Lee’s random thoughts

Among the many electronic newsletters on various subjects that end up in my inbox, the ones that I always glance at least briefly, are the astronomy-related ones.

Together with regular “clicks” to visit links via the places like the Astronomy Picture of the Day and numerous newsfeeds, the newsletters from NASA, JPL, Space.com, astronomynow.com, the Planetary Society and various astronomy clubs & societies around the world are very useful to keep up to date with relevant developments.

Read the rest of “The best is yet to come” »

The FIFA World Cup sure is interesting. My early prediction was that Argentina has the best chance to take the Cup, with their closest competitors being Brazil, Spain, Portugal and dark horse the Netherlands. In the meanwhile I was glad that both the US and UK made it to the next round, since I have many friends in both those countries.  But Argentina and Brazil are gone, and so has Portugal.  In the end it is Spain (at least I was right there!) and the dark horse remaining

Bafana Bafana ended their campaign with honour, beating the French 2-1 but sadly did not get through to the next round. Apart from SA, my two sentimental favourites were Switzerland and Spain (two countries where I lived).

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It has been in the headlines for so long that one can almost not remember what it felt like without the FIFA World Cup dominating just about everything else in South Africa as far as hot topics are concerned.

For very many it is truly a dream come true. Some couldn’t really care less about sport in general and football in particular, or about large events involving big crowds. Many worry about the real economic impact the World Cup will have on the South African economy. 

Read the rest of “The FIFA World Cup 2010 - yes, it is here” »

25 May is a special day in the lives of fans of the work of Douglas Adams (1952-2001). Since I am one of those fans, I’m indulging in ponderings about his writings which, as I have discovered over the years, are close to the hearts of many of my friends and acquaintances as well.

I am not aware of many other authors who have a special commemorative day that is celebrated all over the world. But on Towel Day, the annual celebration on 25 May, Adams fans around the world – and presumably the rest of the universe - proudly carry a towel in his honour. If you forgot to do so this year, then there are about 360 days left to plan your outfit (plaid dressing gown and slippers are strongly advised) and get your towel laundered.

Read the rest of “The restaurant at the end of the Universe does not close in 2012…” »

Recently I was contemplating the significance of Earth Day (22 April) and asked people on one of my websites what they thought of as the main candidates as the “greatest threat to Earth”. The answers included global warming (and related factors such as the ice caps melting and major coral reefs and forests dying), over-population, the lack of (or limited use of) renewable energy resources, a strike by a major asteroid or comet, some other major event in the Solar System, a nearby supernova and of course also the Sun.

My original question had been a bit misleading, because I wanted to see to what extent people equate the future of the planet with the future of life on Earth, and specifically the future of the human race.  It is natural that we see the universe from the one point of view with which we can identify– the human perspective.

Read the rest of “The greatest threat?” »

I thought it might be worthwhile copying part of a discussion conducted over the past few days and started on Facebook by my friend Mixael.  It had to do with man’s place in the cosmos. 

You can read the whole thing here.

I’ll start with where I joined the conversation, which had been going on for a while:

“I think of it from a somewhat different point of view - one that says we have to be careful not to define our planet, solar system etc in terms of a human-tainted pair of glasses.

Read the rest of “… and pondering man’s place in the cosmos” »

Herewith my “starlit ponderings” for March:

The long summer nights in the Cape also mean many evenings with clear skies for skygazing. The area around Orion dominates the view all summer and this year it has been particularly rewarding to follow the movement of the beautiful reddish glowing planet Mars nearby.

But what I find even more exciting is the view to the South, where the beautiful Southern jewels invite you to inspect them more closely. Provided you have escaped the worst of the city lights, that view to the South also includes the two Magellanic Clouds with the popular attractions of sights such as the Tarantula Nebula (NGC 2070) in the LMC or the beautiful globular cluster NGC 104 (47 Tucanae).

Read the rest of “Starlit ponderings - March 2010″ »

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”  - Alphonse Karr

Today’s picture is a bit of Photoshop cheat/fun with a simple still life picture I took a few days ago.  I liked the end result.

With very few exceptions I don’t like politicians.  So, when my guru-on-so-many things has this to say, let me share it with my friends: 

“Der Staat ist für die Menschen da, und nicht die Menschen für den Staat…” - Albert Einstein

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Today’s picture is of Ganymede in the bath - with Io looking on.  The perspective makes them seem equal in size, but in reality Io is much smaller than Ganymede.  She adores him and is always curious about his movements.  He, in turn, loves bathrooms, being made a fuss of, Callisto, adventures in the form of walks around our small housing development,  food  (of course!) and knowing where I am.  In the beginning he actively disliked Io to the point of swatting her whenever she came near.  Now he does that only on occasion and they often play outside together.

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 You might remember that the fireball seen in the Northern parts of the country late last year prompted me to ponder about our fragile planet being hit by objects from space. However, it also made me think about the thrill and lasting impressions of some fleeting moments relating to astronomy.

There is the “everyday” beauty of moments of unexpected delight: a full moon that suddenly rises from behind buildings or a mountain like a butter-coloured yellow balloon against a navy-blue early evening sky.  Or the pleasant surprise of looking up from the centre of a light-polluted city (actually in this case from a friend’s house less than a kilometre away from the new Cape Town soccer stadium in Greenpoint) on a very clear evening  - and realising that I could easily count six of the Seven Sisters in the Pleiades.  Or watching the stars pop out one by one as you sit at the beachfront and having a stranger come up to you to ask if they may borrow your binoculars for a moment to look at Jupiter.

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The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science - Albert Einstein

Phew - SA should have won 3 but England’s fighting spirit deprived the Proteas of that achievement.

“The reality is that we could not land the knockout punch on two occasions. But I don’t feel it was a miscarriage of justice that we did not win the series,” said Graeme Smith afterwards. 

Although Swann was a deserved (shared) winner of the Man of the Series award, I might have liked to see Collingwood as one of the guys sharing the MOS - he did more or less what Atherton did years ago… battle it out superbly.  I was at the Wanderers when Athers played that wonderful innings that drove the Proteas (and especially Donald and the then SA captain Cronjé) up the wall.  Boring for some, but something special for the connoiseur.  We  Protea supporters can be glad Collingwood did not do it a third time…

Read the rest of “Drawn cricket series” »

Everyone is talking about the earthquake in Haiti.  Millions of words are being said and written on the subject. 

I don’t think I have anything more elequent to say about it than others.  It is a terrible irony that one of the poorest nations in the world has to suffer the effects of one of nature’s spectacular shows of destructive force.

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I often have to do some mental calculations to figure out how late it is where some of my friends in far places live.  In this context, here’s an excerpt  - courtesy of a colleague at the astronomical society who dug this up to answer a question  - from Brian Warner’s book  Astronomers at the Royal Observatory Cape of Good Hope that fascinated me.  The question had to do with when SA adopted the GMT-2 as a standard:

“Under Gill’s directorship, the Observatory continued to determine and disseminate time. “Observatory Mean Time” was telegraphed throughout the Colony as a Noon signal. This was used to drop the Time Ball in the Cape Town Docks. A 1 o’clock signal was also transmitted, which dropped Time Balls at Simon’s Bay, Port Elizabeth and East London, and which fired the signal gun on the Imhoff Battery.

Read the rest of “SA Standard time” »

 Thanks to those two remarkable spacecraft the Voyagers, scientists have gathered a great deal of informationabout our solar system  - and now also about interstellar space.  Look here. I have been interested in the Voyagers all along and continue to be amazed at how much we are still learning from two craft that are, by today’s standards, fairly “primitive”.

Read the rest of “Voyagers - still doing it after all these years…” »

I was overwhelmed by the movie magic of James Cameron’s Avatar. Groundbreaking stuff . The magic lies not only in the technology but in the story and the message - and seeing the hard work by so many pay off in something of a modern entertainment miracle -  certainly a milestone in film making.  The fantastical world created in Avatar - yet one with a powerful message about caring for our world and about human priorities - is something special. The point is - this is not special effects in the way we have grown used to it - it is a completely new way of making movies - and the method was used to great effect with magical sensitivity and attention to detail. It comes as no surprise that one of the major contributors to make the magic, was Peter Jackson (or more specifically, his team of WETA Digital computer /digital visual effects experts from LOTR fame). Others may come along and use these new techniques for pure”effect” (and probably for gratuitous violence ad nauseum) but at least the first film of this new generation of movies is one that works well also on an emotional and intellectual levels.

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The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale: to an observer in the Andromeda nebula, the sign of our extinction would be no more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens: and if that match does blaze in the darkness there will be none to mourn a race that used a power that could …have lit a beacon in the stars to light its funeral pyre. The choice is ours. - Stanley Kubrick

A year ago to the day someone I loved and trusted hurt me very badly.    Maybe this is in part because  - like most people do at least sometimes in their lives - I trusted the wrong person and was devastated to discover I had made a big mistake.

Maybe I got hurt because my skin is so thin.

Read the rest of “Thin skin revisted - the love connection” »

An aquaintance of mine wanted input from his female contacts about women who have caught their parters/husbands/boyfriends watching porn. (”And how did they react to it….?”)

Somehow that immediately irritated me as being something biased and portraying stereotypes that are not always useful. Besides the fact that the topic has become jaded and has been asked many times with all the shocked (and mock-shocked reactions to follow), my question is “So, only men watch porn…?” You bet your bottom dollar  the answer to that is “No!”:)

Read the rest of “A rant - about porn” »

After my homespun wisdom of yesterday, here are some quotes on friendship to ponder:

• Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief.|Joseph Addison - English essayist and poet.
• The finest kind of friendship is between people who expect a great deal of each other but never ask it.|Sylvia Bremer
• A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.| Charles Darwin. (I assume he naturally selects women in that philosophy as well…)
• I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.| Thomas Edison
• Friendship should be more than biding time can sever.| T. S. Eliot.

  Read the rest of “Quotes about friendship” »

Something like Facebook and the way that we add all kinds of people who play some role in our lives there as friends, makes me ponder the meaning and definitions of the term.

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This comes from one of those Internet “chain” things that encourage people to exchange some information about their  likes and dislikes.  Most of those are silly, but this one was interesting .

The “rules” were not to  take too long to think about it but to list “Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you in no more than 15 minutes.” Tough on a bookworm and I ended up with a longer list.

Read the rest of “Favourite books - a quick list” »

Someone remarked today on the fact that both of us had studied Eng Lit at RAU (which is now the University of Johannesburg).  She said it was strange that we both chose to study English at an Afrikaans university.   That made me think way back to my student days when it was one of the best English departments in the country - with wonderful lecturers finding a way to lead us within a system of lecturing that was innovative for the times. Today even primary school kids do projects and have to learn how to find information for themselves rather than learn things by rote - but in those days the way that RAU vigorously promoted independent academic thought and expected students to do research rather than to rely on information imparted at lectures, was new and different.  Our lecturers were some of the first who acted like coaches and facilitators rather than as gurus - although of course, lectures were very important and without those you would not have done all that well either.  

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“It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” - William Blake

I was hurt today by someone whom I think of as a friend and in whom I thought I could confide.  It upset me on a number of levels and although it also spurned me to action regarding an issue that had been on my mind anyway,  it left me feeling very sad.

Read the rest of “Thin skin and friendship” »

The anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission made me feel philosophical and  a bit old (if you are old enough to remember it, you are definitely at least middle aged, and who likes being reminded of that?).

But it also makes me think that somehow something is “wrong” with our priorities - or they have gone wrong in the past 40 years. Why is it that it is so easy to find money for weapons and war, or for truly frivolous things or to encourage the kind of consumerism that merely aids waste (in all senses of the word) and global warming, but so hard to find sufficient resources for primary research and for pioneering efforts relating to the sciences and technology? Astronomy and space exploration certainly fall under those castegories.

Read the rest of “Of Apollo, global warming, Jupiter and us” »

Is it a sign of one’s age that these entries on the loss of loved ones become necessary? A friend has had to say a final farewell to her husband of only 47 who died of cancer.  She dealt with the process of this terrible loss over many months with grace, wisdom and even humour.  

Today is my late mom’s birthday,  and it is almost inevitable that my thoughts have turned to issues of  life, death, loss, belief and love.  Although life goes on and there are the normal , mundane  things to do and “everyday” emotions, this certainly has me in philosophical mode.

Read the rest of “Loss - again” »

  True, the title of this entry is a cliché, but at least it is a more or less appropriate one. Today 40 years ago Apollo 11 was launched on its way to the moon and on 20 July a full 40 years would have passed since man first walked on the moon.  For the first time we did not merely fly past another object in the Solar System beyond Earth itself - we landed and carefully stepped onto soil that is, quite literally, out of this world.  Did it really happen that long ago?  Most young adults and all children of today were not born yet in 1969.

Read the rest of “Man on the moon - how 40 years flew…” »

On Monday and Tuesday, I went along on a 2-day Skygazers & Scribblers workshop to Sutherland. Two of the members of Cape Centre went as well.  I drove through with John Richards,  who is a very interesting and fun travel companion. The idea was not only to attend workshop sessions and see the facilities at Sutherland, but also to look at the stars together.

But instead of stars we got snow! Have a look at the pictures here.

Read the rest of “Snow in Sutherland” »

A remark by a friend on http://www.thenewRadiant.com made me think I should about sci-fi and other reading for pure fun.  I do read some science fiction, although  when it comes to escapism in books, audio or on the screen, I tend to prefer the fantasy/humour of a Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. I like those BBC programmes on radio and TV that defy an exact categorisation (humour?  sci-fi? fantasy?)  such as Red Dwarf . I enjoyed the Rama books and some of Heinlein’s books - but don’t quiz me on sci-fi in too much detail though, I get stuck pretty soon.

Read the rest of “Of sci-fi and the Space Race” »

Winter in the Cape can be wonderful.  Some winters are drawn out and grey, but sometimes there are winters such as this one, when you get the best of many worlds. There is enough rain to please the farmers, but the periods of wet, windy cold do not last too long and are interspersed with sunny, bright days and relatively mild temperatures.

For a few days - and sometimes longer - we get battered by scary storms with howling winds, rain and sometimes even thunder & lightning (scarce in the Cape).  These storms make you want to crawl into bed with a hot water bottle and some books or DVDs - or simply sit and watch and listen to the sounds of nature.

But then suddenly, as though the storm never happened, there comes the sun.  The temperature remains chilly, but the air is crisp and bright and at night the winter skies are breathtaking with the best part of the Milky Way visible. 

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