Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• If you're of the increasingly rare human subspecies called "morning people," consider watching the predawn sky for the next few weeks. Once Mercury gets a little higher above the horizon at dawn, you'll be able to see all five naked-eye planets in a line: Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter.
• Here in Arizona, I don't even have to get up early. I've been spotting planets at 7 AM, when we take the dogs out. (Sleeping until 7 is sleeping in for us.) No Mercury yet, but all the others are there, and easy. And here and there I see a meteor, which is yet another advantage to the contrarian morning-person position.
• Astronomers are looking at planetary perturbations again, and doing some math suggesting that a gas giant bigger than Neptune out beyond Pluto. My question: Wouldn't anything that big have been spotted by now? It should be possible to calculate the range of visual magnitudes for a gas giant of typical composition at various distances from the Sun. Even if it's as faint as Pluto, the Hubble could snag it with one secondary mirror tied behind its back.
• One downside to claiming that every summer hot spell means global warming is that the public then unrolls the syllogism and comes to believe that every winter cold spell means global cooling. Climate means trends that extend cross 30-50 years. Everything else is weather.
• A new model of the Sun's internal mechanisms suggests that solar activity may fall as much as 60% by 2030. That number is misleading for a number of technnical reasons, but if the Sun is indeed the primary driver of climate, I'm glad I'm in Phoenix--and I'm staying here this time.
• If you haven't reviewed it lately, it's time to go and read ESR's very cogent description of "kafkatrapping," which is a common logical fallacy that cooks down to, "If you're not willing to admit that you're guilty of ism, that proves that you're guilty of ism." I see it all the time. I and many other people in my orbit consider kafkatrappers to be utter morons. We may not say it out loud, but we do. Don't go there.
• Newspaper subscriber numbers are in freefall. I like newspapers, and once we're really quite sincerely residents of Arizona, we'll likely pick up the WSJ again. In the meantime, I think I'm doing what most other people have been doing for some time: picking up news on the Web.
• The appendix could be the body's Federal Reserve Bank for gut bacteria. I've often wondered if overuse of antibiotics has contributed to the explosion of obesity cases since the 1970s, by narrowing the range of beneficial microbes in the lower tract. There are solutions, and although they may seem ukky, they do seem to work.
• Watch what happens when you pour molten aluminum onto dry ice, and (a little later) liquid nitrogen.
• And even though I vividly described what happens when you drop fifty pounds of of cesium into water in Drumlin Circus, if you don't have a thingmaker to cough up a fifty-pound ball of cesium for you, here's what happens when you drop 25 grams of cesium into water. Do the math.
• Finally, while we're talking exotic metals, here are some cool videos of gallium doing freaky things.