Here at aBlogtoWatch, we aren't just watch nerds, but normal nerds as well. We'd be lying if, as guys, we claimed that having serious talks about surviving a fantasy. You’ve got problems, I’ve got advice. This advice isn’t sugar-coated—in fact, it’s sugar-free, and may even be a little bitter. Welcome to Tough Love. Tomorrow is Lipstick Day and M.A.C. is giving away free full tubes of the stuff to celebrate. You don’t have to buy anything, just show up at one of their U.S. Latest breaking news, including politics, crime and celebrity. Find stories, updates and expert opinion. The Sidewalk Ballet [An abridged excerpt from The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs] Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old. · When I was in Canada, it was really cool to see everyone using the metric system. But what made me a little nuts was how everyone pronounced the word. Raleigh is #2 Most Educated City in the Country - Forbes, October 2017. Raleigh in the Top 5 Cities for Jobs in the U.S. - Glassdoor, September 2017.

The Sidewalk Ballet. The Sidewalk Ballet[An abridged excerpt from The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs]Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple- minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with improvisations. Watch Portrait Of A Zombie Online Facebook more. The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet.

I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?)… The heart- of- the- day ballet I seldom see, because part of the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. Mr. Lacey, the locksmith, shuts up his shop for a while and goes to exchange the time of day with Mr. Slube at the cigar store. Mr. Koochagian, the tailor, waters the luxuriant jungle of plants in his window, gives them a critical look from the outside, accepts a compliment on them from two passers- by, fingers the leaves on the plane tree in front of our house with a thoughtful gardener's appraisal, and crosses the street for a bite at the Ideal where he can keep an eye on customers and wigwag across the message that he is coming.

Bad Astronomy - : Bad Astronomy. Well now, this is an interesting discovery: astronomers have found what looks like a "super- Earth" – a planet more massive than Earth but still smaller than a gas giant – orbiting a nearby star at the right distance to have liquid water on it!

Given that, it might – might – be Earthlike. This is pretty cool news. We’ve found planets like this before, but not very many! And it gets niftier: the planet has at least five siblings, all of which orbit its star closer than it does. Now let me be clear: this is a planet candidate; it has not yet been confirmed. Reading the journal paper (PDF), though, the data look pretty good.

It may yet turn out not to be real, but for the purpose of this blog post I’ll just put this caveat here, call it a planet from here on out, and fairly warned be ye, says I. The star is called HD 4. I wouldn’t want to walk there).

It’s a K2. 5 dwarf, which means it’s cooler, dimmer, and smaller than the Sun, but not by much. In other words, it’s reasonably Sun- like. By coincidence, it appears ot be about the age as the Sun, too: 4. It was observed using HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (I know, it should be HARVPS, but that’s harvd to pronounce). This is an extremely sensitive instrument that looks for changes in the starlight as a planet (or planets) orbits a star. The gravity of the star causes the planet to orbit it, but the planet has gravity too. As it circles the star, the star makes a littler circle too (I like to think of it as two kids, one bigger than the other, clasping hands and swinging each other around; the lighter kid makes a big circle and the bigger kid makes a smaller circle).

As the star makes its circle, half the time it’s approaching us and half the time it’s receding. This means its light is Doppler shifted, the same effect that makes a motorcycle engine drop in pitch as it passes you. Massive planets tug on their star harder, so they’re easier to find this way. Also, a planet closer in has a shorter orbit, so you don’t have to look as long to find it. But in the end, by measuring just how the star is Doppler shifted, you can get the mass and orbital period of the planet. Or planets. In this case, HD 4. HARPS, and three planets were found.

But the data are public, so a team of astronomers grabbed it and used a more sensitive method to extract any planetary signatures from the data. They found the three previously- seen planets easily enough, but also found three more! One of them is from a planet that has (at least) seven times the mass of the Earth, and orbits with a 1. Called HD 4. 03. 07g (planets are named after their host star, with a lower case letter after starting with b), it’s in the "super- Earth" range: more massive than Earth, but less than, say Neptune (which is 1. We don’t know how big the planet is, unfortunately. It might be dense and only a little bigger than Earth, or it could be big and puffy.

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But if its density and size are just so, it could easily have about the same surface gravity as Earth – that is, if you stood on it, you’d weight the same as you do now! But the very interesting thing is that it orbits the star at a distance of about 9. Sun… but that’s good! The star is fainter and cooler than the Sun, remember. In fact, at this distance, the planet is right in the star’s "habitable zone", where the temperature is about right for liquid water to exist! That’s exciting because of the prospect for life.

Now, whenever I mention this I hear from people who get all huffy and say that we don’t know you need water for life. That’s true, but look around.

Water is common on Earth, and here we are. We don’t know that you need water for life, but we do know that water is abundant and we need it. We don’t know for sure of any other ways for life to form, so it makes sense to look where we understand things best. And that means liquid water. Here’s a diagram of the system as compared to our own: Note the scales are a bit different, so that the habitable zones of the Sun and of HD 4. HD 4. 03. 07g is actually closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun – an AU is the distance of the Earth to the Sun, so HD 4.

AU from its star). What makes me smile is that the new planet is actually better situated in its "Goldilocks Zone" than Earth is! That’s good news, actually: the orbit may be elliptical (the shape can’t be determined from the types of observations made) but still stay entirely in the star’s habitable zone. And take a look at the system: the other planets all orbit closer to the star! We only have two inside Earth’s orbit in our solar system… but all five of HD 4.

Mercury’s orbit. Amazing. So this planet – if it checks out as being real – is one of only a few we’ve found in the right location for life as we know it.

And some of those we’ve found already are gas giants (though they could have big moons where life could arise). So what this shows us is that the Earth isn’t as out of the ordinary as we may have once thought: nature has lots of ways of putting planets the right distances from their stars for life. We’re edging closer all the time to finding that big goal: an Earth- sized, Earth- like planet orbiting a Sun- like star at the right distance for life. This planet is a actually a pretty good fit, but we just don’t know enough about it (primarily its size).

So I’m still waiting. And given the numbers of stars we’ve observed, and the number of planets we found, as always I have to ask: has Earth II already been observed, and the data just waiting to be uncovered? Image credits: ESO/M. Kornmesser; Tuomi et al. Related Posts: – ALPHA CENTAURI HAS A PLANET!– Kepler confirms first planet found in the habitable zone of a Sun- like star!– A nearby star may have more planets than we do– Exoplanet in a triple star system, smack dab in the habitable zone– Super- Earth exoplanet likely to be a waterworld.