was celebrated on October 12 when I was young, but, like many other holidays, it was moved to Mondays; in particular, the second Monday of October. I don't regard it as an important holiday, especially when many see it as a symbol of colonialism instead of the discovery of the New World. Nevertheless, attendance was low at my workplace today, and we were let out an hour early. This shows that even minor holidays are increasing in importance as of late. I feel the 10 major US holidays rank like this in importance:

1. Yule (December 25)
2. Thanksgiving (4th Thursday in November)
3. New Year's Day (January 1)
4. Independence Day (July 4)
5. Memorial Day (last Monday in May)
6. Labor Day (first Monday in September)
7. Martin Luther King Day (third Monday in January)
8. Veterans' Day (November 11)
9. Presidents' Day (third Monday in February)
10. Columbus Day (October 12)

Which President was the Best?

Today Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize. It was well deserved. Jimmy Carter lived much of his life seeking peace everywhere, with the Camp David accords, Haiti, and numerous other places. In my opinion he was the best President in my lifetime. Here is my ranking of the men who served as our President in my lifetime:

1. Jimmy Carter. High regard for people and peace.
2. John F. Kennedy. Started an optimistic new age: Camelot
3. Harry Truman. Was able to say what he meant.
4. Gerald Ford. Served as well as he could for a president that was not elected.
5. Bill Clinton. Able to achieve things with people, but his amorous pursuits did him in.
6. Lyndon Johnson. Developed the Great Society, but the Vietnam War was our biggest failure.
7. George H. W. Bush (father). Won a war but could not bring around the economy.
8. Ronald Reagan. Symbolizes optimism but also "moral majority" and Iran-Contra.
9. George W. Bush (son). Angered world with non-involvement in anti-racism and ecological concerns, too martiocratic.
10. Richard Nixon. Opened China but Watergate was the worst scandal in our history.

To Anacreon in Heaven

Toastmaster Table Topics become blog topics. That's an easy transition. The one from today's meeting is "To Anacreon in Heaven". I was called upon to explain if anyone under the age of 50 knows the words to the Star Spangled Banner. [Warning: this hyperlink plays music.] I don't think it has anything to do with age. Most people know the words to the first verse but not the other verses. They were written by Francis Scott Key, and reflects the relief and joy that people found when they saw, throughout all the fighting at night, that the US Flag was tattered, but still flying over the fort. It seems to have been trivialized in our society to the extent where the last two words seem to be "play ball!"; perhaps we should reread the verses and ponder over their meaning.

Many people don't know the origin of the music. It was once a drinking song! "To Anacreon in Heaven" was sung in bars in colonial America in the 1700s. The range of the music is wide, an octave and a half. Not many of us have that kind of vocal range. It was purposely written that way, along with pompous and provocative words, to test the ability of people to sing it when half drunk. It begins "To Anacreon in Heaven, where he sat in full glee…" and the first verse terminates with "The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's Vine", referring to the ancient Roman god of wine and merriment. So next time we hear that anthem play, think of the drinking song which underlies it.

Quaoar

Everyone knows that Pluto is a planet, or is it? It is so much smaller than the smallest planet Mercury. If Pluto is a softball, then Mercury is a soccer (or foot) ball. But it is so much larger than anything else. Not any more. Pluto is now known to be a Kuiper Belt object, a collection of large asteroids beyond the orbit of Neptune. Other Kuiper Belt objects are known; for example, Pluto's own satellite Charon. There are others, such as Varuna and Ixion. These two worlds are slightly bigger than Ceres, the largest Mars-Jupiter asteroid. Just recently another Kuiper Belt object was discovered to be even larger than Varuna and Ixion; it was named Quaoar and it is 777 miles across, or about the size of the Great Lakes region in the USA and Canada. This is so large compared to Pluto that it is hard to claim that Pluto is a planet. One would then have to call Quaoar a planet; then one would have to call Varuna and Ceres planets, and so forth until we have thousands of planets. It is easier to call Pluto not a planet but a huge asteroid; the biggest in the Kuiper Belt, although what would happen to the claim of Pluto being a planet if a Kuiper Belt object bigger than Pluto were found?

By the way: Quaoar. It is pronounced sort of like you have a speech impediment: kua-o-are. Where did it come from?it differs from quasar in just a single letter. It is from Los Angeles county Native American myth; a good description, from, is: "Their only god who came down from heaven; and, after reducing chaos to order, out the world on the back of seven giants. He then created the lower animals,” and then mankind." I think they mean "cut the world". But the quotation, from www.angelfire.com/journal/cathbodua/Gods/Qgods.html, shows a progression from chaos to order, the opposite of Coyote's direction; Coyote introduced disorder when he scattered the stars all over the place. As such, then, this asteroid represents order, something that Kuiper Belt objects don't seem to have.

Brakes

Today I took my van in to have the brakes repaired. They are soft and you press the pedal to the floor before they take hold. The repair place replaced the master cylinder and fixed some brake pads. The problem returned so I took it back. They said there was nothing wrong with it. Huhhh?? I drove it; I did not really believe it, but if you can't get someone to repair something because that person does not think it needs repair, there is not much you can do. It got bad enough so I felt I had to take it in. So I did, this time to the dealer. They bled the lines and said that when a master cylinder is installed the lines need to be bled in a special way. I wonder if the first place knew this. I hope it is repaired, now. I am a little concerned that they corrected the symptom without finding the cause. What caused the air to get into the brake system? If they simply bleed the lines, the cause will get the air back into the system. I hope it is ready because I have a long trip coming