The theology of sisters?

As a new Catholic, all things Catholic are new t some extent, but some things are new to a huge extent. Take nuns, for example (please, take them!). The closest you get to encountering nuns in mainstream Protestantism (my background is Presbyterianism) is either the old ladies (widows, mostly) in some Sunday school classes, or wives of the elders. So moving into the Church has left me wondering what to make of nuns (or, sisters, since I have a teeny tiny suspicion "nun" carries some Enlightenment cynicism) -- wondering and then blogging...

INSCITIA:

The theology of priests, I get: alter Christus, presbyters with bishops, community pastors, etc. But are nuns the feminine "counterpoint" for priests? What is the biblical and traditional pattern-basis for sisters?

COGITATIO:

My hunch is that nuns derive from two ecclesial sources. One, St. Paul's discussion of celibacy in I Corinthians 7. Two, the Apostle's discussion of widows in the letters to Timothy and Thessalonians (details are fuzzy at the moment, will check later). Nuns are the "counterpoint" for brothers, monks, who are just members of religious communities "in this final age" (I Cor. 7:29f). Further, I think nuns continue the tradition of widows who can be committed to service without worries of finding a spouse, etc. (I Tim 5:3).

A remaining question is, of course, how nuns came to include young women who were not only not widows but had never even married. I know Doug Wilson (or was it Doug Jones? I always get those Muscovite Calvinists mixed up) makes a big deal about this (in his stimulating little book about Christian manhood), presumably because it demonstrates "Rome erred" against Scripture with its own "man-made" traditions.

RESPONSUM:

Carbon paper?

I picked up a bubble (or boba) tea a couple of hours ago (here technically known as 波霸奶茶, which, ahem, to put it delicately, means buxom milk tea). While waiting for the goods to bubble up from behind the counter, I sat fiddling with my receipt. I was number 275. When I scratched my finger on the receipt's front surface, it left dark streaks on the paper, as if I'd used a piece of lead (or a key) to write on normal paper. One of my strongest daemons (inscitiae exterminator), or maybe it's one of my best muses (inscitiae exterminatrix), started kicking up dust, demanding more knowledge. I flipped the receipt over to scratch the back: it left no marks at all. I scratched the back very hard on the table and flipped the receipt over to its printed front:　no marks had come through that way either. Only when I scratched (lightly or hard) the printed front did I get the marks. Which got me to wondering, and then to blogging...

INSCITIA:

What accounts for these marks? And what accounts for their showing up only when I scratch the paper "head on"?

COGITATIO:

I think the paper is some cousin of carbon paper. The difference seems to be that while the latter uses carbon particles to "stain" an overlaying sheet of paper, this receipt-paper uses collapsible micro-paper fibers on the front side. The printed information on the receipt is distinct from the scratches I made, just because the former are ink, while the latter are "impression shadows" made when the micro-fibers crush together under my fingernail (sort of like being able to look through glass from above, but seeing it as basically opaque-green from the side). I envsion a tiny forest of white fibers; when you scratch them, they tubmle into a tangled mesh, and look darker from above that the treetops' tips.

But why don't they crush into marks with pressure on the back? The opposing pressure from the table would seem to crush the "trees" just like my fingernail, right?

I'm really stumped; for now all I can do is scratch my mark-free head.

RESPONSUM:

Solo priests?

Here's a riddle I just had on my new canon law blog.

INSCITIA:

Canon 904 says "priests are to celebrate [the Mass] frequently; indeed daily celebration is strongly recommended, since even if the faithful cannot be present, it is the act of Christ and the Church in which priests fulfill their principal function."

Yet, two canons later, we read: "A priest may not celebrate without participation of at least some member of the faithful, except for a just and reasonable cause."

So, uh, which is it? Frequent Mass celebration even without anyone else visibly present, or only celebrating in the presence of even a few of the faithful?

COGITATIO:

I think canon 905, which sets the context of regular worship in a normally populated faith community, offers the explanation. Canon 904 stipulates regular worship for priests under any circumstances. Canon 906 then rejects priests worshipping solo under conditions where the faithful could and should participate. Canon 905 provides the contextual hinge. I think priests are allowed to worship by themselves even without any faithful present because the Mass is an earthly-heavenly reality, so it never involves only those present to our eyes. Insisting the liturgy is only for the Church militant completely warps its transcendent dimension as heaven-on-earth. A solo priest, or a solo Christian for that matter, is an oxymoron. If however a priest chose to worship at the exclusion of the visible participation of others, he would be warping the earthly dimensions of worship, preferring an anemic disincarnated, airy gnostic spiritualism.

RESPONSUM:

Shameless self-promotion?

Does it make any sense to apologize for an act of "shameless self-promotion"? If it's shameless, there is no basis or motive for apologizing. But if it's couched in an apology, the act must be fraught with shame, no?

Maybe we should just say, "You're welcome for my shameless self-promotion!"

"When you got it, flaunt it, FLAUNT IT!" -- Max Bialystock

Reconstituted soap?

[Another one of those "Wow, Elliot's pathologically bored" posts. You're forewarned's all I'm sayin'.]

I'm a bit of a saver. Really, I'm a low-grade pack rat. But only because I'm convinced the pack rat has his advantages. More than once have I been saved time and effort because I had this-and-that tucked away "just in case."

Imagine: in the wee hours as I hurry to get clean and dressed for a flight or trip out of town, I suddenly realize I already packed my deodorant and toothpaste in my luggage the night before. Now, if I weren't a pat rack, I'd have to unzip my carefully loaded bag, dig out the toiletries, apply them, repack and re-zip the bag, thus increasing my pressure and tardiness. Fortunately, though, I keep old stubs of deodorant in my closet and shriveled tubelets of toothpaste in my bathroom for just such a last-minute deliverance (or for the case, bizarre as it may sound, when a friend needs some deo and toothpaste I haven't just used). Clearly, this is an example provided by a pat rack in defense of pat racks, but hopefully the point stands: I have lots of little "leftovers of life". (No, I don't reuse toilet paper!)

One sort of these leftovers has caught my mind's eye more than others lately, though, since I'm not sure what to do with it. I speak of my old, thin, fragile but still very usable slices of bar soap. Rather than scrubbing them down to useless shards of soap that break to pieces when you use them (you know what I'm talking about), I insist on stopping at a minimum usable mass, in the off-chance that I unwittingly run out of new soap and need some back-up without having to go to the store. (Hey, it's saved me before.) But as long as I have new soap, these old soap cards just sit there, leading me to wonder, and then to blog...

INSCITIA:

What can or should I do with these pieces of soap? (Obviously, tossing them is not an option, at least not until I move.) How can I reconstitute them?

COGITATIO:

I have considered for some time melting them all down into a new hybrid-bar (though, in reality, nearly all of them are Ivory, so the Frankensoap would be soothingly, albinously homogenous). The problem is just how to melt down the soap and, not being a soap maker, reform it into usable soap-bar condition. (It was a virtual disaster when I melted down an old coffee-bean-studded candle and tried to remold it in a cooking pot; this melt-and-mold approach is a last option.)

My proposed solution is to buy a cheap, and thus basically disposable, pot to melt the soap down, and then pour the soap sludge into a heavy plastic, soap-shaped box, letting it cool.

The only catches I see so far are 1) not knowing the melting temperature (or possible noxious fumes) of soap and thus whether it's dangerous to try melting it at home, and 2) how to remove the Frankensoap from the box after it hardens. I think I'd let it harden at room temperature and then place it in the freezer, expecting the soap to contract more than the plastic box, allowing me to pop the frigid soap out by hand.

RESPONSUM:

Always, everywhere and by everyone?

Sorry, please go here (to FCA) for this inscitia.

Coffee bulb physics?

A few weeks ago some friends near my school invited me to lunch. I went. I ate. I saw. Specifically, I saw another of the nifty glass-and-metal coffee makers I discovered when I came to Taiwan. The contraption, if memory serves, consists of a lower bulb (mini-coffee pot) for boiling water; a metal base Bunsen burner for the boiler bulb to rest on, with a small upright metal pole for holding up a metal hoop (about mini-coffee-pot high); a long glass vase with a tapered bottom (to rest in the metal hoop), joined to a glass tube by a rubber stopper; and, finally, a metal ring wrapped in nylon to filter the coffee grounds as the coffee percolates into the bulb below. The nozzle of the tube sticks into the boiler bulb.

Set the water to boil for a few minutes and it suddenly "slurps" its way up into the vase, at which point you drop in the coffee grounds. You must make sure the ring filter is secure at the base of the vase. Once you're satisfied the grounds have boiled enough, kill the Bunsen flame and the coffee drains into the bulb for serving, leaving the grounds on the nylon filter in the vase. Elegant and efficient.

What really caught my eye were two things. First, I noted how quickly and suddenly the water moved up from the bulb into the vase, and, second, how if the flame were lowered or removed for even a few moments, the coffee would slide back down into the bulb. (As long as the grounds were on the vase-side of the filter, though, you could just re-apply the heat, and the fluid would re-enter the vase.)

This whole operation -- not to mention the outrageous buzz from a laarrge midday coffee -- had me transfixed. "How did it work?" I asked, my teeth chattering on the mug. Which got me to wondering, and then to blogging...

INSCITIA:

How does this sort of coffee maker work?

COGITATIO:

My brain staggered back almost ten years to Mr. Ritter's senior physics class. Temperature... volume... pressure... Boyle's Law! Boyle's law, as far as I understand it, describes the directly proportional relationship between pressure (p), volume (V), for an ideal gas (I dream of gases!) at a constant temperature (C), to wit, p*V = C. In other words, for example, as pressure increases in a uniformly hot volume of gas, the gas's volume increases (think of a plastic bottle swelling in the sun and then hissing when you open it). Conversely, as volume increases in a constant temperature gas environment, the gas's pressure increases (think of a water balloon filling to bursting).

The interesting thing about Boyle's law, though, is that theoretically (or, operationally speaking), C need not be the constant. Any of the equation's elements could be posited as constant, though this would change some proportions from direct to inverse. To wit, at constant pressure, volume is inversely proportional to volume (p = C/V), meaning, the higher the volume, the lower the temperature. And so forth for other scenarios and operations.

I realize now that the coffee maker not only has no constant temperature as such, but also concerns fluids, not agses, so Boyle's primary law is not technically apposite in this case. But the basic idea of the law got me thinking of an explanation: in the bulb, as the water, which has a constant volume (ignoring evaporation and small ejected droplets), gets hotter, its pressure will increase. Since there is only one way out of the increasingly pressurized bulb (namely, up, up and away!), the boiling water will shoot up the tube to a lower volume. (The vase has no flame in it or on it to pressurize its contents.) As the fluid cools in the vase away from the flame, its pressure "gives in" to the air pressure in the vase, and it tries to sink back into the bulb. The constant Bunsen flame, though, prevents it from doing so, since that high temperature always "kicks" sinking fluid back to the lower pressure vase-system above.

I believe the mechanism is that heat energy raises the water's pressure in the bulb higher than the combined force of gravity and air pressure in the vase. This greater thermal, kinetic energy, according to Boyle's law, will propel the water up. Once the temperature decreases, however, the fluid succumbs to air pressure and gravity, and finds itself back in the bulb.

Voila, ou no?

RESPONSUM:

Hair today, gone tomorrow?

[WARNING: Upon reading this post, you'll think I'm either really creepy or pathologically bored. Or both. But that's the price of mounting my ignorance. Onward!]

Having grown a beard for five months recently (though I shaved it down to a gotif last week), I have picked up the habit of, well, how do I say this? Pushing any upper-lip whiskers long enough to reach into my mouth an snipping them of with my teeth. A beard trimmer on the go; and it keeps things remarkably even. The hitch is that since my fingers are near my mouth a lot to perform this nibble-trim, I can just as easily nibble-trim my nails. I used to be a very bad nail-biter (fingernails, I mean). I've gotten a lot more sanitary and less jittery for such behavior; but I still sometimes chip away at them absentmindedly. What's more, I admit there's a peculiar satisfaction in redigesting proteins that your body has processed and produced in nail- and hair-form. Waste not, want not, I say! (By the way, a hair sample is the longest lasting method of drug testing, since drug traces end up in follicles and then grow all the way up into hairs. It's impossible to bleach, wash, or dislodge the traces as long as the hair is intact.)

Finally -- full disclosure -- I must admit the hair-and-nail gourmet has a side dish: skin. Cuticles, molting calluses, etc. all cry out for some fine dental manicuring. So nibble I do. It's probably a habit I developed in response to my painful history of ingrown toenails, based on which I learned the Number One Maxim of nail care: Keep the Skin Below the Nail Edge, Otherwise the Nail Edge Below the Skin Will Burrow Into the Skin! self-grooming is a noble primate tradition, right?

So there you have it: whiskers, nails and skin, all an undeniable part of my diet. All this nibble-trimming and nail-chipping got me wondering, and then to blogging...

INSCITIA:

How long could you survive on a diet of nails, hairs and epidermal skin? What's the caloric value of such homegrown snacks?

COGITATIO:

The key is the growth rate for all these appendages. You'd have to pace your consumption to maintain a steady level of nails and hair. Maybe you could favor alternating hands every day or two. Maybe you could have a "scalp-hair feast" every few days, between which you'd sate yourself on knuckle, arm and leg hair. (And we can't forget eyebrows, eyelashes, any torso- and ear-hairs.) Meanwhile, you'd have to scrape all dead skin flakes, and even decent little bits of callused skin, off your arms and back for in-between nutrition. I think skin-cell loss would be reliable and frequent than hair- and nail-growth, so it would be your staple. I would "allow" for basic water intake (which would in turn produce some nice electrolyte-0rsih sweat to wash down whiskers al la nail).

Considering all these parameters, and how long an average human can live on total food fasting, I give this diet at least a solid two months. Consider it a radically Emersonian Akins Diet.

The slogan? "Eat at Toes!"

RESPONSUM:

No, I'm not that smart

I realize I haven't blogged here at ScIn for a number of months. Which has led me to blog.

INSCITIA:

Where has Elliot been for so long, and is he really no longer ignorant?

COGITATIO:

I think he swallowed an Omniscience Pill and hasn't stopped floating.

RESPONSUM:

It's not that I have no more ignorance; it's just that apart from a phase of groggy anti-blogging-itis, I also have been very busy offline. My "flashes of ignorance" still do come, all the time, in fact, but then wash away in a stream of more mundane knowns, leaving this blog as lifeless as a black hole.

I have a few inscitiae lined up soon, though, so stay tuned.

Spiritual boquets?

As my anything more than random readers will know, my other blog, FideCogitActio, is heavily theological and spiritual. This blog, however, is virtually "atheological" -- until now. By George, I have a case of theological inscitia!

Several weeks ago, months in fact, I was reading St. Francis de Sales Introduction to the Devout Life when I saw him encourage making a "spiritual bouquet" to the Lord. "Make a what?" I asked myself. I gathered from the context of St. Francis's counsel that this "bouquet" was some kind of offering to God as a symbol of thanksgiving, amended life, a vow, etc. But I really couldn't tell what such a bouquet was materially: a real bouquet of lowers? a paper cut-out bouquet of flowers? a cluster of fragrant prayers? This left me wondering, and then blogging:

INSCITIA:

What is a spiritual bouquet in Catholic piety?

COGITATIO:

I think it's a series, or cluster, of prayers either in a journal, written on slips of paper, or prayed.

RESPONDUM:

Aqua boom?

Do you dream? I almost never dream. (And, to head you off at the pass, I know, I know, I know, I hear it every time: since ALL people dream, I actually DO dream, but just don't REMEMBER the dream. I know, I know, just humor me!) For the past decade or so, I am aware of remembering dreams, even aware of remembering having had a dream, perhaps a dozen times. A few nights ago made it a baker's dozen. I had a bizarre adventure dream. I'll spare you the details (mainly because my memory seems also to have spared me of them over the days), but I ended up under water, chasing a wicked fast, super-intelligent squid. Which led me to wonder, and then to blog.

INSCITIA:

Can you break the sound barrier underwater? Has it been done? What speed would you need to do so? And what would happen if you did it?

COGITATIO:

I think it is possible, but would require an incredibly fast speed. My ancient and rusted-out physics acumen reminds me altitude and air density are directly (or is it inversely?!) proportional to the sound barrier. (Something like 967 mph at sea level?) The higher you go, the thinner the air becomes, and the lower the sound barrier becomes. This is, I think, partially why planes make sonic booms at such high altitudes.

Despite my supersonic optimism, a major snag in the possibility of a subaquatic sonic boom, as far as I can see now, is the physical limits water resistance would put on a potentially supersonic subaquatic vessel (PSSV). It may be possible, for engineers to develop and pilots to handle a PSSV on the drawing board and in simulations, but I have a feeling the relatively enormous density of water, coupled with its friction and inertia, would top out any PSSV's velocity below the sound barrier.

A mere James Bond pipe dream?

RESPONSUM:

Fuzzy lasers?

Believe it or not, I'm a bit of a tech nerd. I like gadgets. One of my lingering day dreams is one day to build a droid or android. (Of course, the paradox is that I'm also a bit of a Luddite, insisting, for example, the Internet is one of the greatest spiritual challenges for modern humans and preferring simple, older-fashioned gizmos to overly ornate, multi-purpose thingamajigs. I don't like all this technical jargon, but I use it.) Being a gadget man, if a laser pointer comes my way, I'll take it. And who wouldn't? Who doesn't like shining red dots onto far buildings at night? Or making your little dog chase a bobbing red light on the floor? Or turning off the lights and making your fingertips and nostrils glow red in the darkness? Or imaginging shooting laser Morse code to aliens? These are the highest joys of any bored and precocious man (or, uh, so I hear...).

At any rate, a laser pointer did fall into my clutches a few weeks ago and I have had red fingertips ever since. I've also had more time to observe the little red light beam dangling from my key ring. Which made me wonder, and then blog.

INSCITIA:

What makes laser light look the way it does? I mean, when I focus on it, the light seems to shimmer and vibrate, like I can actually see clumps of photons swirling. Why does it look like red "TV snow"? All around the center of the laser beam, I note a sort of "photo fuzz", like a small patch of red "light fog" -- why?

COGITATIO:

I did a little reading about lasers today (the More How Stuff Works book) and suspect the visual "fuzziness" of laser light has to do with the "coherent" nature of laser light. Laser light is coherent, as far as I understand it, in that its photons have very similar, very close wavelengths. Mirrors within lasers help laser quanta converge, unlike incandescent light, which spreads its photons into many directions. As such, laser light's coherent quanta would appear clumpier to the naked eye. Unlike the wave fluctuations of incandescent photons, which escape our notice, coherent laser quanta tumble together in an apparent way. I think it must have to do with wavelength interference, but I'm not sure how.

It's a very wobbly lay-cogitatio, but hey, that's why I have this blog! Have at ye!

RESPONSUM:

Thought experiments?

I once read somewhere, somewhen, that Galileo (or someone) disproved Aristotle's theory of force and gravitation without even moving or measuring projectiles. Now, as you can see, every detail about this recollection is beyond fuzzy.

INSCITIA:

Can anyone out there fill me in on this thought experiment? Who did it (if not Galileo)? What was its content?

COGITATIO:

I've tried to recall how the pure-thought experiment disproved Aristotle's theory (i.e., it was a reductio ad absurdum about the latter's claim that bigger objects fall faster), but it's just so hazy and I'm not so smart. All I remember clearly is that the author was illustrating how science is not primarily or even necessarily a mathematical endeavor. Good science depends fundamentally on observation and logic.

RESPONSUM, care of "c" [pending Cogitator analysis]:

www.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/...sci_method_9t12.html

Waking bears?

I was watching Will Farrell's (sp?) Anchorman (again) with some friends this Saturday. The climax of the film has much to do with Kodiak bears, presumably angry to have been woken from their hibernation. Which led me to wonder, and then to blog.

INSCITIA:

Is it even possible to wake hibernating bears? Is not hibernation a deep, nearly catatonic, seasonal and hormonal "coma", which makes the bears totally and irreversibly unconscious? Or is it just a really long and sometimes fitful sleep? Do bears wake up naturally from time to time, or, as I recall from elementary school, do they load up for winter (lots of berries and a plug of pinecones) and then hole up in caves literally until winter breaks?

COGITATIO:

I am fairly certain the bears can be woken, if for no other reason than that lying for months as sleeping, vulnerable hunks of waiting meat for any non-hibernating predators probably weeds out that flaw. Then again, hibernation is from all I know, a profoundly deep and immobile lifecycle. What do I know? Ah, I'll sleep on it.

RESPONSUM:

Tea pot?

FACT 1: I was a huge Aerosmith fan in my teen years. I used to know all their lyrics, albums, track names, band members and riffs by heart.

FACT 2: Now, I live in Taiwan, where I've cultivated a taste for, if not "fine", then at least good tea (especially pure green tea).

Today a peculiar connection formed between these two facts. As I added more hot water to my tea bottle, I imagined the green leaves releasing their strong, amber riches as if on command, as if they were made to dissolve into fluid delight in the mere presence of hot water (oh, wait...). The image of green leaves releasing a pleasing consumer harvest reminded me of - why lie? - pot, marijuana, the ganja.

Now, I'm not a pot head; I've never even smoked the stuff. (Maybe green tea is as botanically rebellious as I get.) But, thinking of my tea as pot instantly reminded me of the lyrics from Aerosmith's (1976?) song, "Mama Kin." In that song, Steven Tyler euphemistically describes a rock-bohemian as "sleepin' late and smokin' up tea," tea of course being a code name for pot (both have green leaves, etc.). These mental meanderings led me to wonder, and then blog.

INSCITIA:

Can you make marijuana tea? For that matter, can you make tobacco tea? If not, why not?

As I daid, I'm not an admirer, smoker nor dealer of either plant, so the profits for me in this question are all but nil. It's the idea, though, that intrigues me.

COGITATIO:

I understand marijuana is weed, and therefore probably all too planty a plant to do anything but cut, dry, press and smoke. The same must certainly go for tobacco. Even so... some of the Chinese herbal medicines I've seen can't be any less bitter, raw, planty or unpleasant than boiled weed juice. It seems to me if you added some honey or sugar or some flavor enhancement, you could get past the acrid bitterness and enjoy the, eh-hem, more reputed aspects of either weed. Further, bypassing the smoking of those plants would remove the inherent health risks of any sort of smoking, as well as, I am certain, enhance the potency of the weeds. No flavors, chemicals or minerals would be lost as when the plants are processed and burned, so I imagine "tea pot" and "teabacco" would enhance their respective markets.

Are there serious medical dangers in boiling pot and or tobacco? In any case, why haven't I heard of this before? (Maybe because I'm not a pot head or a smoker...) As always, I welcome instructive comments. For those who may respond, there's no need to explain how you know the ins and outs of the pot world. :emoticon: It may just be a matter of time till we see cans and bottles of "Tea Pot" and "Teabacco"!

RESPONSUM, care of "c":

Don't try this at home kids, I'm a plant physiologist. The medium length answer to your question is that it all depends on the solubility of the active ingredient. Nicotine is water soluble, but but doesn't taste very good. That's why the nicotine gum tastes horrible. The main reason for that is that it is highly alakaline. THC, me thinks, is lipid soluble, and does not readily dissolve in water. I'm sure it's possible to make your proposed pot tea, and I'm almost certain that it's been tried. My guess is that it would take a lot more of the stuff to have the same effect. Smoking a substance delivers the chemical directly to the lungs, as with nicotine and THC. People could start making pot tea and nicotea, but they would end up using a lot more and paying a lot more. The bodily cost of consumption lost from the lungs would certainly be taken by the digestive system, and we would, perhaps, see an increase in stomach cancer. It seems to me that man has figured out the most pleasurable delivery methods for all his vices. That is, until recently, when people started vaporizing liquor. Quickly becoming illegal across the US, liquor vaporizers allow the consumer to breathe in alcohol vapors, which goes straight to the lungs, bypassing the digestive system, for a quick and powerful dose of alcohol. I remember the good old days when tasty ale was enjoyed in moderation. Kids these days.

Broad zoom?

Things are advancing slowly but pleasingly here at ScIn. For one case I've gotten two responsa to my inscitia from real live people in the past week or so, and for a second case, was able to dispel my inscitia with a little googling.

Now, having just read some cinematic analysis, I've got a film question. Calling all film students and movie buffs!

INSCITIA:

How do they do that zoom in which the person stays stationery at center and gets closer and tighter, while the (unfocused) background widens and moves around him? (This effect is commonly seen at moments of surprise or panic, to highlight the character's sense of vertigo and isolation.)

COGITATIO:

I think I once deduced or heard this effect is achieved by keeping a tight lens-focus on the person while physically moving the camera in towards him. The lens-focus stays tight, clean and immobile while the background moves into greater unclarity. That sounds legit, I guess, but still doesn't help me understand how a camera can register such disjunctive perspectives. (If this is right, I only thought of it in a burst of covering my arse, where trying to look knowledgeable may have flushed me into a cinematographic epiphany.)

RESPONSUM:

Fidgety stars?

Piggy-backing off my earlier post about “star streaks,” I’d like to add the following.

INSCITIA:

Given that stars appear immobile due to their tremendous distance relative to us, why do they still appear to shimmer and twinkle and twitch?

This question bothered me the night I was up in Da Keng.  I was surprised to (re)discover how animated the stars looked, thinking that one of them was as close to a UFO as I'd ever seen.  Happily, I was able to get a responsum to this inscitia just by googling.  (Which, of course, raises the question how viable this whole ignorance blog is, since I may be able to find responda to all my inscitia just with enough googling.  Even so, I like the idea of admitting on ScIn when I’m ignorant.  This blog is, as I say, as much a discipline of learning as a forum for cultivating humility.  Plus, I really would love to hear from knowledgeable readers, thus bringing collective wisdom to me in a personal, interactive way.)

RESPONSUM:

[A]tmospheric turbulence produces continual small changes in the optical properties of the air between the star and our eyes. The light from the star is refracted slightly, and the stellar image dances around on our retina. … Astronomers use the term "seeing" to describe the effects of atmospheric turbulence. The circle over which a star's light is spread is called the seeing disk. On a good night at the best observing site, the maximum amount of deflection produced by the atmosphere is slightly less than 1 second of arc. The seeing disk of a star is only a small fraction of an arc second. The point-like image of a star is seen as scintillating. (c/o the Singapore Science Center)  

So, there you have it.  The “UFO” twitching I saw New Year’s eve in Da Keng was atmospheric, not astronomic (a fact which I suspected at the time, since the most dramatic twitching came when clouds passed over and past stars).  Ironically, this atmospheric “interference” is actually a key part of our enjoyment of stargazing.  if we saw stars “as they really were,” without any “seeing” (atmospheric disturbance), we might just find them boring.  Twitching, disturbed real stars are and always will be much more enthralling than perfectly observable, static glow-in-the-dark sticker stars.  

Along the same lines, I recently read how the coffee-table-book photos we have of our galaxy and of other astronomical entities get nearly all their beauty and splendor from photo filters, digital touch-ups and, most important, prolonged shutter exposure.  The pictures we see of the Milky Way as a lush, swirling mass of stars and planets is actually due to immense light saturation, basically galactic photographic steroids. If we saw a true “snapshot” of the Milky Way, or of any part of space in general, we’d see an unimpressive huge black matte peppered very lightly with stars and asteroids.  Regardless how dramatically PBS animates it for public education, emptiness and darkness, not fullness and brightness, are the chief attributes of space.  

An irony for me was that I read about this in a book defending the likelihood, if not biological necessity, of extra-terrestrial life.  I find this ironic, incongruous, because a key premise in the SETI movement is that, even if we leave aside intrusive comic-book “grays” and “Martian men,” virus- or bacteria-laden space debris flitting from plane to planet, suffice to pollinate the whole cosmos with low-level life.  Oh, really?  The fact is, as this book pointed out, if you sent even a large rocket through space, it would in all likelihood travel “billions and billions” of light years without a single collision.  Presumably, SETI’s hypothetical life-rocks have better odds of touching down.

An added bonus?

I am currently revising an FCA article. I wanted to write "As an added bonus..." but then backtracked to write the leaner, seemingly non-redundant "As a bonus...".

INSCITIA:

Does is it make any sense to say "an added bonus"? Isn't the very meaning of "bonus" something that is "added"? Does an "added bonus" amount to a "bonus bonus"?

COGITATIO:

I know (I think) that in Latin "bonus" simply means "a good." But I think in modern English, "bonus" carries the idea of an extra, even gratuitous, good. As such, it is redundant to speak of an "added bonus." An unadorned bonus is bonus enough, no?

RESPONSUM:

Star streaks?

I was in the mountains last night for New Year's. Finally above Taiwan's smogline, I was actually able to see -- stars! Seeing them again for the first time, I was amazed at how "fidgety" they all seemed to be. No matter how hard I stared at them, and in fact, the harder I stared at them, they seemed to twitch and in some cases even change position. ("No wonder there are so many UFO sightings," I mumbled.) Thinking with such wonder about starlight, I recalled that the starlight we see is in fact old news: the light currently being emitted by the stars has not yet reached earth from so far away, so when we look up, we only see stars' old, well traveled photons.

INSCITIA:

If the earth is moving and if starlight reaches us in a stream of photons, why don't we see stars as streaks across the sky? Indeed, isn't the North Star so very bright just because earth 's axis moves in line with it, and therefore more photons from the star can hit us directly, without any terrestrial shift?

Imagine a man spraying a hose to the side while running: the water bends back as he runs forward. How or why doesn't the same go for starlight? Or imagine taking a photo of moving cars at night, with a long shutter exposure: as the photons collide into the camera's retina, the moving lights form streaks in the final photo. In both cases, the dynamics are reversed (the stars spray and are stationary, while the earth gets sprayed [with photons] and is in motion), but I think the analogies holds.

COGITATIO:

I assume the answer has to do with the immense distances of the stars from earth, and that from that far out starlight somehow "equalizes" around its originating point, so that we see the mean amount of light and recognize it as a star. In other words, the stars we see are like visual "statistical averages" of photons, and they appear to contract into one star. Since the only thing consitstently producing light is the star, it is the only thing that will reach our eye on a "statistically mean" frequency. Any twitching by the stars, then, would just be the batches of photons outside the star's statistically mean core.

RESPONSUM PRIMUM:

As of 4 December 2006, my co-workers quickly disabused me of my ignorance on this one. "It's distance versus speed, dude," they said. They reminded me that if we leave a camera shutter open a while at night, we will indeed see streaks. I am supposed to understand that because the stars are so very far away, we simply can't perceive their motion. It's like sitting on a train watching the far mountains "stand still" while the nearby grass, fences, ground, etc all zoom by.

This explanation is obvious and simple. Even so, I can't shake my sense of curiosity - which I'll say is so inchoate as to amount to ignorance - as to WHY such a phenomenon occurs. It still seems there must be some kind of perceivable alteration of the stars based on our terrestrial motion, much as the sun changes appearance just in relation to our orbit of it. "You can lead a fool to wisdom..." I suppose? I accept the explanation, but something elemental still tantalizes and eludes me at a deeper level about this phenomenon. Hmmm...

RESPONSUM SECUNDUM, care of "the other e.b.":

We can see the stars move due to terrestrial motion, paralax, dude.

Some practical explanation. Close an eye (any eye) and raise your thum to a fixed point on a far wall... now switch eyes, your thumb appears to have moved relative to the fixed point, right? Yeah baby, paralax.

And if you think about it this would work for "closer" objects as the earth moves around the sun. For instance durring summer a certain relatively close star would apper distance x away from a "fixed" star (one whose distance is so astronimically far that it appears unmoving even relative to our solar orbit). However, as the year progresses to winter the earth moves around to the other end of its orbit (like "switching eyes" in the previous example) and we now see the "close" star from a slightly different angle and it now looks as though it has traveled to a distance y from it's "unmoving" neighbor.

This only works for stars that are on the order of "astronomical units" away from us (one astronumical unit (au) is the distance from the earth to the sun, or thereabouts [using a base line of "1 AU" made some of the math easier given that, at the time, astronomers had no idea what the true distance was])

So, if we know the distance the earth has moved (roughly 2 au's), and we can see how much the "close" star has "moved" agains the relatively fixed background we can then extrapolate a distance using simple geometry (the earth's orbit is a base of a right triangle and the angle can be deduced from the amount the "close" star travels, apply the pathagorian theorem and there you have it).

pax

Volo scandeo inscitia mea!

"I want to mount my ignorance!"

The idea of this blog is to voice any and all areas of my ignorance. Astronomy, history, languages, biology, politics, theology, etc. -- anything I recognize as a dark spot in my mind, I'll post here.

Why?

Two reasons.

First, admitting and then broadcasting my ignorance cultivates humility; and humility is key to spiritual growth. I, like many people, glibly devote so much of my blogging to announcing what I think, presumably because it's what I think I know. How sobering it is to devote whole blog to what I don't know! If I were really alert and honest, this blog should quickly swell to tenfold the size of my other writings. Hence the title: mounting ignorance.

Second, while I must face my vast ignorance, I won't wallow in it. By posting quandries here, I am genuinely seeking knowledge. Hence the title: mounting ignorance [to overcome it].

The format of Scandendum Inscitia (ScIn, "skin") is as follows: I'll provide a context for my ignorance and then lay down my ignorant query (INSCITIA). Then I may or may not offer some thoughts about how to resolve my ignorance (COGITATIO). Either way, the post will end with space for readers, or my own subsequent learning, to resolve my inscitia (RESPONSUM). (I'll transplant the responsa into the post from emails or comments readers offer.) Hence, this blog in no small way depends on readers willing and able to help me mount my ignorance. May my inscitia yield unto God's sapientia.

Finally, I resist the common stereotype of the Middle Ages as a dark and mindless, as a dead and lifeless, age. The longer one studies that era, the more one is impressed, even stunned, by the medievals' voracious desire for learning. Plus, if you read St. Anselm or other medieval giants, you can't miss their humility. While they may pontificate and explicate about the highest mysteries, they all the while make it clear they do so as weak and ignorant mortals walking by the humble light of fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). Given my sympathies for the Middle Ages, and given that age's utterly Latin composition, I hope to use Latin frequently here at ScIn in a true medieval, voracious and humble pursuit of sapientia. Besides, using Latin here will help me maintain and regain my middle-school Latin.

INSCITIA:

Have I left anything out?

RESPONSUM:

INSCITIA:

Where is my Latin wrong?

RESPONSUM: