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Over at a discussion board about religion and cosmology, I helped make a discussion concrete by asking whether the participants often gaze at the stars through a telescope. And what this does to them.
The discussion delved into a debate about the fact that the African Dogon tribe was already capable
of distinguishing between Sirius A and Sirius B, long before telescopes were invented.
Lots of poetic comments about star-gazing too.
Then someone popped up and said looking through a telescope is a brilliant past-time, but that he always gets hungry when doing so. The discussion suddenly took a hugely materialistic turn:
-Which types of food go best with the spiritual feelings that often accompany star-gazing?
We decided on fatty fast-food and easy snacks.
So here, today, I present the mobile snack-bar with attached big telescope. The lights of the snack bar can be dimmed, it operates in full silence (apart from the occasional hiss when a saucage gets grilled) and which can be taken to a patch of land where the skies are dark enough to engage in star-gazing and pop cosmology.
There is no proof that God disapproves of eating hot dogs while investigating Sagittarius.
Dogon and Sirius
http://skepdic.com/dogon.html
in the Skeptic's Dictionary [baconbrain, May 03 2008]
[link]
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Bad idea, unless you can pipe the distorting warm air from the grills away from the telescope |
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Keep the crumbs out of the controls and the grease vapors off the glass. |
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That Dogon business is not a fact--see link. |
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Location, location, location. |
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A friend of mine is the IT guy at the Mount Palomar observatory. He says the operating temperature of the place is ambient - when it's hot, it's hot, and when it's cold, it's cold. Something about not messing up the equipment with differing temperatures. |
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So choose a temperate location for this venture. |
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As a Sagittarius, I would disapprove. |
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As a Scorpio, I don't believe in that zodiac/horoscope stuff. None of us Scorpios do. |
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As a Scorpio I don't mind hotdogs.
None of us Scorpios seem to. Of course the brand we buy are nothing but lips... |
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We don't believe in this horoscope crap at all, as we are hard-bitten sceptics. But then, Cancers are all like that. |
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Any of that high-fiber Cassie's Grains here? Or is it just Dobson's Grill? Could we serve up some Fig Newtons with a Maksutov Cocktail? |
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As an Aquarian, I would rather grill some minced, seasoned and packed-into-a-cone-shaped Capricorn.
Then eat it with salad, pitta bread and lashings of chilli sauce. |
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as a Capricorn, I object to that! |
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Has anyone done the Uranus gag yet? |
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No, we have to do the one about loosening Orion's belt first. Then comes the one about milky way goodness. Then you can do the Uranus gag. |
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... and the deep-fried Mars bar... |
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..as a Martian, I object to people frying in our bars! |
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Coincidentally, there is currently (this very day) a
transit of the Sun by Mercury. If you project from
a telescope (or even a very good pair of very-
firmly-held binoculars) onto white paper, you can
see Mercury as a tiny, tiny dot creeping across.
There's also one large sunspot, more or less on the
line of the transit. |
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(Despite myself, I will issue the obvious warning -
don't look through the bloody eyepiece or you will
burn a hole right through the back of your retina,
you really will. Project from the eyepiece onto a
piece of white card.) |
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At the moment it's in the quadrant where the sun is
soon to set. Earlier today it was in the quadrant
where the sun was visible. No bloody wonder Galileo
decided to be Italian. |
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Sorry to take away your triumph, but it would be hard to find anything I wouldn't bun in this category. |
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" As a Scorpio I don't mind hotdogs.
None of us Scorpios seem to. Of course the brand we buy are nothing but lips...
— 2 fries shy of a happy meal, May 04 2008 " |
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Is this true, or merely lip service ? |
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