This title results from some of the worst handwriting in the Universe. My son says it sounds like a weirdly nationalistic action novel. I call that a novel interpretation.

It’s just one of this semester’s bloopers by my astronomy students. An unusually large number of my students earned “A”s on their finals. Most of these bloopers come from *other* students’ exams, quizzes, and term papers.

entirely in part

The celestial earth is imaginary.

Earth turns on axis, celestrial sphere keeps it steady.

Just like the celestial equator, the celestial earth is imaginary and doesn’t really exist.

Aristotle said that the Earth was the center of the University.

The planets orbited the universe in ellipticals not circles.

Everything revolves around the universe.

Earth isn’t geocentric.

Copernicus saw renegrade as an illusion.

ellipitical ellipses

The planets have an elliptical orbit that spins on their axis. Because Pluto does not do this, it is considered a dwarf planet.

Gravity is the way that earth contains everything.

The gravitational pull is only found within earth since in space an individual has no control of how they move or how other thing have no control as well.

Objects are directly proportional to attraction to mass.

opposite forces attract.

an Einstein non-static Einstein Equation

Telescopes are used to see fainted astronomical objects.

There is no need to grind the mirror because the light is bouncing from one to another.

Reflecting telescopes consist of a lens that helps absorb all the radiation from the light waves.

Reflecting telescopes use mirrors inside the tube of the telescope to bounce off the mirrors.

To view telescopes with brighter surfaces, astronomers developed telescopes with higher focal ratios to view planets and double stars.

The Newtonian … does not have chromatic abrasion.

Liquid fuel is way more efficient than solid fuel because you can stop the aircraft to refuel.

[To pluck returning astronauts out of the ocean,] helicopter pilots were Navy rescue pilots, which meant that they were used to relatively low flying around the ocean, but they were also used to having a wench system.

Howie’s Comet

Earth is just a huge comet that has lots of parts inside that makes life for living/non living organisms.

[Hotter than 1100º Celsius] hydrogen, helium, other gases all melt and form layers.

Craters can be different continents when they are high up, however, is often filled with water when low.

very unique, but similar

After 30 minutes in the event most of the planets were too burly.

When you look at Jupiter from afar, it appears to be purple.

Around Titan I was able to see some orange rings.

Earth … has a similar magnetic field as a magnetic.

The magnetic field makes up the magnemotism … which correlates in iodinization.

One of the most important stars in our solar system is the Sun.

Total solar eclipses are unlike any form of eclipse.

During a total solar eclipse, it appears from Earthlings’ perspective that the moon and sun are covering one another.

The illusion of it is one of the best because it makes the moon appear bigger than it is because it covers the moon.

Red dwarts

High mass stars have a shorter life spam.

galaxies which are near to the Universe and in the Milky Way

millions of years of light

The Croation of the Universe.

[Autofill blunders for “extraterrestrial”] extracurricular, extraterritorial

Instead, this is what they wrote on assorted quizzes, tests, and term papers:

Stars, little twinkling thing that rised up and down constantly.

A three-dimensional plane

An area opposite to another area in the ellipse contained the same amount of area.

Any point on a planet’s orbit was equally distant to the sun, traveling at a constant rate.

According to Newton, gravity is equal to the area squared divided by the mass cubed.

Newton’s law is only mathematically right for objects that have a velocity smaller than the light of speed.

Newtonian telescopes have the mirror bounce off the side … whereas another kind bounces back through a hole in the original mirror.

One of the Newtonian telescopes was called Cassograin, and how it worked was that the light gathered would not come out.

There are two lens in a refractor. Light enters the tube and is gathered by the first len, and the second len magnifies the focus produced by the first len.

A celestial body can be reflected through three mirrors positioned opposite of eachother.

Godsonian

V-rays

We observe Venus using ultraviolet lights.

3 types of carbonaceous chondrites are relatively common, which can bring carbon to the planet when there is a collision or catering. … Io … is the only object in our solar system that does not have catering.

A solar eclipse happens when the darkest side of the moon hits the Earth.

It was in the grounds of Cambridge University that a student and a professor discovered pulsars.

The Big Bang theory has been proved to be true from detecting cosmetic background radiation.

I apologize for the extreme delay. JIR has just broken out of an unwanted hiatus occasioned by my committing too much time to too many projects. The logjam is loosening. Every subscriber will receive every issue they’ve paid for, but it will take a while. I’m not taking on any new projects until I satisfy JIR and other projects already underway.

Over the years, JIR has used many different printers, large and small. The most recent, Yokto Subroto, has retired. I appreciated his attention to detail (which prevented many mistakes), his high quality (which kept the magazine looking substantial), and his realistic communication (which brought my flights of fancy down to Earth). With Yokto printing JIR, there were no Big Surprises or Catastrophic Emergencies. This issue was printed on the same press, by the company that bought it.

A previous owner of JIR, George H. Scherr, passed away in 2016.

Yet again, Wikipedia and Wikimedia have been most helpful. JIR submissions cover more different sciences than any one editor understands, so having an instant-lookup to learn what terms mean, and where puzzle-pieces fit, helps a whole lot. Derided in its beginning years, Wikipedia has made great efforts to get its act together. Nowadays, scientific articles are quite clean, though hardly perfect. If you have the expertise to correct and perfect their articles, supply technical references, and fill holes in their coverage, please do so. They post standards for contributing and editing, and priority requests. This is a major community service that anyone can perform in any amount at any time.

The associated Wikimedia Commons is a free repository for illustrations and other media. You probably took pictures that illustrate points particularly well. Clinging to their copyright may earn you less in money than freeing them will earn you in reputation and satisfaction. Wikimedia standards are posted too. You can select how you want to handle the “some rights reserved” alternatives.

When you get used to doing this, recommend it to experts you know in other fields, too.

For this issue’s articles about time, Robbert van der Steeg’s masterful “Eternal Clock” gives pause. He is a Dutchman living in Kenya, posting photos and manipulations to Flickr under Creative Commons. His creativity is, however, uncommon. It takes wing using the software “MathMap” and “Gimp”.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders offers JIR many opportunities for lampoons over many decades. In this issue we offer DSM-style descriptions of 2 exaggerated personality types, separated by the vast chasm of the gender divide.

I recall hearing that an apparently-serious scholar recommended that
• meticulous attention to detail, and
• determination to get technicalities “right”,
flag disorders common to nerds. What a disordered mind that numbskull must have! How much could Silicon Valley accomplish without those qualities? Or any science or engineering? Heeding details and getting things right is not a disorder. Thinking they are, is.

The article on selenium demonstrates the ongoing need to keep a sense of proportion in science. Legalisms have strayed vastly out of whack, reminiscent of the bad old days of the Delaney Clause. More such abuses lurk in classifying substances as “generally recognized as safe” though textbook science and plain English do not generally recognize them that way at all. JIR welcomes shout-outs and spoofs about exemplars.

While nosing around for pictures to illustrate our “big nose” article, I didn’t remember Jimmy Durante in time. The Wikimedia search engine brought up a lot of portraits from areas surrounding the Caspian Sea. Is this characteristic supported by research? How else has it been applied?

Most commercial companies are too sober-sided and too sales-focused to be any fun. Congratulations to O’Reilly Auto Parts for advertising their flux-capacitor. We’d love to learn about other science-fun items.

We have a new minimalist leader in adhering to our length-standard of “write it for what it’s worth. Include everything you ought to, then stop.” Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Dr. Paul K. Dayton, a rare wit, has whittled his main contents to 2 letters: “No.” He doesn’t leave much opportunity to reduce contents further.

A passing mention in Daniel Galef’s “Academic Bestiary” invites elucidation. Those “brightly coloured Salad Trees” are planted outside of his article’s animal kingdom. Are they related to “fruit salad trees”? Could an imaginative botanist please elaborate?

Chipmunk butter, lauded in Robert Haas’s article, is surely not the only imaginable rare gem of a food. Please recommend what else ought to be.

In Fall 2016 I had more students than usual, and they committed more bloopers than usual:

Much of what we know about the universe is unknown.

An overview about a brief overview

The celestial spear does not exist physically.

The sun was directly overhead at noon during the summer solstice and this was marked by the Mayan by aligning important buildings.

In Chichen Itza at sunset the sun would set directly in front of the building.

equatorial pole

The entire Mason Dixon line was surveyed through a stone.

Kepler [wrote] his laws of planetary emotion.

Planets orbit around the sun in ellipsises … .

The orbit of the sun is an ellipse on the focus.

The square of the period of a planet is proportional to the cubic square of its orbital radius.

The period was squared of a sidereal was proportional to the cubed of distances.

Newton’s idea of gravity explained how the moon is rotating around each big planet.

Many galaxies and objects orbit around the Earth.

Reflecting telescopes were made to eliminate [chromatic aberration] by not having light come in.

The spacecraft Voyager was launched with Yuri Gaganan bravely setting out to find out more informations about the moon.

Particles collided so randomly that the point of randomness did not exist.

Comets have certain features that allows the planets to stay the way they are, maintain its temperature and function.

[Magnetic fields on] many other planets are unable to be identified, some may have North poles, other may have South Poles.

Hubole set out a spacecraft that landed on the surface of Venus.

An object is stuck to the surface of the Earth, instead of vice versa.

Tectonic plates can collide with another, making rivets in the surface or Mountains above.

Magnetic field of the Sun … causes the rotation of the planet and keeps each stars and comets in its own place without having them fly out different places. It keeps constant the eyle of rotation and speed and makes it possible for planets to stationed.

When a star is closer to the astromer they give off blue rays, farther away give off red.

Planets that redshift are “moving” further away from us on the surface of the Earth.

Both the red dwarves and the red giants go throw the red shift, which is shifting their position in regards to size and temperature that evolve over time.

The observed redshit of spectra from distant galaxies caused astronomers to believe the Universe is expanding.

If we look at the spectral lines of an astronomical object far away, the red color on the spectral lines will move farther away every time we observe, creating a shift between observations.

75% of Long Gamma Ray Bursters occur in galaxies with the lowest mental content.

Two supermassive black holes have been found in the Chandra X-ray satellite.

The “Big Dang” explosion