Y’all know by now that I love the xkcd webcomic, as do most nerds on this planet.

Disclaimer: Randall Munroe, the creator, is a friend of mine and we’ve done a few things together in the past.

In a recent comic he mentions a cursed number, saying it has some sort of Lovecraftian property that, if you were to see this number, you would be driven mad:

I laughed when I read this, as I usually do when I read his stuff. But it reminded me that numbers are funny things.

10²¹ is a really big number. Exponents are super deceiving if you’re not used to them. 21 isn’t a big number, so 10 to that power isn’t really too big, is it?

Yes. Yes, it is. If the Cursed Number has that many digits, then Randall is right: the chance of any living human ever actually seeing it is essentially zero.

Think of it this way: Let’s assume the Cursed Number is an integer. There are 8 billion people on Earth. That’s 8 x 10⁹. Dividing the two, that means every person on the planet would have to look at 125 billion numbers to guarantee one person sees the Cursed Number.

You know how I know you haven’t seen that many (integer) numbers in your life? Because if you spent every waking moment looking at numbers, one after another, at a speed of, oh, let’s say 10 numbers per second, it would take a little over four hundred years to see them all. That’s maybe longer than you’ve got to do so.

If we included every single person who has ever lived, estimated to be 100 billion, it would still take over 30 years per person at that ridiculously high rate for every second of their lives to guarantee someone becomes Numerically Cursed. It’s technically possible someone could have seen it, but in practice I’d bet against it.

If the Number That Cannot Be Seen is not an integer then we’re certainly done. Even if you include a small number of mantissa numerals (the ones after the dot in a decimal) the number of numbers becomes vastly huger. The lifetime of the Universe wouldn’t be long enough to see all those numbers.

See? Deceiving, exponents are. They do make life easier, since I was able to do all this math in a few seconds, and use the exponents to do a sanity check to make sure I was right. And in astronomy we’d get quickly crushed under the weight of the numbers if we couldn’t abbreviate them with exponents.

Trust me. I know my cursed math^*.

^* Hold your mouse over that comic (or tap it if you’re using a mobile device) to see the joke.

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While doing some research for an article, I found a paper about a survey of the sky being done by JWST called COSMOS-Web. I like to define acronyms when I can, but the paper didn’t say what that stood for! But there’s a reference in that paper to another paper about the original COSMOS survey, and in that paper it’s listed as “Cosmic Evolutions Survey” — as an aside, this is what I call a tortured acronym, since you pick and choose the letters to make it from the original words — in this case “COSMic evOlutions Survey” —  as opposed to sticking with the first letters of those words; many times the acronym is chosen first and then letters used to fit it).

OK. So COSMOS-Web, which uses JWST, must refer to the James Webb Space Telescope. I did see other references calling it COSMOS-Webb, in fact! So why only one b in the official paper?

Ah, why indeed? This is a footnote in the paper:

That’s wonderful! The “cosmic web” part refers to vast quantities of interlaced material from which galaxies first formed in the Universe, which we’ve only just barely begun to map.

As for the Webb part, long-term subscribers to this newsletter may remember me writing about this in 2022 (twice!). In a nutshell: 

The original working name for the observatory was the Next Generation Space Telescope, referring to how it would use newer tech than Hubble. NASA (and ESA, a major partner) like to name ‘scopes after people, and NASA unilaterally (without consulting with the astronomical community or even ESA) decided to name it after James Webb, the NASA chief administrator in the 1960s. However, he didn’t have anything to do with infrared science, which is what the telescope does, and while he promoted science at NASA back in the day it was still a weird choice.

Then it came out that there’s pretty good evidence that Webb may have played a part in the Lavender Scare, a homophobic moral panic at the time, which resulted in many NASA personnel being fired for being queer. A lot of astronomers (including me) felt this name was too laden with problems to hang it on the flagship astronomical mission. Then, perhaps worse, NASA basically swept it all under the rug despite the protests of a lot of people in the astronomical community.

For that alone the name should have been changed! In the end, the name was kept, and that’s why for the past three years I have always referred to it as JWST, and never the actual name (except for venues that won’t let writers use acronyms without defining them first, which I understand, but need not adhere to here in my newsletter).

Ironic, though, that my not liking to use acronyms led me to that footnote!

Being inclusive and supportive isn’t all that hard. The only difficulty is social and mental inertia, and overcoming that only seems hard. Astronomers, like all people, exist in a vast variety of flavors, and they all want to explore the universe and do it as themselves. If you push some of them aside, what might we be losing? But even that’s not the real reason to be welcoming to all. The real reason is it’s the right thing to do.

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!