March Pieces Of My Mind #1

Genetic astrology: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/biotech/testing/genetic-astrology-le…

To me, human origins, ancient human migrations and where we all came from is infinitely fascinating. I don't actually care what the answer is, I just want to know for the sake of knowing.

But who the hell cares who my ancestors were? I don't. I don't get this genealogy stuff at all. If I was a race horse or a prize winning dairy cow it might matter.

The Kuiper belt has been less affected by glacatic tidal effects than the distant Oort cloud. The latter has its orbital paths randomized to the point that they do not even remotely stick to the orbital plane of the rest of the solar system.

The Kuiper belt objects mostly formed in situ, apart from a "scattered disc" component that has either very elliptic orbits or orbits angled up from the ecliptic -an effect of gravitational interactions with Uranus and Neptune sometime in the past (those two planets started up closer to the sun).

The Oort cloud is mostly made up from small objects that were throen out by Jupiter or Saturn. Since they are more massive, those perturbations either threw the small objects from the solar system altogether, or had the power to throw them much farther out than the Kuiper belt.

Objects from either group mostly consist of volatile substances including frozen water. When they come closer to the sun, the material turns to vapor and you get a comet.

Thanks! How can we have any idea of the Oort cloud's diameter?

John, it might just matter if I could point to a burial cairn/mastaba/tunnel complex and say "look, my ancestor Sveinfeig built that!".
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Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser inspired the first short stories by Pratchett that became the first discworld novel.
Fritz Leiber's fantasy stories have not aged well.
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Nine Princes in Amber -the princes could use the multiverse as a storage house, getting any item they wanted. It reminds me of the virtual armoury in Matrix.

In the case of the above quotation, the item they fetched was a large army of well-trained religious fanatics.

(OT, but fun) -Right Wing Watch quoted [dumb guy] verbatim saying that those who run universities should be taken out and shot. And by quoting [dumb guy], he now says it amounts to proof those evil libruls are out to smear and destroy the Cristians. At a certain level, stupidity gets entertaining.

Martin, we should never let [dumb guy] within reach of those powers you describe!

No, because Nine Princes in Amber is pretty boring to read, and it would be horrific to live.

Oort cloud diameter... I think you can derive that from the orbits of extremely long-term comets. They go so far out that other stars often pass inside the cloud, but the brief gravitational disturbances from that do not affect cometary orbits. Space is BIG.. And so are the time scales.

...And you probably have several Earth's worth of mass out in the "scattered disc" component of the Kuiper belt alone. If you are willing to wait ten thousand years you could literally build a new world from scratch.

"Until recently, no airplanes had motorised wheels" because of the weight penalty. And when the planes land, the wheels have to come up to speed in a split second, by friction at touchdown. The rubber does not last long.

"If you are willing to wait ten thousand years you could literally build a new world from scratch."

The way things are going, we might need to. I must leave a note.

At least Småland has a name that once made sense in historical context. The US state of Nevada (from Spanish nevar, to snow) gets very little precipitation, as it is in the rain shadow of an eponymous mountain range which is mostly in California. And for that matter, the country of India is named after a river in Pakistan.

As an ingorant American, my entire knowledge of the Swedish language derives from the names used for products at IKEA (okay, except for the meatballs; I knew about them before).

I am repeatedly amused when I learn (sometimes through Martin's blog) that sometimes the names are contextually appropriate, and not just false cognates.

"Småland" is the name IKEA gives to their supervised childcare room at their U.S. stores :-)

If there is an Uppsala, why is there no Nersala ???

@Michael: English and Swedish are both derived from a common language, proto-Germanic. So it's no surprise that they have so many cognates. In addition, some words were borrowed into Old English from Old Norse (a more recent ancestor language of modern Swedish) in the 9th and 10th centuries AD, and many non-Germanic words have been borrowed into both languages (either independently, or into Swedish via English).

Recall that the existence of the Indo-European language family was deduced when a British colonial administrator in India noted many cognates between Latin/Greek and Sanskrit--far more than one would expect given the scarcity of contacts between the Mediterranean basin and the subcontinent.

Erling, since Stockholm is downstream from Uppsala, we have a candidate for the name!
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Martin, in defence of Zelazny he wrote a couple of more deep novels too. "Eye of Cat" was particularly moving. Later, he seems to have resigned to the readers wanting entertainment, not depth, and he churned out many more books of the "Amber" series until he died quite young.

"Night in the Lonesome October" is a semi-satirical novel, including elements of the Lovecraft stories. It was the last book Zelazny wrote. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Night_in_the_Lonesome_October
And speaking of Lovecraft spoofs, like Stross "Laundry" series, Shakira's breakthrough album was named "Laundry Service". A clue to the grand conspiracy?

The Oort cloud should be called the Öpik cloud after the Estonian astronomer who first proposed it as a source of comets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_%C3%96pik

The diameter of the cloud isn't well-defined. Like the Earth's athmosphere, it fades out without a clear-cut boundary. The closeness of Alpha Centauri (A and B) gives an upper limit, because they will steal objects that drift too far away from our Sun.

Thanks Lassi! I guess much of the cloud doesn't quite deserve that name.

Also, the Kuiper belt should be called the Edgeworth belt or the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt.

(OT) Skeptic alert: Urinal Spoonbendler has volunteered to help find the missing passenger aircraft.
And the dumb guy mentioned at # 6 has been fired for saying liberal academics should be shot.
-Alas, here is another dumb guy: http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2014/03/arizona_republican_com…

It's an over-reaction. People in psychology should be defunded and made to get real jobs - shooting is way too extreme.

Vaguely related to the "Amber" thingy:
"Good Morning, Inflation! Hello, Multiverse!" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-tegmark/good-morning-inflation-he_b_4…
-Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a wiser version of me that is totally in control of his life…

Oort cloud revisited: http://xkcd.com/1297/

@Birger - you've just proved that I spend *way* too much time on the Internet. Nobody should be able to mentally picture stick figures just from seeing the letters xkcd in a link.

Bronze artefact alert:

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/102774/8571303.html

I won't actually be drinking any of this:

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/98649/8565916.html

John @28: That makes kopi luwak look like a proletarian beverage. Not that I'd be drinking any of that stuff, either--I don't drink coffee. But I do like Chinese and Japanese green teas. Even so, $70k per kilo is a bit beyond my budget.

Eric - They have banned kopi luwak here because they found out people were caging palm civets and force-feeding them. I would never have drunk the stuff anyway.

I'm trying to work out what difference it makes to the taste of the panda poo tea that the girls picking it wear panda suits.

I'm perfectly happy with the iron goddess, myself.

In our house is largely Dragon Well, Iron Goddess, Assam and, for the evenings, honeybush.

(OT about RPGs) "You rolled a natural twenty! Go straight to hell!" apparently Jack Chick and his ilk are “monozombeists”. http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2014/03/19/you-rolled-a-natural…

John, it was a civet that wrote the song immortalised by Family Guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz0EjPogxVE

In the evenings I have mulberry & pine needle.

We went through a burdock tea period, but we got over it. We have yet to try velcro tea.

I can't hear anything at the moment, Birger, I have Tropical Ears. I did listen to it before, before I went troppo.

I'm finally reading Jean Manco's "Ancestral Journeys". After a slightly awkward, bookish intro on basic principles of linguistics and human genetics, which may not be too riveting for the initiated, once you get into it, it's a cracking good read. It's almost unputdownable.

Mention ancestral journeys, and right on cue, in come Joe Pickrell and David Reich.

http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2014/03/21/003517.full.pdf