Well, here's an interesting little concatenation of New Things (some newer to me than others, as I'll explain towards the end). And, like so many great scientific discoveries, it all started with something blowing up.
(From here, you get treated to a tour of how my mind works... don't say I didn't warn you.)
Speculation on the part of a certain college professor I know as to what might have caused the flare led to a quick refresher (for me, anyway) on stellar evolution (said professor points out the typo in the second paragraph of Section 2 in that link, btw-- should be "red dwarf" not "white dwarf" there-- so it's NOT just a silly British TV show), from which I learned exactly why a neutron star is called a neutron star (because it's made up of neutrons... duh. They're so dense that the protons and electrons wind up essentially sharing cabin space instead of staying separate, if I understand matters aright). I also learned about helium flash (scroll down about 1/3 of the way on that link, btw).
That led to a perusal of the H-R Diagram (for Hertzsprung-Russell), and a game of "name the famous stars from sci-fi." Spotting "Polaris" and "Vega" in close proximity reminded me of a tidbit of knowledge about our current pole star-- namely, that Polaris was not always and will not always be our pole star. (For the really curious, no, I didn't learn that in school. I learned it from reading old issues of Wonder Woman. So there, to anyone who thinks comic books can't be educational!) Before 3000 BC, it was Thuban, and after AD 14,000, it will be Vega (tho' my memory got the progression backwards, originally), thanks to-- as I soon discovered-- a bit of wobbliness known in more high-falutin' phraseology as equinoctial precession.
Oh, and one last tidbit... I also learned how to (roughly) figure out your latitude from the North Star (at least, from anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere): the latitude is in (near) direct correlation to the degree of altitude of Polaris. So, at 45 ° latitude, Polaris will be up at a 45 ° angle (more or less-- there's that wobble, remember) from the horizon. Now if only you remembered to bring your sextant....
(Yes, okay, bad librarian puns...) I'm currently perusing the January issue of Choice-- the same source of that great math website I listed earlier. I love that Choice reviews selected web sites (as well as books) of interest to academia. Anyway, another to share:
ECAI: electronic cultural atlas initiative
It took me a moment to realize there is no such thing as a "Wolfram Function." Wolfram is the name of teh company sponsoring this site on "formulas and graphics about mathematical functions." Stuffy as that sounds, this site exhibits one of those ways in which mathematics can be, occasionally, seriously cool (go into "visualizations" for more cool math art):
And in case you were wondering what the subject line meant, Alexander Calder was an American sculpture artist, and the man who invented the mobile. (More on him here.)
