A To Z Blogging Challenge: Astrophysics And Asteroids

Today is the kickoff of the A to Z Blogging Challenge!

My theme this year is science. Specifically, recent discoveries in science: Last year I explored various fields and gave overviews of what they were all about, but this time I've decided to track down some interesting discoveries/recent developments in scientific fields and post about those. I'm also winging the challenge--not exactly by choice, but I'm looking forward to seeing what I can come up with on a moment's notice. (Hopefully our internet connection will stop acting weird and let me blog normally soon. Pages are taking minutes to load for some reason.)

But before we finally get to the actual content of my post, I'd like to give a shout-out to the creator of the A to Z Challenge, Arlee Bird. He's an amazing blogger and built a challenge that has allowed people to explore the web and get to know people they'd normally never find.

Now, for my first A to Z Challenge entry: Astrophysics and Asteroids

Astrophysics is the study of space and the universe, such as stars, planets, matter, energy, and practically everything that involves the world beyond Earth. It's the examination of how celestial objects form or self-destruct; it raises questions about what occurred and is occurring in the universe.

The universe, of course, includes asteroids. On February 15th this year, as you've most probably heard, an asteroid (a "superbolide", bolide referring to the bright light it produced) hit the atmosphere and exploded over the Ural Mountains in Russia, above the town of Chelyabinsk. The asteroid was around 17-20 meters across and had a total impact energy of 440 kilotons of TNT, though around 90 kilotons was released as light.


Astrophysics has helped determine the size, velocity, and the likelihood of such an event occurring again. The chances of another asteroid exploding in the atmosphere is not, in fact, as low as you might think; since much of Earth's surface area is uninhabited by people, these types of explosions may occur from every few decades (which is the shortest estimate) to about 100 years and just go unnoticed. More are being found these days due to sensors put in place for the detection of nuclear blasts.

One thing astrophysics can't do, however, is predict such asteroids in advance. They're too minute for current methods and technology to find before they strike the planet, though there are plans to build a new satellite that would orbit the Sun and could be capable of pinpointing the smaller objects.




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Sources:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/meteor-strike.html
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/fireball_130301.html
http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/
http://io9.com/5985276/incredible-details-are-emerging-about-russias-chelyabinsk-meteor

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Do you think there should be more effort put into defending Earth from asteroids?

If you're participating in the A to Z Challenge, what did you choose for letter A?


-----The Golden Eagle

War and Peace: A Review

As mentioned in this post, I was reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I finished it yesterday (taking me almost a whole month to get through it, which is a terribly long time for me) and decided to give you a review of what I thought of this famous novel.

Note: This does not contain major spoilers, but if there are any of you who haven't read it (I wasn't the last person in the world to pick this up, right?) and don't want to know anything about the book before you do, considered yourself warned.


(Also note that this is not as short and tight as a regular book review. I didn't think I'd be able to condense my thoughts into just a few lines per category, so I'm going with a more informal post. Hope you don't mind.)

I expected that I would slog through the book. The version I took out of the library is 885 pages long, small text, large paragraphs, and there's relatively little dialogue. I did end up slogging through bits, but it wasn't as much of a "loose, baggy monster" (Henry James) as I'd thought. Yes, Tolstoy does go off on tangents and gives long explanations and goes on to tell the reader why the war was absolutely inevitable and so forth, but it wasn't entirely boring. A lot of it was interesting enough to keep me from skimming, which is a habit I get into when there's tons of text in a novel.

The characters were also interesting. I read several other books while tackling War and Peace, and I couldn't help comparing the contemporary characters to the ones in a classic like this. They're very different. Tolstoy gives you many descriptions of what the characters are like, and it's not just physical appearance, which (it seems to me) is how most people are described today--he describes how attractive the characters are, how their appearance relates to their personality, what is reflected on their faces, the different body language and what it means to the social circles they're in.

The changes (or lack of them) in the characters played an important role. They're quite different at the beginning than they are at the end, seven years later in 1812. It was sad to see how relationships changed, fell apart, and formed over those years, some things seeming hopeful at the beginning but completely unraveling later on. Some ties seemed doomed to fail from the start--and there's really nothing that compares to waiting for things to come crashing down on everyone's heads.

Of course, there's also the war part of the story. Much of the social interaction happened in peaceful areas, far from the fighting. There was lots of military strategy and violence, and this is where Tolstoy seemed to most often get off track from the main story. He went to great lengths to describe the mindset of the generals, the other officers and military, and the inevitability of war. (I disagree with Tolstoy here. If you ask me, everyone makes decisions that lead to war, so you can't really argue that it's just part of a sequence of events no one can stop.) He doesn't really spare you any details, from the characters' mixed emotions about being in battle to the letters between Napoleon Bonaparte and Tsar Alexander.

So, was all this peace and war, war and peace worth the time spent reading? I would say yes. I plan on reading this again, in fact, sometime in the future; I can see why they called this book a classic.

But.

Allow me to digress and point out one grievance I had with this novel, which was the dominant thought in my mind when I finished: the ending is unfair.


Well, you say, did you expect it to be fair?

Kind of. At least for this one character. I felt bad for her--she hadn't done anything special in the story, but while the other characters were having affairs and flirting and falling in and out of love and jumping into doomed marriages and dueling and just generally acting up, she sat through it all, rather calmly and quietly and reasonably.

Of course, she didn't get a happy ending. The OTHER characters got their happy(ish) endings after making all kinds of mistakes, but she didn't.

Fiddlesticks, Tolstoy. It wouldn't have been so hard to leave her content.

Sigh.

(To learn more about War and Peace, visit the Wikipedia article HERE.)

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Have you read War and Peace? If not, do you plan to read it?


If so, what did you think of it? And were you frustrated for said character at the end?


-----The Golden Eagle

Theremin

This is a theremin:

And this is Theremin with a theremin:

Can you believe this guy spied on us for the Soviet Union?

Watch the full episode. See more History Detectives.

Watch the video. (If it doesn't load, click the link that says "full episode" and then go to "Chapter 4 of 4: Theremin".) Or if you don't have time, I'll give you gist of it. Leon Theremin, a Russian inventor, invented the Theremin, and is widely credited for the beginning of electronic music. However, while he befriended RCA and other companies who wanted to buy the rights to his inventions, he also spied on company practices for the Russians. He reported what he saw back to his home country, and later, invented "The Thing", an espionage device that needed no battery, and could transmit everything the Americans said through the passive device.

Pretty sneaky, huh?

-----The Golden Eagle