See How It Turns Out

Mike commented on my previous post, "Heh. Not sure astronomy is the best hobby for someone who wants to 'follow and see how it turns out.'" Very funny and true. Most astronomy involves timeframes that make evolutionary biology look like a sprint. And yet, I can't think of a better era for a space buff to be alive.

Mike's comment also got me thinking about a little mental list I keep of things I'd really like to witness in my decades (I hope) left on the planet:

1. I'd like to be around when someone figures out dark matter and dark energy, the invisible something no one can find that seems to comprise 90% of the mass of the universe.

2. I'd like to see a picture of a planet outside our solar system--preferably Earth-sized. Not a wobble, spectrograph, or statistical chart. I want oceans and clouds.

3. I'd like to live long enough to see a permanent manned base on the Moon, something that could mature into a colony. Maybe even something with a little studio apartment set aside for me.

4. I'd like to see us discover evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. That would be a turning point in human history, the event that everything else either came before or after. (At the same time, I imagine that people living centuries in the future will envy our virginal ignorance in the same way we're wistful for a pre-Columbian America: "Gee, I wonder what life was like before we found out about the Zorxian Empire? Good times, good times....")

I think I've got a fair shot at the first three; the fourth much less so. Give me one or more of those--plus my family happy and healthy, poverty and disease eradicated, the environment in decent shape, blah blah blah--and I think I'd die a happy man.

The Lopsided Universe

Messier 101: A counter-clockwise spiral galaxy

I've always had a passionate amateur's interest in astronomy and once, long ago, hoped it might become more. In college I taught astronomy labs and helped run my campus's small observatory, and "astronomer" seemed like just about the coolest thing anyone could ever put on a business card. I just couldn't convince a grad school to agree with me.

That's all right. The nice thing about astronomy is you can keep up with it as a civilian. You can even do it; I have a small scope I don't pull out too often because my house is surrounded by street lights, but in theory it's a field where amateurs often put together equipment just as good as the professionals' and can still make a contribution.

A few years ago, I was one of millions who turned over a portion of my computer's processing power to help find ETs. A group called SETI at Home (SETI = Search for Extraterrestrial Intellligence) developed a program that anyone could install to help analyze signals captured by a radio telescope. The program works like a screensaver. Whenever your computer is idle it switches over to analyzing data, automatically reporting its results to the researchers and downloading another batch of signals. By distributing the task among legions of ordinary computers, the SETI folks got more done faster than if they'd used the world's most powerful supercomputer. As far as I know my computer never found anything interesting. In fact, as far as I know, the entire project hasn't found much interesting, which is kind of an interesting result in itself. It was fun until they issued an update that gave my computer indigestion and I stopped participating. But it's been a while and I think I might give it another try.

More recently, I've been looking at smudgy little space photos for an effort called Galaxy Zoo. Galaxy Zoo aims to classify galaxies, and its strategy is similar to SETI at Home's: spread out a job too daunting for a small team of researchers among millions of amateurs instead. Once you sign up and pass a test to prove you know what a galaxy looks like, you can log on to Galaxy Zoo and sort them to your heart's content. There's nothing automated about it. You manually click through image after image, deciding whether each depicts an elliptical or spiral galaxy (the two main types) and, if it's a spiral, whether it turns clockwise or counter-clockwise. In practice it's not easy--everything looks like a dim fuzzy blob after a while--but the Galaxy Zoo researchers at Oxford University show the same images to several people to reach consensus. In fact, I got an e-mail from them this morning explaining that each target galaxy has been looked at more than 30 times, and our amateur results agree with a smaller sampling classified by professionals. So far so good.

Here's the bizarre and interesting part: as this article in the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph newspaper explains, the universe seems to have a lot more galaxies spinning counter-clockwise than clockwise.

That is a deeply astonishing result. First, understand that a spiral galaxy that appears to be wound counter-clockwise would look clockwise if we were on the other side of it. The direction of a galaxy's spin is nothing more than an accident of where you happen to be when you look at it. Second, one of the fundamental principles of astronomy is isotropy--that is the idea that, on average, the universe is pretty much the same no matter which direction you look and there's no special vantage point that's better than any other. With that in mind, looking into space from our nowhere-special perspective, you'd expect to see nearly equal numbers of clockwise and counter-clockwise galaxies. If you dump a million pennies on the ground, approximately 500,000 will be heads and 500,000 tails. It's the only result that makes any sense at all.

And yet, I and my fellow Galaxy Zoo galaxy classifiers say the cosmos, as seen from Earth's vantage point, strongly favors the counter-clockwise.

Clearly, I broke the universe.

The researchers are trying to figure out what it means, if anything. Analyzing more pictures might help solve the puzzle. My own suspicion is that they've discovered less about the universe than about the flawed eyes and minds observing it. When confronted by an indistinct image our brains find patterns and fill in details that aren't really there, and I think it's possible that maybe--maybe--there's something hard-wired into us to discern counter-clockwise patterns more readily than clockwise. Like seeing ghostly faces in the static.

That sounds like a reach, but it makes a million times more sense to me than the alternative. In any case, it'll be cool to follow and see how it turns out. Which is the entire point.

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I'm Here!

Everything's fine, just very heavy on deadlines and light on blogging inspiration.

In an upcoming post I'll recap the two cancer-fighting walk/run events I plugged earlier this month. In short: Great! Thanks again to everyone who read about them here and was inspired to help out somehow.

I saw the new Disney movie "Enchanted" a few days ago and thought it was very good. Many nice references to Disney classics that you'll catch if you've seen them a thousand times (during my raising of two girls we wore out tapes of "Little Mermaid," "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," and Disney's "Robin Hood") and know some of their backstory. "Little Mermaid" voice actress Jodi Benson has a good role as Patrick Dempsey's secretary, and I've since read that Paige "Belle" O'Hara and Judi "Pocahontas's singing voice" Kuhn are in it as well, though I didn't catch them at the time. I think the movie's real accomplishment is successfully navigating the fine line between mocking the genre (as with "Shrek") and respecting it (I almost typed "respecting the essential validity of its archetypes" but then pulled the stick out of my rear and thought better of it). And little bits of cartoon at the beginning and end sure made me miss good ol' hand-drawn two-dimensional animation, which I understand John Lasseter has restored to Disney after previous administrations scoured it. Good for him.

Thanksgiving (U.S.) at the in-laws was very nice family time. It occurs to me I haven't often expressed thanks to the people who've bought my book, read my blog, or gone to the time and trouble to send me a note. So ... Thank You. It means a lot. Special appreciation for those few friends who were among the first to find Mom's Cancer online and have stuck with me since.

I expect I'll have more to say soon.
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The Trip Report

The Mighty Housatonic
(I hope to someday learn how to pronounce that)

One of the nice things about travel is it makes you appreciate home. My wife and I are happy to be back, although I return to face a mountain of work that has to get done before Thanksgiving. You may judge how eager I am to tackle the mountain by the length of this post. Let's see how well I can procrastinate.

Elaborating on my previous post's highlights:

1. Western Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Berkshires. Beautiful country, perfect little villages full of nice people. If there is a single home in the entire region that doesn't look like it belongs in a painting by Grandma Moses, Currier & Ives, or Norman Rockwell, we didn't see it. Ordinary houses well off the beaten path have all the clapboard, dormers, gables, cupolas, cornices, finials, and flying buttresses you could hope for (maybe not flying buttresses). Beautiful brick construction of the type we simply never see in northern California because ours all fell down in 1906. We're pretty sure everyone keeps their one-horse sleighs locked up in their garages until the first snow falls, because that was the only detail missing.

We met several locals who were almost apologetic about the state of their trees' leaves. Leaf tourism is a big deal, and we were alternately told that we'd missed the best colors by a few weeks, that we'd see better color a little farther north, or that the colors were bad everywhere this year. As we explained to a few folks: we're from California. Our standards for fall leaf color are pretty low. However, I don't see anything wrong with vistas like these:

2. Opening of the LitGraphic Exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum. What a beautiful facility. I only realized as we drove to it that the reception was scheduled to begin after sunset, and it was pitch dark by the time we arrived at 5:45 p.m. So of the building exteriors and surrounding landscape, I can only say that the photos I've seen look very nice.

The interior, I can report first-hand, is terrific. Galleries are arrayed around a small central rotunda featuring Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" paintings. Many of Rockwell's huge, stunning originals are on display, in some cases accompanied by the sketches or studies he used in their creation. It's not an enormous place; I'd call it appropriately intimate, in an architectural style that seems to reflect a Rockwell aesthetic without calling attention to itself at the expense of the artwork.

The LitGraphic exhibit occupies three galleries in the back, with one dedicated to "historical" work by artists such as Eisner and Kurtzman, and the other two to more contemporary pieces. A tiny side gallery--almost a corridor--has benches facing two TV monitors that looped five-minute interviews with six of the exhibit's contributors, including me.

Me and my wall.

Watching myself on TV.
Because I'm just that vain.

It's hard to estimate how many people attended the opening reception. More than 100 for sure. Several were museum patrons and members, though the museum staff told me there were many new faces they didn't recognize--presumably people just drawn by the subject matter--and they were thrilled with the turnout. The first person we recognized shortly after we arrived was curator Martin Mahoney, who came to my home to interview me. I also reconnected with Jeremy Clowe, who ran the camera and did a fantastic job editing all the interviews into a great presentation. He worked very hard to find five minutes that did not make me look stupid. We also enjoyed meeting their friends and loved ones as well.

3. Meeting Artists. Dave Sim, Peter Kuper, Howard Cruse, Marc Hempel, and Mark Wheatley all had work in the exhibit and attended the opening. I spent a few minutes and had good conversations with each, during which we said nice things about each other. Dave was great, and Peter and I turned out to have a mutual friend in Editor Charlie (not as big a coincidence as it may seem; Charlie knows everybody). Even artists much cooler, better, and more experienced than I admitted that showing their work in the Norman Rockwell Museum was something of a career highlight, which made me feel a bit less like a freshman at the senior prom.

With "Cerebus" creator Dave Sim.

4. Terry and Robyn Moore. I mention Terry Moore of "Strangers in Paradise" separately because we had a little more time to talk and, maybe, connected in a less superficial way than usual at an event like this. We really had a good visit about writing, the creative process, family, all sorts of stuff. As I wrote in my last post, Terry and Robyn seem like especially nice people I look forward to seeing again whenever I can.

Terry (center) and I chatting with a museum patron who was very proud of the comic-themed tie he'd worn for the occasion.

Dinner following the reception was held at the palatial (literally) Cranwell Resort in nearby Lenox, where I got to know more of the museum's staff, curators and administrators. I was impressed by how excited they seemed to be about hosting the exhibit. They talked about the emergence of a new narrative form and the continuum of telling stories with pictures that linked Norman Rockwell to us. Good food and better company. It was after 11 when we finally parted.

5. Guy Gilchrist. Guy began his professional cartooning career at age 14. Mentored by "Beetle Bailey" creator Mort Walker and often working with his brother Brad, he's had an impressive career that's included "The Muppets" and "Nancy" comic strips as well as many books and commercial art projects. Now he works out of Guy Gilchrist's Cartoonist's Academy in Simsbury, Connecticut, which serves as his studio, a school, and a summer day camp for kids.

The first impression any fan of comics and cartoons would have when entering Guy's academy is jaw-dropping wonder. The walls are covered with original art, some by Guy but most by other great pros: Milt Caniff, Stan Drake, Curt Swan, Cliff Sterrett, Jack Davis, too many others to count or recount. As I told Guy, I think young cartoonists can learn more from looking at original artwork for 10 minutes than they can from a shelf full of books, so he's done them a tremendous service right there. The academy is also outfitted with desks, art supplies, light boxes, and computers for the students to make their own comics and flash animations. It's quite an undertaking.

Guy very graciously treated us to lunch and spent about two hours of his day off with us. He's known a lot of the old-guard East Coast cartooning elite and is quite a raconteur. He's also very generous. I won't embarrass Guy (or me) by revealing how generous; let's just say I'm pretty sure if I'd expressed admiration for his microwave oven, he would have unplugged it from the wall and carried it to my car. All in all, it was one of the nicest, most interesting, insightful and engaging conversation I can recall having with any cartoonist. Thanks, Guy.

Talking cartooning over the foosball table. Guy's students do animation at these computers, hence the cels on the wall for them to study.

6. Historic Boston. Not much to add here, except that we spent a day walking the "Freedom Trail" and seeing all the highlights. A couple of hours were spent in the company of this delightful man, who led a group tour and enhanced our understanding and enjoyment enormously.

My wife Karen and I flanking Revolutionary-era hat maker Nathaniel Balch.

We spent some time exploring the Common, the Public Garden and Beacon Hill, and Boston seems like a perfectly fine city that well deserves it reputation for nighmarish traffic. Now, I expected that in the heart of the city, laid out 250 years before the invention of the auto. Jumbled narrow streets are part of the charm. My real puzzlement and frustration was with the modern stuff, which was a lot more baffling than it ought to be. Tunnels you can't get to, streets with five names within four blocks, interstates to nowhere. And the Massachusetts Turnpike: seriously, what the hell? I'm familiar with the concept of toll roads, but this thing's got booths that take cash, booths that dispense little tickets with teeny Excel spreadsheets printed all over 'em, booths at every exit manned by three guys who collect $1.10 from the six cars per hour that wander through. We went through one booth whose entire purpose seemed to be circling us around to a different booth. To misappropriate an old saying, this is no way to run a railroad.

However, it's a poor guest who leaves badmouthing his host, so I'll wrap up by saying we had a wonderful time in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and only regret we didn't have a chance to see everyone we wanted to. Also, I have never seen so many Dunkin' Donuts franchises in my life.

UPDATE: At the request of exactly one person, I've linked the first four photos above to higher-resolution version of the same. OK, Sherwood?
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Mini-Memo from Boston

Weather Report: Chilly but clear, perfect for our Nor'east trip so far.

Highlight #1: Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Highlight #2: My work on a wall at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Holy cow.

Highlight #3: Dave Sim, Peter Kuper, Howard Cruse, Marc Hempel, Mark Wheatley.

Highlight #4: Especially Terry Moore ("Strangers in Paradise") and his wife Robyn. Nice, nice, nice people. I feel like I made new friends for life.

Highlight #5: Two hours with cartoonist Guy Gilchrist, a kind, generous, and entertaining gentleman. And he bought the pizza.

Highlight #6: Historic Boston. Never been here before, and I love going someplace and having my perspective rearranged. The places in the history books are real, many within a short walk of each other. Cool.

Pictures and more maybe late Wednesday.