I’m not planning to blog a lot on the Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples as is openly accessible. Your comments are going to carry a lot more weight there than here. But I’ll try and keep track of what other people are saying elsewhere. I’m expecting this to be the first paper of a developing argument, so I’ll need to see what people identify as problems and address them. There’s two comments in the Times today which I think neatly highlight one of the issues. One is from Efrosyni Boutsikas and the other from Mary Beard.

Boutsikas’ objection is interesting. I wanted a comparison data set to examine for Greece and the only one I know of that’s published is Retallack’s in Antiquity. To be honest it’s not entirely fair to use Retallack’s data as he wasn’t that concerned with astronomy. Instead he was looking at geomorphology, and I think he has some really interesting results. Now Boutsikas has her own survey, which she did specifically with archaeoastronomy in mind. That’s why I’m interested when she says of 107 temples in Greece only 58% faced east. That might cause me some problems and here’s why.

First we need three variables. n is the number of temples. That’s 107. p is the probability and event will happen, and q the probability it won’t. p+q = 1 because something has to either happen or not happen. So what value is p? It depends on what Boutsikas means by east. If she means the eastern half of the horizon, then p is 0.5 and so is q. By pure chance we’d expect np temples to face east. That’s 53.5. In her survey 62 temples faced east. That’s more than chance, so I’m right yes? Not so fast.

There’s never going to be exactly 53.5 temples facing east. Around 19 times out of twenty 20 there’ll be 53.5 plus or minus two standard deviations. If you want the chance of a false positive to be lower than 1 in a 100, then you need 53.5 plus or minus three standard deviations. The standard deviation (σ) for this kind of distribution is calculated by the formula:

If we want the one in twenty confidence that means

So 19 times out of 20 you might expect to find between 43.1 and 63.9 temples facing east. The result of 62 is inside this range, so there’s nothing significant. How do I explain that? I’m not sure I can. I can’t say what time period her temples come from. If she’s looked at Bronze Age sites and Roman sites in Greece then we’re not comparing like with like and it’s possible that when we compare temples built in the archaic and classical periods as they were in Sicily then we’ll have more of a match. Another possibility is that I’m simply wrong.

But this depends on Boutsikas meaning eastern half of the horizon when she says east. I use different definitions of east for different tests and make clear which are which in the paper because it makes a difference. If Boutsikas has put her temples into four categories, north, east, south and west, then east means eastern quarter of the sky and the equations turn out differently.

If east is the eastern quarter then 19 times out of twenty at most we would expect at most 35.71 temples. By chance there’s be over 40.19 temples in the sample less than 1 time out of 100. 62 temples would be over seven standard deviations away from the expected result. If that’s by chance it’s an amazing freak result. It means I can’t respond to Boutsikas’s claims until I can see the data to analyse, so I know what east means. She might have proven my paper wrong, or else proven it very right. How can that be when only just over half of the temples face east?

Imagine you’re at a casino. Someone is spinning the roulette wheel. Half the time it lands on the numbers 0-9 and the other half it lands on another number. It doesn’t matter than you can’t predict exactly where the next ball will land. In the long term that casino will lose money because something is affecting the wheel. This isn’t about having a hard and fast law for astronomical alignments. It’s about whether or not a significant number of temples are aligned to the sun. If you’re going say that there is or isn’t a significant number, first you have to know what a significant number would look like. Typically in the social sciences that would np +/- 2σ. I prefer np +/- 3σ because I’m making claims which people might not be comfortable with, so it’s reasonable I should provide stronger evidence.

If I am right that doesn’t mean Boutsikas’ and Retallack’s surveys can be junked. In fact it means the opposite. In Retallack’s case he’s showing there’s a clear correlation between the dedication of a temple and the soil type it’s built in. Now if there’s a general rule that Greek temples face east, the temples which don’t become more interesting because then you can ask “What’s special about those temples? Why were they built that way?” It’s the same for Boutsikas’ data. If there’s nothing special about the alignments then temples which don’t face east are nothing special. If, using this method, her data shows a tendency for eastern alignments then she has a data set with plenty of interesting temples that could tell us something about Greek religion. For instance it could highlight where a local cult was doing something special that you wouldn’t find elsewhere in Greece.

Clearly Boutsikas’ objection is serious and I’ll need to consider it carefully, but in this case it could be a case of cross-wired. I don’t think she’d seen my article when she talked to the Times because I hadn’t emailed it to her till last night. We’ve both been working on similar topics and so could have come to the same conclusions. If we been talking with each other then there could have been a bit of friction if we saw our ideas in each other’s theses. She’s been put on the spot reacting to a paper which she probably hasn’t read, but she’s clearly an expert in the subject because of her own research. She’ll go where her research takes her and I’ll go with mine. The reporter has picked up on that confusion. Does that leave him in the dog house? Definitely not.

I’m really pleased with the way Mark Henderson has written this up. It’s not his job to preach my wonderfulness, it’s to report on how this research fits in with other research. Getting the quotes from Efrosyni Boutsikas was brilliant because it shows there’s currently two models which come to opposite conclusions. As we both publish more those models will get fleshed out and adapt. Which one will be accepted? Hers? Mine? Some kind of hybrid, or even neither? It’s not just about getting the right answer. At the moment we might not even agree on what the right answer will look like. Which brings me to Mary Beard’s piece.

I think it’s great commentary. I think she’s spot on when she rejects the idea of a modern astronomy in the ancient world. I would quibble with her rejecting astronomy for the rhythms of day and night. That sounds astronomical to me and there’s also evidence the seasons were important. I think she might be trying to emphasise the importance of cosmological features, in the sense of natural order, rather than strict observation. The only real puzzle is that she’s saying that there’s it’s obvious that Greek temples align east-west when in the column next to her Efrosyni Boutsikas is saying they obviously don’t. This is a bit of an interdisciplinary gap.

From the outside you might expect archaeologists and classicists to talk to each other. They’re dealing with the same people in the same time period. In reality this doesn’t always happen. A few years back the Roman Archaeology Conference, the big conference for Roman archaeologists held once every couple of years was scheduled opposite the Classical Association conference. The two sides don’t always talk to each other. In the past few years Boutsikas has been publishing on her work. Ioannis Liritzis and Helena Vassiliou have been arguing that Greek temples were aligned towards or away from aurorae or stars. This is having no impact amongst classicists. Equally I can’t just turn around and say “Greek temples tended to face east” because all the researchers who disagree could ask “How do you know?” It’s obvious doesn’t work as an academic response, even though I agree with Mary Beard. I don’t imagine that would be her response in an academic forum. But what she’s done is she’s very helpfully shown that if I want to talk to classicists then show why I think I have something to talk about.

That’s why I’ve had to write this paper. I want to write more, but the first question anyone can ask is “How do you know that’s not just a chance result?” That’s why I developed this method. I wanted something simple and effective. The reason I put it in PLoS One is that it also has to be accessible. I’m planning to write more articles for specialist journals, but people reading those will need access to my data and my methodology. That needs to be available to classicists, archaeologists, astronomers and anyone else with an interest.

You can read the original research for free and download it at PLoS One. If you leave comments there then they’ll be seen by everyone else who examines the paper. If you’d like to blog about the paper there’s a collection of photos from Sicily at Flickr with a Creative Commons licence.

Salt, A. (2009). The Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples PLoS ONE, 4 (11) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0007903

1. It’s fast.
   The paper was submitted on the 8th of September and I got the acceptance, subject to revisions on the 30th of September. I wouldn’t be quite so happy if it had been rejected, but you have to be prepared for that. The faster there’s a decision the quicker you can work on the revisions or else re-write for another journal. The rapid response means that I can cite the data in this paper in other papers immediately rather than delaying writing about further work.
2. It’s accessible.
   Research might be interdisciplinary, but not so many journals are. For this paper the alternatives would be publication in specialist archaeoastronomy, classics, archaeology or astronomy journals. I can do that and will do that in the future, but writing for those journals means writing for those specific audiences. If they’re subscription-based they also lock out a large proportion of the potential audience. If an astronomer is in a university without a classics department then it’s going to be hard for him to get a copy of the paper. Likewise many universities don’t carry archaeoastronomy journals. PLoS One gives me a platform to introduce the work and then I can publish tailored articles developing ideas in the specialist journals.
3. It opens conversation.
   You can comment on the paper. So too can anyone else. This is particularly handy for interdisciplinary work. I’m hoping the conversation doesn’t end with this one paper. The article-based metrics will included some of citation search. Hopefully in a couple of years people reading this paper will be able to see where they can find criticisms and developments in other papers. That’s amazingly useful for interdisciplinary work where subsequent papers could be in journals in a variety of disciplines.

I’ve decided some form of open-access is essential for interdisciplinary work. The paper stands or falls on whether or not the binomial distribution is the right tool for the task. That means for academic honesty I have to submit it to a journal where the I can be reasonably sure it will be scrutinised by people familiar with basic statistics. Scientists might laugh at that as the mathematics in the paper is very simple. I think any classicist could follow it, but some could quite reasonably be wary of it. Is it statistical sleight-of-hand? They can read any comments left by statisticians or astronomers and judge how confident they should be in the findings. Likewise people unfamiliar with the Greek material can read the classicists’ and archaeologists’ comments and see if the human aspect of the research is sound.

It’s also important for me because I might learn something, and indeed I did. This is a better paper post-review than it was when I submitted it. I’ve re-thought how I process some of the data and that will have a positive on the next project I do.

After going through the process I’m impressed with PLoS. I think I hit every bump in the submission process, most of it due to the ordering of the paper being different to how I would normally write it. Still, the everyone was very helpful along the way. If you’re a recent PhD or grad student with a need to put out some publications, I’d recommend publishing with PLoS One. Of course I’m writing this before I’ve seen how the paper has been received, so you can check on my article metrics yourself to see if it’s being read or else sunk into obscurity.

The subject of the book is the Parthenia (Partheneion) by Alcman (Alkman) a poet writing in the 7th century BC. It describes part of a ceremony to devote something to a goddess, possibly Artemis though Bowra (1934:35) disagrees. He argues that ὀρθρίαι means at day-break rather than being a reference to Artemis Orthia. This is pretty much the problem with the Parthenia. It’s fragmentary and even the fragments we do have are ambiguous.

There’s some astronomical element to the poem, but exactly what in the poem is astronomical and what is being offered is also debated. Everyone’s arguments about what the poem means stands or breaks on a section which Ferrari calls ‘the most tormented passage in this section of the song’. Thanks to Google Books, I can add the two relevant pages below under Pleiades, Hyades and Sirius so you can see what the problem is.

The key passage in near English is something like:

For as we carry ὀρθρίαι φαρος
The Πεληάδες rise and struggle against us
Like the star Sirius
through the ambrosial night.

Depending on how you translate the Greek words you get a different outcome.

If you think φαρος is a robe or veil then you’re in good company. This is known from other rituals. Usually that means that people then translate ὀρθρίαι to describe Artemis Orthia, a virgin goddess with an interest in children and childbirth. That makes Πεληάδες the Pleiades. Many people then make this a spring festival – and that for me is where this translation breaks down.

The Pleiades are not like Sirius. They’re staggeringly unlike Sirius. Sirius is the brightest star in the sky and the Pleiades are an open cluster of faint stars that are like a smudge of light to the naked eye. If your eyesight’s good you can make out individual stars. That would suggest that’s it’s not the appearance that matters but the timing of their appearance. In that light, the spring festival makes sense. In this period the Pleiades first appeared in the morning sky in May. The problem is the reference to Sirius. Sirius was setting in the evening sky at this time. It didn’t rise till July. This is why I cannot see how the poem describes a spring festival. The presence of Sirius seems to rule that out.

The alternative taken by a smaller group of people is that a φαρος is a plough. This would be Ferrari’s interpretation and Martin West’s too who generally has a big brain when it comes to lyric poetry. If a plough is being brought then this becomes an autumn festival. There were many harvests throughout the year, but the agricultural year restarted each autumn after the last harvest with the ploughing of the fields. This is astronomically better because Sirius would have been visible in the morning sky which very neatly ties to ὀρθρίαι meaning day-break. That’s essential because Greek religious ritual often happened in the morning or just before sunrise. This doesn’t give me so much of a headache, as it’s physically possible, but I still struggle with the Pleiades being like Sirius. That’s why I’ve tended to like a third option that Ferrari mentions.

Πεληάδες doesn’t just mean faint open cluster of stars. It also means doves. If were serious about wanting to solve this puzzle then I’d be looking at dove migration and historical and archaeological evidence for hunting. Birds tend to migrate in autumn, that works with φαρος as a plough. Songbirds also tend to fly at night. Travelling through the sky like Sirius through the night would be a bad simile, but less so than the Pleiades as stars option to my ears. This would tie in with the kind of astronomy Hesiod practiced. He didn’t just look at stars, but also at ecological signs, like the migrations of birds and the behaviour of other animals.

Don’t go investing too much in my belief though. This is an opinion formed from a fairly small amount of reading. One of the things that makes this book so useful is that it draws on an extensive amount of evidence. You don’t have to agree with Ferrari’s destination to see that the trip is worthwhile. She also pulls in evidence from archaeology and art as well as drama, especially Euripides. I think it’s speculative work, but it’s certainly not baseless speculation.

However, I’m not fully convinced by the explanation. Nearly all the supporting evidence post-dates Alcman’s work by a long way. Euripides was writing in the fifth century BC. I think that’s important because I think something happens to astronomy in this period. The fifth century is when Meton pins down his luni-solar cycle. It’s also a time when there’s a stronger sense of Hellenic identity, partly as a reaction to the threat from Persia. I think the book is extremely helpful for exploring what people in the fifth century thought about the connection between the heavens and religion. I want to believe that we can take this evidence and apply it back to seventh century Sparta. It would make my life so much easier, but I don’t think there’s the certainty in the evidence to fix the Parthenia to the autumn. My opinion might change in the future. I found the text a bit, ha ha, laconic. It means I’ll have to read it a few times to get a better idea of some of the more subtle arguments. It’s not a badly written book and definitely not deliberately obtuse, but it is concise.

All in all though it’s very thought-provoking. It puts some flesh on to models that try and connect religion and astronomy. It means that ritual isn’t just about the material, but also about how it’s used. It would be interesting to see if anyone else had evidence approaching the same problem from the opposite direction. A survey of temples to see if there’s some sort of archaeological correlate with the astronomical behaviour might be useful.

Bowra, C.M. 1934. ‘The Occasion of Alcman’s Partheneion‘ The Classical Quarterly 28(1): 35-44 [↩]

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This is about as close as I'd like to get to a barrister. Photo (cc) Steve Punter.

I’ve been busy recently. Hopefully you’ll see the fruits of some of that work shortly, but it means I haven’t had time to write much here. One of the side-effects is that I get email pointing to something that I should blog about from a few people. For example an artefact has turned up somewhere which is really dodgy. I’d guess there’s some sort of illegal activity in its sale, but I don’t have the time to research where. Now if I had a forum I could leave it and half-a-dozen other people could have been talking about this on site. One problem though is libel.

If you’re running an auction house, Ponsonby’s for the sake of argument. If you routinely sell unprovenanced antiquities then you really rely on your reputation. You don’t need people pointing out that a large number of Puglian vases you sell are likely to have been illegally excavated from Italy (up to 95% of such vases according to one estimate). Nor do you need people highlighting that there’s a cottage industry in producing fake Mycenaean figurines. Basically, the biggest guarantee that this stuff is a sound investment is your word and your reputation.

If someone blogs on Puglian vases generally, that’s a problem but reacting to it is a bad idea because it drags your name into an argument about sleaze. If it’s documented that you’ve handled stolen goods and a blogger mentions this it’s still a bad idea to legally respond – you’d be reported on widely for legal threats over something which is obviously true. You’d eventually silence the blogger, because the blogger wouldn’t be able to afford to defend the case, but you’d be slaughtering your own reputation in the process. So a forum would be a place where you could discuss this and help reduce the value of illicit antiquities without damaging the market for legal artefacts. But there’s a problem when you start discussing motive.

Sooner or later someone will point out that Ponsonby’s routinely handles illicit material. It’s entirely human to speculate that if a new undocumented Puglian vase turns up, Ponsonby’s know it’s probably been excavated by organised crime. That’s human, reasonable and actionable. At that point you’re assigning guilt to Ponsonby’s and damaging their reputation by saying they’re knowingly engaging in criminal action by fencing stolen goods. Now they have a case worth winning, because when they win it will be clearing them of criminal activity and enhancing their reputation – ironically making them very attractive to anyone else who wants to launder artefacts.

That’s why I don’t have a forum. Someone acting sensibly and reasonably would eventually put me in a position where I’d have to start deleting comments because I’d be held legally accountable for whatever snookums538 posted on the site. It might seem like paranoid, but it’s justified paranoia.

For example Martin Schøyen has some incantation bowls from the Middle East. David Gill and Sam Hardy both mentioned a debate in the House of Lords earlier this week. An investigation has stated they were probably illegally removed from Iraq despite being, in a very real and legal sense, the property of Mr Martin Schøyen. I’ve blogged in the past about how much these are very much Martin Schøyen’s property. In fact he has my sympathy as the fact that the investigation into the origins of these bowls was suppressed, by persons unknown, could lead someone to mistakenly think something a bit dodgy is going on. It’s definitely not. I know Mr Schøyen is a fine upstanding citizen because when I emailed asking for a copy of the report he didn’t reply – thus keeping to this out of court settlement.

I sent the email after getting a comment from a publicist for the Schøyen Collection. I wrote a blog post which made it clear the bowls were 100% legally the property of Martin Schøyen. I linked to a newspaper article which made it clear that Mr Schøyen had done nothing wrong in any way because the bowls were entirely and unquestionably legally his. The comment, first after the post, might not be quite as positive as mine, but it shows that even on a minor blog art collectors take their reputations very seriously. But what would happen if someone posted something libellous as a comment? This is why I use comment moderation, currently via Disqus.

Comment moderation is essential for a blog as anyone who’s run one will tell you. For every comment by a real person, there’s about four by automated systems. These can come in storms. For example a post about the British Chiropractic Association has recently had at least 250 spamming attempts in the past twenty-four hours. Without some form of spamguard I’d be getting swamped by junk comments. Not all of these comments are going to be GET P0RN HER3!!!!!!!. Some will attempt to look normal. If your computer gets whitelisted then it bypasses a lot of checks. Laura’s comment “Do you really want to know why this is a terrible idea? Ask an immunologist.” has given me some problems. It could be genuine and immunologists might be opposed to extrasolar astronomy. However the non-sequitur suggests someone hasn’t read the article, so it could be an attempt by a spam computer to pass as normal. Allowing the comment to stand marks out a security hole in this site and maybe that’s why the number of spam attempts has rocketed. I’ve contacted the email associated with the comment asking if it’s genuine and got no reply. That’s why I’m deleting it. Another common feature if spam posts is that they have a lot of links. There’s often good reason to include links in comments, you’d want to point to some other information maybe. But because of spammers Disqus counts the links and deletes. Anything above two links is probably going to be deleted.

I don’t like doing that because if someone’s taken the effort to type something in then that’s kind of them. It’s clear I don’t agree with Scott Monahan. I’ve never known a department with a ‘departmental grant writer’, but maybe they do things differently in America. I accept that there’s always going to be someone who knows where Atlantis is, or who really settled the Americas. If they want to share that enthusiasm that’s great, just so long as they don’t think I’m obliged to take them seriously. Besides the great thing about taking comments from people who disagree with you is that occasionally you learn something.

If your comment doesn’t appear here, it’s quite possible it’s down to some reason that’s not your fault. If I’ve pointed you here that’s all you need to know. This is why, especially if I like your comments, I recommend setting up your own weblog. So why bring this up now? Well I’ve been visited by one of the special people on the internet.

An artist's impression of Gliese 667c. Connected to, but definitely not, Ganymede in Lyra's naming system. Photo (c) Nasa.

Wladimir Lyra’s following in the footsteps of Jack in his arXiv paper Naming the extrasolar planets. Currently planets are tagged after their parent star, so if we found a planet around α Ceti, it would be called α Ceti b. The b in lower case is used for the first planet to be found, c for the second and so on. a is not used to avoid confusing a planet with a star. Unfortunately in the case of some double stars a capital B would be used for the second star, so names could get confusing. So why not name the planets? Lyra gives a couple of reasons why he thinks this would be a good idea. One is that names like Bacchus are more beautiful than names like HD 128311. One person’s beauty is another person’s mess, so I’m not convinced by this. However, he also proposes that names for extrasolar planets aren’t just decorative, there’s also the Copernican principle.

“Mercury – Venus – Earth – Mars is a sequence of equals. Sol b – Sol c – Earth – Sol d would implicitly imply that the Earth is special in some way.” For this reason, Lyra argues that naming the extrasolar planets is necessary to avoid the impression that the Solar system is special. I’m more persuaded by this, but it misses an obvious point – the Solar system is special. It’s where I am, it’s where all humans are and it’s where they’ll be for the foreseeable future.

My biggest objection to his paper was that I’m not sure how helpful it would be. Even dealing with ancient historians I tend to avoid classical names for stars, except in a few cases. Vindemiatrix or Protrygetor, names for the same star in Latin or Greek aren’t as helpful as ε Virginis, because ε Virginis gives the reader a clue as to where in the sky they’ll find the star. Similarly I can see why Lyra would give the name Bellerophon to a planet, but I wouldn’t find it as helpful as 51 Pegasi b. The IAU have said there are likely to be too many extra-solar planets to name. The problem isn’t likely to be the supply of names, which is a shame as Lyra solves that neatly. It’s memorising what goes where.

For that reason I’d prefer a Bayer style system so in the ε Eridani system you could number the planets from innermost orbit to outer I, II, III and so on. It sounds simple, but it won’t work. The first star you find in a system is likely to be the most massive, not the closest to the star. Using this system you wouldn’t be able to number planets until you discovered every planet in the system. Every time you discovered a new planet you’d have to renumber the system, causing havoc when you try and use older papers for comparison which use a different numbering, or else have a database of each system’s number order for planets. Another solution would be to number planets in order of mass, but that’s not likely to be fool-proof either.

Another possibility would be a Bayer style designation which embedded information about a planet in its name. So Gliese 876 d would be Gliese 876 p1.9379, p for planet and the number following it is the orbital period. This too has flaws though as orbital periods can be calculated from assumed masses and may be revised in the future. A possible solution would be to only give names to the minimum number of significant figures necessary. In the Gliese 876 system that would give planets names p60 for b, p30 for c and p2 for d. The exact figures may change, but the relative order of periods would mean you would have a fair chance of identifying a planet named in a early paper on the system at some time in the future.

Things do change and catastrophes occur upsetting systems. Hybrid names like 55 Cancri p 5000 Argive might help track references to 55 Cancri d as papers accrue over the years. I’ll cheerfully concede a name like Althaea for planet 16 Cygni Bb (the first star discovered orbiting 16 Cygni B, hence the Bb) would be easier to understand. Ultimately though I think the problem is not the names, or their allocation. It’s what the names are used for.

The visible planets had names because they were visible, distinctive and needed names. Uranus and Neptune also got names because there were so few planets so more names were not mentally taxing. Lyra points out that asteroids have names. This is true, but when 1 Ceres and 2 Pallas were discovered it wasn’t anticipated that 2309 Mr Spock would be joining them. These days a catalogue number is essential to identify an asteroid, the name is not so important. The same can be said of comets. Originally they were named by the date they appeared. After the discovery of the periodicity of comets by Halley, they began to be named, but these days comets also bear catalogue numbers. So who will use these planet names?

For the vast majority of the extrasolar planets their existence will only be noted by astronomers, much like stars and galaxies today. While names may be beautiful, astronomers don’t seem to use them for stars, nore for many galaxies. Likewise names may add something of value to extrasolar planets, but equally use of them on a regular basis could be cumbersome. Names have most value where things are not easily categorised, like the rocks on Mars. Mythological names have the further disadvantage in that they are purely abstract rather than ontic dumps. An ontic dump would have the double use of not only labelling a planet, but giving some information about it. Bayer classifications, when used as names, are usually ontic dumps, as are the current extrasolar planet names. This matters in the Lyra name system as some of the names actually run counter to Graeco-Roman cosmology.

As an example the name Dike is associated with a planet found in Libra. In classical mythology Dike, Justice, is in fact an aspect of Virgo. Libra was originally the Claws of Scorpio. Once the method is explained then the Lyra system makes sense, but it would be counter-intuitive in some cases for anyone with a knowledge of classical mythology. Another example would be that Amphitrite, the nymph wooed by Poseidon with the aid of Delphinus is not associated with constellation Delphinus. If names are to be used then a method divorced from the mythologically laden meanings of the modern constellations might prevent confusion. That’s why I think Stuart’s suggestion to use names from all sorts of literature has a lot of merit. Though there’s something to be said for Exoplanetology’s suggestion too.

Ultimately the names for the extrasolar planets will be names that have meaning to the community of regular users. In the past classical references were common culture shared by academics in all European universities. Those days have gone. I could bemoan the decline in classics, after all I’m an ancient historian. But there’s also a lot to celebrate about the creation of academic links outside the Euro-American community. If names are adopted hopefully they’ll reflect that it’s not just the number of worlds that has grown, but also the astronomical community from a small elite at the start of the 20th century to the worldwide exchange of information and ideas that we have today.

If you’re wondering who Jack is, there a video on YouTube.

Science of the Invisible: How I learned to stop worrying and love FriendFeed

BBC NEWS | Landscape photo of the year 2009
Some amazing photos here. I particularly like the Aberdeen and Kilnsey photos and now have a huge urge to get a wide-angle lens.

This was an experiment with a plug-in which pulled in posts to FriendFeed. It’s not really working well for me, so I doubt I’ll be using it in the future, but I’ll be blogging about it.