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Bill O'Reilly thinks that Jesus makes the tides work http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/02/11/you-cant-explain-bill-oreilly/ [discovermagazine.com].

As much as O'Reilly annoys me, I really, sincerely hope that you are able to recognize satire when you see it and are just hoping for some karma by being sarcastic or trolling. For the benefit of the doubt and for my sanity, I'll presume the latter.

Bill O'Reilly thinks that Jesus makes the tides work http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/02/11/you-cant-explain-bill-oreilly/.

Or the on-going attack on teaching evolution in US public schools http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_public_education.

Globally, evolution is taught in science courses with limited controversy, with the exception of a few areas of the United States and several Islamic fundamentalist countries.

So it's not just radical Islamic regimes, it's Christians in the US.

Or the Conservapedia saying that Einstein's Relativity theories are a "liberal plot". http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/conservapedia_founder_takes_on_the_notorious_liber.php

The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.

Don't forget the wanna-be Christians despots here in the USA.

> There aren't many fundamentalists compared to
> moderates

Is this gut feeling, or do you have data? If the latter, can you cite?

Also, do note that "moderate" might mean different things in different places if you're simply defining it in terms of the population median. If that's the case, you may be interested in http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/02/egypt-vs-indonesia-in-attitudes/ and can of course not provide data to support the initial claim, since it becomes true by definition.

> Stop the cycle of violence. BE the bigger man you
> claim you are.

This is a lot easier to do if you have strategic depth, for what it's worth. Or even tactical depth. Both commodities are unfortunately in short supply in the Middle East....

Ah, found some info on it I think.

Thanks also to the crews of Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11.

A reminder courtesy of the Bad Astronomer.

Do you have any reputable citations showing professional climatologists engaging in groupthink or responding badly to reasoned criticism? I ask because, once again, your description of the climatology community sounds like a description of a cult... [Dumb Scientist]

You mean like how they circled the wagons around Phil Jones, even when actual bad behavior on his part was discovered? For example: [ShakaUVM]

“This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.” [RealClimate]

Presumably you meant to say that scientists in general are circling wagons and responding badly to reasoned criticism.

Or you can just read the editor’s comments left in the response sections of RC.org. Just skimming through that above article, here’s an interplay between Pielke and Stefan. [ShakaUVM]

Coincidentally, Pielke Jr. had similar things to say about that interplay. That's the interplay where he asked a bunch of 'questions' like "Was it appropriate for the IPCC to make stuff up about my views?". Then Stefan replied:

Clearly there are different views on this, which is why we called this graph "debatable". But let's keep things in perspective: we're discussing Supplementary Material and a response to one of those 90,000 review comments now, not even the report itself. You've been working hard to scandalize your personal quibbles with IPCC here - how consistent is this with your self-proclaimed role as "honest broker"? Stefan

That link leads to an in-depth comment, and neither seem to constitute "responding badly to reasoned criticism." In fact, it's not clear that Pielke's rant counts as "reasoned criticism" in the first place. As far as I can tell, he's got

The article doesn't talk about bacteria spores, but spores of the amoeba that have bacteria inside of them. Most of these bacteria are from kinds that the amoeba "likes" to eat, so when they get to a new location, they have their "favorite" food with them. The bacteria multiply, and the amoeba feasts.
Somehow, it doesn't work so well when I go abroad and try to take raw material for my favorite food (20oz T-Bone, FYI).
You can get more info here.

REligion doesn't answer the why, it just creates a straw man to take the credit.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/01/17/dysteleological-physicalism/

It's a bit of a stretch, but science is part of news for nerds. . . .

I agree completely. But astrology isn't science, not even in the least. This should have been in the "idle" category. As wizardforce mentioned below, Bad Astronomy covered this very well.

I think that Bad Astronomy summed it up perfectly.

I think it is worth while to point out that, of the 5 independent investigations that were launched as a result of the so-called "Climategate", all 5 have exonerated the Climatologists under investigation. None of the 5 were able to find any evidence of scientific malpractice. I'd call that, coupled with the endorsement of the G-7 national academies of science, a pretty unequivocal vindication of the science of Global Climate Change.

No, no, no. One can clearly see that it's a giant bug with a huge pincer. Either it's made of green ectoplasm or conjured up by evil magic.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/01/11/voorwerp/

You can find out a bit more information here.

The actual cause of such phenomena could very well be some not-yet-discovered natural force that has nothing to do with people at all, living or dead. What I personally believe is that strange things do happen that we do not (yet) know how to explain and as such, we have no idea what might be causing them.

But the fact is that, quite simply, the case against ghosts and other supernatural phenomena, including a completely open-ended and nebulous 'unknown force of nature' is actually incredibly robust at this point in science. To explain this point in greater detail, I will defer to a better writer than me, and link to a blog post: Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory.

The short version is that modern science has not only identified a set of forces and characterized them in detail, but in measuring all these things, we've also effectively mapped out the parameter space of possibilities in considerable detail. Thus we know the limits about what kinds of "previously unobserved" forces could possibly exist. And the territory that remains truly "unknown" is very "out there" (e.g. forces so weak that they would never affect our daily lives).

Of course any bit of science could be wrong. There could be forces/effects that operate in specific ways that cause them to be unusually strong in certain places and times but exceedingly weak all the rest of the time. More generally, all our theories and measurements could be wrong. But in the same way that at some point the evidence for a round Earth (or whatever) is so obvious and consistent and ubiquitous that it's no longer worth questioning, we are very much at the stage in science where it doesn't make sense to wonder if strange "unknown forces" are mysteriously changing temperatures and moving object's in someone's kitchen. We know the answer: no.

I have seen abundant evidence that the Earth is spherical. That's why I see no point in investigating a flat-Earth theory.

Indeed. And the reality is that the evidence against the paranormal is also very abundant.

The poster should go ahead and do the measurements. It's a good exercise in the scientific method. I guess it's possible he'll discover something revolutionary. But, again, it's possible, in some abstract sense, that we'll one day send a satellite into orbit and discover that the Earth is, in fact, not round and never was. But the possibility seems so remote that it's hardly worth actively trying to prove/disprove. Similarly in this case I really think the default stance should be to assume that any attempt to measure 'ghosts' will fail and just leave it at that. I know that sounds arrogant and presumptuous, but from the point of view of modern physics, the idea of trying to measure the paranormal (which has in fact been "measured" billions of times before, consistently producing null results) seems just as silly as trying to skeptically decide if the Earth is round or flat.

I know, RTFA is not commonly a part of the commenting procedure in these parts.

But maybe - before posting that, you could *at least* RTLFP (read the last f*n paragraph):

"Parker is releasing his data as a press release, so keep an eye on your favorite (or least favorite) news organizations to see who bites on the sham cell tower-fertility connection."

Or, failing that, RTFURL (read the f*n URL):
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/12/17/each-cell-phone-tower-creates-18-babies- the-difference-between-causation-correlation/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/12/17/each-cell-phone-tower-creates-18-babies-the-difference-between-causation-correlation/

That plastic water bottle you tossed in the trash could soon be fueling your car instead of sitting in a landfill for 1000 years.

I'm still waiting to run my car off turkey guts.

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/anything-oil

Well, maybe.

But the way I see it, that stuff is available 24/7 on the Internet, so have we really fallen all that far? I hit APOD first thing every morning. That often sends me off to various astronomy web sites or wikipedia entries on subjects I didn't even know existed. Then, of course, there's Phil Plait, who's pretty much a hero around here :)

Interesting tidbit in Discover Magazine. Apparently the cells do well with plain phosphorous, but if the cells grow in an arsenic-dense medium, the cells enlarge and special vacuoles appear. It's fascinating stuff.

I'm afraid that, with finals in a half hour and all, I can't leave much of a substantial comment, but this announcement reminded me of another article I read a couple of years ago. I think I must have made a connection in my head between arsenic and cyanide... In any case: http://discovermagazine.com/2008/feb/did-life-evolve-in-ice Enjoy. Critique. Do whatever--it's not my article.

Exactly, under laboratory conditions an arsenic-rich environment doesn't kill it, in fact the bacterium continues to grow, though not as quickly as in an environment that contains phosphorus. Using radioactive isotopes to trace the distribution of arsenic through the organism revealed the chemical in important molecules like proteins, DNA, and ATP. Discover Magazine has published a good blog post that explains what the research does and doesn't show so far.

The scientist who lead the team who conducted the experiment is pretty cool. And it seems she's found a research project for the rest of her life.

It probably has to do with the recent discovery of oxygen on Saturn's moon Rhea.

Why would NASA announce something that has already been announced? Kinda defeats the purpose of an announcement.

It probably has to do with the recent discovery of oxygen on Saturn's moon Rhea.

Maybe the focusing problem was that the optical design was developed to focus on objects 35,000km below it instead of objects 13 million light years above it...?

Ten things you don't know about Hubble

Spying on a Hubble Telescope Look-Alike (Keyhole 11)

From TFA:

In August of 2009, GPI was shut down by Washington state's Ecology Department who said GPI had "not provided adequate compliance with the environmental air quality regulations." This was cleared on September 8, 2010 by an EPA ruling that support's GPI's claim and reverses Washington state's Ecology Department's claim that placed the GPI process in the class of incinerators, which it is not.

So the government of my state caused major problems for GPI, and the federal government had to overrule the state. That's just great.

According to TFA, GPI's plant operates using "a proprietary catalytic pressure-less depolymerization process (CDP)" yet the state Department of Ecology (DoE) insisted on regulating the plant as if it were an incinerator plant, which it clearly isn't.

We have a liberal Democrat for a governor, the Democrats have a complete lock on the state legislature, and plenty of liberal voters. Our governor claims to be in favor of the environment, in favor of business that helps the state, in favor of jobs, etc. Where was she when the state DoE was causing these problems?

I really wonder at the politics behind this. If this is random bureaucrats just being pointlessly bureaucratic, why didn't any other part of government get involved and help resolve this? Where were the state senators and representatives from the Pasco area? Did the governor just never hear of this, and if so, how is that possible?

If I were governor and something like this happened, I would very publicly intervene. There's no political downside! The governor has more power than bureaucrats at the DoE, and the voters would love to hear that a green energy project was helped out. So why didn't that happen?

P.S. This of course reminds me of the other thermal depolymerization plant, the plant in Carthage, Missouri that processed turkey offal into energy and fuel. That plant was shut down several times, over allegations of a bad smell; the bad smell was reported at least once on a day that the plant wasn't operating. Eventually they installed upgraded scrubbers on their exhaust stacks and resumed operation. The company, Changing World Technologies went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and I guess the TDP plant was shut down. That seems crazy to me; the price of crude oil is high, so they should be able to run their plant at a profit. I guess they are just in too much trouble financially to even run the plant right now?

I hope this "CDP" plant in Pasco works out better than the Changing Worlds one did.

steveha

Data: There's a planet orbiting a metal-poor star.
Conclusion: IT COMES FROM OUTSIDE OUR GALAXY. ....wait what?

Datum 1: The star comes from the Helmi Stream, a well understood remnant of a dwarf galaxy consumed by our own.

Datum 2: You've been modded insightful.

Conclusion 1: Neither you, nor the mod, read TFA.

Datum 3: TFA doesn't even mention this.

Conclusion 2: I hadn't read TFA either.

Recommendation: Read http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/11/18/exoplanet-found-from-another-galaxy/#more-24148 for a much better explanation.

Another good demonstration of Dark Matter is when large galaxy clusters collide - the matter interacts creating a shockwave, while the mass (as detected by gravitational lensing) flies straight through unaffected
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/08/21/dark-matter-exists/

Video demonstration
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg2SHngX_D8

You kidding? I've seen an article about a crazy doctor in an ethically-vague country who already killed someone with stem cell treatments: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/06/18/danger-stem-cell-tourists-patient-in-thailand-dies-from-treatment/

"According to a paper about the case just published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, the woman went into a decline soon after her treatment. Within three months she required dialysis, within a year one kidney had failed, and within two years she was dead. A team of Thai and Canadian researchers performed a postmortem analysis of the kidneys, and found no evidence at all that the treatment had benefited the woman–and they found strange lumps and lesions at the sites of injection. Further investigation revealed that the masses were tangled mixtures of blood vessels and bone marrow cells."

Oh man, if that's not nightmare fuel, I don't know what is.

...an accretion disk could certainly form around a neutron star as well...

Phil Plait didn't say it couldn't. Link

Yes! And the additional health-benefit of inhaling loose, blowing nano-particles - and the subsequent introduction to the pulmonary systems of city-dwellers - is surely the cincher on this!

More and more it appears the so called voice of the crowd is becoming the voice of the organization paying the spammers.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/11/02/follow-the-%E2%80%9Ctruthy%E2%80%9D-tweets-to-find-twitter%E2%80%99s-political-spammers/

You should read the discover article on the thing. I was saying exactly the same as you before I did. The gist of it is this: Imagine the car going exactly at the speed of the wind. In the car there is no wind, except that the ground is moving. The ground moving turns the wheels powers the propellor, which rotates and gives the car a force forward. Since wind speed is 0, there is no resistance, no force to counter the propellors force, the car will now accelerate, i.e. start going faster than the wind. Once you accept that it will then go faster than the wind, the only question is how much faster. (The ground acting on the wheels will exert an very small force on the car, which can be made infinitesimal by reducing the friction)

It's also possible that the transition from prokaryotes+archaea to eukaryotes is a very low-probability event — as far as we know, it only occurred once in the entire history of terrestrial life. See this for details and references.

Just look at the mental state of the people who plan to "take back their country". The Tea Party morons deny global warming. http://www.newser.com/story/103446/among-tea-party-widespread-global-warming-doubt.html

The Conservapedia thinks that Relativity is a liberal plot: http://newsdesk.org/2010/08/conservapedia-calls-theory-of-relativity-a-liberal-conspiracy/

In its “Counterexamples to Relativity” website, Conservapedia says, “The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.”

The Texas Board of Education (take that title with a grain of salt) is putting Christian thought into text books, including trying to teach creationism http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/24/texas-state-board-of-education-confirms-irony-is-dead/

The forces of stupidity have a lot of practical power, and they are using (abusing) it. The net result will reduce the USA to a third world country. Most of the people reading this post will live to see it happen. Well, the USA had a good thing going for a while, at leas from 1945 to 2000 or so.

First, you are wrong.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/08/03/new-study-clinches-it-the-earth-is-warming-up/

I dislike the power grab by governments, but... http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/06/09/im-skeptical-of-denialism/

Don't claim it's not true, point out alternative solutions. Unless you have been doing the research and have access to some data no-one else does that casts these claims into any REAL doubt.

First, you are wrong.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/08/03/new-study-clinches-it-the-earth-is-warming-up/

I dislike the power grab by governments, but... http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/06/09/im-skeptical-of-denialism/

Don't claim it's not true, point out alternative solutions. Unless you have been doing the research and have access to some data no-one else does that casts these claims into any REAL doubt.

The ability to discover simple to control systems that operate as analogues to more advanced physics is wonderful and not some fake trick as some comment posters suggest.

Check out this page where the kitchen sink phenomenon is shown as well as another analogue for an event horizon, the "fish in the stream" analogue. (Where water flow is faster than a fish's top speed, a fish will hit a point of no return.) Found by googling for: physics analogue kitchen.

This page has some interesting explanations and also mentions there are other analogues that for example suggest answers to the still open question of what happens at planck lengths where space is expected to become grainy or net-like.

There is another page that describes another use of the same circular hydraulic jump in the kitchen sink, saying that it is a three-way analogue: "The connection between ocean bores, stellar gases, and the swirl of water in the kitchen sink is a splendid example of a three-way physical model." So with white holes brought in maybe this is a four-way analogue now. This page is quite a fun read and describes in detail why the hydraulic jump appears. It also describes how this is like the shock wave caused by the upwelling of gas from a star's surface meeting gas that is falling back onto the sun.

You could get some better economies of scale with larger reactors than we build now but it's hard to transmit and distribute electricity from anything much larger then what we build now.

1. The Big Potential of Micro Nukes.
2. Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes.
3. Toshiba's building a "Micro Nuclear" reactor for your garage?
4. Micro-nuclear plants for local power
5. Bill Gates and Toshiba teaming up to build small, 100-year nuke plant?
6. Scaling nuclear power for villages, apartment buildings, shopping malls, factories, and ships

You were saying what again?

Falcon

Yup. Hubble captures picture of asteroid collision! :) I think the news here is that the scientists have now had time to look into this more and have confirmed it. HOWEVER, I'm not sure of that. I'm thinking Emily Lakdawalla at The Planetary Society Blog will have something on this...

Female blobfish think he's cute.

Why the long face?

Because Ziggy melted.

Why the long face?

I'm glad that the bill has been passed. Now, could someone enlighten me on how it differs from those goals announced on April 15th?

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp-space-conf-factsheet.pdf

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/04/15/obamas-space-speech-well-go-to-mars-in-this-lifetime/

So, it looks like the GOP fought tooth and nail against privatizing spaceflight because they wanted to brink the pork home and more or less are dictating rocket design to NASA. Juicy bits here:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/30/congress-passes-nasa-authorization-bill-but-id-rather-watch-sausages-being-made/

What really galled me, though, was that several Republicans blamed Obama for NASA's current mess, including Ralph Hall (R-TX, remember him?). This is grossly and demonstrably unfair and untrue. Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) hammered over and again the idea that Obama is trying to kill the manned space program. That is not true, and in fact the current situation (including the five year gap between the Shuttle and any follow-on rocket system) started in the Bush Administration. Constellation has been in trouble for some time, behind schedule and over-budget. I'm of the opinion that Obama's plan to defund Constellation does not kill the manned space program as Culberson said it will. I have written about this repeatedly: far from killing it, this new direction may save NASA from the mess it finds itself in right now.

What's weird is how Culberson used the bogeyman of Obama to try to gain sympathy for the bill, saying that a yes vote on the bill would stop Obama's plan to dismantle NASA. I find that odd, as much of the bill aligns with Obama's plan for NASA, including defunding Constellation and promoting a new rocket system*. Moreover, I want to point out that Obama's plan, and this bill, funds private space concerns (like SpaceX, which is preparing to launch its Falcon 9 rocket which will be man-rated and capable of flights to the space station). You'd think Republicans would support this, as they have a mantra of privatizing health care, social security, and so many other government efforts. However, many Republicans don't like private space companies. An exception I must note was Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who spoke up about funding private space efforts and how important it is. On most issues he and I disagree strongly, but on this one we agree.

I'd say it doesn't hold water because... well, he simply doesn't have enough information at this point.

Indeed. From the Bad Astronomy blog:

However, this does not mean the planet is habitable, or even very Earthlike. It may not even have any water on it at all. For now, we can't know these things, so beware of any media breathlessly talking about life on this planet, or how we could live there.

Just because you repeat it many times does not make it true.

Neither will denying facts make them false. You can blindly deny our incomplete knowledge all you want, but it makes you look like the idiot...

but to imply that there was some fundamental error or shortcoming in the understanding of flight over the past 60 years does not do justice to the way that modern science and technological understanding develop.

Okay, how's this:

"the performance of insect wings, when tested under steady conditions in wind tunnels, is too low to account for the forces required to sustain flight"

It is only in the past few years that the fact that "flapping wings generate additional forces during stroke reversals." was determined as a solution to the problem.

"the source of extra lift remains unknown." ... "An intense leading-edge vortex was found on the down-stroke, of sufficient strength to explain the high-lift forces. The vortex is created by dynamic stall, and not by the rotational lift mechanisms that have been postulated for insect flight"

When did the "hindsight" issue crop up? Only after the full 60 years or maybe it was after 2 hours with a paper and pencil back in the 1950s when someone said "hey, bees fly pretty slow compared to our jets - what's up with that?"

It's easy to recognize that something doesn't add-up. That's worlds away from having a plausibly-complete understanding of exactly how it DOES in fact work. Einstein certainly knew where General Relativity broke down, but he wasn't able to come up with a solution for it, and he had well more than "2 hours with a paper and pencil".

I see now it's not in-fact hindsight in your case, but unadulterated ignorance, which just happens to be pro-(omnipotent)-scientists rather than the more common opposite. I suppose you'd have been claiming we had a complete understanding of insect flight 15+ years ago, when there were many fundamental blanks in the equations. I'm sorry I wasted my time.

If you or anyone else are interested in the topic and would like to edify themselves rather than blindly tear-down others, here are a couple jumping-off points:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v384/n6610/abs/384626a0.html

http://www.pnas.org/content/102/50/18213.full

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/uosc-lev030108.php

http://discovermagazine.com/2000/apr/featphysics

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/306/5703/1960

Didn't you watch Dr. Plait's lecture Don't be a Dick? Your sig helps nobody

Welcome the very, very messed up world of journalism law in the early 21st Century. Tech advances, the law plays catch up.

Your reading list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libel_tourism

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/08/26/speech-act-now-a-law-big-win-for-libel-reform/

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_V2BY9JufdkJ:immi.is/%3Fl%3Den%26p%3Dvision+immi.is&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

Read this:

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/sep/einstein-nobel-prize/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=

If you really want to understand about Einstein's acceptance by the scientific community, and the reasons why the Nobel Prize committee went against him.

Should have gone with

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/files/uploads/wmapspectrum.png

instead. Now that's a model that fits data! :)