Science fun for February 2011: Tyche, the mysterious giant planet

I've seen this story floating around some websites I read, and I find it fascinating. There may be another planet in our solar system. Not some tiny rock like Pluto or Sedna, this new hypothetical fellow traveler Tyche is four times bigger than Jupiter, the biggest planet in our neck of the woods, so it may be a brown dwarf, a small sun that has burned out.

How can something so big still be uncertain? It's really far away. The distance from the earth to the sun is called an Astronomical Unit or A.U. for short. Pluto, which has a very elliptical orbit, is sometimes as close as 29 A.U. and sometimes as far away as 49 A.U.

Tyche, if it exists, is 15,000 A.U. away. The handy picture above is NOT drawn to scale as far as the orbit of Tyche is concerned. It's speculated to be out in the Oort Cloud, the asteroids, rocks and comets that make up the very edge of our solar system.

The guys claiming the discovery are John Matese and Daniel Whitmire from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. According to them, it might take about two years of study of data that has already been gathered by NASA to prove their conjecture.

I have to admit, this is kind of cool. I'm not as hip to astronomy as a nerd should be, so I didn't even know about the Oort Cloud until yesterday. Now, I'm looking for ways to pepper it into my conversation.

Oort Cloud. Say it today to someone you love.

And to add a little bit of politics to a completely apolitical topic, I found this stuff on Talking Points Memo, a left-wing politics blog, the Huffington Post, a left-leaning general news source and Slate magazine, another website leaning left of center. I couldn't find it on any right wing websites.

The evidence is strong. Our side really does want to learn how the universe works. Their side kinda likes sticking their fingers in their ears and humming loudly. Guys like Bill O'Reilly don't even know that Mars has two moons, so a giant planet orbiting the sun a long way away is completely off his radar.

The speed of the Internet.

Former major league player and manager Chuck Tanner died today. He is best known for managing the Pirates to the World Series championship in 1979. The message on MLB.com is dated 25 minutes ago. A.P. obituaries is not carrying the story yet.

His Wikipedia page has already been updated.

God bless the nerds who work for free.

I read it for the articles.

Silvio Berlusconi is prime minister of Italy. He also runs a major Italian television network, and always seems to be "hands on" when hiring the honeys that will be on his network.

And we are definitely talking "honeys", as in very pretty and very plural.

Think Newt Gingrich's politics, Donald Trump's ethics and Hugh Hefner's horny-ness, with more money than all of them combined.

Talking Points Memo has a slideshow of the many women involved in the multiple brewing scandals, including this young lady who got a lavish gift from Berlusconi for her 18th birthday. Berlusconi turns 75 this year.

Enjoy the slideshow. You may want to turn the lights down. Some Marvin Gaye might also be in order.

"There's... nothin' wrong with me-eee... lovin' you-oo!"

(I take it back. There might be something wrong, like certain laws.)

The Apostate

In this week's New Yorker magazine, Lawrence Wright tells the story of writer/director Paul Haggis leaving Scientology in an essay entitled The Apostate. There are links all over the Internet to the story, including on the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo, but putting it here on my humble little blog means it's gone viral, which I guess is supposed to be a good thing.

If you've read The New Yorker, you know what to expect in an essay. It's long and meticulously researched. If someone tells an anecdote, everyone involved in the story is given a chance to state their recollection. Wright has a fondness for simple declarative sentences. Though emotions run high both in church members and in those who left the church, the tone of Wright's writing is so calm, it almost feels like a dissection.


Nearly everyone living mentioned in the article is given a chance to respond. The notable exception is David Miscavige, the man who at the age of 25 took the helm of Scientology after the death of founder L. Ron Hubbard and has helped it grow remarkably in the past 25 years. If we accept the official version from Scientology, Miscavige is a wonderful human being. If we listen instead to the formerly high placed defectors, he is a violent bully with terrifyingly quick mood swings.

Miscavige declined to be interviewed. While other Scientologists who knew Haggis are quoted by Wright, the only official who goes on record is Tommy Davis, son of the actress Anne Archer, who has been practicing Scientology since Davis was a young boy.

It will be interesting to see how the church responds to this story. According to Haggis, a tenet of Scientology is to listen to all sides before making up one's mind, but not surprisingly, every Scientologist will find a dozen good reasons not to believe anyone who leaves the church.

I've never been in the church. I think most of you can figure out whom I believe.

It's a very good read. Matty Boy says check it out.

Stuff I like:Scrabble

For some time now, I have been in need of a hobby that would get me out of the house. I like to play a lot of board games, but several of my board game playing buddies have moved away and those that are still around don't get together as often as we used to. I watch the documentary Word Wars a while back, and though it was obvious professional Scrabble was no way to make a living, I decided to give Scrabble as a hobby a try.

I bought the game to play on my computer a while back, and today I went for the first time to the Oakland Scrabble Club, which meets at the game store It's Your Move up on Telegraph in the Temescal district, an easy walk from the MacArthur BART station. I was greeted by a very nice lady named Cynthia, who runs the club both because she is president and a natural born queen bee. She very cheerfully and helpfully beat me like a red-headed stepchild while keeping track of all the other games being played, correctly answering any and all questions about challenges of possibly fake words (known as phonies by the hardcore Scrabble players), while casually clearing her rack twice (known as a bingo) to easily outpace me, though I did get both blank tiles in my rack at the same time and hoarded them until I could make a bingo of my own. After our game was over, she told me I had potential and needed to have the two and three letter words down pat, as well as the ways to add to two letter words to make three letter words and the ways to make the three letter words into four letter words.

So that's my homework assignment.

After our game was over, another newby came in, an attractive young lady named Shea whom I played twice, winning both games. In my first three games, I went 2-1 with an average score of 317 (not great, not completely sucky either) and had outscored my opponents by 74 points overall. I had fun and I will definitely go to the Oakland Scrabble Club again.

If you like the game, the club meets on the 1st, 3rd and 5th Saturdays of the month. It's easy to find an opponent and the store is a nice environment. There are also plenty of good places to grab a bite nearby afterwards.

If you are an East Bay person like me who likes games, Matty Boy says check it out.

Doubling down on teh stoopid.

Let's stipulate for argument's sake you say something stupid or offensive or just something you didn't want to say. If your momma raised you right, you then say something like "I was wrong" or "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that".

But if you were raised by wolves or you have some congenital problem that makes it impossible for you to admit error, you say something along the lines of "I meant to do that!" or "No, YOU'RE wrong!" or "Jeez, but you're sensitive and politically correct."

This is what the young people on the Internets call "doubling down".


A few weeks back, Bill O'Reilly thought he completely pwned an atheist by saying that no one could explain the tides, and therefore God must exist. Stephen Colbert did an amazing smackdown of this with the aid of astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. In the Colbert bit, his crack staff found footage that shows O'Reilly has been using this argument for years and years.

Okay, stupidity over. Done and done!

Not so fast, my friend. Remember earlier when I spoke of people raised by wolves or congenitally incapable of admitting error? Bill O'Reilly is the grand marshal of that parade.

Now that someone explained gravity and the moon to Bill, his next inexplicable miracle no human can explain is "How did the moon get there?"

Here's the thing. We are all ignorant of something. You kind of expect this of people who got third rate educations, like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. But Bill O'Reilly graduated Harvard and he's still this Sofa King stupid.

Guys like this make it harder for me to type the sentence "I believe in education". It also makes me wonder exactly how many classes he slept through on his way to his high school and college diplomas.

My connection to John Barry, 1933-2011

Composer John Barry died this week at the age of 77. He was famous for his film scores, notably several James Bond films as well as Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves, and unlike some film score masters, he could also write pop tunes. My blog buddy Abu Scooter has a nice tribute. Actor Alec Baldwin put up a good essay on the Huffington Post.

For me, I started teaching myself piano many years ago. The first tune I remember figuring out all the chords and changes for was the theme from Born Free, one of Barry's great pop tunes. I played it over and over again until I felt I got it right, playing the melody with my right hand in octaves and breaking the chords into simple arpeggios with my left. No one was in the piano room with me, but it could be heard all over the house. When I got up and went to the kitchen, my mom asked why Chris, one of my older brother's musical friends and a much better pianist than I was, was playing Born Free over and over. I told her it was me, I had just learned it. I still remember feeling proud about the comparison.

Best wishes to the family and friends of John Barry, from a fan.