To calculate the exact location of a star, planet, or satellite, read the appropriate chapter in this book, download the source code, data files, or binaries, as needed from the publisher, and off you go on a wild adventure that combines star gazing, mathematics, and coding.

I am especially attracted to science or technology books that contain something the reader can work with. A book about a programming language should walk the reader through developing a good example of useful code. A book about computational science should include templates for workflow in data analysis. It is rare, though, to find a book about a pure science (as opposed to technology) that does this. Celestial Calculations: A Gentle Introduction to Computational Astronomy (The MIT Press) by J. L. Lawrence is one of those pragmatic publications.

J.L. Lawrence comes from the world of technology. He is a CTO of a company that builds computer systems for satellite-launching customers including the government. So, one might imagine that he has an interest in pulling out the old slide rule and doing applied rocket science.

Consider the situation of a serious amateur astronomer. You can look at the stars and planets through a good set of binoculars, or an amateur telescope. After a while, you may want to upgrade to a telescope that can be linked to your laptop for positioning. Or you might build a star tracker to allow your camera to get a nice shot of a comet. And so on.

But eventually you may also want to get into the math of the heavens, combining that with some coding skills you can easily pick up, and figure out how to locate planets, find specific stars, track the moon’s behavior with great accuracy, and convert between all the values of time and space that happen when round objects of various sizes find themselves falling towards each other in great, seemingly infinite time, spirals. And so on.

Celestial Calculations is written for amateur astronomers who want to use accessible math combined with extensive ready to go code written manly in python, java, and visual basic.

The prose that discusses the math and astronomy is straightforward and accessible, and if you read the book just for that you will come away much better informed about the solar system and broader universe. If you do that, you will probably skip about 20% of the technical discussions and math (maybe a bit more). The math is very clear and you can work through the concepts in your head, more or less, to get the idea, and appreciate the dynamic relationships between things in space. The programming is all relegated (but with notes in the book) to a major on line archive that you can download and use on your own computer to make the calculations, and modify as you wish.

The software is developed with a Microsoft Windows user in mind. The software should run on any platform, but you may have to fiddle with paths and other environment issues if you are using a non-Windows machine.

A Wrinkle in Time (A Wrinkle in Time Quintet Book 1), the first in the series of four books now a major motion picture, for three bucks in Kindle Form

I’m talking about LibreOffice or OpenOffice, but the concept applies to any office suite. Specifically, we are talking here about the behvioar of the “Open Recent Documents” function under the “File” menu on the typical Office style application. This menu item shows you the most recent several documents you’ve had open, so you can re-open one right away. Continue reading A Smarter Open Recent Files Function in Office →

First, let me disabuse you of the notion that “JavaScript” and “Java” are totally unrelated to each other other than having the word “Java” in both. That is a bit of revisionist history that serves no real purpose. On the other hand, JavaScript is not a scripty version of Java by any means. The two are different languages, developed independently, for very different purposes. The overlap or connection stems in part from the fact that early thinking about getting a language to program stuff inside browsers was happening when Java was emerging, and Java would be likely considered the default language to use for such a think, if a full blow real life language would ever be considered for this task. JavaScript have elements that look like Java, and was created by Brendan Eich to use instead of Java and it was, at the time, called Mocha, which is a coffee drink and Java is coffee and they drank a lot of coffee so….)

I just upgraded this site to WordPress 5.01. (I waited out 5.o.) I am now faced with an editor that is not text based and does not give me access to my HTML codes. Instead, it uses this thing called “blocks.”

I just finished inserting that graphic of the unhappy Wall Street stockbroker guy (to the right) and if you look at the caption, you’ll see that there is a link in the caption. That was actually difficult to do in the older version of WordPress, so I like that.

I wonder what other kinds of blocks there are? Let’s see.

Headings

There are (see above) headings. Those are blocks.

It is said that a quote can be put in a block. It is a block quote.

There is a plugin that allows you to go back to the old style of editor. I’ll probably install that to see how it works, but this “Gutenberg” editor, as it is called, seems cool. I’m a very text-oriented writer, but this is not bad. We’ll see.

Next task, if I can get it to work: Make comments editable for you, dear readers, a commonly requested feature.

… and refreshes … and refreshes … and refreshes.

I speak, of course, of the non-existent hiatus in global temperature increase vigorously but incorrectly pointed to by deniers of global warming. What happened was this. We had a really warm year, owing to an El Nino, in the late 1990s. Then, things settled down a bit, and due to normal variation of the Earth’s climate system, that year was followed by a series of years in which the global surface temperature continued to increase, but very slowly. Meanwhile, of course, the Earth’s ocean temperature was steadily increasing, no pause or hiatus there. Then, after a few years, the Earth’s surface temperature warmed very rapidly. The period between that El Nino year, and the rapid return of temperatures rising, is where climate science deniers shoehorn their hiatus. Continue reading The Pause that Refreshes →

Michael Mann, author of The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy, Dire Predictions: The Visual Guide to the Findings of the IPCC, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, and one gazillion scientific papers on climate change, won the prestigious Climate Communication Prize, awarded by his peers earlier today at the American Geophysical Union meeting. Continue reading Michael Mann Scores 2018 AGU Climate Communication Prize! →