What Music Do You Listen To?

Asking someone what their favourite type of music is can be problematic for those of us not used to treating conversation as anything other than a method of divulging pertinent information. There seem to be only two accepted answers, both horribly lacking in information.

The first answer is "Single genre". Firstly, this will mean very little to you unless you also like that genre as well. You can express a negative opinion about it but if you don't like the genre then chances are that your concept of it is off. Countless metal fans have been angered by the insinuation that metal is all violence and Satan worshipping (Black Sabbath were predominantly Catholic). Equally as many have cried inwardly when suggesting the exquisite Juno Reactor or such like and been rebutted with a dismissive "I don't like that electronic shit". Secondly, with only one point of data you are going to have to employ some convergent iteration to get an idea of what area of [Genre] they actually like. As far as conversation goes this can be somewhat awkward. It is however information on which you can haphazardly expand, which is more than can be said about the alternative.

"I like a bit of everything" and it's likenesses are woefully inadequate as an answer and do nothing to help the asker ascertain whether or not they have anything to add to the conversation. It's like being asked what course you're studying and replying with the name of your university. While with the first answer you could conceivably start a conversation, as one might start a fire with application of friction to wood, this answer is like pissing on the tinder. You don't help matters and even if no one gets annoyed there is going to be one hell of an awkward silence to come. Ironically it is usually said by those who actually really want to let people know more about themselves. "I listen to certain genres predominantly but don't judge me on that. I probably listen to your music too!" the replier tries to say, but all we hear is "I don't want to continue this conversation."

Clearly the first answer is the better, but it is still infuriatingly lacking. I propose this. When asking, specify that you want 3 genres of music that the recipient listens to the most. When answering, assume that this is what the asker requested. This has the benefit of primarily giving information upon which a conversation can be expanded upon, but it also allows the asker a certain amount of leeway in their answer. "I listen to a lot of Metal, but I do often enjoy Electronic stuff, especially Trip-Hop. I do have a secret soft spot for that Carly Rae song, mind!" If needs be you/they can then clarify that while you/they predominantly listen to these genres y/t do enjoy other things as well. The point of this exercise is to get an idea of someone's taste in music, to establish some basis of a relationship, not to enforce rigid conversational law. And if they genuinely only listen to one genre, they can leave it there.

And if they still try to stall for an answer without offering anything to go on you can rest assured that you're talking to someone who is so lost for personality that they don't quite know which artificial one they want to portray to you.

And for fuck's sake, don't ask what someone's favourite film is. 9 times out of 10 all you're going to get as a reply is an awkward pause as they (I) work through a mental spreadsheet of Genre/Tone/Theme/Acting/Irony/etc. to come to a conclusion that they're (I'm) not sure they want to stick with.

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Notes: The discovery of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto

Let's take stock. We started out confident in our belief that it was just us, Sol, Luna and the fireflies. Now, we have knocked ourselves down a few pegs. We're not in the centre of the universe, there are other things orbiting the Sun (and not us, the bastards) and we have a bunch of equations that tell us how they move. We also have a brilliant device using lenses and tubes that let us see these things much more easily. Yes, telescopes were a particularly brilliant invention. They allowed us to observe the sky with unprecedented accuracy. Looking around our 5 neighbouring planets, the Moon, the stars, that odd comet...Yes, that one. No, it's definitely a comet, I'm sure. No, no tail as of yet but it's a comet, I'm certain of it.

Comet.

The discovery of Uranus is quite a pleasant one as it happens. It had been seen so very many times over the years but most put it down as being a star. Then a German fellow going by the name William Herschel moved to England, built himself a telescope and had a marvellous time with it until one March night in 1781 he noticed a fuzzy thing and thought to himself "Ah, a comet". Specifically he noted

"In the quartile near ζ Tauri ... either [a] Nebulous star or perhaps a comet"

He claimed as much to the Royal Society and the Astronomer Royal, the latter replying to him not knowing what to call it at all.

 "I don't know what to call it. It is as likely to be a regular planet moving in an orbit nearly circular to the sun as a Comet moving in a very eccentric ellipsis. I have not yet seen any coma or tail to it

Herschel continued to refer to it as a comet, albeit cautiously. By the end of the year however he had concluded that, as others had already begun to suspect, it was a new planet. The happy ending to this story, King George III threw money at Herschel on the condition that he move to Windsor and let the Royal family have a look through his telescopes. There is some more drama to be had about it's name but I'll let you discover that for yourself. It was discovered to have a really very long orbital period. 84 of our Earth years, in fact. Further observation also unearthed some rather interesting data. There was some anomalous factor in the orbit. Now we have dealt with this before. Something is going against our view of the universe and we need to sort it out. Thus we come up with some possible explanations:

• Poor quality observations. This is the favourite of the theorists. Those bloody experimentalists fucking up the data collection. Look at it again, our way is law. Newton's Law.
• Does the gravitational force really obey the inverse square law? Yes, on the other side of the coin, could it be the theorists at fault? Certainly this has been true before. Remember geocentricism, eh theorists? Yeah, choke on that.

Theorists and experimentalists are like that, in the same harmless way that Physicists pick on Chemists pick on Biologists for being a somehow lower form of science. And everyone picks on Psychology. Anyway, the debate raged on, until a couple of people, one French Urbain Jean Joseph le Verrier, one English John Couch Adams, proposed another idea. What if there is another planet, beyond Uranus, who's gravitational force was affecting the orbit of Uranus? Calculations were made, observations done, and low and behold, a "star" making planet like motions was observed. Le Verrier, being the one who actually saw the bloody thing (Seems that Adams did something of a hash job with his data) called it Neptune, and after years of debate, the credit was split between the two. Thus, in some small way, two nemeses came closer, as people, as humans. Yes, we the British could focus on making everyone else hate us instead.

Once again did history repeat itself, it seems, as Neptune's orbit also did not seem to conform to expectation. Ah, but we knew the tricks now. A new "Planet X" was predicted (Planet IX, surely), and eventually, in 1930 something was found. It was named, adorably, by an 11 year old schoolgirl with an enthusiasm for both astronomy and classical mythology. Venetia Burney figured that the name of the god of the underworld was an apt name for such a cold, dark planet. After the name was chosen by unanimous vote Venetia received £5 for her trouble. Adjusted, that is roughly £234 of our Pounds Sterling. Given to an 11 year old.

Fair play

Incidentally, it should be noted that the apparent mass of Pluto was no way near what would have been required to mess with Neptune's orbit. No, Pluto was not the Planet X everyone was looking for. A search for a 10th planet was made but this was all but abandoned following the discovery that the discrepancies in Neptune's orbit were due to a slight overestimation of it's mass. An overestimation of 0.05% in fact, comparable to the entire mass of Mars.

I would like to end the post by reminding everyone that 2012 is not yet over, and there is still every chance that our modern day Planet X, aka Nibiru will swing through the the solar system fucking some serious shit up as it goes before the year is out. Ignore any of those "scientists" or "astronomers" who might tell you that it is kind of impossible for it to actually exist. They're all just in on the conspiracy.

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Notes: Kepler's Laws and the Repercussions

Now where were we? As yes. Imagine you're an avid 16th century astronomer. You make extensive observations of the positions of the planets, and have a fairly comprehensive view of it all. You're even pro-copernicus, though having taken such staggeringly accurate data this isn't much of a surprise. Unfortunately you're also a bit protective of your work (Not an unreasonable stance during the time)  so you don't really tell anyone about it. Congratulations, you're Tycho Brahe. Good news, you have a bitching moustache, and your assistant uses your data to come up with a set of laws that would revolutionise astronomy. Bad news, he does so after you die from a kidney/bladder ailment having refused to go to the toilet at a banquet because it would have been a breach of etiquette. Or you were poisoned with mercury, so there's that.

Speculation aside, your assistant, Johannes Kepler now has access to your lab and notes, and man does he go to town. Within a couple of decades of Tycho's death he had worked out 3 laws of planetary motion:

           1. Planets orbit the sun in ellipses with the sun at one focus

Some maths now. An ellipse, in layman's terms, is a squished circle. If that's good enough for you then just go ahead to the second law now. See you there in a bit.

Mathematically, an ellipse is a set of points that satisfies the equation:

• ^x2⁄_a² + ^y2⁄_b² = 1

Ellipses have an eccentricity 'e', which is basically to what degree they are squished.

• e ≡ √1 - ^b2⁄_a²

Do please ignore the godawful overline job there. That's meant to be all square rooted. But as you can see, if  a=b then eccentricity is 0, and you get a circle. On the other hand as e approaches 1, through oversized a or undersized b, then we're more or less getting a line.

Here is the eccentricity of the planets we've discovered so far:

Earth - 0.017
Venus - 0.007
Mars - 0.093
Jupiter - 0.048
Saturn - 0.056
Mercury - 0.206

Clearly most of our neighbours are fairly normal. Venus is practically Ned Flanders. Mercury on the other hand is down right ovular in it's travels, and this was something that had baffled astronomers who had previously believed that everything moved around in nice polite circles.

This was the equivalent of not thanking someone after they hold a door open for you.

         2. "Equal area" is swept out in "equal time".

This one is simple enough. See the orbit below?

During a value of time t, wherever the planet is in the orbit, the area cleared between it and the star will be area A. Next.

         3. The relationship between period p and distance from the star is:

a³ = p²

^{There's not much more to say on that matter so have some data on it.}

Ah but I wish you could make decent tables in Blogger. 

Now I've already said a lot on the subject of Galileo and his life including the fact that he didn't invent the telescope, as is so often claimed. Thus I shall not dwell for too long on such matters. I did mention that he made a number of discoveries with his telescope however, and I shall briefly expand upon a few of them.

• He discovered mountains on our own moon.
• He had a good look at the celestial Thursday that is Jupiter, and observed that it had four moons of it's own; Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. These are known as, understandably, the Galilean moons.
• He worked out that the moons satisfy a "Kepler-like orbit", that is to say that the cube of the distance between them and Jupiter is proportional to the square of the orbital period.

All in all everything he discovered kinda fought against the idea of geocentricism. After that, well, like I say, I've gone into it already. Let's briefly move onto someone New...ton.

Sorry. Anyway, Kepler's laws were pretty observation based. They worked, absolutely, but the maths behind it was lacking. So the story goes, having had a crack at it himself this bloke called Christopher Wren made what is known in the business as a Scientific Wager, offering 40 shillings to anyone who could deduce Kepler's Laws from the inverse square law. Alas, while Newton had a stab at it, by the time he had finished he was too late. His only consolation was that his work grew into one of, if not the most important pieces of work in science. The 40 shillings would have been nice though.

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