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December 15, 2005

"I caught her on a park bench, making out with a chaos demon! Have you ever seen a chaos demon? They're all slime and antlers. They're disgusting."

Well damn. I forgot to note ubiquit.us/blog's birthday last week, as well as ubiquit.us/blog's 200th post yesterday.

To make up for those oversights, it's link time.

My three-year-old is confused about TV.

It's not so much that Joshua's puzzled by the technology, though he does have an endearing habit of calling it "TVV." His confusion is that our house contains a smart TV and a stupid TV.

The stupid TV is downstairs in his parents' bedroom, and he watches it between the rather early hour at which he wakes up and the somewhat later one at which his decrepit father drags himself out of bed. The downstairs TV looks like the upstairs TV, except the shows on it are only on at set times, you can't see old shows whenever you want, and if you have to go to the potty you miss things.

The smart TV is upstairs in the living room, and it doesn't have any of these disadvantages. Because -- as you've probably guessed by now -- it has TiVo.
A large object has been found beyond Pluto travelling in an orbit tilted by 47 degrees to most other bodies in the solar system. Astronomers are at a loss to explain why the object's orbit is so off-kilter while being almost circular.
Tentatively named 2004 XR190, the object appears to have a diameter of between 500 and 1000 kilometres, making it somewhere between a fifth and nearly half as wide as Pluto. It lies in a vast ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt, most of which orbit in nearly the same plane as Earth.

But at 47 degrees, 2004 XR190's orbit is one of the most tilted, or inclined, Kuiper Belt Objects known. That suggests it was flung out of the solar system's main disc after a close encounter with another object - such as Neptune or perhaps a star that passed by the Sun billions of years ago.
Hal Levison, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US, says he and others have produced objects like Buffy using models of such special resonances. "However, I do have some problems with the idea," he admits.

He points out that this object was found when it happened to be passing through the plane of the solar system - where it spends just 2% of its orbit. That suggests many more such objects remain undiscovered, tilted at orbits where most surveys do not search for them. "I just don't think these mechanisms can deliver that much stuff," Levison told New Scientist.

He ventures another possible explanation - that the Sun had a twin and that both stars followed circular orbits around each other. "That could excite inclinations without exciting the eccentricities," he says. "However, this idea creates more problems than it solves, by far."
Sculptural depictions of the erect penis were an everyday sight in the classical world. A common boundary marker and household totem in ancient Greece was the herm, originally a representation of the god Hermes. It consisted of a head on top of a simple squarish pillar--your basic supersized Pez dispenser--unadorned except for, in front, an amply proportioned, usually erect, and sometimes arrestingly protrusive penis and scrotum. Scholars tell us that such decorations were apotropaic (you learn a lot of vocabulary in this field)--that is, intended to ward off evil, and that folks back then paid no more attention to them than we would to a lucky horseshoe. Maybe. All I'm saying is, stuff that even now we'd consider hard-core porn you saw then just walking down to the Piraeus.

The ancients were also unembarrassed by graphic displays of sex. Greek men--to be precise, male Greek aristocrats--figured if it moved, they could have sex with it, or at least look at pictures about having sex with it. We have countless examples of crockery showing various combinations of humans, deities, and the occasional animal engaged in the amatory act, most of it presumably used as party favors to put the lads in the mood. Even in painterly scenes having nothing to do with sex the genitalia were often conspicuously displayed.

From this vast array of XXX-rated artwork we can make a few deductions about Greek aesthetic preferences, genitaliawise (here I mainly follow Kenneth Dover's landmark study Greek Homosexuality, 1978): (1) Long, thick penises were considered--at least in the highbrow view-- grotesque, comic, or both and were usually found on fertility gods, half-animal critters such as satyrs, ugly old men, and barbarians. A circumcised penis was particularly gross. (2) The ideal penis was small, thin, and covered with a long, tapered foreskin. Dover thinks the immature male's equipment was especially admired, which may account not only for the small size but the scarcity of body hair in classical art. A passage from Aristophanes sums up the most desirable masculine features: "a gleaming chest, bright skin, broad shoulders, tiny tongue, strong buttocks, and a little prick."
"I've just been to Japan pursuing this," Taylor told Sci Fi Wire during a King Kong-related interview. "I think that is the great untold story to the world. It is sublime. It is arguably some of the most beautiful and poignant animation ever created, and a huge percentage of the pop culture world now know it, but only through a live-action feature film will it transcend that and receive the recognition for the art piece that it is.

"Now, actually achieving it as a live-action feature film is extremely difficult to imagine. Technologically, sure, it's doable. But at an esoteric, universe level, it is an unbelievably impacting and dramatic story concept. [It's got] pseudo-religious overtones, and all these wonderful motifs are woven into it. It's something that you can generate over 26 hours of animation, but trying to encapsulate that down into a feature film would be a massive challenge. But … with the right director, I think it could be a very beautiful movie. …And that's my big pursuit at the moment. I've put an awful lot of energy into it."
To explain why the pendulums move in opposite directions, the team set up a system of equations that took into account the pertinent properties of the system, including the weights of the various components and friction. The structure of the equations made it clear that friction is the cause of the antisynchronized motion. As Huygens originally postulated, the swinging of the pendulums exerts small forces on the supporting beam. If the pendulums are moving in the same direction, together they nudge the beam the other way, giving rise to frictional forces that naturally put a damper on this kind of motion. If the pendulums are moving in opposite directions, however, the forces they exert on the beam cancel each other, and the beam doesn't move. So over time, antisynchronized motion wins out over synchronized motion.

According to Steven Strogatz, an applied mathematician at Cornell University, Huygens's discovery was the first-ever observation of what physicists call coupled oscillation—at least in inanimate objects. In the 20th century, coupled oscillators took on great practical importance because of two discoveries: lasers, in which different atoms give off light waves that all oscillate in unison, and superconductors, in which pairs of electrons oscillate in synchrony, allowing electricity to flow with almost no resistance. Coupled oscillators are even more ubiquitous in nature, showing up, for example, in the synchronized flashing of fireflies and chirping of crickets, and in the pacemaker cells that regulate heartbeats. "The theme of synchronization between coupled oscillators is one of the most pervasive in nature," Strogatz says.

Posted by Jon Rubin at December 15, 2005 02:45 PM