How I almost killed the Vice President's dog...

Those of you who know me know that I work at the U.S. Naval Observatory. Since 1976 the Observatory has also been the home of the Vice President of the U.S. Since 1997 I've had the chance to show three VP's and their families the various sights of the Observatory. The new tenants, Vice President Joe and Dr. Jill Biden, have been quite actively visiting us since moving into One Observatory Circle.

Dr. Biden in particular brings people up fairly often. Today she hosted a reception at the Residence for 5th & 6th Grade students from a DC Charter School and a military school from Quantico. One of the activities that was planned was a quick visit to our 26-inch "Great Equatorial" telescope, with yours truly as the host.

Between the students, Secret Service, teachers, & VP staffers there were about 35 people who eventually wandered up from the house, along with Champ, the Bidens' year-old German Shepherd dog.

Champ was having a grand ol' time cavorting on the lawn with the kids. As we all filed into the telescope dome he made a number of attempts to come in as well, until he finally escaped a staffer and found his way inside.

We've just refinished the floor in there, which happens to be an elevating platform to gain access to the telescope. It's nice and shiny and slick. Champ was darting between people, skidding into turns, and generally having a ball. Until he skidded once too often. There's a large hole in the floor where a spiral staircase gives access to the basement. Out of the corner of my eye, amid all the confusion, I see Champ's rear end disappear down the hole. He hangs desperately onto the lip for a brief instant with his front paws, then Whoosh! Down he goes like Alice down the rabbit hole.

My first thought was "Oh, shit! He's either dead or has a broken back! Either way this doesn't look good..."

Several agents and Dr. Biden rush down the steps. I at least had the presence of mind to turn the light on and got Bill (one of the real astronomers who works with the telescope) to clear access to the more conventional basement stairway.

Then one of the aides says "OK, Mr. Chester, we're all ready for your presentation!"

Well, somehow I pull it together, do my speil, during which Dr. Biden comes up to indicate Champ's OK. Does that qualify as "Grace under pressure?"

Greatest C&W Song EVER!!

My favorite used to be "Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life". Now it's "I Just Got Flipped Off by a Silver-Haired Old Lady Who Had a 'Honk If You Love Jesus' Sticker on the Bumper of Her Car".

'Nuff said...

"It's The End Of The World As We Know It" (R.E.M.)

I got an email from my brother the other day. He'd been driving from Seattle to Denver and, in the AM static of late-night radio in the wide-open spaces, heard some doomsayer predicting the apocalypse in 2019 thanks to an asteroid that had us in its sights. My brother is a reasonable, rational, intelligent guy, but he still needed some re-assurance that we weren't going to end up like the finale in a cosmic "Mythbusters" episode. So this is what I wrote him in response.

Mark Twain said it best: "The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right." Over the past 30 years of employment in this business I have collected what is now amounting to a fairly fat folder of various "end of the world as we know it" theories, schemes, alleged cover-ups, etc. In case you missed them (I certainly did) there were at least a half-dozen apocalypses since 1984. I'm talking about complete annihilation of the planet and all we hold dear to our hearts. It's possible that I might have missed three of them for colonoscopies when I was under general anesthesia, but reliable sources tell me that the only things I missed while in dreamland was my own extreme flatulence. Someday after I retire I'm going to write a book...

The rock in question, (89959) 2002 NT7, caused a brief stir when it was first found in 2002 as the first object to rate a positive value on the "Palermo Scale", an empirical impact threat hazard rating. Values of zero indicate that the potential threat is comparable to that of a random event. A value of 1 indicates that there's a 10-fold increase in risk over the random background level, 2 means 100 times, etc. This li'l guy had an initial value of 0.06 (big woo...) As often happens with these things, once an orbit is determined, we can go "data mining" in old photographic plate collections and find older observations of an object which can then be used to furhter refine its orbit. About 3 months after 2002 NT7 was found, its image was duly tracked to an older survey plate, and the new orbit (fitting both the contemporary and older observations) changed its Palermo Scale rating to -0.25. In other words you're more likely to get bonked by a random event than by this particular one.

Now, all that aside, there are plenty more where this guy came from. Asteroid (99942) Apophis is a similar critter. When initially discovered in 2004 it racked up a Palermo Scale of 1.10, and some early calculations indicated that there was a 2.7% chance of it hitting us on 4/13/2029. Subsequent data have refined the orbit enough so that we now know it won't hit us at that time, but it will whizz by at a distance of some 20,000 miles. There was some probability that this close pass would deflect the asteroid enough to set up another possible impact on 4/13/2036, but a battery of optical and radar observations made over the past few years have reduced this chance to about 1:250,000. The object has been measured with radar instruments, so we know its size is about 250 meters. Were this to plop down in Puget Sound you and your immediate neighbors between Bellingham and Tacoma would not be happy campers, but this won't send folks east of Idaho scrambling for the rosary beads or bomb shelters. Unless it lands on the Yellowstone Caldera...

But seriously, folks...we now know that asteroids hit the earth all the time, relatively speaking. Last winter one in the 25-50 meter class landed in Somalia. It scared the bejeebers out of a few Bedouin, and an airline pilot saw its flash from ~250 km away, but it exploded in the atmosphere and basically scattered small rocks over a wide swath of Sahara desert. Objects of this size hit us ~2 or 3 times a year. Objects on the 100 meter class smack us every couple of centuries. Apophis-sized objects hit every few millennia. They will produce impressive results. I've stood many times on the rim of Meteor Crater in AZ, the result of the most recent such encounter ~50,000 years ago. Yes, it's a very impressive hole in the ground, but once you're ~10 km from it you'd never know anything cataclysmic had happened.

Why don't we see more of these types of craters on the earth? Well, 70% of the planet is covered with water, and 90% of the population inhabits 3% of the surface. "If a tree falls in a forest..."

Now we know from the geological record that there have been some major "show-stoppers" which have occurred in the dim & distant past, viz. the dinosaurs, the great Cambrian extinction, etc. As a species we owe our very existence to these events, so its only natural to suppose that one might eventually do us in. Do I lose sleep over it? Nope. Won't do me any good. I'm confident that Apophis will sail by merrily in 2029 and 2036. If I live long enough it will be a really cool thing to watch in the telescope. However, one of Apophis' undiscovered buddies could smack us tomorrow with little or no warning.

Since 1994 various groups have been operating remote telescopes to survey the night sky to look for what we call NEOs (Near Earth Objects). In the course of this work they have discovered hundreds of thousands of rocks of various sizes, and out of this vast collection they have identified ~1500 "PHAs" (Potentially Hazardous Asteroids). These are generally ones that have a 1:100,000 or better chance of hitting us in the next 1000 years that could potentially result in near-global-scale effects. At these odds I can tell you in all sincerity that none of them will hit us in that time span.

However, I can't tell you anything about the estimated 300 - 500 that we haven't found yet... :-)

But if you're a die-hard doomsayer all of this is moot. The next date for the end of the world is December 21, 2012. That's when the current 13-baktun series in the Mayan Calendar ends and the calendar supposedly resets, with the usual attendant bad shit happening. What the doomsayers don't tell you is that the Maya had another cycle in their calendar called a "sun", equivalent to five 13-baktun cycles. Five suns is equivalent to ~26,000 years, which happens to be the precessional cycle of the Earth's rotational poles. Prophets of the End of Times? Nope...the Maya were just damn good astronomers!

My brother replied to this today with a wonderful pearl of wisdom he ascribes to an old Sicilian proverb: "The Mother of Stupidity is always pregnant".

The Boys Are Back In Town...

Some of you may have noticed that my posts seem to have some sort of connection to music now and then. As with many of us, I'm sure, certain events become associated with certain songs. The song in today's Ramble was by a group named Thin Lizzie. I was never a big fan, but this song still gets a fair amount of airplay on the "classic rock" stations.

So why should I care about this song? Well, today I had my third colonoscopy. Seems I'm a veritable polyp factory, so, lucky me, I'm on the "view every 2" year plan. Lots of people seem to fear this procedure. Not me. I don't mind it a bit. It beats surgery any day. I think what most people fear is the prep for the procedure, which is no picnic but is on the whole pretty benign. Once you've gotten past the prep, the rest is easy-peasy.

The best part of the whole deal is that you are blissfully unaware of what they're doing to you. They gave me Propofol, aka "Milk of Amnesia". Yes, it's what killed Michael Jackson, but it hasn't killed me. Yet.

So here's where the music comes in. My doc loves classic rock. It's playing in the background as I'm wheeled into the exam room. Two years ago, as I was going under, the boom box happened to be playing Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused". The last thing I remember was the beginning of Jimmy Page's solo where he uses the cellist's bow to get those whoopy effects out of his Gibson. How appropriate.

Today, I related the story back to my doc, and he switches the box to a really good guitar song by a group who's name I didn't quite commit to memory before memory got erased. But for some reason, Thin Lizzie's song seemed to keep playing over and over in my head for what seemed like forever. But then *boing* ... I'm awake.

So now I have two songs to remind me when my next exam is due. As far as today went, I had a sessile polyp and several smaller ones excised, so they're still finding happy homes in my gut. I'll have to go back in another two years, but as long as the tunes are decent I won't mind. Wonder if my doc will take requests ...

Where the streets have no shame...

So I'm driving into work this morning, taking a somewhat more indirect route than usual. This involves driving along some mixed residential/business streets rather than the usual slog up I-395.

I'm driving on 23rd Street in Crystal City. This is a fairly busy road when traffic is backed up, which is usually always. There is a woman standing in the street talking to a guy in an SUV who's half in the parking lane. She's on the driver's side, chatting as if nothing out of the ordinary is going on, except that all of us trying to get to Jeff Davis Highway have to pull into the oncoming traffic lane to avoid hitting her.

Traffic in DC is bad today, so I can't take my usual route uptown through eastern Georgetown. I get on the Whitehurst Freeway to Canal Road and go up behind Georgetown University. As I'm driving up 44th Street there's a contractor, standing by the driver's door of the ubiquitous white van, talking on his cell phone. I have noticed this behavior with almost every contractor who's worked in my neighborhood over the years. Is it just me, or do they really get better reception standing in the middle of the street?

Finally I turn north on 39th Street near G'Town Hospital. There is a man in a business suit, carrying a briefcase, walking up the street beside the parked cars. There's a perfectly good sidewalk on the other side of the parked cars. Good thing he's only a block away from the hospital...

Butterflies...

No, not the cute ones that pollinate flowers, I'm talking about the ones you get in your innards.

I have never been much of an athlete. In school I was forced to play soccer, which I hated, basketball, which I hated, and baseball, which I didn't hate but as with the other two I basically sucked. And football? Fuggeddaboutit!

The one team sport that I ever enjoyed playing was ice hockey. I grew up near a lake that froze over inn the winter, so pond hockey was a big activity once you plowed enough snow off to make a playing area. And I sucked at that, too, but at least I had fun.

I never played "organized" hockey until I went to a small boarding school in New York. My junior year I finally made third-team, and they put me on defense because I could skate backwards. Senior year I made JV.

In college I played in a few frat leagues, and after moving to DC I picked up the game again after an 8-year hiatus. Then came Abby. Those late night starts in Bowie and Columbia lost their charm...

Then my daughter decided she wanted to play.

Well, since I was paying all this money for practices, etc. I decided to skate and help out with practice drills and the like, and the bug bit me again. After 15 years! So now I've been playing on and off for the last 7 years or so in various "C" leagues in the area.

One thing, though. Before each and every game I get those dang "butterflies"! You'd think after all these years that stuff would go away. By this past spring they were seriously getting to me.

This summer I decided to take the season off. I have always said that I'll keep playing until a) it's not fun anymore and b) I can't for some physical reason. Condition a) was violated last spring, so I figured time away would be a good thing.

Well, I've just returned from my first game of the season. We lost ... nothing new there ... but it was fun, and I can still play a more or less decent game. So now I have to work on those butterflies. I still get 'em before each game. Maybe I should go see a good lepidopterist ...

That song from the "Pepsi" pavillion at the 1964 World's Fair

Yesterday we placed our oldest offspring on a plane at Dulles Airport. When we got home I used some web site to follow the progress of the flight to Frankfurt. This morning I did the same to follow the progress of her second flight to Accra, Ghana. Yes, Ghana. As in Africa!

This afternoon, about 24 hours after we parted ways, she called on somebody's cell phone from the city (?) of Hohoe, where she'll spend the next six weeks doing volunteer work. She called! We heard her voice! The weather's hot and muggy, her butt is sore from the lousy seats on the plane, but OTW she's fine.

Wow...

It really is a small world after all...

Now I can't get that silly ditty out of my head.

Opinions expressed here...

Yeah, you all know what they say about 'em. Well, here's where you'll get a random selection of mine. I'll be wasting most of this space talking about things that matter to me. Astronomy. The environment. Hockey. Idiots in Washington and elsewhere, generally lumped into the category of Republicans (I was once one myself until my wife wrested me from the Dark Side).

As Mark Twain once said, "The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right." Wise man, that Mark...

Cheers,

StarryEyeGuy