Greetings, Fellow Sagittarians

If you have a distorted brain like mine, you've probably wondered about the angle on which the Milky Way cuts across the sky. It's just all wrong.

The Moon orbits the Earth around the equator. Both north poles point roughly in the same direction. In like manner, the Earth orbits the Sun around its equator and, again, both north poles point in roughly the same direction. But neither the Sun nor the Earth are in-line with plane of the Milky Way.

And the question is, why?

The answer is quite astounding...

Over the past couple of billion years, the Milky Way has been devouring a near-by dwarf galaxy we have come to call Sagittarius. The process of colliding galaxies is quite complex and, if you have Ubuntu, quite spectacular (as Ubuntu includes a screen saver that shows you the interactions of colliding stars graphically).

We've always thought of our sun as forming on the spiral arm of the Milky Way. But the reality is, our sun formed from the fragmented ruins of the Sagittarian dwarf as it collided with Milky Way. Rather than being a part of a spiral arm, we're thundering through a spiral arm of the Milky Way. Our Solar System is punching a hole in the spiral arm, passing through it like a bullet (which is not a bad analogy given the phenomenal speed our Sun is moving at).


And the evidence, the proof, has been staring us in the face each night as we've gazed up at the Milky Way. Rather than being on the same plane as our host galaxy, we're passing through at roughly 60 degrees.


Surprised? Find this incredulous? Unbelievable? Remember, all truths start out as heresies...

Curious? You can read more about this from these links...

ABC Science
The Solar System's direction of travel
We Are Not From Here

Contribute to Cutting Edge Astronomy

Want to be part of genuine astronomical research? Now's your chance. Computer operated machines have photographed more than a million galaxies (or galaxy candidates). But the human mind is still far superior to computers at pattern recognition. And even if you teach a computer to recognise a spiral or eliptical galaxy, the computer would still fail to recognise anything really unusual or new. The scientists themselves are going nuts trying to classify this many photographs, so they've asked for help.

You can be the first human to set eyes upon a distant galaxy - be the first to classify it!
Here's one I classified as a clockwise (from an observer in the Milky Way) spiral galaxy. I feel 80% sure. If you can do better, then you need to sign up quick! Right now I'm the best they've got!

On the web site, you set up a user-name. Then do a five minute tutorial in galaxy categorisation at the required level. Then do a quick test. If you get 8 out of 10, you can contribute. Perfect for a lunch break. Have a go!

Leaving the Seat Up or Down

Careless of lowering the tone of this blog - the following insight affects us all.

Everyone knows you should leave the toilet seat down after use - except for men who need it up. Surely, if a woman in the household has just gone (stay with me here) this increases the likelihood of a man being next. Quite complicated, really. In fact, the true cost of either strategy (up or down) depends on the constituency affected and the probable reactions of said parties.

At any rate, many would agree that certain people need some decision-making help in this thorny field.
Thankfully, with the deft use of game theory, The Science Creative Quarterly mathematically modeled the cost to John or Marsha.

Please print off the above table as a ready-reference to post in shared convenience facilities.

Space Sounds

Although sound can't travel in space, this site has some intriguing "sounds" captured by space craft. In particular, I got a kick out of the "noise" generated by Jupiter's magnetic field and the sound of dust particles striking the antenna of Voyager II as she passed through the rings of Saturn. Oh, don't forget to check out the Lion's Roar on Earth...

Check out spacesounds

Why are scientists atheists?

Why are scientists so dead-set against the concept of God?

They say, "we can't test the theory." But you can't test the string theory either, and you don't see mass revolts against that. There's absolutely no proof for the existence of Dark Matter except that we have a hole in our gravitational calculations and it just so happens that Dark Matter is a convenient way of filling that hole. Occam's Razor would suggest that when 99% of the universe has to be made up of Dark Matter for the our equations to return a result close to what we see around us, it's the equations that are wrong. Dark Matter is fairy dust.

Interestingly, if you adopt the fractal universe and the influence of electromagnetic radiation on large scale structures of the universe, the "need" for Dark Matter to make the equations work disappears... To my mind, the observational evidence for a fractal universe and the elimination of fairy dust are the two strongest reasons to consider fractals. But... that strays from the point.

Science has always been at the cutting edge of suggesting things it cannot prove or substantiate. It took almost a decade before anyone was able to find any conclusive proof about relativity and, even then, some of Einstein's predictions weren't properly tested until the late 1990s, almost a century after they were made. So I don't buy this, "I don't believe in God because I can't test Him" argument.

I love the image associated with this post. It shows the distribution of galaxies through space. The solid green curve you can see is the Great Sloan Wall. A hundred years ago, an image like this was unimaginable. Erwin Hubble would be astounded at how far we have come in such a short period of time.

So why do scientists feel threatened by the existence of God?

Artificial Intellegence

Do you trust the machine? An intriguing story at Wired tells of a web service providing bankruptcy paperwork.

A web-based "expert system" that helped users prepare bankruptcy filings for a fee made too many decisions to be considered a clerical tool, an appeals court said last week, ruling that the software was effectively practicing law without a license.

First I laughed, but this has huge implications for not-too-distant future technology.

Reynoso entered his personal information, debts, income, assets and other data into a series of dialog boxes, and the program generated a complete set of bankruptcy forms, including an affidavit for Reynoso to sign claiming he'd done all the legal research on his own.

Fair enough! He did do the research - in a manner of speaking. If he had done his research in books he would still be taking the word of the authors. If he printed pages from the web he could be said to be "doing his own research". The affidavit was an attempt (albeit a failure in this case) to make the user take responsibility for the results.

The problem here arose because of an error in the paperwork and the affidavit was apparently inadequate. But this is very early days, software will improve. Some legal advice is fairly simple and a reasonable short term target for AI software. The same can be said for financial advice.

If I need to decide whether a certain level of mortgage is manageable, or whether to pursue a libel case, there are undoubtedly some rules-of-thumb. Answering a few questions ought to give me some guidance.
Perhaps:
Proposed mortgage in described circumstances constitutes: Extreme Risk!
Consider 20% reduction in mortgage level for Moderate Risk.
or:
Libel case success probability: 30%
Libel case failure probability: 70%

Now if I'm choosing between paying £150 for 5 minutes with a lawyer looking down his nose at my small-beer proposal, or paying £5 for consultancy from software that can trawl a database of a million similar cases, the software sounds like a good start. Sure the software can miss things, but so could the expensive lawyer.

A little further down the road - how long before NHS Direct uses some Artificial Intelligence triage? Of course there will be an outcry when it's first suggested, but it will come.

And I think people will want it. How many of us have already walked into the GP's surgery with a fist full of printed web pages filled with possible diagnoses and courses of treatment. We may have used a search engine to find page. Soon we may try a medical search engine - perhaps a search on a symptom database. Perhaps we'll select a category, narrow down the search, answer a couple of questions and view a list of probable conditions. Then who did the research?

Who will take professional responsibility for recommendations made by this software? In the bankruptcy case, the web site maintainer is held responsible. He was ordered to withdraw the service and pay back the fees. This seems straight-forward at first. But web technology isn't bound like that. The site (or something similar) will pop up again, perhaps hosted in a less regulated country. Ultimately, the user will be responsible for the advice he follows.

And what happens when the software is sophisticated enough to amend itself, or to update it's own research database? Then the software will write new software - a generation removed from human authors!

Science fiction authors have been thinking about this for decades. We'd better all start thinking about it. It's here.

And now for something completely different... a fractal universe...

The thing I love about science is it never stops thinking... Just when you though it was save to go back in the water along comes Jaws, or at least, the scientific equivalent of it.

I'm no scientist, but I love the simplicity of design. To my mind, the Big Bang never made sense, and not because I believe in the Creator, but because it is contrary to experience. Order never follows chaos.

So it is interesting to see the emergence of the fractal universe theory. To me, at least, it seems to hold true because it extends a simple concept found all around us in nature. So that the same holds true at the macro level of the universe is no surprise. The real surprise will be if the scientific community is open minded enough to embrace this dynamic concept and take it further.

Check it out for yourself

Killer Vitamins

I've said before, I choose health studies like I choose my shoes. They've got to support what I wanted to do anyway, and cost me next to nothing.

So I'm delighted to report the latest study showing that vitamin supplements shorten life!

Now I can stay out of those damned health food shops where the staff always look so acned and emaciated that I'm hoping they didn't handle my £10 jar of echinacea (or some shit that some kook said would fix some ill I didn't know I had).

Aliens?

Why are Christians (especially) threatened by the possible existence of aliens?

Why can't there be life on other planets?

I've been recently reviewing such
astronomical details as The Great 
Attractor and the Sloan Great Wall,
things that just baffle the mind for 
their sheer size. If the known
universe (and The Great Attractor is 
unknown, we can see its gravitational effect, how it is attracting our 
galaxy at a phenomenal rate, but we have no idea what it is, while the 
Sloan Great Wall is probably only a small portion of the actual wall), 
but if the known universe was the size of the earth, pick up a grain of 
sand and look at it. That's still larger than our entire galaxy! Let 
alone our solar system or the Earth itself. We are a really, really, 
really small part of this universe.

For those of you that are Christians, think Psalm 8:3-4

I think most people would agree with the definition of an alien being a 
lifeform that does not originate from Earth. In that regard, the Bible 
is full of aliens. Think angels, devil spirits, cherubim, seraphim, etc.

OK, sure, these are all classes of spirit beings, not physical beings. 
But they're alive and they do not originate from the earth. Why does 
life have to be limited to just the physical realm. That's all we can 
investigate at the moment, but pause to remember, 100 years ago a 
wireless connection would have been witchcraft, flying to the moon was 
considered a flight of pure fantasy. Now days, no one blinks an eye at 
these concepts.

Is it egotistical on our part to assume or to insist that we are the 
sole intelligent inhabitants of this universe? Why couldn't God create 
life in some other galaxy (there's certainly plenty of them) or even in 
this one? It's His prerogative, not ours. Who are we to insist He 
couldn't have done that?

Deuteronomy 29:29 says the secret things belong unto the Lord our God. 
Perhaps the Bible is just silent on the subject and we've misread 
silence as a declaration of exclusivity on mankind's part. Perhaps He's 
taking the US nuclear warship policy, refusing to either confirm or deny.

Perhaps one day ET will return our long distance call... It would 
certainly lead to some very interesting conversations and comparisons 
between the development, culture, intellectual and religious paradigms 
of two previously isolated worlds... Rather than feeling threated, I 
think it would be fun. There would be a lot we could learn. Perhaps 
we'll be surprised by how different "they" are. But, given that the laws 
of science are universally applicable, perhaps we'll be even more 
surprised by just how much we share in common. And in the meantime, 
there's always Hollywood to stir the imagination :)

Science and Fashion

I've long felt that popular science is as subject to whim as any other fashion. Studies come and go - especially relating to health. Just pick the ones you like, and ignore the rest until they pass out of vogue.

Here's one for tea drinkers. A cuppa protects against heart disease and cancer!

And don't forget to finish up with an ale for long life!

Drinking for Longevity

I've always thought you should pick your health studies by how much you like the conclusions (and never read the small-print). There are always a few around that extol the virtues of tobacco, coffee and chocolate.

Here's a study that says drinkers live longer.