Note (March 2020). This post was composed in 2018, but never posted. But I still agree with it, so better now than never!
A little confession to start this post. I've hated virtually every planetarium show I've ever attended. What? Why would a science type hate a planetarium show? Because they typically spend 90% of the time talking about constellations. There is no science in constellations! The operator goes into great detail identifying the constellations, naming the various stars and drawing lines between them to show the bear or whatever. Content free. The big exception was the night an amateur astronomer friend of mine put on a planetarium show for our Cub Scout troop. He quickly went through the requisite constellation stuff, then showed us photographs he had taken of the rings of Saturn. In addition to the spectacular photos, he explained how he took them, and described many features I had never known about. I enjoyed that immensely.
The recent eclipse mania was, alas, reduced to a outside planetarium show. As an example, check out CNN's "The Solar Eclipse, in Pictures". It is mostly pictures of people viewing the eclipse! There is a nice picture of the corona, which can only be seen by eye during an eclipse, without even mentioning it.
In the various discussions of the eclipse, if anything scientific is discussed, it is an explanation of why eclipses happen so rarely. That's great, I like that. But what is rarely discussed is that the eclipse is only possible due to the nearly identical angular sizes of the moon and sun. And what is the nature of that corona? What do we know about the fields and charged particles that are only so rarely revealed to the naked eye? How do scientists learn about them without waiting for rare eclipses? The soul hungering for some science starves with the media coverage of this supposedly scientifically important event!
29 March 2020
COVID-19 Progress
A look at the COVID data: Here is the March US data of daily new cases. It is better to look at that data rather than the total number of cases because the daily number tells you how you are doing now, information that takes a while to show up in the totals. Furthermore, the plot is on a logarithmic scale. On such a scale, exponential growth shows up as a straight line. The slope of the line tells the doubling time for new cases, how long it takes for the number of daily cases to double.
You can see that from March 1 to about March 21 the US new cases followed the straight line very well, with a doubling time of about 2.3 days. However, my daughter and I noticed early this week that that the new cases were now doubling only every 5-6 days. This is significant; today the US had about 19,000 new cases but if we had continued on last week's curve there would have been 73,000 new cases today! I think this is encouraging news. We're still on an apocalyptic trend, but it will take us twice as long to get there now!
Data from worldometers.info, updated April 3, 2020.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)