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Saturn Moon Continues to Delight and Baffle
vic_1066 writes to tell us that BBC News is reporting on the many interesting discoveries made by the Cassini probe. The Saturn moon, Enceladus, apparently continues to provide confusion and excitement for scientists the world over. The Cassini probe has been making waves ever since its arrival to the Saturn system.
An off the cuff guess? About that warm spot and tiger stripe at Encaladus's south pole?
a ssini-080505.html
Meteor impact, and seismic aftereffects.
After all, it has the "Death Star" moon for a neighbor: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/c
The English spell themselves with a capital E.
It's funny, Richard Hoagland is on Coast-to-Coast AM pretty regularly. (What can I say? I'm an insomniac and it's an entertaining show.) On the radio, he sounds very smart and usually quite rational. The web site, on the other hand, is so kooky it's almost hard to believe that it's written by the same person. He seems to be extremely fond of zooming waaay in on heavily compressed JPEG images and imagining all kinds of artificial formations in the compression artifacts. I wonder sometimes if he really believes all this stuff, or if it's just a ploy to get attention and presumably bring in $$$.
FWIW, his own biography says he was a museum curator, a NASA consultant (whatever that means), and a science advisor to CBS news. It's a more impressive resumé than your garden variety conspiracy nut, but he wasn't exactly a "big wig at NASA".
i would point out that it being less cold (e.g. warmer) would result in your balls freezing off in a slightly *longer* amount of time... say, 2.45 seconds. just sayin...
Instead they just invent things to satisfy their ever-more-convoluted theories. i.e. black holes, dark matter, dark energy.
That would be fine, except that every single one of these press releases is filled with wild speculation -- subsurface water, volcanism, recent meteor strikes, martians, what have you -- anything and everything except the only thing that has ever been observed to cause (e.g.) polar heating.
Never mind trotting out black holes, billion-solar-mass black holes, "dark matter" (imagined to constitute 90% of the mass of the universe), "dark energy" (part of it? supposed to repel matter), the "Great Attractor", galactic lensing, "magnetic reconnection", WIMPs, MACHOs, the Big Bang, Inflation, zero-point energy, and worse, without even a trace of embarrassment. That, and cropping from Hubble pictures anything embarrassing, such as quasars actually in front of opaque nearby galaxies.
After the last cosmic background experiment concluded, Georg Smoot at a podium announced, in the the most smug of terms, that it proved the Big Bang theory "correct, once and for all." Of course no single experiment, or even a dozen, can do any such thing, and Big Bang is looking iffier every month.
Wikipedia on Dictionary History. Enjoy. I am personally a "When in Rome" person on the English language. I can speak and spell British English and American English, and I even know several of the Canadian English oddities (some words are spelled the American way, others the British way). Because I am an American, when I'm in any nation-agnostic forum such as Slashdot, I use American English. I won't correct your spelling if you say favour, but I will myself spell it favor.
Now, as to its/it's... I can understand why uneducated monkeys may have a problem with the distinction, but people with even the slightest experience with a programming language of any sort, be it GW-BASIC, PDP-8 assembler, or Common Lisp, have no excuse for not obeying such a basic rule of English syntax. Slashdot as a whole has atrocious spelling and grammar, which is ironic given that outside of the English language most of us are downright pedantic about spelling and grammar. You wouldn't see code like wile(1) { blah(); } or while 1 blah(;) (both examples in C) and let it slide without both correcting it and punching the guy who wrote it in the face - why do you let it slide in English?
I think that they're not actually all that baffled about what's going on, but that saying "We're baffled, and learning SOOO much from this" is intelligent PR that helps these scientists get more public support, and indirectly funding as well.
I mean if they said "Great - now we understand (most) everything that's going on at Saturn." then they'd be up excrement-creek without funding.
Now don't get me wrong here. I'm all for money being spent on scientific research. I'm even for this tactic being used to do so.
Based only on the assumption that nothing but gravitation can produce x-rays and high-velocity jets, or affect motion of large (electrically-conductive) masses. Even your "super-massive black holes" aren't enough to account for galactic rotation; you need to make up "dark matter" too.
galactic lensing, ... This definitely exists.
Sure, here and there. But it gets trotted out every time somebody points out that quasars are all clustered around nearby galaxies.
the Big Bang has quite a bit of evidence for it.
Meaning, really, that the mountains of evidence against it are neatly hidden behind an even bigger pile of ghostly "dark matter".
zero-point energy This exists too.
Sure, and any astronomical or cosmological event that demands an unlimited energy supply can tap into it at need.
That, and cropping from Hubble pictures anything embarrassing, such as quasars actually in front of opaque nearby galaxies. Cite?
OK:
The Discovery of a High Redshift X-ray Emitting QSO Very Close to the Nucleus of NGC 7319
Missing Quasars of M82
and Big Bang is looking iffier every month. Doubtful.
I will note here that respondent fails to defend "dark matter", never mind "inflation" or "dark energy".
That would be fine, except the explanations make no sense at all, and also fail to account for the features observed. What's worse is when they doctor the pictures to make them seem more like the explanation, as in the Io volcano pictures where they painted in flaming geysers in place of white-outs in the actual images. The white-outs were from something way hotter than any volcanic eruption could be.