On the second point, you may be correct. (It depends on whether they were using the scanners precisely as they'd be used in normal operations or whether they'd disabled some of the obscuration software, but not know, we can assume the former.)
On the first point, however, I'm not sure I agree that it's meaningful. We've found a specific example of immature people in the TSA. This a trend does not make. Nor are assault and harassments like this unique to the TSA: all kinds of professional jobs we trust at least as much as TSA folks (doctors, politicians, astronauts) have had sordid stories of really weird behavior like this. So it's a bit much to extrapolate far with this particular incident.
That said, I'm not a fan of the scanners. But I prefer if we chose our arguments against them with care.
Sort of. It's less enlightening given that this sort of violent outburst and childish hostility occur in pretty much all fields. We've even seen it in astronauts. I kind of think we're stretching to connect this story with the screeners.
Let's look at Cassini, shall we? It started planning around 1989, was launched in 1997, arrived in 2004, and will die no later than 2017. That's nearly 10 years from conception to launch, and 15 to orbital insertion. For Uranus and Neptune, the time to orbital insertion is even longer, so probably nearer 20 years. In other words, we should have started planning this mission about 10 years ago. That would have also been consistent with NASA's earlier pace, launching a flagship per decade or so. That was dropped during the 1990s thanks to Goldin, sadly.
Meanwhile, yes, NASA has been exploring Mars and launched a quick Pluto flyby since then, but those missions aren't in the same class as Cassini or Voyager. They're small, quick missions which fill one scientific niche, but flagships, long missing from the drawing board, fill another.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this story isn't really about my rights online. It's not even about my rights at all as much as an example of hundreds of assault cases that seem to happen everyday.
(In this case, it also sounds like there was a decidedly hostile working environment going on and that the supervisor was way, way out of line, too. Not that it justifies a physical assault, but still.)
The next mission is going to Jupiter, actually, to visiting the icy moons. That's been determined. Uranus and Neptune were never very seriously on the table, sadly. (The candidates this round were Jupiter system, Icy sats of Jupiter, Titan, and Enceladus. And Enceladus wasn't even given much of a chance, in truth.)
"It has already given us remarkable views of Uranus and Neptune, planets we had never seen close-up before."
And, sadly, we haven't been back since. I can't quite bring myself to call this a travesty, but it does seem like a wasted chance to explore some still-mysterious planets. (Granted, it's expensive to send orbiters out there.)
Yes, ideally every class would be small enough to have a full class discussion. But I've seen lit classes break up into smaller groups and discuss (prof circulated). It can be done. Less than ideal, but you often teach under less than ideal conditions.
Absolutely. A lot of science is about making the argument is convincing as possible by eliminating as many of the obvious objections as you can. But even if you did the Galileo experiment as you suggested, you'd have distinct differences in the different balls you rolled. (I know, I just made 25 students do it last week.) So the question is, can you explain those differences away by invoking another reasonable effect? (In our case, air resistance.)
In the end, it's still a judgment call. More so for cutting-edge science than, say, the Galileo experiment, which has been done enough times that we've worked out a lot of the kinks. (Remember, he didn't have stop watches or electric triggers.) But still: at some point, it's a matter of what you, the fellow scientist, find sufficiently convincing.
The methods were subjective? This is science? Maybe it's me. Maybe I don't understand the term "science".
Not to be insulting, but since you suggested the dichotomy: yeah, you don't understand science apparently. All science is subjective. I know teachers paint a simple picture of a nice flow-chart that removes any human element to it in high schools, but that's about as realistic as the picture of government you get. Reality is more complex. Scientists have to always judge whether a result is significant, when one theory is better than another (hint: it's rarely clear-cut, which is why new theories take years to get accepted in most cases), and which behaviors are due to noise and which should be worrisome.
For example, do you believe that objects fall at the same rate? Odds are you've never done an experiment that showed that. You might had done an experiment that approximately showed that, but I can almost be assured that your experiment showed different falling times for different objects. Now, there are many reasons why this can happen: air resistance (Galileo's own explanation), measurement errors, jitter in the release mechanism, etc. And you can be assured that almost anyone would agree that it's fair to ignore those effects in drawing conclusions. But that's a judgment call, requiring a human to make the call. It's subjective where you draw those lines, based on past experience and various biases.
Science is subjective. It always has been. This isn't even a new observation, Kuhn made a fairly big point of it more than 50 years ago.
Actually, it generally shows you can cram. It's not the same as real learning. I've seen plenty of students who could ace an exam and still couldn't apply a thing they'd learned in a real situation (even in a lab).
Real world situations mean having to actually use what your know, not simply rattle off facts back to someone. That's a skill you can learn (and should learn) in college, but most exams don't teach that at all.
That's not really true. I have classes in which they are too large to take attendance and I still get discussions and group activities daily. Your wife seems to be assuming that discussions have to involve the whole class in a single discussion.
That said, I would never use a system like this to take attendance. Quite apart from the silliness, there are a lot of privacy issues.
Exactly. Exams tell you very little about real learning. If your goal is to get students to have a bunch of facts and techniques memorized for the duration of an exam, then by all means, examine away. There's even a fair chance that a few of those things will persist more than a week after the exam. But if you want real, useful* learning, you have to do more than dish up fact and then test regurgitation.
* In a day and age with Google and smart phones, memorizing facts has limited use in the world.
I was actually thinking of the oxygen ratios in the Greenland rocks, which go back 3.8-4 bya, but I was aware of the Australian zircons as well. I hadn't heard/didn't recall them showing the fractionation beyond 4 bya, though. I find it difficult to imagine Earth being very conducive to life before this with the Late Heavy Bombardment ending around this time.
No, it's known that they're just as fragile. Making a molecule in space yields the same physical chemistry as making it on Earth. The dissociation energy is the same (unless you're arguing isotopic fractionation, which shouldn't change things much either way).
Organics can be delivered to Earth on meteorites. The interiors don't get hot. ALH84001 seems to show exactly this. (You can debate the possibility of contamination from the Antarctic, but it's not overwhelmingly obvious that that's what happened.) The question is less, "Can we get organics?" and more, "Can we get the majority of the early organics that way?"
In this case, yes, no one is calling them "alive". But the panspermia hypothesis does speculate that live could be delivered here, so I didn't want to rule that option out is all.:-)
Yes, thank you. I'm aware of that, but I'm not sure why you mention it. It's not a question I was asking in the first place and it's not really the reason Earth was inhospitable for water and organics. (Also, I'm fairly skeptical of the Lagrange point model. I have never seen any reason that you'd need it to form there or that it would even be likely to do so. It strikes me as a horrible place to form a second planet.)
Earth was inhospitable for a variety of reasons, including the frequent bombardment of comets and asteroids. (The Moon-forming impact was just one of many that would have repeatedly sterilized the Earth in the first half billion years or so.) Couple that with the accretionary heat that Earth had to radiate off for quite a while, and this place wasn't pleasant.
"abiogenesis" means start of life from non-life. I dropped the prefix because I don't care where the life comes from in this case. (If meteorites bring in living organisms which colonize Earth, that's biogenesis for Earth, but not abiotic.)
Now, I'm not a cosmologist or anything, but I think Mr. Scientists isn't mentioning that "earth already had plenty" because the Earth did not become conducive to water or organic molecules until relatively recently.
And that's what I'm taking issue with. If the planet couldn't support water and organics, it couldn't support water and organics. Space-organics are just as fragile to heat as terrestrial-made versions.
Also, "relatively recently" is pretty lame in this case. The first 10% of Earth's history was inhospitable for life. We know it quickly recovered because there's evidence for life going back between 3.8 and 4 billion years.
I'm familiar with the YORP effect. Unless the asteroid were spinning very quickly, it's still not clear how this helps or why it's relevant. If anything, it would push the water towards the spin equator.
I'm not sure how the Yarkovsky effect, which alters orbits, would redistribute water.
As for spectroscopy, it's a fairly well-established and reliable method. Probably more than half of astronomy relies on it, in fact. So I'm willing to trust them when they say there are organics up there.
Slashdot Mirror
On the second point, you may be correct. (It depends on whether they were using the scanners precisely as they'd be used in normal operations or whether they'd disabled some of the obscuration software, but not know, we can assume the former.)
On the first point, however, I'm not sure I agree that it's meaningful. We've found a specific example of immature people in the TSA. This a trend does not make. Nor are assault and harassments like this unique to the TSA: all kinds of professional jobs we trust at least as much as TSA folks (doctors, politicians, astronauts) have had sordid stories of really weird behavior like this. So it's a bit much to extrapolate far with this particular incident.
That said, I'm not a fan of the scanners. But I prefer if we chose our arguments against them with care.
Sort of. It's less enlightening given that this sort of violent outburst and childish hostility occur in pretty much all fields. We've even seen it in astronauts. I kind of think we're stretching to connect this story with the screeners.
NASA is, in fact, wasting chances.
Let's look at Cassini, shall we? It started planning around 1989, was launched in 1997, arrived in 2004, and will die no later than 2017. That's nearly 10 years from conception to launch, and 15 to orbital insertion. For Uranus and Neptune, the time to orbital insertion is even longer, so probably nearer 20 years. In other words, we should have started planning this mission about 10 years ago. That would have also been consistent with NASA's earlier pace, launching a flagship per decade or so. That was dropped during the 1990s thanks to Goldin, sadly.
Meanwhile, yes, NASA has been exploring Mars and launched a quick Pluto flyby since then, but those missions aren't in the same class as Cassini or Voyager. They're small, quick missions which fill one scientific niche, but flagships, long missing from the drawing board, fill another.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this story isn't really about my rights online. It's not even about my rights at all as much as an example of hundreds of assault cases that seem to happen everyday.
(In this case, it also sounds like there was a decidedly hostile working environment going on and that the supervisor was way, way out of line, too. Not that it justifies a physical assault, but still.)
The next mission is going to Jupiter, actually, to visiting the icy moons. That's been determined. Uranus and Neptune were never very seriously on the table, sadly. (The candidates this round were Jupiter system, Icy sats of Jupiter, Titan, and Enceladus. And Enceladus wasn't even given much of a chance, in truth.)
Same way you change speeds: use the main engine to create an acceleration.
Ah, yes. The "ugly bags of mostly water". How I loathe them.
"It has already given us remarkable views of Uranus and Neptune, planets we had never seen close-up before."
And, sadly, we haven't been back since. I can't quite bring myself to call this a travesty, but it does seem like a wasted chance to explore some still-mysterious planets. (Granted, it's expensive to send orbiters out there.)
Yes, ideally every class would be small enough to have a full class discussion. But I've seen lit classes break up into smaller groups and discuss (prof circulated). It can be done. Less than ideal, but you often teach under less than ideal conditions.
Absolutely. A lot of science is about making the argument is convincing as possible by eliminating as many of the obvious objections as you can. But even if you did the Galileo experiment as you suggested, you'd have distinct differences in the different balls you rolled. (I know, I just made 25 students do it last week.) So the question is, can you explain those differences away by invoking another reasonable effect? (In our case, air resistance.)
In the end, it's still a judgment call. More so for cutting-edge science than, say, the Galileo experiment, which has been done enough times that we've worked out a lot of the kinks. (Remember, he didn't have stop watches or electric triggers.) But still: at some point, it's a matter of what you, the fellow scientist, find sufficiently convincing.
The methods were subjective? This is science? Maybe it's me. Maybe I don't understand the term "science".
Not to be insulting, but since you suggested the dichotomy: yeah, you don't understand science apparently. All science is subjective. I know teachers paint a simple picture of a nice flow-chart that removes any human element to it in high schools, but that's about as realistic as the picture of government you get. Reality is more complex. Scientists have to always judge whether a result is significant, when one theory is better than another (hint: it's rarely clear-cut, which is why new theories take years to get accepted in most cases), and which behaviors are due to noise and which should be worrisome.
For example, do you believe that objects fall at the same rate? Odds are you've never done an experiment that showed that. You might had done an experiment that approximately showed that, but I can almost be assured that your experiment showed different falling times for different objects. Now, there are many reasons why this can happen: air resistance (Galileo's own explanation), measurement errors, jitter in the release mechanism, etc. And you can be assured that almost anyone would agree that it's fair to ignore those effects in drawing conclusions. But that's a judgment call, requiring a human to make the call. It's subjective where you draw those lines, based on past experience and various biases.
Science is subjective. It always has been. This isn't even a new observation, Kuhn made a fairly big point of it more than 50 years ago.
Actually, it generally shows you can cram. It's not the same as real learning. I've seen plenty of students who could ace an exam and still couldn't apply a thing they'd learned in a real situation (even in a lab).
Real world situations mean having to actually use what your know, not simply rattle off facts back to someone. That's a skill you can learn (and should learn) in college, but most exams don't teach that at all.
That's not really true. I have classes in which they are too large to take attendance and I still get discussions and group activities daily. Your wife seems to be assuming that discussions have to involve the whole class in a single discussion.
That said, I would never use a system like this to take attendance. Quite apart from the silliness, there are a lot of privacy issues.
Exactly. Exams tell you very little about real learning. If your goal is to get students to have a bunch of facts and techniques memorized for the duration of an exam, then by all means, examine away. There's even a fair chance that a few of those things will persist more than a week after the exam. But if you want real, useful* learning, you have to do more than dish up fact and then test regurgitation.
* In a day and age with Google and smart phones, memorizing facts has limited use in the world.
My first asteroid was named "Bob". You speak heresy and I shall now make righteous war upon you, unbeliever.
Even before you got the last bit, I was thinking, "That would explain why the tree of life is rooted in the thermophiles." Nice. :-)
I was actually thinking of the oxygen ratios in the Greenland rocks, which go back 3.8-4 bya, but I was aware of the Australian zircons as well. I hadn't heard/didn't recall them showing the fractionation beyond 4 bya, though. I find it difficult to imagine Earth being very conducive to life before this with the Late Heavy Bombardment ending around this time.
It's asteroids all the way down, silly.
No, it's known that they're just as fragile. Making a molecule in space yields the same physical chemistry as making it on Earth. The dissociation energy is the same (unless you're arguing isotopic fractionation, which shouldn't change things much either way).
Organics can be delivered to Earth on meteorites. The interiors don't get hot. ALH84001 seems to show exactly this. (You can debate the possibility of contamination from the Antarctic, but it's not overwhelmingly obvious that that's what happened.) The question is less, "Can we get organics?" and more, "Can we get the majority of the early organics that way?"
In this case, yes, no one is calling them "alive". But the panspermia hypothesis does speculate that live could be delivered here, so I didn't want to rule that option out is all. :-)
Yes, thank you. I'm aware of that, but I'm not sure why you mention it. It's not a question I was asking in the first place and it's not really the reason Earth was inhospitable for water and organics. (Also, I'm fairly skeptical of the Lagrange point model. I have never seen any reason that you'd need it to form there or that it would even be likely to do so. It strikes me as a horrible place to form a second planet.)
Earth was inhospitable for a variety of reasons, including the frequent bombardment of comets and asteroids. (The Moon-forming impact was just one of many that would have repeatedly sterilized the Earth in the first half billion years or so.) Couple that with the accretionary heat that Earth had to radiate off for quite a while, and this place wasn't pleasant.
"abiogenesis" means start of life from non-life. I dropped the prefix because I don't care where the life comes from in this case. (If meteorites bring in living organisms which colonize Earth, that's biogenesis for Earth, but not abiotic.)
Now, I'm not a cosmologist or anything, but I think Mr. Scientists isn't mentioning that "earth already had plenty" because the Earth did not become conducive to water or organic molecules until relatively recently.
And that's what I'm taking issue with. If the planet couldn't support water and organics, it couldn't support water and organics. Space-organics are just as fragile to heat as terrestrial-made versions.
Also, "relatively recently" is pretty lame in this case. The first 10% of Earth's history was inhospitable for life. We know it quickly recovered because there's evidence for life going back between 3.8 and 4 billion years.
I'm familiar with the YORP effect. Unless the asteroid were spinning very quickly, it's still not clear how this helps or why it's relevant. If anything, it would push the water towards the spin equator.
I'm not sure how the Yarkovsky effect, which alters orbits, would redistribute water.
As for spectroscopy, it's a fairly well-established and reliable method. Probably more than half of astronomy relies on it, in fact. So I'm willing to trust them when they say there are organics up there.