Blogs / Bad Astronomy

OK, I’ve had enough.

I want my transfat back!

I was at Target recently picking up a few things, and saw that HoHos were on sale. Yes, the little chocolate-like log things; when I was a kid I loved them, and I still sometimes buy them so I can be a kid again for a little while (like I need an excuse). Plus, I’ve been a good boy: I finished my book, I’ve been working on the blog and the website, and doing other things that need to get done. I want to treat myself. So I buy a box.

In the car I opened the box, got out a HoHo, and took a big bite… and almost spat it back out. It was awful, like someone had injected it with pure suck. After a moment to overcome my shock, I reached for the box. With increasing dread, I looked over the ingredients, and there were the words I knew would be there:

"Trans fat 0g"

AIIIIIEEEEEEE!

What are companies thinking? Do they really honestly think that by removing all semblance of flavor and replacing it with — I’m guessing here — toe cheese, they’ll be able to keep customers, just because they took out the transfat?

Piece of free advice to Hostess from an ex-customer: put the transfat back. That’s what makes the HoHos taste good. That’s why people buy them.

Sure, transfats are bad for you. But you know what? I’m buying a HoHo. I know I’m getting something that is not healthy for me. The same thing happens when I grab a candy bar, or a bowl of ice cream, or a piece of fried chicken. I’m not eating these because they’ll give me six-pack abs, I’m eating them because they taste good.

I am really, really tired of people making my decisions for me. Kids are getting fat eating Twinkies and HoHos? OK then, parents, here’s more free advice from another parent: stop feeding them to your kids. The Little Astronomer gets lots of healthy food in her lunch every day, plus sometimes a snack, a goodie, a treat. Three cookies, or a pudding, or some other sweet. But that’s after the banana and the sandwich.

It’s not all that hard. Moderation, folks. It’s that simple.

Transfats are bad for you, but not if you take care. Eat good stuff, walk around a little bit, bike to the store sometimes instead of drive. That way, the occasional 4 or 5 grams of transfats won’t kill you.

And to any company that takes the transfat out of their food: you can bite me. Because I won’t be biting you.

My brother-in-law (not the title character in this entry) just bought himself a fantastic digital SLR camera, and has been merrily snapping away. He stayed with us this past weekend, and after a light snowfall got this shot of a visitor in our driveway:

It’s definitely a woodpecker, and he caught it just as it was taking flight. Thing is, it matches the pictures we looked up of a Gilded Flicker, but a guidebook I found says they only live in the desert. What was he doing in Boulder?

I’ll tell you what he was doing. He was eyeballing the siding of my house, sizing it up for a vicious pecking. We’ve been woken up a half dozen times at 6:00 a.m. by woodpeckers attacking the house. When we first moved here, I noticed a lot of houses had plastic owls hanging up, or drawings that looked like faces two feet across hanging over the neighbors’ eaves. I recognized them as being woodpecker scarer-offers, and had second thoughts about living here.

I love Boulder, I really do. But I will eat the next frakkin’ bird that wakes me up that early. I’ve taken to keeping tennis balls outside the door to the back yard so I can throw them near (not at) the bird to scare it off. It works, but he’s always back the next day.

Pain in the butt bird. Sure is pretty though.

So of course as soon as I take a trip to LA and am really busy, a whole pile of astronomy news pours out when it had hitherto been a slow week. I suspect a lot of these will have more details at the NAM website, so check there too.

1) Omega Centauri may be a galaxy. Omega Cen is a globular cluster, a giant ball of millions of stars. These beehive-looking objects are very pretty and very old; some as old or older than the galaxy itself. The Milky Way has well over 100 of them orbiting it. The thing is, Omega Cen is a lot more massive than any other globular, and astronomers have suspected it’s actually a dwarf galaxy. New studies using Hubble and Gemini South have found an intermediate mass black hole in its core, a black hole bigger than one that forms when a star explodes, but smaller than the ones found in the centers of big galaxies. In this case, it has about 40,000 times the mass of the Sun. These are difficult to form, and harder to find — this one was found using the relative motions of stars near the center of Omega Cen. A black hole of this mass is unexpected in globulars, but is about the right size for a dwarf galaxy. This lends credence to the idea that Omega Cen is misclassified.

2) Astronomers see a nascent world. Astronomers using a radio telescope to observe the nearby low-mass star HL Tau were surprised to see a large clump of material near the star. Turns out it’s a planet forming as we watch! It’s more massive than Jupiter, and twice as far out from HL Tau a Neptune is from the Sun. HL Tau is only 520 light years away, giving us a pretty good view. The disk and star are only 100,000 years old, which is incredibly young to be seeing something like this! For comparison the Earth is 6000 4.6 billion years old.

3) Lightweight black hole. Using a brand new technique, astronomers have identified the lowest mass black hole ever found. Orbiting a star like the Sun, the black hole has an estimated mass of 3.6 times the Sun’s mass, a little more than half the mass of the previously known lightweight hole. The new technique is quite complicated, involving measuring the change in the brightness of X-rays coming from a black hole as it gulps down matter from its companion star. The scientists tested the method using black holes with well-known masses, and their results agreed, so they are confident their new result on this bantam black hole are accurate. This very cool news; the lowest mass a black hole can have is only about 3 times the mass of the Sun (black holes forms when the core of a massive star collapses, and it takes that much mass to make a black hole, otherwise a less-dense neutron star forms), so this one is very near the limit. Studying black holes like this one will tell us a lot about how they form, but we have to find them first! So this method is promising.

OK, that’s it for now. I have to go and do movie-star stuff, and it’s a dead certainty I can’t keep up with the astro-firehose this week will be from the meeting in the UK. Like I said above, go to the NAM site or Universe Today to keep up with the latest.