Some Magical Sisters From My Absolute Favorite Book Series Of All Time: The Young Wizards Series! It’s

Rebloggable-d by request: Names in the Speech

So this may be an odd question, and not one you’ve thought about much — but how would the Speech interact with someone who uses/identifies as a different name than their birth/legal name? I don’t mean like Kit — presumably his name in the Speech would include a phrase along the lines of ‘Christopher, called Kit’ — but a case where the birth name has been ‘rejected’, and isn’t part of the wizard’s identity at all.

intheafterlight

Space is so creepy and wonderful. Who the hell needs hell when there’s space.

Like there’s an old constellation called Eridanus that you can see in the southern sky, and its not a very interesting constellation. It’s a river. It’s actually the water that’s pouring out of Aquarius, so in the sky it’s kind of boring. It’s a path of stars.

But within Eridanus, in between the stars, there’s a place where the background radiation is unexplainably cold. Because after the Big Bang, there was all this light that scattered everywhere, and it’s the oldest light in the universe, but we can’t see it. It’s so dim that it only shows up as a glow of microwaves, so to us, it just looks like the blackness of the night.

But there’s this spot in Eridanus where that little glow of ancient microwaves isn’t what it should be. It’s cold and dark.

And it’s enormous. Like a billion light year across. Of mostly just emptiness. And we don’t know why. One theory is that it’s simply a huge void, like a place where there are no galaxies. Voids like that do exist. Most of them are smaller, but they’re a sort of predictable part of the structure of the universe. The cold spot in Eridanus, if it were a void, would be so enormous that it would change how we understand the universe. 

But another theory is that this cold spot is actually the place where a parallel universe is tangled with our own. 

What are white holes? Many people are familiar with black holes as a 3-D hole that alters time and space where not even light can escape. However, what is our knowledge on white holes? Well, as your might suspect, white holes are the exact opposite of black holes. They expel matter into space at intense speeds with immense energy. Some cosmologists believe that on the other side of a black hole is a white hole. An interesting point that can either excite or disappoint you is that white holes cannot be entered from the outside. This means that there may never be physical proof of a white hole and will only stay in theories and mathematics.

Nevertheless, there is a paper written in 2012 that argued that the Big Bang was a white hole itself. Unlike black holes, white holes cannot be observed continuously and can only be observed at the time of the event. It also connects a new class called y-ray bursts to white holes. If you would like to read this interesting paper check out http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.2776v2.pdf. Hopefully one day we can learn more about white holes and the mysteries they hold. The universe is fascinating and has secrets that are waiting to be unlocked the question is how much money are we willing to spend on the universe?

Take action today: http://www.penny4nasa.org/take-action/

so, I’ve taken up tailoring recently. and while I was working on a draping today, I got to thinking about entropy.

(drapings are those things where a tailor takes a blank section of cloth and sculpts a piece of clothing directly onto a model’s body. it ensures a perfect fit. entropy refers to the level of organization in a system. the less organization a system has, the greater its entropy. entropy can only be overcome with energy. it takes effort to organize a system. the natural state of the universe is one of complete entropy, i.e., the lowest energy state possible.)

A piece of broadcloth, before it’s used for a draping, is the cloth in its state of greatest entropy. it’s featureless. uniform. whatever small variations exist between one part of the cloth and another are random and will ease out over time. wrinkles. chalk markings. small snags.

a finished piece of clothing is the cloth at its lowest state of entropy, and by extension, its highest energy state. it is structured and organized. it has many features, all of which interact with each other in a coherent system. seams and darts and buttons and lining all cooperate to give the dress, or whatever it is, a fixed shape and function.

most things are like this. your body. the planet Earth. the Milky Way. they are systems made of organized parts which give them form and function. 

(the difference between you and a few buckets of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and a few other atoms combined into an inert slurry is the entropy of the system.)

but in order for those systems to become organized, they needed energy from an outside source. without energy, everything slides towards entropy. the energy that makes your body possible comes from the food you eat. the energy from your food comes, though a few middlemen like cows or cabbages or whatever, from the Sun. the Sun’s energy comes from the fusion of hydrogen into helium. A hydrogen atom is just a proton: maybe paired with an electron, if it bumps into one. And those component particles were created in the first few wild moments after the Big Bang.

All of the energy in the universe can be traced back to the Big Bang. every organized system owes its life to the Big Bang. we’re just sipping from its cup until we die.

(where did the energy that ignited the Big Bang come from? no one knows. there’s room to see God there, if you’re so inclined.)

but the energy of the Big Bang wasn’t infinite. we are, slowly, using it up. the universe is sinking to a lower and lower energy state, all the time. according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the energy of a system can only stay the same or decrease. entropy will win. people refer to this as the heat death of the universe. according to current science, it’s the most likely end point for everything.

so anyway, I got to thinking about this while I was tailoring today.

I spent all day on this project. I put a lot of energy into it. my energy, as mechanical energy, or the physical act of sewing, into the cloth, where it’s now stored as potential energy, which is the energy of positioning. I turned chemical energy (food) into motion and then into shape. each of these transitions is a step down the ladder. a little bit more of our universe’s inheritance, spent.

and I got really sad. that probably sounds ridiculous, right? but I think about this a lot. every time I spend energy, that’s energy the universe can’t get back. a sequin off the Big Bang is now a new dress on my ironing board. was that energy well-spent? should it have gone to something else? it doesn’t matter. it’s gone now. the universe is a little bit closer to death.

then I stopped being sad, and I just felt a deep responsibility to take care of that dress. because, mathematically speaking, there’s nothing superior about organization over entropy. the particles don’t care if they’re in a high or low energy state. your atoms don’t know who you are, and it doesn’t matter to them if you’re you, or a few buckets of slurry. the value of organization is subjective. systems are important because we believe they are. the universe’s life and death only matter if they matter to us.

I like tailoring. my new dress came out well. I’m looking forward to making another one. I’m sorry that someday there won’t be any more new dresses, or anything else.

maybe that’s good enough.

According to the laws of physics, a planet in the shape of a doughnut (toroid) could exist. Physicist Anders Sandberg says that such planets would have very short nights and days, an arid outer equator, twilight polar regions, moons in strange orbits and regions with very different gravity and seasons.

Read more: http://bit.ly/1kPLXGT via io9

New observations of a ‘dust trap’ around a young star solve long-standing planet formation mystery Astronomers using the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array have imaged a region around a young star where dust particles can grow by clumping together. This is the first time that such a dust trap has been clearly observed and modeled. It solves a long-standing mystery about how dust particles in discs grow to larger sizes so that they can eventually form comets, planets and other rocky bodies.

Astronomers now know that planets around other stars are plentiful. But they do not fully understand how they form and there are many aspects of the formation of comets, planets and other rocky bodies that remain a mystery. However, new observations exploiting the power of ALMA are now answering one of the biggest questions: how do tiny grains of dust in the disc around a young star grow bigger and bigger—to eventually become rubble, and even boulders well beyond a metre in size?

Computer models suggest that dust grains grow when they collide and stick together. However, when these bigger grains collide again at high speed they are often smashed to pieces and sent back to square one. Even when this does not happen, the models show that the larger grains would quickly move inwards because of friction between the dust and gas and fall onto their parent star, leaving no chance that they could grow even further.

Somehow the dust needs a safe haven where the particles can continue growing until they are big enough to survive on their own. Such “dust traps” have been proposed, but there was no observational proof of their existence up to now.

Bottom left image: Artist’s impression of the proposed disk structure of Oph IRS 48. The brown spots represent the large and small grains. The larger grains detected by ALMA are concentrated in the dust trap at the bottom of the image. The blue represents the distribution of carbon monoxide gas. The gap in the disk is shown with the proposed planetary body that is sweeping the area clear and providing the conditions necessary to form the dust trap. Credit: Nienke van der Marel

Nienke van der Marel, a PhD student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, and lead author of the article, was using ALMA along with her co-workers, to study the disc in a system called Oph-IRS 48. They found that the star was circled by a ring of gas with a central hole that was probably created by an unseen planet or companion star. Earlier observations using ESO’s Very Large Telescope had already shown that the small dust particles also formed a similar ring structure. But the new ALMA view of where the larger millimetre-sized dust particles were found was very different!

“At first the shape of the dust in the image came as a complete surprise to us,” says van der Marel. “Instead of the ring we had expected to see, we found a very clear cashew-nut shape! We had to convince ourselves that this feature was real, but the strong signal and sharpness of the ALMA observations left no doubt about the structure. Then we realised what we had found.”

What had been discovered was a region where bigger dust grains were trapped and could grow much larger by colliding and sticking together. This was a dust trap—just what the theorists were looking for.

Bottom right image: ALMA image of the dust trap around Oph IRS 48. The distinctive crescent-shaped feature comes from the accumulation of larger dust grains in the outer regions of the disk. This provides the safe haven dust grains need to grow into larger and larger objects. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO) / Nienke van der Marel

As van der Marel explains: “It’s likely that we are looking at a kind of comet factory as the conditions are right for the particles to grow from millimetre to comet size. The dust is not likely to form full-sized planets at this distance from the star. But in the near future ALMA will be able to observe dust traps closer to their parent stars, where the same mechanisms are at work. Such dust traps really would be the cradles for new-born planets.”

The dust trap forms as bigger dust particles move in the direction of regions of higher pressure. Computer modelling has shown that such a high pressure region can originate from the motions of the gas at the edge of a gas hole—just like the one found in this disc.

“The combination of modelling work and high quality observations of ALMA makes this a unique project”, says Cornelis Dullemond from the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Heidelberg, Germany, who is an expert on dust evolution and disc modelling, and a member of the team. “Around the time that these observations were obtained, we were working on models predicting exactly these kinds of structures: a very lucky coincidence.”

The observations were made while the ALMA array was still being constructed. They made use of the ALMA Band 9 receivers—European-made devices that allow ALMA to create its so far sharpest images.

“These observations show that ALMA is capable of delivering transformational science, even with less than half of the full array in use,” says Ewine van Dishoeck of the Leiden Observatory, who has been a major contributor to the ALMA project for more than 20 years. “The incredible jump in both sensitivity and image sharpness in Band 9 gives us the opportunity to study basic aspects of planet formation in ways that were simply not possible before.”

here are some plasma waves recorded by the voyager from certain planets and turned into sounds audible to humans. they’re quite lovely, especially to meditate, astral project, or just fall asleep to.

Neptune

Jupiter

Uranus

Earth

Saturn

you have to pretend to be a wizard sometimes, for your health. the obvious method is d&d, but you can also open the dishwasher on cold mornings and raise your arms dramatically as you’re enveloped in the steam, or you can find a really good stick to walk around in the woods with, or you can run a bizarrely dedicated rp blog on tumblr. but it’s an important component of human well being to occasionally pretend to be a wizard.