hermiene.net

Doodle is dead, and rightly so, but its spirit lives on at Llamaphobia! Yes, I'm pretentious enough to call it a full-fledged web comic. And look, I even made up for missing yesterday's strip by including it there. Yay! Thanks to relsqui for the comic's title and James Blair for hosting it.

I increased my Geometry Wars score from 23M to 24,937,870 and regained my rank at 27th place. Why is it that I can only increase my score a few million points at a time?

I'll miss today's comic, but only because I'm working on something sweet and awesome. And by the way, I have a buffer of comics, so it's not like I haven't been working (I have!). I also retroactively removed the two comics I have already made from my news posts. I realized that posting them like that is the first step down the slippery slope to a tumblelog (it's already bad enough that I refer to my site as a blog rather than a personal web site, which is what I'm trying to make it into).

More later.

Two new web comics added: Cyanide and Happiness and Kittybot. I swear, the crazy thing isn't that there are twenty-seven comics being linked to. It's that I actually follow them all.

I also read two books: Xenocide and Letter to a Christian Nation. The latter made me want to read its predecessor, The End of Faith, which I'll definitely buy on my next Amazon spree.

Doodles! Say hello to Doodles, our newest member. (Now dead, replaced by Llamaphobia.) I plan to post small doodles every Monday and every Friday, without fail. I'm not at all inspired by xkcd. No, sir!

I read a Dawkins essay called The Real Romance in the Stars, and a quote struck me:

"Note, accordingly, how little it means to say something like 'Uranus moves into Aquarius'. Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us, which have no connection with each other except that they constitute a (meaningless) pattern when seen from a certain (not particularly special) place in the galaxy (here). A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to 'move into'."

And indeed, it can't "move into Aquarius." Using the power of modern computers and a mountain of astronomical data, I have put together a little demonstration with the awesome program Celestia (I recommend you check out the effect for yourself in real-time 3D). Here is Uranus as viewed 100 kilometers from its surface. One can just make out the Aquarius constellation. (Click for larger versions.)

Zooming out to about a million kilometers, one can see the orbits of Uranus' many satellites.

At one astronomical unit (the distance between the Earth and the Sun) above the surface, the orbits of all its 27 satellites are visible. Some of the stars in the Aquarius constellation are visible.

At 120 AUs, the whole Solar System is visible, and Uranus' orbit is highlighted in red.

At one light year away from Uranus, our sun is still visible, but its planets are not.

At 50 light years out, we see the sphere that Celestia uses to draw constellation borders. It's completely irrelevant now, of course, so the next picture will have it removed.

At 300 light years out, the illusion of a constellation as a coherent entity completely breaks down, and one is left with imaginary (and ultimately meaningless) lines connecting the stars.

What can you learn from this? "Astrology is bunk" is a good lesson. "The charlatans who steal weak-minded people's money using astrology are fools" is another good lesson. Again, the effect is much better seen in real-time 3D. Go download Celestia.