Welcome to my Lair!

Published on October 29, 2010 in Website. Closed

Welcome to the Lair of Evil Dr Ganymede! Welcome to the Lair of Evil Dr Ganymede! On this site, you’ll find my science blog as well as articles about role-playing games and worldbuilding that I’ve written or co-authored, along with artwork that I’ve created using 3D modelling software (POVray and Lightwave) over the years. I’ve also put my Ph.D. Thesis and abstracts online on my Science page.

I run a blog here in which I generally talk about interesting planetary science and astronomy topics, but I may talk about RPGs and worldbuilding and other stuff I find interesting too (you can read all the blog entries below this post, so scroll down!). Since I can link to different subjects via blog categories, I can actually set up different URLs for each subject – these subject-specific blogs can be accessed via the “Blog Topics” menu in the sidebar on the right (e.g. if you just want to read the Science articles in the blog, please bookmark http://evildrganymede.net/category/science/). To read the full article, just click on the title of the entry in the blog – you can comment on a blog post from there too.

Thanks for visiting!

Website update: Further Stars List uploaded!

Published on January 8, 2012 in RPGs, Science and Worldbuilding. 0 Comments

I’ve finally added the “Further Star List” to my Realistic Near-Sol Astrography webpage – it’s an excel file containing accurate locations of a selection of major stars (including Vega, Deneb, 51 Pegasi, Spica, Bellatrix and Algol) that are more than 10pc from Sol.

The format is a bit raw (and I’m not entirely sure why I selected those specific stars to list!). The dark red X/Y/Z columns show the distances in each direction (Sol is the origin, +X is Coreward, +Y is Spinward, +Z is “above” Sol). If you have trouble interpreting it, let me know!

You can doublecheck the stars too – you can use the Convert spreadsheet in Section 1 of the mapping page to convert the RA/Dec of any stars into X/Y/Z coordinates. If you have astronomy software like Celestia, open it up and activate the Galactic Grid and rotate it so that you’re facing 0° latitude and 0° longitude – you’re now looking directly along the +X axis. Turn to look at 0° Lat, 90° Lon and you’re looking directly along the +Y axis. Look at the Galactic north pole, and you’re looking directly along the +Z axis. You should be able to find your stars using this (e.g. Aldebaran is pretty much directly along the -X direction, and down a bit on the Z axis. Look towards 180° Lon direction and -20° Lat, and there it is!).

I’ve been sitting on this for six and a half years (!!) and finally decided that I’m never going to draw hexmaps showing these stars, so I may as well just release the data and let other people figure it out! Enjoy! :)

The link is at http://evildrganymede.net/rpg/world/mapping.htm#Section3b.

The Journey Home

Published on November 21, 2011 in Science. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Whatever you’re doing today, find some time to watch this – it’s astronaut Ron Garan’s amazing timelapse video of the Earth seen from the International Space Station as it hurtles around our world every 90 minutes. There are all sorts of wonders in here – lightning, cities, aurorae, stars, and even the moon makes an appearance – plus it has an awesome soundtrack! :)

Time Lapse From Space – Literally. The Journey Home. from Fragile Oasis on Vimeo.

(more info at http://www.universetoday.com/91170/ron-garans-incredible-iss-timelapse-coming-back-home/ )

Dawn arrives at Vesta!

Published on July 19, 2011 in Science. Closed Tags: , , , .

(I was going to call this post “Dawn breaks at Vesta” but that might have given the false impression that Dawn literally broke in orbit and isn’t working anymore ;) )

Dawn successfully entered Vesta orbit in the weekend, and has returned the first pictures from Vesta orbit!

Vesta! (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

The big lump in the middle of the asteroid is actually the central peak of a massive crater caused by an impact that literally blew away most of the protoplanet’s southern hemisphere! There are all sorts of interesting things to see here – lots of bowl-shaped craters, grooved/scallopped terrain in the big crater floor, and what looks like a huge cliff marking part of the rim of the big crater!

There’s also a very nice image showing another view of Vesta’s ‘south pole crater’, along with other asteroids that we’ve sent spacecraft to shown to the same scale:

Vesta, with other asteroids (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JAXA/ESA)

Vesta is about 530 km in diameter, so it’s pretty large for an asteroid – it’s the third largest in the asteroid belt – and is far bigger than Lutetia, which was previously the record holder for ‘largest asteroid visited by a spacecraft’. Dawn will move on to visit Ceres next year, which is the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt and (unlike Vesta) is actually spherical too.

We’ll see more of Vesta as Dawn maps it from orbit over the next year – this only the beginning, and I’m very excited to see what else will be revealed! (You can find out more about the Dawn mission at its official website)

Approaching Vesta!

Published on July 14, 2011 in Science. Closed Tags: , , , .

Vesta! Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

On July 15th, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft will be entering orbit around the asteroid Vesta – and I’m really looking forward to it! This is a new frontier – while we’ve seen a few small asteroids (e.g. Ida, Gaspra), we’ve never seen a big asteroid up close, and Vesta is the third largest asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter (it’s also the second most-massive after Ceres, which will be visited later by Dawn). We’ve also found several meteorites on Earth that we think were blasted off from Vesta’s surface by impacts on the asteroid – these indicate that Vesta should have differentiated into a rocky mantle and metallic core, and I’m curious to see if there is evidence of volcanic activity on its surface (my Ph.D. supervisor published some papers about Vesta’s early history, and some of his interest and enthusiasm about it has rubbed off on me!).

Asteroids are interesting beasts – they’re mostly found in the space between Mars and Jupiter, and are remnants from the formation of the solar system. The rocky planets in the solar system formed by accretion in the solar nebula about 4.6 billion years ago – put very simply, dust grains clumped together due to gravity to form planetesimals, which themselves clumped together to form protoplanets, which then clumped together to form larger planets. However, Jupiter’s gravity affected (and still affects) the orbits of nearby objects, which prevented the asteroids from accreting into planets. As a result of this, we now have a band of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter – it’s essentially debris that was never allowed to form into a planet. What’s more, if you could combine all the asteroids currently in the asteroid belt, the resulting object would be smaller than our own moon (part of this is due to the fact that many asteroids have been ejected from the belt by gravitational interactions or destroyed by collisions)! Since we’ve not seen a large one up close before, a lot of planetary scientists will be interested to see what Dawn reveals at Vesta (and later when it moves on to orbit Ceres, which is the largest asteroid and also a dwarf planet).

As Dawn has been approaching Vesta over the past few weeks, features have been slowly coming into view that we couldn’t see from Earth. The latest picture (shown above) hints at interesting features – for one thing, there don’t appear to be an awful lot of large craters visible, which would imply that its surface may be young (possibly evidence for volcanic resurfacing?). Some curvilinear features are also visible in the southern hemisphere – maybe they’re tectonic in origin, or perhaps they’re something else (crater-chains? flow fronts?). Right now it’s all very tantalising, but we’ll find out more when Dawn goes into orbit in a few days!

[Book Review] The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan

Published on July 2, 2011 in review and Science. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Demon-Haunted_WorldSummary: If everyone read and understood this book, the world would be a much more sensible place. It should be required reading for everyone, whether they’re interested in science or not.

Review: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark is in my opinon one of the Carl Sagan’s most important works. In it, Dr Sagan does nothing less than explain how science works, and provides a clear framework for readers to understand how to view the world rationally and skeptically.

While the internet is potentially a veritable goldmine of information, nowadays it is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s a great resource for research and learning about the world if you know how to look for relevant material and how to assess it and filter out what you don’t want or need. On the other hand, there’s a lot of noise to wade through, consisting of wacko pseudo-science, crazy conspiracies and New Age ideas like the end of the world in 2012, Nibiru, faked moon landings, “Intelligent Design”, religious raptures, magic healing rocks, crop circles, “energy healing” and other such nonsense. Much of this is presented “authoratively” and if a reader doesn’t know better – or doesn’t know how to question these ideas – then it’s not surprising that people can be taken in by them.

While many of these ideas gained popularity after the book was first published in 1996, The Demon-Haunted World is aimed at addressing this problem. Thematically, the book is divided into three parts – the first few chapters present some of the pseudoscience ideas (those prevalent during the 1990s, at least) and debunks them by discussing them skeptically and presenting reasoned scientific arguments against them. The second part – the meat of the book – presents the “Baloney Detection Kit”, which describes how science works and how to think logically and skeptically about what you’re presented with in order to determine an idea’s validity. Can the idea be tested? Can the facts be confirmed independently? What happens if the idea is extrapolated beyond its initial statement, etc? This is an invaluable manual for honing one’s critical thinking skills – something that sadly doesn’t seem to be taught much as a specific subject at schools and universities, and seems to be very much lacking in the world today. The final part of the book is more a collection of essays related to the theme of science communication, the standard of science education in the US, and freedom of expression (with a bit of politics thrown in) – not directly relevant to the rest of the book perhaps, but still an interesting read.

Science is presented as a “light” that shines against this oncoming “darkness” – dramatically put perhaps, but I do genuinely think that there is a real danger that scientific ideas are slowly being cast aside in favour of superstitious nonsense. Already we have had politicians with “faith-based policies”, “alternative medicine” touted as being superior to real medicine without clinical trials or peer-reviewed studies, and pseudoscientific garbage against evolution presented as a valid alternative in school science classes. Is this really where we want to be in the 21st Century? I don’t think so, and I fully believe that these ideas should be actively fought against wherever they may arise.

The Demon-Haunted World most likely won’t convince people who are already hardcore believers in pseudoscience of the fallacy of their ideas – they’re probably too far gone for that – but it can at least be used to immunise others against their ideas. It provides a very useful mental toolkit, not only when it comes to understanding science but also for constructing a rational view of the world in general. As such, I think everyone needs to read this book!

Still alive

Published on May 22, 2011 in Science. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Well, I’m still here. So, apparently, is everyone else. Earthquakes, tidal waves, Great Beast Dagon rising, people ascending to heaven, etc etc didn’t happen. I particularly appreciated the inspired elegance of Eternal Earthbound Pets, an atheist-run company set up to look after the pets of people who have been “taken to heaven” in the Rapture (no refunds of course! And being atheists, they’d definitely be left behind so you know they’ll be there to take care of your beloved animal companions! Genius! ;) ).

On a more serious note, science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson raised an interesting point on Twitter today – “If Jesus actually arrives May 21, it’ll be easy to convince skeptics. If he doesn’t show up, do the faithful become atheists?”

It’d be nice to think that they would… but I suspect that people who genuinely believed that they’d be “taken to heaven” are already so far gone from rational thought that they’d just come up with excuses like how their faith has been “tested”, or that human error in calculating the date was to blame and that the Rapture would still happen at a later date, and just keep on believing (in some cases, because their faith is literally all they have now). I’ve even seen people ‘correcting’ the Rapture-believers by saying that the bible says that “no man will know the date”, but that doesn’t get around the fundamental problem that they’re believing a work of fiction that has no basis in reality to start with! Irrationality is funny like that.

EDIT: Yep. The “believers” interviewed in this article from The Independent are all making excuses rather than abandoning their faith. Typical.

I guess the next scheduled “end of the world as we know it” will be the Mayan Apocalypse in December 2012, so we have about 18 months to prepare for the next bout of insanity to sweep the world (and IMO that one’s even crazier than the Rapture). And I wonder why I sometimes feel I’m fighting a losing battle to educate people about science… I think I’ll go hug my copy of “The Demon Haunted World” by Carl Sagan now (which I would say is required reading for everyone).

Rapture: It ain’t gonna happen.

Published on May 20, 2011 in Science. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

I’m really hoping that the mainstream media/news sites are discussing this “Rapture” rubbish because they’re making fun of it (World supposedly ends on May 21st. Again. *yawn*), because my own feelings about it are neatly summarised by this:

It’s kinda disturbing to see full articles about it on CBC and the BBC news websites though (and undoubtedly there are many elsewhere too). I’d like to hope that most people are smart enough to realise that this prediction is just the delusional ravings of a madman, but there are undoubtedly a lot of people in the world who are less educated and who don’t know better who may believe it – and spreading the word about it even further in mainstream media is not helpful (and no, I’m not going to propagate it further by linking to the articles here – if you have no idea what I’m talking about then you’re much better off that way! ;) ).

At best this sort of thing should be in the “offbeat” section of the news sites, not on the main pages. Ideally though, I don’t even think it should even be mentioned at all by them because it doesn’t deserve any attention – and yet, here we are. People believe in this sort of thing because they don’t know much about science, or how to reason or think critically about things, but the media just seems to want to propagate the story further instead of either ignoring it or pointing out that it’s nonsense. I wonder if the media will be reporting every crazy prediction made by every lunatic now? Again, I refer the reader to the Facepalm above.

So here’s my (scientific) prediction for what will happen on May 21st – absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. “Millions of people” will not “disappear” or be “raptured”. About 360,000 babies will be born, and about 155,000 people will die (ref), as happens every day on Earth. Life will go on as normal for everyone, except for the thousands of people who were dumb enough to be so taken in by the Rapture nonsense that they gave away their money or worldly goods, and I guess they’ll be feeling pretty stupid.

While it may have the odd historical account in it, the christian bible is largely a work of fiction (with many edits and embellishments over the millennia as well to distort/destroy anything that wasn’t). And the Book of Revelations is absolutely a particularly fanciful work of fiction (it’s a fun read as such though!). Hence, the Rapture ain’t gonna happen.

And as Apocalypses go, the Rapture is apparently a very considerate one. After all, it doesn’t start in one place and spread outwards from there (like an asteroid impact), it actually goes methodically by timezone across the world, happening at the same local time in each one. Apparently God is not only “vengeful” and “generous”, but he’s also convenient!

I suspect this craziness is only going to get worse as 2012 approaches… meanwhile, I’ll see you alll on May 22nd ;)

(P.S. Sorry for the lack of updates here recently – I’ve been busy with work and other projects recently and haven’t had too much time to write articles!)

MESSENGER’s first image from Mercury orbit!

Published on March 30, 2011 in Science. Closed Tags: , , .

The solar system’s innermost planet finally has its very own orbiter, in the form of NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft (the acronym-makers at NASA must be very proud of that name – it’s short for “MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging”, and MESSENGER itself is also a riff on Mercury’s mythical as the fleet-footed messenger of the gods. Cunning!).

Today, on 29th March 2001, it sent back its first image from Mercury orbit – which is exactly 37 years after Mariner 10 sent back its first pictures of Mercury after it first flew past (but didn’t go into orbit around) the planet in 1974!

The first (colour) image from Mercury Orbit!
Credit:NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Continue reading ‘MESSENGER’s first image from Mercury orbit!’

[Book Review] How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, by Mike Brown

Published on February 27, 2011 in review and Science. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Summary: A tale of discovery, long hours, family and scientific skullduggery! Very enjoyable and easy to read, and well worth picking up!

Review: Readers who are familiar with this blog may have already gathered that I have a strong interest in the question of “What is a planet” and the events and discoveries surrounding that debate. So when Prof. Mike Brown (the discoverer of Eris, the object that ultimately toppled Pluto from its perch as the ninth planet) published a book describing his side of the story I was naturally keen to read what he had to say about the affair.

Continue reading ‘[Book Review] How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, by Mike Brown’

Big moon rising!

Published on February 18, 2011 in Science. Closed Tags: , , , , .

As I was cycling back from the bus stop this evening and glancing up at the full moon (all smudgy-looking, as it was shining through clouds), I was struck by how unusually large it looked in the sky. I’m very familiar with the “moon illusion” – caused by our brains playing tricks on us when the moon is near the horizon and making it look larger than when it’s higher in the sky (see this page for more details) – and wondered if this was just another example of that, but this seemed a bit different.

Continue reading ‘Big moon rising!’