Yearly Archives: 2013

Four far-flung planets

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Alex R. Howe

Some solar systems have a lot of planets packed in close to their stars. Others are just the opposite. HR 8799 is a young star that is more massive than our Sun. It’s so young–about 30 million years–that it’s planetary … Continue reading →

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Book review: Inferno by Dan Brown

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Alex R. Howe

In spite of all logic, I have a soft spot for Dan Brown. I genuinely enjoyed his early work. I got started on Angels and Demons, which I thought was pretty good at the time, despite some errors. I also … Continue reading →

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Movie review: Star Trek Into Darkness

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Alex R. Howe

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I’m a life-long Trekkie. I’ve seen all of the movies (even the absurd Star Trek V) and most of all five series. I also thoroughly enjoyed J. J. Abrams’s in-universe reboot of … Continue reading →

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A planetary six-pack

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Alex R. Howe

Mercury, the closest planet to our Sun, is often thought of as being super-close to the Sun and super hot. But really, it’s 40% of Earth’s distance from the Sun, and it’s only 430 degrees Celsius (800 Fahrenheit) on the … Continue reading →

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Quality control, part 3: the arts

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Alex R. Howe

This is final post in my series on quality control. Click the links to see part 1 and part 2. The Internet gives everyone a voice. It either has become or is becoming our library, our newspaper, our encyclopedia, our … Continue reading →

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Quality control, part 2: the sciences

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Alex R. Howe

In my last post, I discussed the implications of interconnected world of the Internet as it failed to track down the Boston bombers before traditional methods did. In this post, I discuss the broader implications as they pertain to my … Continue reading →

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Boston, Reddit, and the problem of quality control

Posted on April 21, 2013 by Alex R. Howe

By now, you probably know all about the bombings at the Boston Marathon last week that left 3 people dead and 176 injured. It has its own Wikipedia page now, if you’re not up to speed. In the ensuing investigation, … Continue reading →

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Fun with word counts

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Alex R. Howe

Quick, which one of these books has more words in it? Have a guess? The book on the left has 516 pages, which at about 330 words per page means it probably has about 170,000 words, give or take. That’s … Continue reading →

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Red suns

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Alex R. Howe

The most common type of stars in the universe are Type-M dwarfs, better known as red dwarfs. These are stars that are less than about half the mass of our Sun, less than a tenth as bright, and much cooler, … Continue reading →

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De-extinction: not to be or to be?

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Alex R. Howe

The latest word in environmentalism is “de-extinction”: resurrecting species that have gone extinct by cloning them (or occasionally by selective breeding, such as recreating the wild aurochs from domestic cattle). While there are a handful of species we might actually … Continue reading →

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