Starship Asterisk*

geckzilla wrote:

neufer wrote:

geckzilla wrote:
If you're going to post a skeptic link, I'm going to post a skeptic skeptic link.
You can follow it up with a skeptic skeptic skeptic link and so on until we get tired of this.
http://skepticalscience.com/ridley-murd ... rming.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-s ... 38896.html
http://www.michaelshermer.com/2009/08/s ... /#more-918

The skeptics and the skeptic skeptics stood both on opposite sides of the Grand Canyon of Emotions, Bias, and Ideology and shouted across that vast expanse but couldn't quite hear each other, especially with all the echoes of previous shouts muddling the sounds of the newer shouts.

NobodyImportant wrote:This is like the 847th of these distorted "little world" type photos I've seen on APOD...interesting the first 87 times, but getting a bit old by now

That which has come to be,
that is what will come to be,
And that which has been done,
that is what will be done;
And so there is nothing new under the sun.

Learn from history or you’re doomed to repeat it.

neufer wrote: History repeats itself, but the special call of an Art which has passed away is never reproduced.
It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird. - Joseph Conrad

Art "without equal" Neuendorffer

rstevenson wrote:

Nitpicker wrote:
Without having read Nightfall, if the first appearance of distant stars was the cause of the societal collapse on Lagash, then they must have been a bit pathetic. More likely they fell apart because night fell before anyone could invent the torch. Edit: or maybe they burnt the joint down while attempting to.

The premise of Nightfall has always seemed to me to be a little shaky. Sure, a pre-scientific society would have difficulty under those circumstances -- if and only if they hadn't evolved on the planet. But having evolved there, they would have some sort of a built-in survival characteristic -- perhaps falling into a deep sleep for the duration or something similar. This would take over each 2000 years, and life would go on as before when they awoke. But even if we accept the premise, there would still be lots of evidence of the previous cycle's attainments around for the next cycle to build on, so they would gradually build up a scientific explanation for the phenomenom, and would be able to plan for it better each time.

rstevenson wrote:
But that's what you get when you ask a 21-year old candy store clerk to extrapolate an entire planet's social ecology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonpareils wrote:

<<Nonpareils (French: "without equal") are a decorative confectionery of tiny balls made with sugar and starch, traditionally an opaque white but now available in many colors. Their origin is uncertain, but they may have evolved out of the pharmaceutical use of sugar, as they were a miniature version of comfits.

The term "nonpareils" can also refer to a specific confection: a round flat chocolate drop with the upper surface coated with nonpareils. This confection is also referred to as "chocolate nonpareils". Nestlé makes a variety marketed as Sno-Caps. In Australia, these confections are commonly known as "chocolate freckles", or simply "freckles".>>

Nitpicker wrote:Without having read Nightfall, if the first appearance of distant stars was the cause of the societal collapse on Lagash, then they must have been a bit pathetic. More likely they fell apart because night fell before anyone could invent the torch. Edit: or maybe they burnt the joint down while attempting to.

Nitpicker wrote:Without having read Nightfall, if the first appearance of distant stars was the cause of the societal collapse on Lagash, then they must have been a bit pathetic. More likely they fell apart because night fell before anyone could invent the torch. Edit: or maybe they burnt the joint down while attempting to.

Sounds a little like Douglas Adams' tale of Krikket in Life, the Universe and Everything:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_ ... xy#Krikkit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Krikkit wrote:
<<The planet Krikkit is (at the beginning of the novel Life, the Universe and Everything) located in a dust cloud composed chiefly of the disintegrated remains of the enormous spaceborne computer Hactar. Hactar was originally created by the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax to design the Ultimate Weapon. Hactar produced a very, very small bomb that, when activated, would connect every star to every other star, cause them to all go supernova simultaneously and, thus, destroy the universe. The bomb proved dysfunctional because Hactar had designed it with a tiny flaw, reasoning that no consequence could be worse than that of setting the bomb off. The Silastic Armorfiends disagreed and destroyed Hactar.>>

• Shades of Hector & Achilles (Not to mention Cruz & Obamacare.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Krikkit wrote:
<<Due to the dust cloud, the sky above Krikkit was completely black, and thus the people of Krikkit led insular lives and never realised the existence of the Universe. With the population thus prepared, Hactar, disintegrated but still functional, built and crashed a model spaceship onto Krikkit in order to introduce its inhabitants to the concept of the Universe. Secretly guided by Hactar, the Krikkiters built their first spaceship, Krikkit One, penetrated the dust cloud, and surveyed the Universe before them. Unbeknownst to the Krikkiters, Hactar had been subliminally conditioning their minds to the point where they could not accept a Universe into their world view with the intention of putting them into a similar mindset to that of the Silastic Armorfiends. Sooner or later, they would require an Ultimate Weapon, and this would allow Hactar to finally complete his purpose, something he had felt considerably guilty about not doing before. Upon first witnessing the glory and splendor of the Universe, they casually, whimsically, decided to destroy it, remarking, "It'll have to go." Aided again by the mind of Hactar, the Krikkiters built an incredible battlefleet and waged a massive war against the entire Universe. The Galaxy, then in an era of relative peace, was unprepared, and spent the next 2,000 years fighting the Krikkiters in war that resulted in about two "grillion" casualties.>>

geckzilla wrote:
Makes more sense than nightfall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_short_story_and_novel) wrote:

<<"Nightfall" is a 1941 science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov about the coming of darkness to the people of a planet ordinarily illuminated at all times on all sides. It was written while Asimov was working in his father's candy store and studying at Columbia University. Astounding Science Fiction magazine editor John W. Campbell asked Asimov to write the story after discussing with him a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson: If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!

The fictional planet Lagash is located in a stellar system containing six suns, which keep the whole planet continuously illuminated; total darkness is unknown, and as a result so are all the stars outside the planet's stellar system. Since the current population of Lagash has never experienced general darkness, the scientists conclude that darkness would traumatize the people and that they would need to prepare for it. When nightfall occurs, however, the scientists (who have prepared themselves for darkness) and the rest of the planet are most surprised by the sight of hitherto invisible stars outside the six-star system filling the sky. Unfortunately, because the inhabitants of Lagash never saw other stars in the sky, their civilization had come to believe that their six-star system contained the entirety of the universe. In one horrifying instant, anyone gazing at the night sky - the first night sky which they have ever known - is suddenly faced with the reality that the universe contains many millions upon billions of stars: the awesome, horrifying realization of just how vast the universe truly is drives them insane. The short story concludes with the arrival of the night and a crimson glow that was "not the glow of a sun", with the implication that societal collapse has occurred once again.>>

Chris Peterson wrote:The entire phenomenon in the antisolar sky is the Belt of Venus.

Nitpicker wrote:My understanding is that the "Belt of Venus" is the pinkish anti-twilight above the bluish shadow of the Earth.

Chris Peterson wrote:

Beyond wrote:So that's what that bluishness is that you see in the east after sunset and in the west before sunrise, IF you get up early enough, which i don't usually do. Shirley someone must have mentioned it here before and i missed it.

???

The Belt of Venus has been featured in dozens of APODs over the years, I and many others have submitted our own images for discussion, and the subject comes up fairly regularly. Not sure how you could have missed it.

And who the heck is Shirley?

BDanielMayfield wrote:

rstevenson wrote:If the photographer is willing to share instructions, that'd be great. But in the meantime, a search yielded this page from the PhotographyMad site.

Rob

That link was great Rob. It showed that creating these kind of images aren't really that challenging at all. Thanks Rob.

neufer wrote:

geckzilla wrote:
If you're going to post a skeptic link, I'm going to post a skeptic skeptic link.
You can follow it up with a skeptic skeptic skeptic link and so on until we get tired of this.
http://skepticalscience.com/ridley-murd ... rming.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-s ... 38896.html
http://www.michaelshermer.com/2009/08/s ... /#more-918

geckzilla wrote:
If you're going to post a skeptic link, I'm going to post a skeptic skeptic link.
You can follow it up with a skeptic skeptic skeptic link and so on until we get tired of this.
http://skepticalscience.com/ridley-murd ... rming.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain#Forests_and_other_vegetation wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]Effect of acid rain on a forest, Jizera Mountains, Czech Republic[/color][/b]

---

<<Acid rain is a rain or any other form of precipitation that is unusually acidic, meaning that it possesses elevated levels of hydrogen ions (low pH). It can have harmful effects on plants, aquatic animals and infrastructure. Acid rain is caused by emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, which react with the water molecules in the atmosphere to produce acids. Governments have made efforts since the 1970s to reduce the release of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere with positive results.

Adverse effects may be indirectly related to acid rain, like the acid's effects on soil (see above) or high concentration of gaseous precursors to acid rain. High altitude forests are especially vulnerable as they are often surrounded by clouds and fog which are more acidic than rain.

Other plants can also be damaged by acid rain, but the effect on food crops is minimized by the application of lime and fertilizers to replace lost nutrients. In cultivated areas, limestone may also be added to increase the ability of the soil to keep the pH stable, but this tactic is largely unusable in the case of wilderness lands. When calcium is leached from the needles of red spruce, these trees become less cold tolerant and exhibit winter injury and even death.>>

geckzilla wrote:If you're going to post a skeptic link, I'm going to post a skeptic skeptic link. You can follow it up with a skeptic skeptic skeptic link and so on until we get tired of this.

rstevenson wrote:

BDanielMayfield wrote:

BDanielMayfield wrote:Was this image taken with a fisheye camera lens pointed straight down, or was the image created from other more typical images that were then processed into this image?

Ah, I guess since the description says it was a mosaic the latter would be the case, but I’d still like to learn what kind of lens was used and how it was produced.

If the photographer is willing to share instructions, that'd be great. But in the meantime, a search yielded this page from the PhotographyMad site.

Rob

BMAONE23 wrote:

neufer wrote:

petsie wrote:
Oh my! If our planet would look as green as in this image!!
IIRC the area covered by forest reduced (here in germany) to ~30 percent compared to ancient times

But some of those ancient forests were black.

This reads as though our world is greening
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index ... -cause-it/


Note: red areas indicate an increase in plant growth

References

Lo, T.-T. and H.-H. Hsu. 2010. Change in the dominant decadal patterns and the late 1980s abrupt warming in the extratropical Northern Hemisphere. Atmospheric Science Letters, 11, 210–215.

Liu, S., R. Liu, and Y. Liu. 2010. Spatial and temporal variation of global LAI during 1981–2006. Journal of Geographical Sciences, 20, 323-332.

neufer wrote:

petsie wrote:
Oh my! If our planet would look as green as in this image!!
IIRC the area covered by forest reduced (here in germany) to ~30 percent compared to ancient times

But some of those ancient forests were black.

petsie wrote:
Oh my! If our planet would look as green as in this image!!
IIRC the area covered by forest reduced (here in germany) to ~30 percent compared to ancient times