The Bad Astronomy Newsletter

Bad Astronomy Newsletter #17

Contents:

1. Ironic newsletter note
2. Bad Astronomy Movie Review: Men in Black
3. Special to the newsletter: MSNBC Bad News
4. If you've seen one gas giant, you've seen 'em all
5. Subscribe/Unsubscribe info

1) Ironic newsletter note

An alert Bad Reader pointed out to me that the Yahoo!Groups main page for this very newsletter is advertising a "Love Reading", which turns out to be a psychic reading so you can have a stranger tell you things about your love life that they really don't know. Just to show how confused such things can be, the page for the psychics has the statement: "Try a FREE $5 Call Now". That's a nifty trick! The last time I had to spend five bucks on something, I don't remember it being free. Those psychics must have special powers. ;-)

2) Bad Astronomy Movie Review: Men in Black

I have just added a review of the astronomy of "Men in Black" to the website. No, not the sequel that just came out; I haven't seen it yet! But to prepare, I rented the original and was reminded of just why I liked it so much. The astronomy in the movie was amazingly good, ironically so since, after all, it's a movie about UFOs, aliens, government conspiracies and is a comedy to boot! Here's the review.

Hmmm. Given the date of this newsletter, I suppose I should have reviewed "Independence Day". Well, maybe next year.

3) Special to the newsletter: MSNBC Bad News

A news item crossed my email this week, sent by my brother. It's Bad News, but not Bad enough to write it up on the website. So you, my Bad Newsletter Readers, get it special.

MSNBC reported on an interesting news item: using a technique called "quantum entanglement", physicists were able to essentially teleport a single photon from one point in space to another, without having it travel the distance in between. The news media delight in making analogies to Star Trek's transporter, though this isn't really anything like them. In this case, the photon isn't really teleported, but, as I understand it, a new photon is created with all the characteristics of the old one. They are literally indistinguishable, so for all intents and purposes they are the same photon.

This is an interesting and potentially exciting development, but of course transporting a human is so much more difficult that words actually fail (as the news article points out, humans have about 1 octillion atoms, making this a significantly more difficult problem than a single photon!).

So how did the article's author phrase it? Like this: "... but reality was still light-years away from beaming human beings between locations."

ARRRG! A light year is a distance, not a time unit! This kind of thing makes me nuts. I have a web page about this.

I get email from people saying that there are times when using the phrase "light years ahead" can be interpreted as a distance, but here it's clear the author meant it as a time. I suppose it'll be a lot of kilometers before this problem is finally squashed.

Incidentally, the MSNBC article can be found here.

4) If you've seen one gas giant, you've seen 'em all

A Bad Reader who wishes to remain anonymous (he was goofing off at work when he spotted this) sent me a link to an ad for AT&T DSL service. Here's the link:

http://www.consumer.att.com/dsl/promotion/assets/images/headers/hdr_landing2.jpg (Note added Dec. 06, 2002: this link no longer works. I cannot find the image now.)

The picture shows a kid pointing to a picture of the planets on his computer screen, and the caption says "After school today, I went to Jupiter." I think his teacher needs to go back to school: the kid is pointing at Saturn.

5) Subscribe/Unsubscribe Information

If, for some weird reason, you want to unsubscribe to this newsletter, just send email to badastronomy-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com with no body text. Make sure you send it from the address to which the newsletter is sent! Alternatively, you can unsubscribe from the Yahoo!Groups website. Go to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/groups/groups-32.html for more info.

Remember, the newsletters will be archived on the website at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/badastronomy so even if you unsubscribe you can still read them there. I suggest staying subscribed so you get them as soon as I send them.

Also, I do not sell your email addresses and neither does Yahoo! Take a gander at the Yahoo!Groups privacy message if it makes you feel better: http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy/us/ Note that the email addresses are visible to me, but I have no prurient use for them. If that makes you nervous for whatever reason, feel free to unsubscribe and simply read the archived newsletters at the website listed above.

Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
badastro@badastronomy.com
http://www.badastronomy.com