I was so galvanized by the new documentary An Inconvenient Truth (my review is here) that I felt compelled to, a few days later, snatch up one of the last tickets available to Al Gore’s town hall-style discussion at New York’s Town Hall (the theater in Times Square, not the seat of local government). That was on May 25th, and since then, I’ve been watching how astonishingly well the film has been doing in limited release -- at the moment its per-screen average is better than The Break-Up’s and second only to the surprising smash hit, for an unusual midweek release, of The Omen; one commenter at Atrios’s blog recently complained that, where he lives, he could see the idiotic “comedy” RV in an almost empty theater but there was no sign of Truth in his area yet, which is truly bizarre from a pure business perspective if nothing else. And I’ve been letting the experience of seeing the film and seeing Gore in person sink in, and I find myself feeling optimistic, maybe, for the first time in a long time, optimistic about the direction our society may be going in. And I’m itching to do something about pushing us in that direction. I can’t recall ever feeling like this before. And could be it’s symptomatic of a grand shift in Generation X from complacency and apathy to caring and action.

Well, I, for one, welcome our new volcanic-rock-slab overlords:

Wow, is that cool!

A new rock slab is growing at more than one meter a day on the Mt. St. Helens volcano in Washington, USA. The rock slab, growing since last November, now extends about 100 meters out from one of the volcano's craters.

[from Astronomy Picture of the Day]

If your parents had, for some reason, announced the arrival of their bouncing bundle of baby you via radio or television, would the insectoid hive mind on Tau Ceti have gotten word about you yet? What about the machine intelligences on Alpha Bootis? Broadcast transmissions radiate out from planet Earth at the speed of light, but even just our tiny corner of our speck of a galaxy is a big place. So who knows about you so far?

The totally useless but completely awesome light cone RSS feed tracks the growing spread of your (potential) influence throughout the universe. You plug in your date of birth, and each day the RSS feed tells you which new star news of fabulous you has reached. Or could have reached if your parents had had the foresight to make everyone out there could know about you. Or maybe just your thought processes impacted some quantum flunctuation that is even now causing a pseudobutterfly’s wings to flap in the upper atmosphere of Proxima Centauri and starting a hurricane that will destroy the ancient and noble civilization of that world.

Think about it.

This is your brain:

This is your brain on light cone:

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” -- Albert Einstein (found here)

Whoa.

It might seem kinda contradictory, but one of the things that being a devout reader of all kinds of science fiction has given me is a sense of history. Or perhaps I should say, Of a sense of history as a process, as a process that isn’t over yet. When you read SF set in the future, SF that has a sense of history itself (like, say Lois McMaster Bujold’s brilliant space opera series centered around Miles Vorkosigan), you start to develop the appreciation that we’re living in the middle of history, too. Will bored 14-year-old students who’d rather be outside playing low-gee tennis on the Martian surface 1000 years from now roll their eyes when their teacher introduces the topic “The Information Revolution: From Gutenberg to the Singularity, 1450-2250”? Will all the great and glorious mess that is the world around us right now at this very moment be reduced to a single line in a textbook: “The early 21st century (Old Calendar) on Earth was characterized by mass upheaval, mostly over the scarcity of natural resources”?

It makes you feel really small and insignificant.

There aren’t too many geek milestones we can measure a millennium out, but here’s one of them: exactly one thousand years ago, the brightest celestial event in recorded human history appeared in the skies over planet Earth, and lasted for three years. And we know about it because of the geeky astronomers in Europe and Asia who blogged about it. Tim at Goats Reading Books has a nice summary of everything we know about supernova 1006, which was first seen on April 30 or May 1, 1006, including what the geeks at the time had to say about it:

The "guest star" was widely noticed: observations have survived from China, Japan, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Italy, and Switzerland. It made a big impression on the Chinese court astronomers, who kept very meticulous records of its position, and who reported:

its appearance was like the half Moon and it had pointed rays...
[It was] so brilliant that one could really see things clearly [by its light]

Another astronmer in San'a, Yemen observed:

It rose regularly half an hour after sunset. It was not round, but rather was elongated; at its edges were lines like fingers. It showed great turbulence as though (reflected) in disturbed waters.

The monks at the Benedictine Abbey in St. Gallens, Switzerland also recorded the guest star:

A new star of unusual size appeared; it was glittering in appearance and dazzling the eyes, causing alarm. In a wonderful manner it was sometimes contracted, sometimes spread out, and moreover sometimes extinguished. It was seen, nevertheless, for three months in the inmost limits of the south, beyond all the constellations which are seen in the sky.

I like that the monks thought the supernova was “wonderful”...

Related cool links:

• Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is an illustration that approximates what SN 1006 might have looked like in our sky.

• The Wikipedia entry for the event discusses how bright the exploded star would have been: “Some sources state that the star was bright enough to cast shadows; it was certainly seen during daylight hours for some time, and the modern-day astronomer Frank Winkler has said that ‘in the spring of 1006, people could probably have read manuscripts at midnight by its light.’” Cool!

• A thread at Ask Metafilter discusses how to survive a supernova. (“Apparently, 30 light years is the bare minimum before mass extinction.)

• SF writer Charles Sheffield’s novel Aftermath speculates what might happen if one of the stars in the Alpha Centauri system went nova.

Holy crap, did anyone else watch last week’s episode of PBS’s Nova, “Dimming the Sun”? The premise: “New evidence that air pollution has masked the full impact of global warming suggests the world may soon face a heightened climate crisis.” The three unexpected days of clear skies after 9/11, when all aircraft were grounded, showed that the artificial clouds that are airplane contrails are having a dramatic effect on how much sunlight reaches the surface of the planet, part of the overall impact that pollution is having on the environment, and it is scary as hell. Basically, we’re fucked, and it doesn’t even require secret government conspiracies to douse us unsuspecting Americans with aerosols via airplane exhaust.

Meanwhile, deliberate willingness to discard the scientific method for religious reasons as well as the willful ignorance of a scientifically illiterate populace continue to keep issues of global climate change from the forefront.

And this ain’t nothing yet:

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) reached the red planet on 10 March 2006. During its tenth close approach to Mars—its 10th periapsis—the MRO spacecraft turned its cameras to view the planet's surface. Although the images acquired were over a factor of 10 lower in resolution than will ultimately be obtained when the spacecraft and its payload are in their final orbit, these test images provide important confirmation of the performance of the cameras and the spacecraft.

More:

Gary Larson was right:

Dinosaur Tumor Studied for Human Cancer Clues

Cancer in dinosaurs and illnesses in other animals are being studied in a groundbreaking new program that combines medical school with the study of natural history.

Educators hope the effort will produce doctors with a better understanding of why we get sick.

Despite being millions of years removed from our time and our own species, illnesses in animals like the dinosaurs can shed light on the evolution of human disease, says Christopher Beard, curator and specialist in vertebrate paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

"Some diseases that afflict humans today, such as malaria, gout, and cancer, are truly ancient and were handed down to us from our distant ancestors," Beard told LiveScience. "By studying the distribution of these diseases in other living and fossil organisms, we can gain insights into the nature of these diseases."

[from LiveScience.com via Yahoo! News]

Jurassic Park Medical School and Cancer Research Center, anyone?

Sky has the newsflash!

Women with boob jobs may be banned from Virgin's space flights. Bosses fear the implants may expand and burst due to cabin pressure, according to The Sun...

Heh. Leaving plenty of seats on the moon shuttle for us girl geeks, cuz, as Lisa Michaud points out in the “Guy’s Guide to Geek Girls”, girl geeks

don't dress for success. They dress for comfort, for long hours in the lab, for convenience. This is not to say that geek girls aren't capable of looking nice; they can be quite striking when the mood suits them. Most of the time, however, they are under fluorescent lighting and bent over the monitor, so makeup, suits, and high heels are utterly pointless. Not that they aren't anyway, of course

And so some visions of the future pass into the realms of fantasy:

This is adorable. Remember that cool hairy blond lobster thing that was just discovered?

Well, Kuri at MediaTinker.com has created a pattern for a plush stuffed version. It’s the new Beanie Baby!

You can download the pattern and instructions at the MediaTinker link above. I wish I could sew -- I’d love one of these.

What a fantastic example of geek generosity, inventiveness, and playfulness. I love us. Go, us.