[BRIEF NOTE] Death from above

Browsing Wikipedia in the aftermath of Saturday's linkage to articles on the brightest gamma-ray burst ever discovered, I came across an interesting link to the star WR 104, located about eight thousand light years away from the Earth. WR 104 is a binary star, both components of which are Wolf-Rayet stars, relatively evolved, quite hot, and quite massive stars that shed their mass quickly though not always quickly enough to avoid going supernova. As it turns out, WR 104 might actually threaten Earth with a nearby gamma-ray burst--Bad Astronomer has more on WR 104's specialness.

GRBs are a special type of supernova. When a very massive star explodes, the inner core collapses, forming a black hole, while the outer layers explode outwards. Due to a complex and fierce collusion of forces in the core, two beams of raw fury can erupt out of the star, mind-numbing in their power. Composed mostly of high-energy gamma rays, they can carry more energy in them than the Sun will put out in its entire lifetime. They are so energetic we can see them clear across the Universe, and having one too close would be bad.

Enter WR 104. The brighter of the two stars might, just maybe kinda possibly, be ready to go GRB on us. It’s not at all clear if it can, and there is reason to believe it can’t (young stars like this one tend to have characteristics that make it very hard for them to form an actual GRB). Also, even if it does blow up that way, the beams are a double-edged sword; yes, they pack an unbelievable punch, but they’re narrow. A GRB would have to be aimed precisely at us to damage us, and the odds of that are pretty low.

Except that for WR 104, it’s possible the star does have us in its sights.

The only way to know which direction a potential GRB’s beams will blast out is to look for some signs in the system of symmetry; a disk of gas, for example, would orbit the star’s equator, so the poles of that disk would be the direction the beams would follow. WR 104 does have a feature that allows us to determine its orientation — a vast spiral of material being ejected from the system.

[. . .]

The thing to note is that we really are looking at this spiral almost face-on, more-or-less down the pole of the system (it appears to be tilted by about 12 degrees from face-on, but it’s difficult to measure, and could be tilted by anything from 0 - 16 degrees — [Dr Peter] Tuthill’s technical paper has details). It’s hard to say exactly, but it’s close enough to make me wonder.

If the brighter of WR 104's stars were to explode and if its axis points towards the Earth, it could well irradiate the Earth. The impact wouldn't be planet-destroying so much as mass extinction-causing, between the high-energy radiation that would bathe the Earth and the muons that would impact the Earth at relativistic speeds and do something (we're not entirely sure what; the computer models aren't complex enough). We have, in short, a reasonably plausible cosmic apocalypse in WR 104 A.

Tuthill's page on WR 104 is here, while the abstract and pre-print of Tuthill et al.'s "The prototype colliding-wind pinwheel WR 104", available in the 1 March 2008 issue of Astrophysical Journal, is available here. He also is kind enough to provide a page linking to some of the press coverage of WR 104.

[LINK] "In Babel of Tongues, Suriname Seeks Itself"

Simon Romero's article in The New York Times "In Babel of Tongues, Suriname Seeks Itself" surveys the language situation in the South American country of Suriname.

Walk into a government office here and you will be greeted in Dutch, the official language. But in a reflection of the astonishing diversity of this South American nation, Surinamese speak more than 10 other languages, including variants of Chinese, Hindi, Javanese and half a dozen original Creoles.

Making matters more complex, English is also beamed into homes on television and Portuguese is the fastest-growing language since an influx of immigrants from Brazil in recent years. And one language stands above all others as the lingua franca: Sranan Tongo (literally Suriname tongue), a resilient Creole developed by African slaves in the 17th century.

So which language should Suriname’s 470,000 people speak? Therein lies a quandary for this country, which is still fiercely debating its national identity after just three decades of independence from the Netherlands.

“We shook off the chains of Dutch colonialism in the 1970s, but our consciousness remains colonized by the Dutch language,” said Paul Middellijn, 58, a writer who composes poetry in Sranan Tongo.

Nevertheless, Mr. Middellijn said English should be declared Suriname’s national language, a position shared by many Surinamese who want stronger links to the Caribbean and North America. “Sranan will survive because nothing can replace it as the language of the street,” he said.

The position of Dutch in Suriname reminds me somewhat of the position of French in Canada, that last language spoken by seven or eight million people in a hemisphere populated by hundreds of millions of speakers of English, Spanish and Portuguese. The comparison quickly fails on the grounds that Dutch isn't a first language in Suriname and--honestly--Dutch isn't nearly as much of a world language as French. A creeping normalization of Suriname's creole language of Sranan on the model of Haiti's normalization of Haitian Creole, even as English steadily displaced Dutch as a language of wider communication, is probably in the cards for Suriname.

[BRIEF NOTE] Ethnic conflict and language in Taiwan

The recent Taiwanese presidential elections have ended in victory for the broadly pro-China Kuomintang party's candidate, Ma Ying-jeou. An Asia Times article touched upon an interesting theme of ethnic conflict in Taiwan.

In perhaps one of the most unique aspects of Taiwan's election, Ma has repeatedly said in presidential debates and other occasions that he is Taiwanese - something unusual for a president candidate from any country to have to do.

"I grew up eating Taiwanese food, drinking Taiwanese water ... I am Taiwanese," Ma said in a nationally televised debate with Hsieh. "I'm willing to sacrifice all for this land and its people."

If Ma is elected, he will be the first KMT president since the DPP ended a half-century of rule by the KMT by winning the 2000 presidential election. And it would be the first time the majority longtime Taiwanese had elected a president who is not a native Taiwanese, but from the waishenren or immigrant minority. To political analysts like Kou, it would be a sign of progress in Taiwan's march towards democracy.

"The biggest problem with Taiwan's democracy is the problem of ethnicity - the fact that some voters are concerned more with a candidate's ethnicity, not whether he has done a good job or not," Kou said. "If Ma is elected, it means voters don't care where you're from anymore - you still have an opportunity, as long as you do well. If not, you will be voted down in four years. That's an improvement."

I've been aware of the interesting sociolinguistics of Taiwan, with Taiwanese (the local brand of Min Nan Chinese) being a marker of identity closely associated with Taiwanese nationalism, often contrasted with the Mandarin imported by Mainlander refugees in 1949 and afterwards, complicated by interesting demographics, (perhaps a (relatively young) quarter of the population does not speak Taiwanese and a smaller (and relatively older) minority similarly lacks fluency in Mandarin, while the south of the island evidencing more fluency in Taiwanese than the north). This is the first time, though, that I've heard of the conflict between these two language-defined groups being characterized as ethnic conflict.

This Taiwanese clash raises the interesting question of whether similar things will happen in China. James Follows has observed that in the southern boom-town of Shenzhen, Mandarin has displaced Cantonese as the most widely spoken language. Might regional elites or mass political movements in non-Mandarin-speaking China mobilize on behalf of their regional languages?