For no raisin

A list of known planets and their attributes...

Amazonia: is a planet covered in rain forests and lakes. It is inhabited by giant man-hating women, ruled by a femputer who is really a fembot. 

Amphibos 9: is a hot and steamy swamp planet. It is inhabited by Amphibosians.

Byoria 6: home of the Quantum Lichen people.

Chapek 9: is a small, featureless planet colonized 600 years ago by robots who hate humans. The surface of Chapek 9 is extremely barren with a few species of plants being the only native and organic lifeforms. The atmosphere of Chapek 9 is extremely thin, enough to see stars during the day.

Decapod 10: is an Earth-like planet covered in sandy islands and oceans. It is the home of the Decapodians, a lobster-like species of alien.

 Earth: is the homeworld of the humans and is a major planet in DOOP. It is extremely technologically advanced and has millions of native animals. Earth is mostly covered in some form of water, with continents and islands making up the rest of the surface.

Fedex 8: homeworld of the Upsilons.

Jupiter: a gas giant located in the solar system.

Klingon: has an embassy on Earth.

Mars: Mostly made up of farmland owned by the Wong family also home to the famous Mars University.

Neptune: location of Santa’s ice fortress.

Omega 3: is a desert planet where last tapes of Star Trek were kept, along with the crew. It is the homeworld of Melllvar, his parents and possibly more of his species.

Pandora: is a stereoscopic 3-D planet.

Spa 5: where visitors do forced labour, recommended by Dr Zoidberg.

Thuban 9: is the ninth planet of the Thuban star. It's inhabited by the Thubanians and the Chicken-Salmon. Long ago, life there was ideal for cats.

Venus: Home to the Venusians. Its surface has apparently been developed to support wildlife, and may contain gardens.
  

Phil space

A fascinating discovery: the residual water on the Moon came from the Earth. This means when the Earth suffered the likely collision that produced the Moon it already had oceans and a hard crust, and that the water which made it to the Moon survived the collision (quite a feat). Water is a volatile substance. It had to be imported from the outer solar system, where it could exist in a stable form. The water that eventually reached Earth is essentially the same as the water currently buried in carbonaceous asteroids in the asteroid belt, the water came from the asteroid belt, not comets. This means we probably have to thank Jupiter for life on Earth.

In other news, as I tap this out, there's an annular eclipse approaching over Australia; watch it here.

Phil space

The latest from Cassini mission. Its spring in Saturn's northern hemisphere.

More supernature

There’s a book review in the Guardian that gives a spotlight to a fascinating idea – shadow ecology, a stealth biosphere based on an alternative organic chemistry, undetected, right here on Earth, not even imagined until now.

This idea is perfectly congruent with natural selection. At the point when life was formed on Earth there was a lot of biochemistry, energy and time. Most of the history of life on Earth is dominated by single-cell life. By many measures bacteria are still the dominant mode of existence. Multi-cellular life is the comparative exception. There would be no currently available niches for multi-cellular shadow life.

Our conception of life has expanded. Life has been discovered at the bottom of the ocean living in endothermic ecosystems, in extremely acidic or saline conditions, under ice sheets and in deserts. But this life uses the same basic chemistry as our own. If a shadow biosphere exists why have we failed to find it after a more century of biological science? It might be because scientists have been suffering from a lethal theoretical conceit but it might be because it’s not there.

The link between theory and reality is investigation, and there are some tests being proposed to test for possible shadow-life. An example, life as we know it uses the left half of DNA strands as code. “Right-handed” organisms in a culture should respond to right-handed amino acids. Finding creatures using entirely different replicating molecule would be even more exciting.

If found it means something very interesting. We compare how photosynthesis, which evolved once, to the eye, which evolved 50 to 100 times. It is assumed that life arose once on Earth, but maybe it evolved twice, three times, many times. This improves the chances of life arising elsewhere in the galaxy.

Lists etc

Tallest mountains (base to peak) in the solar system according to planet/moon/asteroid:

Mercury - Caloris Montes
Venus - Maxwell Montes
Earth - Mauna Kea
Moon - Mons Huygens
Mars - Olympus Mons
Vesta - Rheasilvia
Io - Boosaule Montes
Mimas - Herschel Central Peak
Titan - Mithrim Montes
Iapetus - Equatorial Ridge
Oberon - Limb Mountain

More thoughts for the brain

Asteroids and comets are almost the functional equivalent of nuclear war today. They are a function of alienation in Marxism and the uncanny is Psychoanalysis. Despite the persistence (within the human context) of capitalist civilisation we know in our marrow that it is unsustainable. 

Despite various adventures, we always seem to be back where we began, like we’re in an ongoing sitcom. Ecocide and revolution are difficult to imagine. Only the prospect of existential cosmic calamity it seems can erase that. We rightly fear such an event, yet we do not sublimate or banish it from our minds, as often happens with climate change. The only difference between this and nuclear war is you can check the news every now and then - phew another asteroid will miss us.

A staffed mission to an asteroid is a good idea. We need to start working out how to defend civilisation from the threat of cosmic debris.

Phil Space

The Sun is out over London right now. If the weather stays clement there might be a chance to see Comet PANSTARRS this evening.

For No Raisin

Phil space

The first Satellite Eye on Earth of the year. Here's a special picture. They Payun volcanic field in northern Argentina: green is vegetation, black is cooled lava, orange is exposed iron oxide.

A little bit of space filling

Ten Unpleasant Facts About John Lennon: not all of them are facts, some of them are opinions, and some of them I don't agree with (I think the Black Panthers were a noble cause, but that's just me). But it's part of what makes John Lennon such a compelling figure, everything that he was he was also the opposite, often at the same time.

Phil space...

There are half a dozen ongoing missions to the solar system. 2012 was a good year for space exploration. A number of interesting things have been discovered.

The solar system is chock full of organic material. Curiosity is homing in on definitive evidence of native Martian organics. MESSENGER has found remote evidence of organic material like tar in the shady polar nooks of Mercury (see picture). We are coming to know more about the methane cycle on Titan.

The other search is for water. People are a lot surer about the existence of water in the solar system. There is a mountain-sized chunk of ice heading into the inner solar system right now, Comet Ison. It may or may not turn out to be brighter than the Full Moon. It will get within 2 million miles of the Sun and leave a blazing tail behind it. Dawn is now on its way to Ceres, a dwarf planet in the Asteroid Belt, composed of ice and rock. Most interesting of all is a two billion year old Martian meteorite discovered carrying water. It is not proof in itself that Mars has surface water 2 billion years ago but it suggests there was 1) water and 2) organics on Mars at the same time as life was present on Earth.

Where did it all go? Is it perhaps still there, locked under the polar caps? Is there a subterranean biosphere prevailing? It’s worth finding out.

Lists from history

Historical Haemorrhoid Sufferers
Alexander the Great
T.S. Eliot
Viv Richards
Marylin Monroe
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Socrates
Nero
Napoleon
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Martin Luther

Historical Druggies (and their drugs)
Admiral Nelson - opium
Lord Liverpool - ether
Tsar Nicholas the 2nd - hallucinogens, cocaine and opium
Winston Churchill - barbiturates
Anthony Eden - amphetamines
Richard Nixon - amphetamines
Leonid Brezhnev - sleeping pills

Historical Phobics (and their phobias)
Nicolae Ceausescu - bacillophobia, fear of germs
Sigmund Freud - siderodromophobia, fear of trains
Samuel Johnson - lyssophobia, fear of insanity
Maximillian Robespierre - haemophobia, fear of blood
Robert Schumann - metallophobia, fear of metal

This week's Phil Space

A fascinating piece on the Runner’s High, how exercise can become literally addictive:

Eight-and-a-half hours into the 100km (62m) Norfolk Coastal ultramarathon, he pain in my legs and badly battered feet was almost overwhelming. I desperately wanted to give in to the urge to curl up in a ball at the side of the trail and shut my eyes.

Sixty-two miles is not particularly far in the ultrarunning world – and the bleak, beautiful and flat Norfolk coastline may not be as hard on the legs as the Alps or Hard Rock 100 – but it was further than I had ever run before. The race pounded me almost into submission before I broke through and was lifted on a wave of euphoria unlike anything I've ever experienced…

Using the 'dark side' had felt cathartic – as if I was performing some kind of alchemy in transforming messed-up emotional crap into endurance running gold (I wish). But as I crunched over the final shingle stretch of Kelling beach and headed up the hill towards the finish, I conjured up an image of my six-year-old running alongside me – laughing and joking as we often do on our Sunday morning jogs around the local park.

It was presumed that this common feeling of elation was produced by endorphins, naturally produced opiates released during prolonged exertion or pronounced stress. Current research is looking at the possible effect of what are called endocannabinoids. It’s all very fascinating, but what’s the angle? Well, nature is the most astonishing chemical and engineering workshop. The HIV virus evolved in West Africa, immunity will have developed there also. This is just an example. 

Is it possible to copyright a gene? Well pharmaceutical companies certainly think so. In a world dominated by commodity economy what’s to stop them enclosing this precious commons?

Seven years and still no book deal...

What's it going to take, HUH?

No, but life goes on and so does this blog. Say what you like (you can't btw - it's a figure of speech) but Through the Scary Door has outlasted:

Shoot Johann Hari
Dead Men Left
Heckles Cakes
64 Slices of American Cheese
The Prophet Rage
History Needs a Push
City Centre Socialist Workers
Tottenham SWP
Theft is Good (but it depends who you're stealing from)
The Sharp Side...

Par En Bas...

Fear of a Red Planet... 

And many other sites runs people who could string a sentence or two together. We definitely hope Red Bed Head, Monuments Are for Pigeons and Proletarian Tide keep the flow coming. What does the future hold? I think we can safely say the bigger picture's going to get worse before it ever gets better. Lots of Tory outrage posts I guess.

Phil space... with words

John Harris, the Guardian’s Mr Britpop, has an interesting look at New Labour political language, though it’s not clear why now it’s still very interesting. He notes of David Miliband:

In the financial year 2011-12, in addition to his salary as an MP, he turned £410,171 in fees for "consultancy work and speeches", supplied to such worthy causes as an agribusiness firm called Indus Basin Holding and the United Arab Emirates' ministry of foreign affairs. How he finds time to represent the struggling folk of South Shields as well as overseeing his Movement for Change (which, according to its blurb, works in "specific areas to support campaigns for change in local communities, to identify and nurture talent and to develop new responses to the challenges that people face") is anyone's guess, though his 45% Commons voting record may say something. Or perhaps he's just given up sleep.

Just to further suggest that's he's bionic, the elder Miliband has also become a prolific polemicist, in the Guardian and elsewhere – though then again, maybe "polemicist" is the wrong word…

Miliband's latest article was ostensibly about the old Blairite theme of so-called public service reform, which of itself may represent a pop at his younger brother: Ed Miliband does not talk about that stuff very much, and his brother's wing of the Labour party has always used this subject as a club with which to beat its supposedly unreconstructed adversaries. Anyway, the elder Miliband said things such as: "Successful economies in the modern world are not sheepish about the power and responsibility of the state. But there is a catch. We need to be reformers of the state to reboot our economy and build a fairer society … the fiscal crunch requires a different kind of state. The failure of the government's economic policy makes how much less we spend, and how and where we spend it, a core issue. We cannot meet our goals on jobs, health, education, long-term care and tackling poverty without changing the way government goes about its business."

This is not his only example. Harris quotes pieces by Stephen Byers, James Purnell and Douglas Alexander, where meaning is as difficult to catch as a bar of soap in a tornado.

It brings to mind a famous piece by George Orwell, on Politics and the English Language. His contention was:

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

This was a major theme of his final novel, 1984, which he began writing shortly afterwards (although Newspeak is somewhat the opposite of vapid political jargon).

It’s worth noting there is such a thing as Good English, though it is not as simple as it appears. All aspects of our society are contested. Language is not neutral but the result of centuries of class struggle. The prevailing ideas in any society, most of the time, are the ideas of the ruling class, and that includes ideas of what makes good or bad forms communication. The split infinitive is a small, simple and obvious example. It was drilled into children for decades that you cannot place an adverb before an uninflected verb. Why? Because, it seems, you cannot do so in Latin, and England was supposed to be the modern Rome.

So when the Eton educated Orwell offers us five principles of Good English we must beware (despite being articulate and politically conscious, Orwell’s writing does sometimes slip into traditional class prejudice). He was smart enough to offer a sixth rule: “break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”. Despite notions of Good English being class based, they are real and consensually accepted (or accepted consensually).

If sloppy or opaque language is a sign of political degeneracy, what does New Labourese say about modern politics?

What, aside from firing muted shots in some factional battle no one really cares about, is the point? Right when this most miserable of rhetorical traditions is refusing to die, people at the opposite end of the political spectrum are mastering the business of being altogether more blunt and plain-spoken. For proof, read the already-infamous Tory treatise Britannia Unchained – which may advocate working until you drop dead and deregulated everything, but is at least coherent and straightforward. Meanwhile, David Miliband and his ilk talk – but say what, exactly? Time to leave the gazebo, disrupt the economic narrative and reboot?

Once the Labour Party came to accept the neo-liberal paradigm it had to move to the right while still engaging its base, which was (and remains) social democratic. While it was called Traditional Values in a Modern Setting, it was actually a divorce between words and deeds. Thanks to New Labour, with the exception of the Tory right everyone in Parliament calls themselves ‘progressive’.

Phil space

The inner solar system is due to be visited Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) more or less this time next year. Big whoop you might say, but it is due to travel within 1.2 million kilometres of the Sun without burning out. If visible it will be seen in the northern hemisphere and could be as bright as the full moon, as spectacular as the Kirsch comet of 1860 (see picture), although there are never any guarantees.

What do comets mean? Well, they literally mean the solar system is an ongoing project. Long-period comets, ones with thousand year orbits are a special mystery. They are awesome and sublime, in the proper sense of the word. The Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet, which collided with Jupiter in 1994 delivered more power in its 21 fragments than the entire world arsenal.

Culturally comets have often been seen as bringers of, at best, change, but usually doom. They violate religious and secular anthropocentrism. Our place in the universe may be secure, but it’s far from assured. Many models of the solar system, such as the Kant-Laplace theory, were developed with at least the part-intention of purging fear and superstition from the cosmos.

But in a distressed, alienated world these fears are hard to shift. There may have been the comet scare of 1910, when the Earth passed through the tail of Halley’s Comet. But 101 years later NASA had to issue press statements reassuring people Comet Elenin posed no threat to life on Earth, yet still the emails came rolling in.

So, unless your the superstitious type, November 2013, look forward to one of the solar system’s greatest displays. Goodness me, there's not going to be much else fun happening  that year.

Lists - Phil Space etc...

A list... for no raisin... yeah, we get it, no raisin, but here the are the best American Dad headlines:

Democratic Party Missing: Feared Dead

Stuff Happens As Wave of Ambiguity Spreads

Optimist Drowns in Half-Full Tub

Economy Turns Corner, Falls Down Stairs

Missing Twins Found in Gingerbread House

Bush Finally Gets Joke About Last Name

Big Bird Dead Of Big Avian Flu

Bush Appoints Stephen King As Ambassador To Terror

Tantric Sex Conference Ends Prematurely

Confused Iranian President Denies Hollow Crust Pizza

Rob Schneider, Dead at 62

Zach Braff mania sweeps Zach Braff's Apartment

Bush to Voters: "Votes for Dems Kills Angels!"

Dems Take House, Republicans Get Record Collection

Rumsfeld steps down... on puppy's head

Turkey Uprising Fails!EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS! Santa exits sleigh, flashes crotch

It's 2007...still no flying cars

Airlines to Screen Emotional Baggage

Plane delayed as Mrs. Plane finishes getting ready

Popeye insists: "Olive Oil Aint No Virgin"

Paper Mill To Town: "You smell weird."

Uncle Insists: "Creepy is the new quirky"

Car radio turned up as girls approach

Son Regrets Teaching Dad How to Text Message

Bear Market Suggests Investing In Salmon

Optimistic Nerd's Glasses Half On

Man Tries Sushi For The First Time: "It's Okay."

Pie chart...

Curiosity probe reaches Mars

The more Curiosity finds the more likely there will be further missions to the solar system. At the moment NASA's schedule is looking fairly sparse. This Mars rover is due to last 98 months, it could go on for longer, but, bear in mind, it is very sophisticated and possibly more prone to malfunction.

New Horizons will say Hi/Bye to Pluto in 2015. The Dawn probe will have reached the end of its official mission by then as well. The Juno mission to Jupiter is expected to finish by 2016. Unless there are more probes planned now, there will be no more (NASA) missions for the forseeable future. The ESA has a probe going to Jupiter, due to arrive in the 2020s.

Humanity is now the biggest factor shaping the planet Earth. We use more energy than all indigenous natural processes combined. Welcome to the Anthopocene. Our future is in space. We have outgrown the Earth in the same way we have outgrown capitalism, i.e. without successfully replacing these systems. Part of getting through the next hundred years with civilisation intact will be colonising the solar system.

For no raisin

Part one of the BBC documentary, The Planets, scored by Gustav Holst (sort of...) and narrated by a Socialist Alliance candidate. The series is actually more about the story of the exploration of the planets. Since this was made the Cassini probe has thoroughly charted the Saturn system. The our knowledge of the major parts of the solar system has slowly filled out. The cutting edge of discovery is in the Asteroid Belt and beyond Neptune. 

The BBC in its wisdom does not have this series out on DVD. Enjoy.