Hasta La Gadget!

What’s with boomers and online dating? The generation that toppled a president, ended a war and preached free love seems to be floundering when it comes to finding romance online. The one refrain we keep hearing from boomers is this: They don’t want to fly solo into aging and yet the main avenue that other generations are taking — finding their mates online — seems to be filled with potholes for them. We turned to dating coach and author Ken Solin, who recently published “The Boomer Guide To Finding True Love Online,” for some ideas about what we are doing wrong. Here’s what he said:

1. We don’t stick to people our own age.
Those who are serious about finding life mates, don’t date people the age of their kids, says Solin. Why? Because partners from different generations have different tastes, values and don’t share cultural reference points. In short, you really have nothing in common and are likely just caught up in the idea that someone so much younger is willing to sleep with you. If you want a lasting relationship, find someone your own age, Solin says.

Solin’s words were born out by a recent Emory University study that showed the larger the age gap, the greater the chance of a marriage ending in divorce. A five-year age gap statistically means you are 18 percent more likely to divorce (versus just 3 percent with a one-year age difference). That rate rises to 39 percent for a 10-year age difference and 95 percent for a 20-year age gap, reported MoneyWatch.

Said Solin: “The biggest mistake newly single boomer men make getting back into dating is chasing younger women. Reasons abound, but here are two popular myths: Young women are easier to date because they’re not jaded and boomer women are bitter and angry. Neither is true. Besides, do you really want to have to explain that Paul McCartney wasn’t always a solo act and that the Jefferson Airplane never flew anywhere?”

Here’s another reality: Young women generally want to have children, which for most boomer men means a second family, started at an age when they may not live long enough to watch them grow up.

2. We aren’t emotionally honest about what we want.
Some boomers — mostly men — are just looking for casual sex, says Solin. That’s fine, he said, but these people need to be upfront about it. In fact, we all should be upfront about whatever it is we want. Don’t waste your time or someone else’s by pretending to be in it for the long haul when you aren’t. And don’t deny that what you want is marriage or a long-term commitment. The point is: In the end, everyone’s goals need to match up or someone gets hurt.

While we’re talking honesty, says Solin, don’t lie about your age either. “Being dishonest about anything is a red flag,” he said. The truth will come out eventually. Trust is defined by integrity. He notes that if you believe you are too old to date successfully online without lying about your age, you probably are. But, he notes, it’s your unwillingness to be honest that’s the problem, not your age.

3. Put your libido on hold.
Boomers, and men in particular, just out of long-term relationships are sometimes eager to become sexually active again, says Solin. But the last thing a newly single boomer needs is to become embroiled in another disaster, and sexually fueled rocket rides practically guarantee failure. “We’ve all been hurt by crashed-and-burned sexual rockets, and getting older doesn’t make healing easier,” he says. Besides, the best sex imaginable is in a relationship in which partners are also best friends, which, while contrary to what boomer guys whose heads are still in the 60s believe, is absolutely true.

4. Post a good current photo.
Don’t post a photo that doesn’t look like you. You will eventually be meeting these people in person, so what’s the point? “A major gaffe that drives boomer daters crazy is a boomer who uses old photos in their online profile,” says Solin. “It’s a smoke-and-mirrors approach to online dating that no one appreciates, and worse, old photos guarantee your first in-person date will fall apart quickly,” he adds. We’re in an era where everyone is wary about being treated dishonestly. Using an old photo is lying, while honesty is refreshing.

And another thing: Please smile. Too many women hide behind big floppy hats and dark sunglasses in their photos and too many have gloomy looks instead of smiles. And men? Guilty of the same mistakes. Most online dating prospects want to see a full-length shot, so post it. It’s fine to include photos of your children, pets, and grandkids. Just no baseball caps or frowns.

5. Don’t keep celebrating Groundhog Day.
In other words: Stop dating the same person with different names. Solin says that this one took him a long time to overcome too. “I dated the same short, blonde, curvy, ski-jump-nosed woman with different names for a decade before waking up to the fact that I was intentionally eliminating the majority of prospects. I met my partner as soon as I became open to other types. And I wasn’t her physical type either, but when we met we both felt the earth move a bit. Typecasting only works in the movies, because if it actually worked for you, you’d already be in a long-term relationship with someone who’s your type,” he says.

6. Stop trying to be anyone but yourself.
The notion that the only way to attract dates is to present yourself as someone other than who or what you really are is badly flawed, and reflects low self-esteem. It won’t take long before the man or woman you’re dating to figure out the truth. Besides, if you don’t feel good about yourself, no one you date is going to feel good about you either. “The old bromide, there’s someone for everyone, is more true than not, so be yourself, because the trick to successful dating is finding someone as much like you as possible. [The idea that] opposites attract is nonsense,” believes Solin.

Have you had luck with online dating? Let us know in comments.

For some, decorating the Christmas tree means first untangling the mess of last year’s light strands. As with many things, however, that will soon be a tradition of the past, and to help usher in our new wireless reality comes Aura, a Christmas tree decoration with an integrated LED light. Unlike similar products, each bulb is wirelessly powered using a … Continue reading

What a long, strange trip it’s been. Microsoft’s effort to document the excavation of all those fabled E.T. The Extraterrestrial game cartridges from a New Mexico landfill — and Atari’s downfall — is finally watchable on Xbox Video. As Variety…

A federal judge ruled Friday night that New Jersey cannot partially lift a prohibition on sports betting in an effort to boost the state’s struggling horse racing and casino industries.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp was the expected outcome since the judge had ruled similarly in the past. The state, locked in a legal battle with the NCAA and four professional sports leagues, is expected to appeal to a higher court.

“We are going to continue pursuing every legal option available,” State Senate president Steve Sweeney said in a statement Friday. “The economic impact that sports wagering can have on New Jersey is far too important to simply shrug our shoulders and move on.”

A federal law bans New Jersey and most other states from authorizing betting on sports. But the state contended it did not want to license or authorize the betting. Instead, it was seeking to end a prohibition and that it would not regulate sports betting.

But Shipp agreed with the sports leagues that setting parameters such as limiting sports gambling to certain places amounts to regulation, but noted, that he “finds that the present case is not nearly as clear as either the leagues or the defendants assert.”

While Shipp agreed with the central part of the sports’ leagues argument, he dismissed some of their other arguments.

New Jersey has been pushing persistently to allow sports betting at horse tracks and casinos in an effort to support both struggling industries. Voters have approved the concept, but a federal court rejected it in a slightly different form. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case earlier this year, and it seemed that might be the end of it.

But as the financial crisis in Atlantic City’s casinos deepened, Gov. Chris Christie’s administration tried a new approach. Instead of legalizing sports gambling in defiance of the leagues and federal government, it called for not enforcing the state’s ban. The Legislature followed with a bill to lift the ban as it pertains to casinos and tracks. Christie signed that into law last month.

The NCAA and four major professional sports leagues contend that federal law would allow the state to lift the ban entirely — but not to allow sports betting with some conditions, such as limiting it to certain locations and keeping minors from participating.

The ruling comes just over a week after NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said he supports legalizing sports gambling — though not in the way it would happen if New Jersey prevailed. Silver is the first commissioner of a major U.S. sports league to make such a stand.

About 450 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Taurus, a dense, dark, interstellar cloud has slowly started to reveal its secrets. It happens to be a very active nursery for young stars resembling our own sun about 4.6 billion years ago. Embedded in this cloud, which has been carefully studied by the Hubble Space Telescope, are very young stars called HL Tau and XZ Tau, each no more than 1 million years old, give or take. You can easily see the nebulae formed by the complex blobs of gas ejected by the young stars.

HL Tauri and surroundings (credit: NASA/HST)

The star HL Tau (more properly called HL Tauri) is 10,000 times too faint for you to see with your naked eye. Even a large telescope has a hard time seeing it clearly through all the dust and gas blocking the view. But other kinds of telescopes can easily pierce the light-years of dust clouds. Since 1975, astronomers had known that HL Tau had some kind of disk of gas orbiting it. The disk is about 40 times the diameter of our solar system. Later on, astronomers studied HL Tau using radio telescopes and detected a dense knot of carbon monoxide molecules centered on the star. Caltech astronomers Anneila Sargent and Steven Beckwith were able to study this clump in more detail and discovered it really was a disk-like region rotating in the same way that planets orbit our sun: faster toward the center and slower toward the edge. Based on observations made in 1986 from the Millimeter Wave Interferometer of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory, it was determined that the disk had about 10-percent as much mass as our sun. Though not enough to build a second companion star, it would be plenty to make a lot of planets, with dust and gas to spare and throw away into the surrounding Taurus dust cloud.

In addition to dust and carbon monoxide molecules, astronomers had also detected water ice in 1975, and micron-sized silicate (“beach sand”) dust grains in 1985. Searches for methane ice in the very cold outer limits of the disk haven’t turned up anything yet. HL Tau’s disk seems to be pretty bland in terms of interesting pre-life molecules! But its boringly simple, or absent, chemistry is countered by the disk being a very complex and active region of space. Along the axis of the spinning disk, small nebulae called Herbig-Haro objects can be seen several light-years away, such as HH-150 and six cloud clumps aligned along a jet called HH-151. These gas clouds are like puffs of smoke being ejected at very high speeds by events happening as the HL Tau interacts with its surrounding disk. We still don’t know exactly what is going on after all these years. Could magnetic fields be involved?

Recent studies of the magnetic field of this disk by astronomers Ian Stephens and Leslie Looney led to a surprising result: Instead of the field oriented with a distinct axis pointing along the HH151 jet, the field was much more complex. It was always thought that the blobs of gas would be ejected along some well-defined axis provided by the magnetic field, like the barrel of a cannon. In the absence of an ordered “poloidal” magnetic field to define a unique direction, the cause of the cloud alignment in the jet remains a mystery. To make matters more interesting, in 2007, astronomer Michihiro Takami, using the Subaru Telescope, detected the faint emission from a counter-jet also aligned with the HH-151 jet and HL Tau. So whatever the events that are occurring in this disk of gas and dust, it tends to favor ejecting two streams of matter in a symmetric way along the polar axis of the disk.

Once astronomers caught the scent of the nearby HL Tau dust disk, there was only one direction to go: higher resolution to see more details and how the disk is actually shaped. By 2011, astronomers Woojin Kwon, Leslie Looney and Lee Mundy had used the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy and detected a flattened shape. It is not face-on but tilted so it looks like an ellipse inclined slightly downwards to the line of sight. The measurements also suggested that the larger dust grains in the disk, possibly as big as sand grains, had settled toward the plane of the disk and a halo of finer micron-sized dust grains probably engulfs the whole disk. The disk is also gravitationally unstable, but they were not able to see any details of the kinds of shapes that result.

Then, in 2014, astronomers used the even higher-resolution capabilities of the new Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to create the now-famous image you have seen on the nightly news. What it confirms is all the previous observations about the size, shape and tilt of the dust disk, but it also could begin to see some of the details of its internal shape. What astronomers found was simply amazing. As many as eight dark bands concentric with the star can easily be seen! The gaps are about 450 million to 1 billion miles wide. What are they?

The HL Tauri protoplanetary disk (credit: ESA/ALMA)

The system is less than 1 million years old, and this seems too short a time to form planets within these dark rings — but who knows? Could you really form Jupiter-sized, dust vacuum cleaners in less than a million years? Some calculations using gravitational instabilities in the disk have predicted Jupiter formation times as short as 100,000 years! This is not the first time such rings have been seen. In 2005, the Hubble Space Telescope found a dark ring in the disk surrounding the star TW Hydrae located 176 light-years from Earth. The ring is 2 billion miles wide and 8 billion miles from its star and, like HL Tau’s rings, may eventually reveal a forming Jupiter-sized planet.

Meanwhile, Hubble has just completed a survey of debris disks orbiting a number of stars that are no longer enshrouded by dust clouds. The collection of 23 stars reveals some interesting clues to how these disks evolve in time between 10 million and 1 billion years after planet formation has probably stopped. The large planet seen by Hubble orbiting inside the debris disk of the bright star Fomalhaut is probably the last stages of such a planet-forming disk system. Meanwhile, the disk irregularities observed around the star HD 181327 resemble a huge spray of debris possibly caused by the recent collision of two bodies. When our infant Earth was struck by a Mars-sized planet to form our Moon, a similar spray of debris probably formed!

Fomalhaut debris disk and planet (credit: NASA/HST)

Theoretical Work: A Story in Progress

For decades, astronomers have worked with supercomputer simulations of the basic laws of gravity, fluid and gas dynamics and radiation transport to create physically consistent models of what these protoplanetary disks should look like as they evolve over time. The mechanism of planet formation has also been explored through a variety of calculations and physics-based models. For example, astronomers Phil Armitage at the University of Colorado and Wilhelm Kley at Tubingen University have arrived at similar models for how a massive planet like Jupiter forms from such a disk and excavates a swept-out ring that resembles the HL Tau rings. The models show how the planet attracts mass from the edges of the ring, and how the process develops spiral “gravity waves” in the disk that then cause the orbit of the forming planet to change over time. Other simulations like the ones by Ken Rice at the University of California, Riverside, show that for much more massive disks, gravitational instabilities can lead to very rapid large-planet formation and the creation of a strong spiral wave resembling what you see in the shape of a spiral galaxy.

A forming planet and ring (credit: Wilkelm Kley/Tubingen)

So the addition of new high-resolution data like that for HL Tau is at long last allowing astronomers to see the hidden details of planet and disk formation and, from this, create the next-generation physics-based models for how planets form. The rings are still something of a mystery and may not actually involve planet sweeping. Until we can detect an actual planet inside one of these rings, this connection is still an unproven theoretical possibility.

Stay tuned for new discoveries and more clues to how our own solar system formed!