From here on, this blog will be friends-only. I may or may not delete or hide existing public entries - there are tons of them - but I doubt I'll write anymore. So if you're a lurker whom I have not already added, comment and I'll consider adding you so you can read my stuff.

Poll #1457192 The End of White People
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 8

How do you think we white people, the brutal scourges of the planet, the evil empire, will get what we've got coming - the end of our civilization, if not our whole race?

Note that pretty much all these answers can be found in science fiction.

From the beginning, it was no contest.

The winner is, the one (that was once four) and only,

MACSJ0717

apperception came up with this idea way back when I first started the Dancing with the Galaxies polls. I liked the idea and the name, but I didn't want to do it in the midst of the DWTG series. But now that DWTG is long since over, it's time. This time, there will only be one poll, because I could find only four real-life galaxy cluster collision images.

The winner (if one emerges) may become an avatar of mine, but probably not the default.

Poll #1407192 Clusterfuck
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

Which is the most beautiful galaxy cluster collision?

The contestants are:

MACSJ0717 (the inspiration for the poll)


1e0657-56, the Bullet Cluster


Abell 521


MACSJ0025.4-1222

You can still vote if you want, but ESO 593-8 has a solid lead - 5 votes compared to 2 for each of the others - and I don't expect more than about 2 or 3 more votes to trickle in before tomorrow morning anyway.

So...my new default avatar will be ESO 593-8.



Thanks to all who voted.

So here it is, the finals round of DWTG. The three winners from the 7-galaxy episodes will face off against each other for the title of best intergalactic dancers and my default avatar.

Poll #1401741 Dancing with the Galaxies Finals
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 9

Which mean pair of galaxies has the hottest moves of all the winners?

The contestants:
Episode 1 Winner, Arp 147, the Ring Thing:


Episode 2 Winner, ESO 593-8, the Right Stuff:


Episode 3 "Winner," UGC 8335, Holding Hands:

Well...this time there's a 4-way tie.

UGC 12914 & 12915: 2 votes
AM 1316-241: 2 votes
Arp 82: 2 votes
NGC 4567 & 4568: 0 votes
UGC 3395 & 3396: 0 votes
NGC 5754 & 5752: 1 vote
UGC 8335: 2 votes

So I get to decide the winner among the four pairs with the highest numbers of votes.

And, voting on "dancing" style (the details of the interaction itself) rather than "clothing" style (pretty colors), I'm gonna have to give it to UGC 8335. I think I remember it taking an early lead anyway.



Next: the finals round. I will not close the Finals poll, and I will leave the results viewable to all, but I will declare a winner by Thursday morning and change my default avatar accordingly.

This will be the second to last interacting galaxy poll - the last poll will be a finals round with only 3 galaxies.

Check out the results from Episode 2 if you want, and then get voting.

Polls close Monday morning.

Poll #1399635 Dancing with the Galaxies, Episode 3
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 8

Pick your favorite of the last set of 7 interacting galaxy pairs.

Contestant line-up:

UGC 12914 & 12915 (SOFIA/USRA)


AM 1316-241 (NASA/Hubble)


Arp 82 (NASA/Spitzer)


NGC 4567 & 4568 (Caltech/Palomar)


NGC 3395 & 3396 (Sloan Digital Sky Survey)


NGC 5754 & 5752 (NASA/Hubble)


UGC 8335 (Hubble)

NGC 5394 & 5395: 1 vote
Arp 194: 4 votes
NGC 1531 & 1532: 0 votes
NGC 6240: 0 votes
Arp 148: 2 votes
NGC 6670: 0 votes
ESO 593-8: 5 votes

The winner is...ESO 593-8! A fine choice.

Where else can you get approximately 10 billion times the star power of "Dancing with the Stars?"

You know the drill. Answer the poll. Split the vote if you can't pick just one favorite.

EDIT: The poll is now closed. Please vote in Episode 3.

Oh, and check out Episode 1 Results if you haven't already.

Poll #1397860 Dancing with the Galaxies, Episode 2
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 11

Which of the second set of seven star-studded galaxy pairs has the hottest moves?

The contestants for Episode 2 are:

NGC 5394 & 5395 (Faulkes telescope):


Arp 194 (Hubble, featured in NatGeo):


NGC 1531 & 1532 (Hubble):


NGC 6240 (Hubble):


Arp 148 (Hubble):


NGC 6670 (Hubble):


ESO 593-8 (NASA/Hubble):

After filling in the votes of the people who didn't re-vote in the public poll, here's my final count for Round 1:

Votes from people who split their vote are counted in full, 'cause, that's what the LJ poll does, and it's simpler.

The Mice: 1 vote
Arp 147: 4 votes
M51: 3 votes
The Antennae: 0 votes
Arp 272: 2 votes
NGC 2207 & IC 2163: 3 votes
Arp 87: 3 votes

The winner is...Arp 147!



If there had been a tie between this pair and another, this would be the pair I chose to win in the tie anyway.

So...Round 2 is imminent. I already have the poll made and the contestants lined up. It'll likely be revealed before you read this post.

Since this was getting very few votes as a friends-only thing, I decided to make it public so people on my f-list can invite people not on my f-list to vote. Detailed results are viewable to only me.

For those new to this: Stars are boring featureless balls of plasma (or in the case of figurative stars, plastic surgery and Botox), so why not dance with the galaxies instead? I have 7 beautiful interacting pairs of galaxies depicted below, and I want you to vote on your favorite galaxy dance. There will be two more episodes of this with 7 more galaxy pairs each, and then a finals round where you get to pick among the winners from each of the three previous rounds. The grand champion galaxy pair will become my default avatar, and the runners-up will also become avatars (if they're not already).

Rules:
-Pick your favorite galaxy pair. It's okay to split your vote if you can't choose a favorite.
-The original friends-only poll is now closed, and the entry will be privatized. If you voted on the friends-only version and don't revote, I'll add your vote to the grand totals.
-The polls will be open 'til Monday morning when I get up.
-My own vote will be used only as a tie-breaker in the event of a tie.

Poll #1396836 Dancing with the Galaxies, Episode 1, Public Version
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 13

Which of these stylish seven is the meanest pair of interacting galaxies?

The contestants for Episode 1 (click for larger images):

The Mice (Hubble)


Arp 147 Pair (Hubble)


M51 Pair (Hubble, Astronomy Picture of the Day)


The Antennae (Hubble + ground-based B&W image)


Arp 272 Pair (Hubble)


NGC 2207 & IC 2163 (Hubble)


Arp 87 Pair (NASA/Hubble, featured in NatGeo)

A disturbing story of the current state of conservative Christianity proves that "respect for life" is a misnomer. It goes like this: A man in Brazil rapes his 9-year-old barely-pubescent tween stepdaughter and impregnates her with twins. The mother arranges with doctors to abort the fetuses, under Brazil's legal exceptions to its abortion ban for both rape and the health of the mother. (The girl's body has not developed the proper size and shape to be likely to give full-term healthy birth to even one baby, no less two at once, without some serious risk to the parent and the offspring.) But the local leadership of the Catholic Church deemed this situation an unacceptable excuse for an abortion: the kid could have a C-section to deliver her babies if she's not able to give birth vaginally. So they excommunicate the mother and the doctors...but not the child because they do know she was in quite a bind...and, so they say, not the rapist stepfather because while rape is a sin, it's a lesser sin than murder.

However, in the thread I linked above, some people were saying that automatic, public excommunication would not be warranted even in most (born-person) murder cases.

I'm not sure if this is true...but if it is, let's think about it a bit.

Why would the murder of a fetus be worse than the murder of an adult?

Because the fetus is an innocent, perhaps?

Well, I'm no expert and do not know current Catholic doctrine, but based on what I was taught by the church 15 years ago during my brief experience with Catholicism, a fetus is NOT an innocent.

See, according to Catholic doctrine as I was taught 15 years ago, all humans inherit original sin from their parents, which they ultimately got from Adam and Eve, in whom sin was encoded in the very flesh and blood like DNA once they ate that infamous apple. This is why Mary, Mother of God (and by some accounts also a pubescent youth), had to have been created via a miraculous Immaculate Conception herself (which, btw, refers not to Jesus' conception by God, but Mary's conception free from original sin): because otherwise, she would have passed on original sin to the Son of God through her tainted egg cell. The child who is not destined to be the Mother of God or the Son of God, however, is conceived with original sin, and gets no redemption from this until baptism, or going through purgatory like any other person who died with the burden of forgivable sin that still needs to be repented.

Yes, even the zygote conceived by pious, married Catholic parents trying for a child, which happens to fail to implant like about half of all zygotes do and is shed in a normal period over which the desperate would-be mother cries, has to hash it out in purgatory even though it never lived to be more than a 2-week-old brainless blastocyst and never had a chance at baptism. We cannot be innocents until the Church intervenes on God's behalf via baptism, or we have repented in Purgatory.

So what, then, is left to justify considering the deliberate slaughter of a fetus an unforgivable sin while the deliberate slaughter of an adult sinner is potentially forgivable?

If sinners are sinners, and have to go through purgatory as long as they have sin in their hearts...then the only things left are degree of sinfulness, which I'm not sure would hold much water as you could potentially find an adult who was as innocent as an adult could be, fresh off of repentance; and, IMO the more likely justification, the conservative Christian agenda of imposing neo-Victorian "You Play, You Pay" sexual morality on women. Even if the woman did not play (i.e. did not consent)...just in case a woman who did play/consent thinks she might get away with it.

It's not about respect for life. If it were, there would probably be more publicity about excommunications for murder of born persons.

Treating culture and biology as two entirely separate and opposing forces is typical of the way we Westerners think. It tends to be very much a viewpoint held by readers of popular science, especially popular science of the mind.

I've read quite a bit of that popular science, and it made a lot of sense to me. From the more conservative side, there was a strong emphasis on how the mind isn't separate from nature, and that there may be many things that the human mind has adapted to learn extra-easily compared to some other things - e.g., learning to fear snakes and spiders more easily than learning to fear, say, a broken mirror as a sign of bad luck. And there are a few basic survival instincts, as well as the groundworks for basic emotions.

Some people take this to mean that a huge part of how we are is innate, and therefore, it's futile to try too hard to change a whole lot with culture...and therefore, it's wise to keep culture more or less the way it is simply because you can't do much better with human nature. We can "suppress" our biology, but we can't change it, they say.

Well...I agree that biology is not separate from the mind. I agree that nature has honed us to be able to survive.

And a crucial and powerful part of that honing is our ability to learn, share information, and ultimately, create culture. Our brains were wired to rewire themselves. That's what all that cortical tissue is there for, and the cerebellar tissue to store the results of previous kinesthetic learning, and other parts of the brain that code memories, and correlate emotions with memories. Of all the instincts that small children are born with, one of the most powerful is that child's instinct to learn.

It's the same brain material, working on and through and as part of the same body, with the same electricity, generated by the same atoms and molecules, supported by the same heat, with perhaps an even higher level of organization we can't scientifically describe yet, that underlies anything we might be born with and anything we might pick up along the way. The genes also get their cues to turn on and off from the environment, further complicating the mix. If we can be aware of our instincts in action, instincts are not a totally separate beast from what we've learned and from the function of awareness itself. If we can "suppress" or even redirect the expression of instincts, then it's even less separate. Our biology makes learning possible, and the results of this learning interact with, and often override, the rest of our biology.

Sure, there are studies that show that identical twins will have about 50% similar mental traits (intellectual skills, mental disabilities, and personality quirks) whether raised in the same house or in separate houses...but most of these twins were raised in the same or not-to-wildly-different overall cultures. But no two people have the exact same formative experiences, from which they learn, even if they have the same 46 chromosomes and grew up in the same home...and hell, even if they shared part or most of their bodies and even parts of their brain tissue as do conjoined twins (who are always identical twins). And furthermore, it's possible that these studies took pretty much everything that tended to be more or less constant within the culture in which the twins were raised for granted, so even the control group of similar-aged foster and adoptive siblings raised together who supposedly "had nothing in common" probably had a hell of a lot more in common that those tests overlooked, because those common traits were a result of their shared (usually USAmerican) culture.

And, in spite of the arguments of evolutionary psychology, I think that one of the most profound examples of how culture and learning are a powerful biological force is in the cultural variations in sexual attraction. Now, your average popular evolutionary psych fan will contend that all sexually mature straight people are attracted to healthy, fertile (meaning pubescent to early middle age or so, with a preference for mid or late adolescence to young adulthood) members of the opposite sex, and that all people in general are attracted to symmetric features - I've even heard "physically average." (Compared to what that person grew up seeing, presumably.) But an obvious look at cultural beauty standards defies this notion. In thousands of cultures, for thousands of years, extreme and effort-requiring variations, even to the point of gross deformity that reduces the health of the individual, have been sexually fetishized. In medieval Europe, this was being fat and pasty, because only the richest could afford to spend all their time indoors eating all they want and then some. In the modern US, it's being skinny (but with big boobs for women - an extremely rare build to have a natural tendency toward, although a few do) and tan, because generally only the richest can afford to lie around in tanning salons and deplete their energy reserves with semistarvation diets and chronic exercise. In ancient China, it was artificially shrunken and deformed feet, which only the richest could do because poor women had to work; in a tribe popularized on TV, it's artificially stretched and deformed necks (ok, just looked it up, it's actually compressed torsos), which all women of the tribe attempted to do, and though I'm not sure on this one, I wouldn't be surprised if the richest stretched theirs the most. If natural-mean-of-the-tribe symmetry and physical health are the universal beauty standards, NONE of these things would be considered beautiful. Yet, all of these things have been considered MORE beautiful than the natural mean of the tribe. Why? Because culture and learning have redirected the human libido away from the symbols of general health, fertility, and well-being and toward these grossly distorted status symbols. If the libido were not so subject to the biological force of learned information, these distortions would repel rather than attract potential high-status mates.

(Oh yes...and an awful lot of these status-conferring distortions I've heard of are done primarily to women, although men may also distort themselves with things like tattoos and piercings...but so much for "men want good looks and women want status.")

Yes, there are animals in which these status-symbol distortions are built-in by instinct, but humans are not one of those animals. The human instinct to survive and thrive must be supplemented by learning what will help it survive and thrive, and if that means marrying a grossly-distorted but well-provisioned individual, that's what they do. Beyond that, they even learn to find these distorted individuals ultra-sexy, rather than being instinctively repulsed by the trade-off. All because the human innate tendency to learn, and its fruits, are a powerful force working through the very same biology through which all the innate stuff works.

There is no ghost in the machine - I agree with Gilbert Ryle and Steven Pinker on that one. But humans, if you think of us as machines (rather than believing in monism from the "everything is ghosts" side, and I wouldn't be surprised if at the most fundamental level of physical nature yet to be discovered, it would be almost arbitrary whether you call it ectoplasm or matter, since you already start to see a little bit of that with the nonlocality and interconnectedness of quantum "particles"), are not simple pre-programmed robots. Nor are we some mixture of a simple pre-programmed robot with some separate learning function. The pre-programmed instincts that affect outward behavior, the learned information, and the facilities that allow further learning are intricately interwoven into one unified "machine." Learning and culture are biological. They are realized and maintained through the substance of human beings. Yes, we also store some of this information on paper, laser disks, and magnetic disks, but this information is only realized in its full glory through human machines, and cannot be created without them (intelligent space aliens aside...I happen to believe we have never been visited by such beings and probably never will be. In any case, culture is still born from life, depends on life to manifest, and will die with the end of all life.)

Yes, Steven Pinker and like-minded folks, there's something called human nature. And learning in general and the creation of culture in particular are a huge part of it, every bit as biologically based and every bit as natural as anything else we are born with or born to develop. It could be accidental, but accidental isn't unnatural...and I highly doubt it's accidental, because chimps, bonobos, and even sea otters seem to also be capable of some degree of learning-based culture.

Nice speech, Barry.

Let's see if you deliver.

"Friend to all nations" - I'll believe it when I see it.

But you tempered your optimism more than I'd expect from the average American at this point, and didn't say anything ridiculous. Neither did the infamous Warren. (I think he knew better.)

Not bad. But it's only the beginning of a lot of cleaning up that needs to be done.

Bushisms. "Stealing" the election. 9/11. Iraq. Gitmo. The "Axis of Evil." Looking like a chimpanzee. A bad economy. You know...all the obvious things. He probably WON'T be remembered for his role in fighting birth control.

Another rare public post. 'Cause we need to talk about this.

I wanted to comment on this post at Womanist Musings (a black Canadian feminist's sociopolitical blog), but my attempts to comment there haven't been working lately. I'm not sure why. But here's what I wanted to say:

There are a few things I've noticed about white people and discussions of race, based on my readings of blogs and my discussion of race with my sisters (we're all white):

1) For many white people, if you dare even say the word "racism," you're called out as a racist, regardless of the context in which you say the word.

2) Related to #1, white people tend to feel that serious rants about race issues (brought up by non-whites) are "divisive."

3) As I've been reading on "Stuff White People Do," white people cannot appreciate discussions of race issues much of the time unless they are served up with humor.

4) White people are more likely to listen to other white people on matters of race...kinda like that thing where feminism is given more legitimacy if a man says it.

#4 is easy. We just need more white anti-racists.

As for #2 and #3, that's tougher. Those issues exist because, as the author of the above-linked post suggests, we have something to lose: we instinctively understand that it would absolutely suck to trade places with Blacks and Hispanics and be the oppressed minority. That's why so many people are afraid of the mass immigrations from Mexico...or of "Them" ruling the country. On this matter, I tend to be more of a blissful optimist...that in the long run, everyone could be "normal" and accepted as a fully integrated member of society. What we have to gain is to feel comfortable around everyone who shares much of our lot in life, regardless of how pale their skin is, or how long and skinny their noses are, or how round their eyes are, or how not-too-curly-not-too-straight their hair is, or even, when you can't make these traditional physical distinctions all that clearly, what language they or their ancestors speak or what prayers they say to (the same *#!@ing) God. Perhaps this is naive, but it's why I support anti-racism. Everyone would benefit from equality. Just as they say about sexism, with the "patriarchy hurts men" line. Racism hurts whites. And not just because blacks, Hispanics, and some Asians, South Asians, and Indigenous peoples are angry at them. It hurts us because it makes us closet jerks, and feeling guilty about it, but not knowing what to do about it. It hurts us because it allows our rich people to shaft both us and our neighbors by making us scared of our neighbors.

I'm going to make this public, 'cause I think it's something for the public to know.

So let's be real about black holes, shall we?

The LHC would produce collisions at a maximum energy of 1,150 tera-electron-volts - this is for collisions between two lead ions. I'm not sure if this is the total energy of both or if each has this energy. But let's assume the latter, for a worst-case scenario. That sounds big, but an electron volt is 1.6 x 10^-19 Joules - two ten-quintillionths of a four-thousandth of a single food calorie. Converted to mass, 1150 TeV is a dinky 2 x 10^-21 kg. Double that and you have 4 x 10^-21 kg. Even if you factor in the rest masses of the two lead ions. Four quintillionths of a gram. That's lighter than a virus. The Schwarzschild radius for this 2300 TeV black hole is 6 x 10^-48 meters. That's over a trillion times smaller than the Planck Length, the hypothetical scale for the unification of gravity with the other three forces. For comparison, an atomic nucleus has a size of about 10^-15 m, and a whole atom is 10,000 times bigger than that.

And even if such a black hole can exist, there's something called Hawking radiation that would blow these tiny little suckers apart before they'd get a chance to suck anything in. The time it would take for a black hole of LHC-collision mass to evaporate is about 6 x 10^-78 seconds. The thing would practically never have existed! And the energy it releases is only about one ten-millionth of a food calorie.

Ok. So that's something to shake a stick at. And the stick would barely feel the heat. But what about the best subatomic-particle-accelerating technology known to the human race: Mother Nature?

Well, the "MNC" (Mother Nature Collider) can produce cosmic rays - subatomic particles - with energies up to the kinetic energy of a fastball, or 10^20 electron-volts. That's about 100,000 times more energy than the LHC. Two of these "cosmic baseballs" colliding could produce a microscopic black hole of mass 3.6 x 10^-16 kilograms. That's around the mass of a bacterium. Its Schwarzschild radius would be a miniscule 5.3 x 10^-43 meters, or a few hundred-millionths of the Planck length. It would last a measly 3.8 x 10^-63 seconds, and explode with a force of...get this...8 small calories, or around a hundredth of a food calorie. It's less dangerous than a can of Pepsi One.

That's still something to shake a stick at, although the stick would warm up by a few degrees. Big bleepin' whoop. And the LHC can't even create particles of that kind of energy.

But let's say, somehow, we outdid nature by untold orders of magnitude and the LHC could produce a black hole the mass of a person. Let's say the mass of a person is 75 kg. That would produce a black hole with a Schwarzschild radius of 1.11 x 10^-25 meters, or 10 billion times smaller than the size of an atomic nucleus. Its Hawking radiation evaporation time would be about 3.5 x 10^-11 seconds - a few hundredths of a nanosecond. Hardly enough time to run into those extremely-far-apart-by-its-standards atomic nuclei and snowball into a monster that will eat the bleepin' earth. But it would explode with the force of 16 one-hundred-megaton nuclear bombs, destroying the LHC and most of what's in its vicinity. No one would live to tell the tale of what happened. But we could guess it was a human-mass black hole by its effects, assuming we can rule out a fairly small meteorite crash or some enemy of the LHC dropping 16 nuclear bombs on the complex all at once.

Hell, if you produced a black hole the mass of a blue whale - 200,000 kilograms - it would only be three thousand times bigger, which is still a few tens of millionths of the size of an atomic nucleus, and would last about 2/3 of a second - not enough time to accumulate much mass and suck up the earth. It would probably not encounter a single electron or nucleus in that time. Although, when that black hole blew up, it would release the equivalent energy of 43,000 one-hundred-megaton nuclear bombs, which, fair enough, probably could destroy the world as we know it. Maybe not blow up the entire Earth, but eradicate all but the hardiest life forms.

But the mass of a blue whale is, oh, about a sextillion cosmic baseballs or 50 septillion typical LHC collisions.

In any case, we do not have the technology to accelerate atoms to the point where they would collide to create the mass of a blue whale, or even a person.

And if we could, it would most likely destroy the world not by sucking the Earth in, but by exploding due to its Hawking radiation.