Slashdot Mirror

I remember well when there was a real, unplanned blackout in San Francisco for about 6 hours. It happened back in 1998 - it was quite a surreal experience.

I tried calling SCE but got a fast busy signal, so I gave up. Then about 20 minutes later, power blew out completely,

Once I thought to turn on my radio, I heard word that power was out all over the west coast.

My understanding is that a major power line coming from Washington got damaged. Because we in California don't have nearly enough local power capacity, scattered areas all over CA were blacked out to not overload what we do have.

Power was out about 2 hours for us in Orange. It was back before night, so I didn't even get to do any good astronomy. I heard power was out well into night elsewhere.

1. Naked-eye observing (more rewarding than many people realize - especially those who haven't experienced country skies - if you can get to a nice, open area that's as far away from light pollution as possible). Check out the Internation Dark Sky Association for more information about "light pollution".
   
   
2. Buy a good pair of binoculars. Head to your library and quickly glance at the covers of the last two or three years of two magazines: "Astronomy" and "Sky and Telescope". It's guaranteed you'll see a review mentioned on the cover for binoculars that are especially well-suited for astronomy. Both magazines have typically done reviews of binoculars every few years.
   
   
3. If you've got the money to take a bit more of a risk (in case your daughter's interest fades in a year or two), then yes, consider buying a telescope. But as others have mentioned, stay away from "department store" telescopes (e.g. "Tasco" brand, etc.). A frequent indicator of an inferior telescope is one that tries to dazzle you with how much it magnifies things. It's often hard for beginners to understand, but this point is crucial for first time telescope buyers: magnification is not what you should be concerned about when buying a telescope! Any scope can be made to magnify any amount, just by changing the eyepiece. The critical things include the scope's ability to gather light (generally, the bigger the aperture the better), the tripod (don't consider this to be minor!), optical quality, overall construction, and so on.
   

Another good organization to consider might be the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP page) They have their work cut out trying to debunk lots of fraudulent claims.

There are also science advocacy organizations, for example those listed at this page, who often have their work cut out for them promoting sensible research against the uncompromising efforts of PETA and so on.

There are also organizations like Zero Population Growth, ZPG site who try to do what they can to address what is clearly behind many current and impending problems, the lack of thought that goes into reproductive decisions worldwide.

Libraries of course are historically important for science literacy and depend on contributions. There hasn't been a local library that I know of that hasn't been very happy to get a subscription to Sky and Telescope, for example.

These aren't charities in the traditional sense, but they are underfunded groups working for causes that may be important to geeks.

And if you really care about light pollution, visit the International Dark-Sky Association and you'll find that light pollution starts at home.

(Perth, Australia: sorry, not visible -- D'oh!)

I've never understood working on a CRT in a darkened area. At best I end up with a whitish rectangle burned into my retinas at the end of the day.

It seems like most people don't like reflections of lighting fixtures or windows (the architectural kind), or glaring fixtures in the periphery of their vision. The reflection problem is easy to solve by tilting the monitor down slightly. The peripheral vision problem is solved by shielding lights so that they shine downward instead of to the sides. I'm not sure why people buy fixtures that produce a small amount of light downwards, and a huge amount of glare to the side and even upwards, but they do (especially outdoor lights, see www.darksky.org for examples). My office got partway to a solution by buying fluorescents with side shields, but the shields still allow a lot of light through in the 0-30 degrees-from-horizontal range. A little late-night work with tape or aluminum foil will fix these.

In any case, the lights directly above a monitor are not much of a problem. Darkening or tenting an entire cubicle just to avoid side glare seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It puts the eyes into a highly dilated (i.e. poor depth of field) state, with dark adaptation taking 20-30 minutes to achieve maximum sensitivity. A few seconds of bright light will undue this adaptation. It also means tiny lights like LED's or light leaks will become glare sources themselves.

It is cheaper to control light pollution than build something in space. http://www.darksky.org is just one of the places where a little money go a long way to fight light pollution.

Now, it is not protected primarily for SETI. Submm is an extremely important branch of astronomy, and gaining. The page of the largest submm telescope in the world the JCMT is a good place to start if you want to find out more about submm astronomy.

As for SETI funding, there are not huge amounts of resources going into it. There are small amounts of resources. IMHO, that is the way it should be, but piggyback projects should be conducted. Computing is best done through distributed projects, like the SETI@Home project. I have stopped running the client, though, I think they're not managing the project right.