The sun’s blowing chunks again, so Space Weather says today is a good day to see purple auroras in Canada, the northern US, and northern Europe.
In other news, my lightbulb just blew up. I think I unscrewed it and screwed it back in too many times. Fortunately, the shade goes up so I don’t have lightbulb all over the floor. Those things shatter into a zillion pieces when they hit.
Tired of the DNC? This summer may be a good time to spot NLCs: noctilucent clouds. “During the summer months, look west perhaps 30 minutes to an hour after sunset when the Sun has dipped 6° to 16° below the horizon.” The mysterious blue-white tendrils are made up of tiny ice crystals in the mesosphere.
People have criticized the movie The Day After Tomorrow for its sudden freeze, though frozen mammoths may be evidence of rapid climate changes in the past. Richard B. Cathcart gives the real reason why the movie is scientifically impossible.
A couple of posts from Jason at Gene Expression discuss unusual variations in height between countries and within individual countries over the course of time. The first post has some interesting excerpts from a New Yorker article and his own doubts that nutrition is the explanation. The second post tells the sad tale of short Koreans and other Asian height variations.
The latest installment of La Griffe du Lion considers why Asian incomes lag behind that predicted by their IQ’s. The math may bore the average reader to tears, but his answer is quite striking - Asians excell in the spatial reasoning portion of IQ but lag in verbal IQ, and this difference has an impact on the GDP of East Asian nations.
The relation between GDP and IQ doesn’t keep me up at night, but it surprised me to hear that verbal IQ (whatever that is) was a more important factor than the other kind. I’d have guessed that spatial reasoning, vital to engineering and physics, gave more of an advantage. Maybe this explains why the majority of students in higher education now are women, despite a lower average IQ - because women tend to have better verbal skills and men better spatial ones.
Rant of the day: Ray Bradbury curses Michael Moore
It got cloudy in Boston around 6:30am, so I’m watching 3rd contact on webcams from Belgium and Iran. The latter page tells how Avicenna was the first person to record the transit of Venus.
[Update:] The Iran feed stopped feeding around 4th contact. Remember, Venus will be back in 2012 if you missed it this time around. I’m hoping to be someplace sunnier by then.
Cartoon of the day: D-Day 2004 by Mike Lester at Backspin
Missing sibling of the day: if you see Veronica, tell her to answer her email. Or her phone.
At sunrise on Tuesday morning here on the East Coast you can see the first transit of Venus in 122 years. See Space Weather for details by country, live video links, and the like. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by telling you not to stare at the sun or put your retinas at the receiving end of any magnifying equipment pointed at said sun. Sky and Telescope has some information on solar filters - the most interesting one being the Pop-Tart wrapper.
The weather in Boston will be partly cloudy, so we may have to wait until 2012 to see Venus in action.
Scott at Gene Expression asks why the mental health profession is wasting time with Asperger’s syndrome, when it’s hardly a debilitating mental illness. Jason Soon replies:
People who enter the psychology/psychiatry profession disproportionately suffer from a pathological condition called Feeler Syndrome. Symptoms include a deficit in concentration abilities, deficits in forming genuine interests in things as opposed to people, a tendency to prefer style over substance in conversation and thought and general dependence on social milieu and the approval of others for sustaining a sense of self-worth. Notwithstanding these problems sufferers retain a high degree of functionality. This is reinforced by the fact that the skills they have overdeveloped to the detriment of others allows them to get into positions of social influence. As a consequence such symptoms also come with a tendency to label others as deficient. Nonetheless the condition is not a hard one, as the wealth created by normals with adequate concentration and conceptualisation skills allows for the redistribution of resources sufficient to sustain these sufferers and allow them to lead happy lives.
Another commenter links Niall Ferguson’s political diagnosis: America has got Asperger’s syndrome.
Pics of the day: Mike Hollihan’s Kerry Mockery collection. (I especially liked “Positions may change without notice” and “Our Modern Janus.”)
Lit of the day: those of the opposite ideological persuasion may prefer The Bushiad and the Idyossey - political humor in blank verse.
I found Mozart Was a Red: A Morality Play in One Act by Murray N. Rothbard at LewRockwell.com and was duly amused. Even if you’re not familiar with the cult of Ayn Rand’s personality, this one-act play is fun in a general cult-of-personality way.
I’ve also been reading Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, a very unauthorized biography of L. Ron Hubbard. Two of the sites where I was reading it are 404 at the moment (Operation Clambake and Nots.org), whether because of legal action by the Scientologists or simple server problems remains to be seen. (Scientologists go to more extraordinary lengths to keep the mythos of their founding personality alive than Objectivists do.) You can find a copy of BFM at Religio.de. It’s long (I’m still not done) but enthralling - truth really is stranger than fiction.
[Spam in a can.]
Wired link of the day: Arise, Mickey, and walk!
Speaking of paralysis, I was reading about sleep paralysis somewhere lately and when I mentioned it, people seemed to think that my hypnapompic hallucinations were weird - and this is the blog category for weird. Sleep paralysis is what keeps those of us who don’t thrash around when we’re asleep immobile. If you happen to become or remain partly conscious while you’re paralyzed, things can get weird. For one thing, you’re paralyzed, and any attempt to move may result in a sense of astral projection - but real problem is that people tend to sense a presence in the room. Hence you get succubi, incubi, old hags sitting on your chest, aliens experimenting on you and the like. Because you’re conscious, it all seems very, very real, though technically it’s classed as a hypnagogic (when falling asleep) or hypnapompic (when waking up) hallucination.
Here are some sleep paralysis links:
I don’t usually hallucinate anything - I just can’t move. It tends to happen when I take a nap in the middle of the day…which I may be doing now, since this entry is spam in a can.