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Please get this out there. There is a number of studies that demonstrate that H2 is bad, very bad, for the Ozone layer. The problem is that H2 is light, very light and it is subject to atmospheric escape (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape). On its way up and out it will pass through the Ozone layer where H2 is highly reactive to O3. The result is H2 + O3 > H2O +O2. So you end up with either water or hydrogen peroxide in the ozone layer. That is bad for 2 reasons. 1) it causes stratospheric cooling which impedes the production of ozone 2) Water at this layer interferes with the ozone production while providing not protection benefits.
http://web.stanford.edu/group/...
http://www.theozonehole.com/hy...
https://www.caltech.edu/about/...
https://sciencing.com/hydrogen...
https://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/~dst...

The September 1999 cover story for the late, great Boardwatch Magazine was my interview with Sir Dystic, which took place at the house in the Oakland Hills he shared with a half-dozen other members of the Cult of the Dead Cow.

Note that the link points to my own website, because no other web archive of the magazine from that period exists, afaik. But here's the Caltech Library citation for the article, in case you have any doubts about its provenance ...

There are so many sources of free tutorial material on the Internet, that I'm not sure lists of the most popular courses are all that meaningful. For example, the Feynman Physics Lectures are available at http://www.feynmanlectures.cal.... That's years worth of study material. It may just be an issue of not looking in the right place for basic science and math courses

Experiments are often repeated, at least implicitly, if some process that previous experimenters followed must be followed again to pick up where they left off. And often it is worthwhile to repeat an experiment with improved equipment, to see whether additional insights can be found.

This is an extremely inefficient way of doing it, and it can take decades for the error to be corrected, even in a hard field like physics (Feynman gives the example of the oil drop experiment. It was also an example of incorrect previous studies leading newer studies astray).

In short, not double-checking studies can lead to wrong results for decades, or longer. Think of the confusion in nutritional science.

How embarrassing.

In practice, any orbits around Lagrangian points L1, L2, or L3 are dynamically unstable, meaning small departures from equilibrium grow over time.[2] As a result, spacecraft in these Lagrangian point orbits must use their propulsion systems to perform orbital station-keeping. Although they are not perfectly stable, a modest effort of station keeping keeps a spacecraft in a desired Lissajous orbit for a long time.

Oh my.

For imaged planets, these are usually the planet properties, typically including, at minimum, the semi-major axis and planet mass, and the stellar properties, usually, at minimum, the distance to the host star and the stellar mass.

So we don't know if, for example, they are orbit-clearing.

Hold your horses. No one is saying to ditch Science.

The OP's point was hat we should stop replacing the Cult of Religion with Cargo Cult Science. A famous scientist even wrote about the dangers of it.

Science does NOT have all the answers -- and never will.

The problem is that pseudo-skeptics are not interested in learning a different approach -- their mind is already made up.

There is a lot of blind faith that ONLY Science can arrive at the truthiness of something -- gee, what does that sound like? A cult: "My way is the ONLY valid way."

You are totally ignorant that there are TWO ways to approach knowledge and Truth:

* Science is Linear approach to Truth.
* Intuition is the Non-Linear approach to Truth.

It is obvious you are not married and don't understand the first thing about using intuition. Do you actually understand ANYTHING about "Leaps of Intuition" ???

Just because YOU failed to understand how to use a different system does in no way discredit EITHER system -- they BOTH have their uses. BOTH can be used to arrive at false answers. But keep shooting the messenger and ignore the message.

The problem is NOT with Science -- it is with closed-minded Cargo Cult Scientists that thinks Science is the ONLY way to understand the universe, and that it has ALL the answers.

The late genius professor Feynman wrote about a previous education scam back in the '60s called "New Math" (older geeks will know this one).

These new hype fads hit the education system from time to time and they're ALL unmitigate bovine manure. None of them actually produces a better educated student. They are each just tools the education establishment and the book publishers use to try to dazzle parents while milking the tax payers for more cash.

Sadly, the current generation of students are being taught to have high self esteem and have no idea how monumentally ignorant they are; the SAT system, for example, has been dumbed down TWICE since the 1980s so modern high scores do not properly compare to scores of previous generations.

Education in America cannot be fixed as long as the teachers are unionized and the two major teachers unions of the nation are both corporations with deep ties to the Democrat party. Every teacher in nearly every state is therefore a contributor to Democrat party politics, is represented by Democrat activists, etc and those massive unions funnel huge campaign cash warchests to Democrat politicians. In any education-related negotiations in most American states, the people on both sides of the negotiating table are actually on the same side. In California, for example, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the California School Employees Association (CSEA) together gave more money to elect governor brown than any other special interest. With that sort of one-party political tilt, the education establishment has a built-in inertia that will prevent ANY reform at all. The only change the existing education interests want is "more money" which they keep getting more and more of without producing ANY measurable improvement in their results. Bill Gates, being aligned with these same Democrats, is unwilling to drive any change they would approve of and thus has not been able to improve education in 20 years of trying.

Here is an explanation from 1994 by Dr. David Goodstein of Caltech, who testified to Congress on this back then, whose "The Big Crunch" essay concludes: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever."

And see also "Disciplined Minds" from 2000 about some other consequences: http://disciplinedminds.tripod... "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society."

Or Philip Greenspun from 2006: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."

Or the Village Voice from 2004 about how it is even worse in the humanities than sci/tech grad school:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document le

Which paper has statistics? (can you post the link). The original one doesn't have any statistical analysis that I can find. There are lots of objects so there will be lots of cases where distant objects seen to be in line with near ones.

How can this explain the correlation of supernova brightness with redshift https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/l...

or gravitational lensing of distant quasars by nearby galaxies.

Or gravitational lensing of the CMB background?

Its a fun discussion why stop now?

Here is a better link without the inane commentary.

Seriously, are we out of real scientific problems to study?

This is a real problem, but so difficult no progress has been made.

I'm with Crick & Koch -- skip the psudo-philosophical ramblings of physics and move to study the NCCs, the Neural Correlates of Consciousness.

This is the brain's activity "while consciousness is happening". Once that is done, we might have an inkling of what we are actually looking for in physics.

Most of it may be quite thick, but some surface features suggest thinner regions covering near-surface lakes.

"generating an impact velocity of around 305 meters per second (1,000 feet per second)"

Ok, the actual science was done measuring meters per second, the press release rounds it to a nice round number of 1000f/s for American audience, and then that rounded number is converted to a quite exact figure of 305m/s.

In the actual paper, the experiment was done with a wide range of velocities. Over 200 m/s was required velocity to generate the effect.

http://calteches.library.calte...

Let me explain this in terms a child can understand.

Learning things gets exponentially harder. Think of it like climbing a cliff. When you move from a 10 ft cliff to a 20 ft cliff, and it takes you twice as long, it does NOT mean we are moving half as fast.

We are working on harder problems so it will take more work to figure them out. That does not mean we are running out of ideas, nor does it mean the ideas are smaller. It means we are applying the same size ideas to bigger problems.

Luckily for us, some of the ideas we have convert subsistence farmers into scientists. The number of scientists has grown at an exponential rate for hundreds of years ( look at this 1994 article, note the exponential y axis on the chart).,

For this reason, this article is entirely wrong. Our problems are increasing in size, but our problem solving resource (Scientists) are increasing at the same rate.

No problem.
 

I love working for, with I boss I think is wonderful.

you have an iBoss? NEAT! I did not know that apple was shipping those yet

It's the latest update of Wife 1.0

I'm not sure how much effort scientists are willing to put into finding out at this point.

Seriously? I hope you die in a fire then. Scientists are always trying to get better data. See Feynman's point about the Millikan electron charge error.

If you look at reconstructions, you'll see there's still a huge uncertainty, and the good reconstructions will at least attempt to calculate the error bars. Shaun Marcott (author of a study you may recognize) says, "We cannot say whether this [modern temperature] change is unique across the entire Holocene because of the resolution (i.e., the sampling of temperature per unit time) of the entire dataset is about 120 years"

I think cold fusion, at least the original incantation was likely just bad science followed by a bad release process, ie, going to the papers first which assuming the original science was not bad would be understandable more than trying sell magic. Probably the same with the em drive. How long did it take to solve the voyager anomaly?

As an aside, one of my physics professors had a spool of platinum wire left over from an experiment and access to the nuclear engineering department's big low background radiation lead room and I spent a few nights recording Geiger counter ticks. :)

Perhaps you don't fully understand the motivation of these historical "projectors". They weren't con artists in the sense in they knew they were fooling their marks. They were generally so caught up in their "inventions" that they overlooked issues like "theory" and "repeatably" in their zealous pursuit of fame and/or fortune. I don't think this is just "bad" science. The herd mentality surrounding Millikan's oil drop experiment alluded to in Feynman's famous cargo-cult science commencement address is bad science, "projectors" is a totally different phenomena...

... you probably lose your scientific career soon enough (sadly).
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."

Having a successful and informative experiment may sometime even end your career sooner than failing in an ideologically approved way:
http://disciplinedminds.tripod...
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."

Part of the reason why:
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific talent to ensure the Nation's future competitiveness, especially since by now other countries have been restored to economic and scientific vigor, but in fact, jobs are scarce for recent graduates. Finally, it should be clear by now that with more than half the kids in America already going to college, academic expansion is finished forever. ...
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one

We talk about a vacuum tube, where an air thight cabine under pressure of 1 atmosphere is traveling ... on mag level rail. There is nothing it can crash into.

Unless something comes loose inside, or the rail develops a fault, or one of the cars drops a part, or the tube becomes deformed, or some asshole shoots the tube with a deer rifle, or a car is driven into it, or some crazy fuck sets an explosive charge under part of it, or there's an earthquake*, etc etc.

Yes, clearly it would be impossible for anything to ever go wrong. Accidents never happen, which is why there's no word for "accident".

-

*Earthquakes never happen in California, by the way. Except the the magnitude-5.2 earthquake that rocked Southern California early last Friday. But other than that one, they never ever happen.

Data from the Chernobyl incident:

No deleterious effects of radiation could be observed in locations where radiological doses were less than or equal to 5 rad/year. Where doses between 5 and 400 rad/year were received, radiation effects were 'ecologically masked,' meaning that adverse effects on individual organisms were observed but no changes in populations or ecosystems occurred. Where doses were >400 rad/year, damaging effects on populations and communities occurred.

Cited source

Average yearly (300 mars days) radiation levels GCR dose rate at Gale Crater on Mars: .21 mGy*, (.021 rem) per day, or (365 * .021 to account for our reference which is per earth year) = ~7.6 rem/earthYear.

*Cited source

Handy conversion calculator

So yeah, if I put all that together properly, not as much of an issue as I'd thought at all.

with regards to the actual R&D, German companies can take credit for industry standard wind turbine, PV, and inverter technology.

I'll challenge that. German companies may have done the industrialiation of wind turbines, but when you're talking about the "actual R&D", they built on the R&D that was done at NASA, who built the first multi-megawatt scale wind turbine back in the mid 1970s, when the biggest production units were 20 kW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And the same is true of PV technology-- today's low cost panels are all outgrowth of the technologies developed in the Low Cost Solar Array (LSA) project (later renamed Flat-Plate Solar Array project) run by JPL and DOE in the 70s to early 1980s: http://authors.library.caltech...

We should give some credit to the Australians as well, particularly the group at University of New South Wales under Martin Green that did a lot of work pushing solar panel efficiency up. But the Germans? Yes, they did some good work too, but the US and Australian research really drove the field.

I don't think Feynman said that, but apparently he did write this...

Now although ice has a “rigid” crystalline form, its temperature can change—ice has heat. If we wish, we can change the amount of heat. What is the heat in the case of ice? The atoms are not standing still. They are jiggling and vibrating. So even though there is a definite order to the crystal—a definite structure—all of the atoms are vibrating “in place.” As we increase the temperature, they vibrate with greater and greater amplitude, until they shake themselves out of place. We call this melting. As we decrease the temperature, the vibration decreases and decreases until, at absolute zero, there is a minimum amount of vibration that the atoms can have, but not zero. This minimum amount of motion that atoms can have is not enough to melt a substance, with one exception: helium. Helium merely decreases the atomic motions as much as it can, but even at absolute zero there is still enough motion to keep it from freezing. Helium, even at absolute zero, does not freeze, unless the pressure is made so great as to make the atoms squash together. If we increase the pressure, we can make it solidify.

I think most physicists would agree that even in the ground state, a crystal will have some "motion" which is related to their zero-point energy.

At the start of the Apollo program, the onboard flight software needed to land on the moon didn't exist. Computer science wasn't in any college curriculum. NASA turned to mathematician Margaret Hamilton, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to pioneer and direct the effort.

You see, this is exactly the kind of fact-free BS that irritates me. Here's a little reality check:

1) The AGC contract was indeed the first to be awarded during the Apollo program as a part of such, in mid-1961.

2) It was awarded to the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory.

3) The major reason why it was awarded to the MIT IL was the accomplishments of Charles Stark Draper with inertial guidance, given the fact that accurate, fully autonomous guidance for a two-week period was considered a necessity for the project (at least at that point in time - the view slightly changed later due to success with radio-based navigation).

4) Some people at MIT IL, such as Eldon Hall, already had the expertise with similar guidance (albeit for shorter time periods) from the Polaris project. They made important hardware decisions very early on, such as the use of digital integrated circuits for the computer core.

5) Others, like Hal Laning, had already had expertise with more complicated software systems, such as compilers (Laning, Zierler, 1954: the first real algebraic compiler known) and real-time executives (which Laning adapted for Apollo with a priority-driven system).

6) Between 1961 and 1963, when many of these fundamental decisions were being made, Hamilton was working on the (military) SAGE project at Lincoln Labs, not at the Intrumentation Laboratory.

7) She only joined IL (and the AGC effort) apparently post-1963, initially in "junior" positions (in her own words), until she'd risen to management sometime in 1965.

In light of these fact, would you care to explain how exactly I'm supposed to see a quote that "At the start of the Apollo program ... NASA turned to mathematician Margaret Hamilton, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to pioneer and direct the effort" as not blatantly misinformed? She was very definitely not the person they "turned to".

Sure... No earthquakes close to Hawthorne...

Some data from seismic monitors.. http://scedc.caltech.edu/recen...

http://earthobservatory.nasa.g...
http://www.kolotv.com/content/...

Back in about 2003 my wife and I were contracting to ACS up in Anchorage we drove up to the HAARP site. Can't see anything from the road but got nice pictures of all the nasty military do not enter under penalty of death signs at the gate. HAARP was a really cool project. I would love to get back there and take a walk through it.

Now that I'm older and have a lot of vacation time I want to go see science sites. My next is going to be the LIGO site at Hanford, at least it's just a day trip for me. You can't get more sciency than that!

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/W...

73 OM, de w7com

Maps of the distribution of dark matter have been produced using weak gravitational lensing, e.g. in the COSMOS survey.

http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic0701/
http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~rjm/cosmos/
http://www.space.com/14176-dark-matter-biggest-map-unveiled.html

The burden of proof here is on both sides.

Really. What the fuck does that even mean?

WISE has publicly released its data, and published multiple analysis papers in peer-reviewed journals . What, exactly, more do you expect them to do?

The burden of proof here is on both sides.

Really. What the fuck does that even mean?

WISE has publicly released its data, and published multiple analysis papers in peer-reviewed journals . What, exactly, more do you expect them to do?

Turing already did this back in 1936. It's called a "Turing Machine". See his essay on computable numbers: http://www.dna.caltech.edu/cou...

"is currently" is the correct phrase. Kepler is in an Earth-trailing orbit with a 371 day period. So it is constantly moving further from the Earth (at least until it reaches opposition, after which it'll start to get closer). The orbit reduces interference from the Earth (RF, thermal, and gravitational) while requiring less energy than reaching the L2, L4, or L5 Lagrange points.

In the aftermath of the loss of the Columbia, the Bush administration directed NASA to return to deep space exploration, arguing that if we are to risk the lives of astronauts in space it ought to be for big things like exploring new worlds. Part of this was the Constellation program to return to the moon to build a permanent manned base at the lunar south pole before putting a man on Mars, which congress under-funded and president Obama cancelled. But the other part was a boost to the Bush administration's re-start of the 1960s nuclear power and rocket engines programs which like everything else he did alarmed the political left.,/p>

The Bush restart of the nuclear rocket engines program was called "Project Prometheus" and was allowed to die-off as Constellation slipped its schedule, was underfunded, and the politics of the day eliminated further Democratic cooperation with Bush.

It seems clear that traveling between stars may be prohibitively difficult even for "advanced" civilizations. To me that alone would explain it.

Sure, it's looking mighty hard to TRAVEL between stars, but if you place a satellite at the right spot you can communicate between stars using a 100W radio.

This is incredibly mind blowing:

Based on the observed signals, LIGO scientists estimate that the black holes for this event were about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, and the event took place 1.3 billion years ago. About 3 times the mass of the sun was converted into gravitational waves in a fraction of a second—with a peak power output about 50 times that of the whole visible universe. By looking at the time of arrival of the signals—the detector in Livingston recorded the event 7 milliseconds before the detector in Hanford—scientists can say that the source was located in the Southern Hemisphere.

Paul Rudd, who beat Stephen Hawking at Quantum Chess!, That's who.

After all, they were fighting over who would give the keynote to One Entangled Evening.

What made it painful was that it was done without algebra or even the symbol pi. Think long wordy descriptions involving limits and ratios and you end up with 3 pages of text for what takes half a line in modern notation. Heck, even his result takes a couple lines to write.

But that's not the only way to do calculus with geometrical methods. And no, I'm not talking about the idea of integration with rectangles that get thinner and thinner.

Tom Apostol (author of one of the most well-known -- and abstract -- Calculus textbooks ever) highlighted the possible benefits of a geometrical approach years ago. A lot of complex problems are incredibly simple and intuitive to solve, once you get used to geometrical methods.

It's also important to remember that geometry was critical to Newton's conception of calculus too. Read his Principia, and you'll find plenty of geometrical proofs showing things that today we'd do with algebra.

Anyhow, the point is that we tend to think in algebra today because that's primarily how we're taught. There are actually intuitive and simple ways to use geometry to do calculus, and it doesn't surprise me at all if the Babylonians figured some of them out. It would surprise me if it really took a couple thousand years before anyone else did anything like that again -- my guess is that many historians who look at treatises from that period don't always realize what's going on in some historical methods, because we no longer work from a geometry-centric view of mathematics.

I begin to wonder if this science guy for Forbes is a douche bag. Seriously read the Cal Tech article "Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet" http://www.caltech.edu/news/ca...

Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown even state: "Now we can go and find this planet..."

So yes the researches are actually skeptical of their own work, we don't need some douche bag trying to make themselves look important.

Article was poorly written- I would think those are the authors bold claims. The scientists claim to have found nothing. "I would love to find it," says Brown. "But I'd also be perfectly happy if someone else found it. That is why we're publishing this paper. We hope that other people are going to get inspired and start searching." - See more at: http://www.caltech.edu/news/ca...

The govt uses eminent domain all the time....

This is ONE instance, that I might actually support the use of it....

You notice how eminent domain is never used against the one-percenters? Eminent domain, today, is only used against those who don't have the resources to fight against it.

I understand that the US has several good locations in the southwest, except for light pollution.

That's like saying that the core of the Chernobyl reactor is a great place to live, except for the radiation. Light pollution is a sure killer for observatories.

Here's the Palomar observatory situation http://www.astro.caltech.edu/p...

Altitude is very important as well - The Mauna Kea site is above most of the Infrared absorbing atmospheric water at almost 14000 feet above sea level. Here's some of th ehighest peaks in North America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . Any you'd suggest for an observatory. Maybe Denali?

But in the end, this really isn't about the observatory. This is about some folks who simply don't want the "white oppressor" in Hawaii - period, and this is just one way to mess with their hate target.

Maybe eminent domain can be used for the government to take over those light polluting properties to use the existing telescopes?

As long as you want to move an absolutely huge number of people. It would be on a bigger scale than giving back Manhattan Island. Even then, you still wouldn't have any mainland sites that are anywhere near as useful as Mauna Kea.

And you tip your hand. If you are in favor of moving millions and millions of people for a subpar observatory, you have to use the same reasoning for using a place that no one is living at.

“We see magnetized rocks on the Mars surface,” ... “And so we know Mars had a magnetic field at one time"

I think all we can say with reasonable certainty is that rocks on the Mars surface were exposed to a magnetic field. As far as I've found, there's no observable evidence that the magnetic field must have come from Mars itself, or even that the rocks were impregnated with magnetic alignment while they were on Mars.

Europa for example has a magnetic field that was induced by Jupiter's own field and was not created by Europa itself.
https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/l...

Hate on asteroid detection all you want, call it a waste of time and money if you must, but the partnership drop is actually due to a recent asteroid detection proposal accepted by NASA for consideration called NEOcam.

NASA policy as laid forth in the institution's founding charter, the Space Act, is to avoid competing with private institutions using public money (their baby, JPL).

No, I don't think so. Amy Mainzer's NEOCAM proposal has been in play for several years now, NASA has very broad authority about space act agreements, and the particular SAA with B612 was a no-exchange of funds trade of DSN support for a first cut on asteroid data. If B612 had flown, it might have made the JPL proposal overtaken by events, but that would have made the Discovery program officers happy (by freeing up time and money for the other candidates). I don't thin that the SAA was canceled as JPL protectionism.

Hate on asteroid detection all you want, call it a waste of time and money if you must, but the partnership drop is actually due to a recent asteroid detection proposal accepted by NASA for consideration called NEOcam.

NASA policy as laid forth in the institution's founding charter, the Space Act, is to avoid competing with private institutions using public money (their baby, JPL).

Well, he mentions the room full of women, and he also talks about being in charge of a group that ran problems through some kind of IBM machines:

And so I was asked to stop working on the stuff I was doing in my group and go down and take over the IBM group, and I tried to avoid the disease. And, although they had done only three problems in nine months, I had a very good group.

                        The real trouble was that no one had ever told these fellows anything. The Army had selected them from all over the country for a thing called Special Engineer Detachment - clever boys from high school who had engineering ability. They sent them up to Los Alamos. They put them in barracks. And they would tell them nothing.

                        Then they came to work, and what they had to do was work on IBM machines - punching holes, numbers that they didn't understand. Nobody told them what it was. The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we're doing. Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission so I could give a nice lecture about what we were doing, and they were all excited: "We're fighting a war! We see what it is!" They knew what the numbers meant. If the pressure came out higher, that meant there was more energy released, and so on and so on. They knew what they were doing.

                        Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They worked at night. They didn't need supervising in the night; they didn't need anything. They understood everything; they invented several of the programs that we used - and so forth.

                        So my boys really came through, and all that had to be done was to tell them what it was, that's all. As a result, although it took them nine months to do three problems before, we did nine problems in three months, which is nearly ten times as fast.

http://calteches.library.calte...

It has an atmosphere at all.
"When Pluto is closer to the Sun in its orbit, the warmth from the Sun heats up the frozen ices of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide on Pluto's surface. These ices vaporize and form a temporary atmosphere. When Pluto moves farther from the Sun, the atmosphere freezes and falls back onto Pluto's surface."
http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech...

At worst it was a fairly successful mission.

Rosetta, the orbiter, plays a very large role, and has been functioning properly.

Philae the lander was designed for two missions:
-Short term, upon landing do a battery of tests powered by primary (non-rechargable) battery. This was a success
-Long term, small battery of tests over a long period of time, powered by secondary (rechargable) battery and solar cells.

The choice of power systems was for the reason of the risk of what happened. It landed in shade but the primary batteries allowed the tests to complete. Because they aren't NASA, Nuclear based RTG power isn't viable.

Here's some interesting papers on the actual missions and design of the vehicles:

http://www.researchgate.net/pu...

http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/wo...

Gravity wave detector.

A gravity wave detector is disrupted by vibrations, and would benefit from NOT putting humans on the moon. A robotic mission would cost about 1% as much as a manned mission, and would actually be superior for this purpose.

There are plenty of good reasons to go to the moon,

Such as?

Gravity wave detector.

In an HX thruster, liquid propellant is pressure- or pump-fed to a lightweight planar heat exchanger. For orbital launch, the propellant of choice is liquid hydrogen. H2 provides a vacuum Isp of 600 seconds, sufficient for a robust single-stage-to-orbit capability, at a heat exchanger temperature of only 1000 C (less than 2000 F). The heat exchanger can therefore be made of ordinary materials, rather than exotic high-temperature alloys, which allows building cheap expendable vehicles.

Kare, Jordin T. "Modular Laser Launch Architecture: Analysis and Beam Module Design." Final Report USRA (2004).

This report is about laser heat exchanger launch system but should be valid. Dr. Kare has studied both laser and microwave launch systems. A single-stage-to-orbit vehicle does not shed tanks or stages. When it reenters the atmosphere is it a big empty tub with a very low cross-sectional mass density. The temperatures it encounters are dramatically lower than a capsule or the shuttle.

In other words, this is far from being the most difficult part of the system.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech...
http://thesis.library.caltech....