Note: The 38th Tangled Bank (a collection of science blog entries) is now up, hosted by GrrlScientist. My own essay about rocks on Titan is featured. Now back to your regularly scheduled entry.
Sure, you might think I’m jealous, because why else would I want to make fun of Scientific American confusing light years as a time and not a distance in their review of Amazing Space, a website they chose for their Science and Technology 2005 Web Awards, noting that they did not include another excellent astronomy site on their list?
Maybe my run-on sentences were the problem.
Anyway, here’s the offending passage:
Welcome to Amazing Space, where starstruck students of all ages can while away light-years pelting comets at Jupiter, falling into black holes and building the Milky Way piece by piece.
Maybe I should send them here. Ironically, had they chosen my site they might have gotten that passage right. 
October 4th, 2005 at 9:05 pm
Shame on them for both making such an error and not including such an excellent website! Shall I send them a copy of the tape?
October 4th, 2005 at 11:05 pm
…time for torches and boards with nails in them…heh heh heh…
October 4th, 2005 at 11:20 pm
Be nice people. People do make mistakes.
Another group (The Raelians) dont seem to know the difference between a light second and a parsec.
Folcrom.
October 4th, 2005 at 11:49 pm
Haha, c’mon, don’t sour grape! You’re pretty much the most well known astronomy site on the web. Give the lesser sites their 15 minutes.
October 5th, 2005 at 3:43 am
so will this be the start of Amazing Space’s “meteoric rise” It is clearly a “Quantum Leap” ahead of all the others, especially as they are “light years” ahead of their time
Yes I remember that chapter on bad use of language. The one I hate is when describing people behaving badly, they say, they behaved like wild annimals. I always feel that is demeaning – to wild annimals.
October 5th, 2005 at 5:05 am
As long as the students are moving at a non-zero velocity that will cover distance, and recording events as a function of distance is no less valid than as a function of time. I see no reason that they cannot while away light-years (or at least small portions of them) in much the same fashion that they could while away years.
October 5th, 2005 at 5:42 am
Sometimes on a trip, I “while away the miles” reading a book. Does this mean I am confusing distance with time? The earth, and even our galaxy are moving relative to other bodies, so why shouldn’t we “while away the light years?”
And shouldn’t we also jump for suggesting that it is possible to build the Milky Way “piece by piece?” Surely this was not how the Milky Way actually originated?
October 5th, 2005 at 7:03 am
It’s kind of you to try to excuse them, tgibbs, but we know that’s not how they meant it… I hate it when people make that particular mistake
October 5th, 2005 at 7:15 am
As a Sci-Am subscriber, I sort of thought it was a cute play-on-words, like a pun.
October 5th, 2005 at 7:16 am
ack hit submit.
In any case, I bet if BA writes them a letter, they’ll publish an explanation in next month’s issue or on the web site.
October 5th, 2005 at 9:26 am
Folcrom says:
>Be nice people. People do make mistakes.
>
>Another group (The Raelians) dont seem to know the difference between a >light second and a parsec.
>
>Folcrom.
You are 100% right there, also they don’t know the difference between Real and Not Real.
October 5th, 2005 at 10:18 am
This whole light-year thing got me thinking… Radio / TV transmissions from the time I was born have passed Vega, Pollux, and Arcturus and are getting near 85 Pegasi and Errai. Thinking about all those light-years of distance is kind of cool.
Of course, thinking that any life forms listening to those transmissions will soon be subjected to The Brady Bunch and disco music is less cool, but that’s the price of their scientific research I guess
October 5th, 2005 at 12:27 pm
My initial thought was the “while away the miles” usage that tgibbs mentioned, but that isn’t how they meant it. The students are not doing something while traveling from one point to another.
Actually, I’m not sure I’m happy with the “falling into black holes” line, either.
Eh… I haven’t read Sci Am since their hit piece on Bjorn Lomborg. I had been getting annoyed by their lack of objectivity up until that point, but that was the last straw.
October 5th, 2005 at 12:40 pm
Evolving Squid: I’ve always been skeptical about anyone out there doing anything with our signals other than nothing a lot of radio noise from our direction. It’s hard enough picking up intelligence (“chatter”) from Earth orbit.
1. Communication even from the rim of out Solar System requires powerful error correcting codes on digital data. Any signals arriving at, say, Vega, are WAY down in the noise, and just raw analog for the most part. I’ll have to model the situation as a satellite link budget one of these days.
2. Looking at the Earth from many light years away reduces it to a point source where all the transmissions are blended together. Even with spectral management, there is overlap and summing. This is an irreversable process, and I doubt you could ever hope to pick out something like a video sync pulse.
So it’s probably easily recognizable as intelligent signals (commentary on the quality of the content avoided), but it would be too noisy and too garbled together. For any given signal there’s a minimum signal to noise level below which you have no hope of recovering the information in any form.
I suspect the bulk of received power would be in the form of the carrier tones from AM radio stations.
October 5th, 2005 at 8:18 pm
Actually, I would suspect that the most intelligence bearing signals received in the great beyond would be high powered radar which tends to be emitted in the megawatt range with narrow bandwidth, whereas commercial broadcast gets only into the kilowatt range and as you say, carries a lot of information that would simply degrade into the noise over long distance.
October 6th, 2005 at 2:32 am
Yes, it’s sheer fantasy to think of alien intelligences watching our ancient TV shows from lightyears away. Even if the signals never degraded at all, the aliens would not only need the right type of receivers to pick them up, they’d also need TV sets of the right era to display the pictures on. And that’s assuming that these aliens come equipped with the right optical and neural structures to make sense of the rapidly flickering photons that make up TV pictures.
October 6th, 2005 at 3:28 am
So what you say, sophia8, is that Galaxy Quest was not a historical documentary?
October 8th, 2005 at 9:32 am
I used to subscribe to SciAm (many years ago). I found New Scientist to be a much better magazine – not only is it more up to date (being a weekly as opposed to a monthly), but it is rather more grown up. Even as an undergrad I found SciAm to be too dumbed down for me.
Which reminds me…
When I was a PhD student, some of the other guys in the same lab were collaborating for a time with a group at the University of Moscow. The Russians came to visit for a few months, and one of them mocked up a magazine cover, taking the “Scientist” from New Scientist and the “American” from Scientific American (at the time, they were a very similar kind of text). So this mock cover had the title American Scientist, and the cover photo? It was a chimp. My, how we laughed…
October 8th, 2005 at 6:04 pm
I don’t know if you’ve heard that song by Chris DeBurgh thats says something about lightyears of time going by.