As a fellow scientist, I'd like to second these remarks. (Well, perhaps you're being a bit too harsh on the social skills of most scientists.) We're competitive as hell. Grants are awarded not just based on previous results, but reputation. And we all know that if we lie, we'll get caught. Someone will eventually look at the data and realize we fudged something. When that happens (and it's usually pretty soon, especially for such a hot issue as AGW), you're reputation will be in tatters and, if you lied, you'll lose your job. You won't get grant money and you'll have to find a new career.
Meanwhile, the various industries that are fighting the environmental movement have their own researchers who would leap on any clear problems in the climate studies. So saying that this is a conspiracy is like believing the Moon landings were a hoax, in spite of the fact the the Soviets even signed off on them.
And Gov. Perry and the Utah government stand to gain, so they're also taking BS? So, basically, everyone is wrong?
By definition, the only people who can research a question thoroughly enough to process the data have to be paid for their efforts, so your dismissal of scientists for getting paid seems a bit silly, doesn't it? In reality, scientists might temporarily get more grants if they found something major, but someone else would shoot them down (there's a huge career to made out of it if you can disprove AGW) pretty quickly and if they're that sloppy or worse, liars, that'll kill their careers. This is a profession where you live and die on your reputation and your past work. This isn't punditry (or Slashdot posting) where you can be wrong (or worse) time after time and still come back strong for the next round.
By the way, what does that graph even show? Temperature of what? Who is tracking it? As you're so keen to ask, who made the graph and who paid for it? A graph without context or definition might insinuate, but it means nothing.
WHEREAS, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a blend of government officials and scientists, does no independent climate research but relies on global climate researchers;
What do you propose to collect independent data from 1950 to 2010? Time travel? Of course you have to rely on global climate researchers.
More to the point, it's not actually true (the IPCC is made up of climate researchers who are asked to participate based on their research on, yes, climate). And who does Utah want researching climate issues, if not climate researchers? Shoe salesmen?
Unless there's a very different story that I've never heard of:
a) That was Indiana b) They never considered a law making it anything c) They certainly didn't consider making it 3, because that's what the Bible says d) No such law was ever passed.
Basically, they were looking at a law recognizing some local crackpot who offered them free use of his method of squaring the circle (which intrinsically involved pi, of course). As it turned out, pi can be read as having multiple values in his work anyway. (It's not entirely clear what he was saying since what he claims to have done isn't possible to begin with.) They were set straight by a friendly, passing mathematician. (More or less literally true, I'm pleased to say.)
As an astronomy professor and long-time amateur observer, I second this list very strongly. (It was the list I was basically going to post, only not as well written.)
Choose a good mix of these and the students will come away happy and a little smarter for the experience, well worth the effort.
Jupiter: They won't see any cloud bands -- just a glowing white dot. They might see phases on it. They'll see the Galilean moons as four points of light indistinguishable from stars.
No, no phases. Jupiter's phase angle is never about about 11, 12 degrees. (And then it's pretty low to the horizon.) However, the moons of Jupiter are visible and they are usually pretty obvious: they're clearly co-linear and special. Choose the right night and you can see their relative arrangement change, too.
Venus: They'll see phases on a white dot, nothing else.
Depends on the timing. Venus goes long periods near full phase, which is lovely to see naked eye, but no fun in the telescope.
M31: A faint, barely visible blur
The Andromeda galaxy should definitely be visible. It's visible naked eye if you have dark skies. The trouble with it is that it's too big to see through most telescopes.
With in the technical fields (fields controlled ulitmately by perfomance instead of popularity) like engineering, the science and business, there almost an even balance between left and right.
Definitely not my experience in the physical sciences. We definitely lean left, at least among the people who speak up about politics.
Do you have any sources to back your claims up (going back to, ideally, your claim that academics (which you didn't define) being against economic productivity)? Your claims sound authoritative, unless you know actual academics.
I think we should keep that in mind when people start impunging motives.
You play the hurt party, but you haven't defended your fairly inflammatory comments at all. This post merely suggests that liberal political groups (and conservative ones) use fears to gain power. Earlier, you made a much more sweeping (and, so far, undefended) statement about academics. Academics have little to gain by fear-mongering in this way, so your post, while reasonable, doesn't really defend your earlier post's rather offensive claims.
It is fair to say that the vast majority hold center-left political views, but this usually doesn't mean outright hostility to capitalism,
In fact, let's go further. Many scientists hold patents which they think may make them money (a very capitalistic goal). Most that I know are sufficiently affluent to be pretty well invested in the stock market or in various businesses. Attacking the economy is not something that most academics are interested in, we benefit from the status quo more than the average person does. The only people I seem to hear making the claim otherwise are right-wing pundits who seem to want to cast doubt on the honesty of researchers who are finding things that they don't like.
But the book is the book, regardless of what newspaper I see review it. The app may not be the same app on a different platform. As much as I dislike MS Office on Windows, it's much worse on a Mac. Platform does matter.
And I'll wager that competing papers don't quote each other's book reviews, in any case. That would be promoting the other paper by both discussing it ("no such thing as bad publicity") and suggesting it's reviews are a good source of information.
Apple doesn't want to list an app that mentions a competitor. (And in a fairly irrelevant way, too. The fact that another version of the app won an award doesn't necessary have any bearing on the iPhone incarnation, does it?) So, in effect, they don't want to advertise for the competition on their own system.
OK, maybe it seems a bit petty, but this isn't really censorship. It seems more like intelligent business practice.
Pretty much bang-on. The only way to catch deliberate, willful fraud is to repeat each step of the experiment. That takes time (of order as much time as the original experiment) and cost, both of which would get pretty expensive quickly. In addition, you face the difficulty of using competitive peers to check each others' work as gatekeepers. (It'd be easy for me to shoot down my nearest rivals in a way that would be difficult to check against me. And I'm the best person to check my rivals.)
In the end, the best way to view a peer-reviewed paper is, "This looks accurate and reasonable enough to share with you all." Not, "This is true," but enough to share around with other academics. Sadly, real-world uses often confuse this with a stamp of approval for accuracy.
(Also note that any peer-review process, short of having a lot of people/group repeat each experiment independently, will be prone to willful fraud. The nature of any security is that once the precautions are known, someone can find a way around them.)
Actually, I don't see a single place where the SciAm article lambastes the British. One of the researchers notes that they could have used the techniques earlier and beaten the American team. The article seems to quote the researcher twice, but it's not really attacking anyone for it, just noting an odd historical quirk I'd say.
Why read malice into it?
(And if you don't want to read about the history of the study, then skip those paragraphs? Some of us find the stories interesting.)
First of all, why bother linking to PopSci when the original story, even as quoted by PopSci, is at Spaceflight Now?
(Of course, the title of the Slashdot piece is pretty bad as well, so I be too surprised.)
Second, the quote in both the blurb and the PopSci article is taken out of context. The original, from Spaceflight Now:
"But we do believe that we are very, very close to proving there is or has been life there," McKay tells Spaceflight Now.
The words at the beginning make a world of difference in terms of McKay's attitude. He's not asserting something he can't know, he's stating he, personally, feels confident. (But it is stated as an opinion.) That's just crappy reporting. (Or, in this case, not even reporting: copying and pasting.)
All that said, it'll be exciting if it turns up anything, but don't hold your breath. There are just so many ways to contaminate the samples or to produce a lot of the effects that they've seen abiotically that I don't think we'll answer this question from Earth. I suspect to get most scientists to agree that there's life, we'll have to find it in situ.
After all, accretion would happen mostly from the "back" side (hemisphere opposite the orbital direction).
Not really. Simulations show that the accretion happens pretty much symmetrically from both sides.
The planetoid wouldn't "catch" anything in its orbit, but would be over taken by things on more elliptic orbits.
In its precise orbit, no. But from nearby circular orbits? Yes. And the planets tend to feed on stuff from nearby like that. (They definitely have access, where is chance strikes from elliptical orbits are harder to engineer.)
Actually, no. Original poster is right, the gas in the disk orbits slightly slower than the solids do. So there is drag. However, the gas is pretty tenuous, so the drag only really affects things that are small, say less than a meter or so. (Or so classical theory has argued.)
How is Halley's comet more significant than the discovery of the first moons in our solar system, apart from our own? (Long thought to be a "planet", not a moon in the modern sense.) With a stroke, Galileo established that other planets could have systems around them, not just Earth. Given that conventional views were that Earth was the center of all heavenly motions, that was pretty major.
Thank you, this exact issue has been pissing me off for quite a while now. There's been a rather substantial movement to retroactive validate the Church's behavior toward Galileo for about a decade (maybe more, but that's how long I've been watching it). Galileo wasn't the most politically astute or generous person to his enemies, but he also didn't deserve the stuff the Church sent at him. The folio with his Inquisition record, for example, was clearly tampered with, with documents clearly added into places to make them appear older than they were.
In the end, Galileo's only defense should have been that his book was allowed by the Church censors. If there had been anything objectionable in it, they should have caught it and shot the book down. Failing that, they should have taken the blame, not Galileo.
As for making Simplicio a parody of Pope Urban, the only thing I've ever heard of that indicates that this was the goal was one quote from Urban put into Simplicio's* mouth. One quote a parody does not make; it's more likely (in my mind, anyway) that Galileo was trying to address one of Urban's objections and was clumsy in how he presented it. (On the other hand, as soon as it was found in the book, Galileo's enemies in the Church went to the Pope to decry Galileo. Note that the Pope didn't get offended on his own, he was goaded into offense.)
* Also note that the name was based on a real historical figure's name.
I think that you're ignoring what probability is all about, here. It's perfectly meaningful to give a number, along with error bars. (Which is precisely what's been done.) Just because the asteroid could be anywhere within a wide range in 20 years doesn't mean all of those locations are equally probable.
There isn't a single number in all of science, apart from defined quantities, that doesn't have error bars. This does not mean that we shouldn't report the mass of the Earth or your survival estimates for various cancer treatments.
By the way, "There are no statistics on spin direction" is patently untrue. I've read whole papers on the topic. They're just not helpful in this case because spins are pretty broadly distributed.
I'm not selectively quoting, I'm reading their clearly stated conclusions right in their abstract. Error estimation doesn't mean "we have no clue what's going to happen" and you should know that it doesn't.
Instead of being insulting, why not read it yourself?
A small estimated Earth impact probability remained for 2036.
and
While the potential for impact in 2036 will likely be excluded in 2013 (if not 2011) using ground-based optical measurements,
No, the odds of impact aren't zero. But they're not anywhere near high enough to be really freaked, either. You're more likely to die of swine flu in the US, after all. So no, we astrophysicists are not trying to treat you like a child, we're trying to explain to you what these odds mean.
(Note that no one is saying that we shouldn't look at ways to protect ourselves from asteroids in general. But this particular politician's claims and sources seem questionable and I, for one, don't think he's going to lead us to any real improvements in our protection.)
Slashdot Mirror
As a fellow scientist, I'd like to second these remarks. (Well, perhaps you're being a bit too harsh on the social skills of most scientists.) We're competitive as hell. Grants are awarded not just based on previous results, but reputation. And we all know that if we lie, we'll get caught. Someone will eventually look at the data and realize we fudged something. When that happens (and it's usually pretty soon, especially for such a hot issue as AGW), you're reputation will be in tatters and, if you lied, you'll lose your job. You won't get grant money and you'll have to find a new career.
Meanwhile, the various industries that are fighting the environmental movement have their own researchers who would leap on any clear problems in the climate studies. So saying that this is a conspiracy is like believing the Moon landings were a hoax, in spite of the fact the the Soviets even signed off on them.
And Gov. Perry and the Utah government stand to gain, so they're also taking BS? So, basically, everyone is wrong?
By definition, the only people who can research a question thoroughly enough to process the data have to be paid for their efforts, so your dismissal of scientists for getting paid seems a bit silly, doesn't it? In reality, scientists might temporarily get more grants if they found something major, but someone else would shoot them down (there's a huge career to made out of it if you can disprove AGW) pretty quickly and if they're that sloppy or worse, liars, that'll kill their careers. This is a profession where you live and die on your reputation and your past work. This isn't punditry (or Slashdot posting) where you can be wrong (or worse) time after time and still come back strong for the next round.
By the way, what does that graph even show? Temperature of what? Who is tracking it? As you're so keen to ask, who made the graph and who paid for it? A graph without context or definition might insinuate, but it means nothing.
WHEREAS, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a blend of government officials and scientists, does no independent climate research but relies on global climate researchers;
What do you propose to collect independent data from 1950 to 2010? Time travel? Of course you have to rely on global climate researchers.
More to the point, it's not actually true (the IPCC is made up of climate researchers who are asked to participate based on their research on, yes, climate). And who does Utah want researching climate issues, if not climate researchers? Shoe salesmen?
Except, as has been noted repeatedly here, most of the electric power in British Colombia is hydroelectric.
Unless there's a very different story that I've never heard of:
a) That was Indiana
b) They never considered a law making it anything
c) They certainly didn't consider making it 3, because that's what the Bible says
d) No such law was ever passed.
Basically, they were looking at a law recognizing some local crackpot who offered them free use of his method of squaring the circle (which intrinsically involved pi, of course). As it turned out, pi can be read as having multiple values in his work anyway. (It's not entirely clear what he was saying since what he claims to have done isn't possible to begin with.) They were set straight by a friendly, passing mathematician. (More or less literally true, I'm pleased to say.)
Underwood Dudley has written about the whole, weird story, but the short version is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
As an astronomy professor and long-time amateur observer, I second this list very strongly. (It was the list I was basically going to post, only not as well written.)
Choose a good mix of these and the students will come away happy and a little smarter for the experience, well worth the effort.
Jupiter: They won't see any cloud bands -- just a glowing white dot. They might see phases on it. They'll see the Galilean moons as four points of light indistinguishable from stars.
No, no phases. Jupiter's phase angle is never about about 11, 12 degrees. (And then it's pretty low to the horizon.) However, the moons of Jupiter are visible and they are usually pretty obvious: they're clearly co-linear and special. Choose the right night and you can see their relative arrangement change, too.
Venus: They'll see phases on a white dot, nothing else.
Depends on the timing. Venus goes long periods near full phase, which is lovely to see naked eye, but no fun in the telescope.
M31: A faint, barely visible blur
The Andromeda galaxy should definitely be visible. It's visible naked eye if you have dark skies. The trouble with it is that it's too big to see through most telescopes.
Yes, but ice isn't liquid water. Which is, as I read this, the point.
With in the technical fields (fields controlled ulitmately by perfomance instead of popularity) like engineering, the science and business, there almost an even balance between left and right.
Definitely not my experience in the physical sciences. We definitely lean left, at least among the people who speak up about politics.
Do you have any sources to back your claims up (going back to, ideally, your claim that academics (which you didn't define) being against economic productivity)? Your claims sound authoritative, unless you know actual academics.
I think we should keep that in mind when people start impunging motives.
You play the hurt party, but you haven't defended your fairly inflammatory comments at all. This post merely suggests that liberal political groups (and conservative ones) use fears to gain power. Earlier, you made a much more sweeping (and, so far, undefended) statement about academics. Academics have little to gain by fear-mongering in this way, so your post, while reasonable, doesn't really defend your earlier post's rather offensive claims.
It is fair to say that the vast majority hold center-left political views, but this usually doesn't mean outright hostility to capitalism,
In fact, let's go further. Many scientists hold patents which they think may make them money (a very capitalistic goal). Most that I know are sufficiently affluent to be pretty well invested in the stock market or in various businesses. Attacking the economy is not something that most academics are interested in, we benefit from the status quo more than the average person does. The only people I seem to hear making the claim otherwise are right-wing pundits who seem to want to cast doubt on the honesty of researchers who are finding things that they don't like.
But the book is the book, regardless of what newspaper I see review it. The app may not be the same app on a different platform. As much as I dislike MS Office on Windows, it's much worse on a Mac. Platform does matter.
And I'll wager that competing papers don't quote each other's book reviews, in any case. That would be promoting the other paper by both discussing it ("no such thing as bad publicity") and suggesting it's reviews are a good source of information.
Apple doesn't want to list an app that mentions a competitor. (And in a fairly irrelevant way, too. The fact that another version of the app won an award doesn't necessary have any bearing on the iPhone incarnation, does it?) So, in effect, they don't want to advertise for the competition on their own system.
OK, maybe it seems a bit petty, but this isn't really censorship. It seems more like intelligent business practice.
Pretty much bang-on. The only way to catch deliberate, willful fraud is to repeat each step of the experiment. That takes time (of order as much time as the original experiment) and cost, both of which would get pretty expensive quickly. In addition, you face the difficulty of using competitive peers to check each others' work as gatekeepers. (It'd be easy for me to shoot down my nearest rivals in a way that would be difficult to check against me. And I'm the best person to check my rivals.)
In the end, the best way to view a peer-reviewed paper is, "This looks accurate and reasonable enough to share with you all." Not, "This is true," but enough to share around with other academics. Sadly, real-world uses often confuse this with a stamp of approval for accuracy.
(Also note that any peer-review process, short of having a lot of people/group repeat each experiment independently, will be prone to willful fraud. The nature of any security is that once the precautions are known, someone can find a way around them.)
Actually, I don't see a single place where the SciAm article lambastes the British. One of the researchers notes that they could have used the techniques earlier and beaten the American team. The article seems to quote the researcher twice, but it's not really attacking anyone for it, just noting an odd historical quirk I'd say.
Why read malice into it?
(And if you don't want to read about the history of the study, then skip those paragraphs? Some of us find the stories interesting.)
First of all, why bother linking to PopSci when the original story, even as quoted by PopSci, is at Spaceflight Now?
(Of course, the title of the Slashdot piece is pretty bad as well, so I be too surprised.)
Second, the quote in both the blurb and the PopSci article is taken out of context. The original, from Spaceflight Now:
"But we do believe that we are very, very close to proving there is or has been life there," McKay tells Spaceflight Now.
The words at the beginning make a world of difference in terms of McKay's attitude. He's not asserting something he can't know, he's stating he, personally, feels confident. (But it is stated as an opinion.) That's just crappy reporting. (Or, in this case, not even reporting: copying and pasting.)
All that said, it'll be exciting if it turns up anything, but don't hold your breath. There are just so many ways to contaminate the samples or to produce a lot of the effects that they've seen abiotically that I don't think we'll answer this question from Earth. I suspect to get most scientists to agree that there's life, we'll have to find it in situ.
After all, accretion would happen mostly from the "back" side (hemisphere opposite the orbital direction).
Not really. Simulations show that the accretion happens pretty much symmetrically from both sides.
The planetoid wouldn't "catch" anything in its orbit, but would be over taken by things on more elliptic orbits.
In its precise orbit, no. But from nearby circular orbits? Yes. And the planets tend to feed on stuff from nearby like that. (They definitely have access, where is chance strikes from elliptical orbits are harder to engineer.)
True, but I think what the OP meant was that it'd lose energy and move toward the Sun.
Actually, no. Original poster is right, the gas in the disk orbits slightly slower than the solids do. So there is drag. However, the gas is pretty tenuous, so the drag only really affects things that are small, say less than a meter or so. (Or so classical theory has argued.)
How is Halley's comet more significant than the discovery of the first moons in our solar system, apart from our own? (Long thought to be a "planet", not a moon in the modern sense.) With a stroke, Galileo established that other planets could have systems around them, not just Earth. Given that conventional views were that Earth was the center of all heavenly motions, that was pretty major.
Thank you, this exact issue has been pissing me off for quite a while now. There's been a rather substantial movement to retroactive validate the Church's behavior toward Galileo for about a decade (maybe more, but that's how long I've been watching it). Galileo wasn't the most politically astute or generous person to his enemies, but he also didn't deserve the stuff the Church sent at him. The folio with his Inquisition record, for example, was clearly tampered with, with documents clearly added into places to make them appear older than they were.
In the end, Galileo's only defense should have been that his book was allowed by the Church censors. If there had been anything objectionable in it, they should have caught it and shot the book down. Failing that, they should have taken the blame, not Galileo.
As for making Simplicio a parody of Pope Urban, the only thing I've ever heard of that indicates that this was the goal was one quote from Urban put into Simplicio's* mouth. One quote a parody does not make; it's more likely (in my mind, anyway) that Galileo was trying to address one of Urban's objections and was clumsy in how he presented it. (On the other hand, as soon as it was found in the book, Galileo's enemies in the Church went to the Pope to decry Galileo. Note that the Pope didn't get offended on his own, he was goaded into offense.)
* Also note that the name was based on a real historical figure's name.
I think that you're ignoring what probability is all about, here. It's perfectly meaningful to give a number, along with error bars. (Which is precisely what's been done.) Just because the asteroid could be anywhere within a wide range in 20 years doesn't mean all of those locations are equally probable.
There isn't a single number in all of science, apart from defined quantities, that doesn't have error bars. This does not mean that we shouldn't report the mass of the Earth or your survival estimates for various cancer treatments.
By the way, "There are no statistics on spin direction" is patently untrue. I've read whole papers on the topic. They're just not helpful in this case because spins are pretty broadly distributed.
I'm not selectively quoting, I'm reading their clearly stated conclusions right in their abstract. Error estimation doesn't mean "we have no clue what's going to happen" and you should know that it doesn't.
Stop trying to hype this.
(Feel free to reply, but I won't be responding)
To be fair, that seems par for most politics. Didn't G. H. W. Bush mandate that NASA send people to Mars back around 1990, for example?
The sad thing is, statements without follow through are probably worse for the objectives than silence.
Instead of being insulting, why not read it yourself?
A small estimated Earth impact probability remained for 2036.
and
While the potential for impact in 2036 will likely be excluded in 2013 (if not 2011) using ground-based optical
measurements,
No, the odds of impact aren't zero. But they're not anywhere near high enough to be really freaked, either. You're more likely to die of swine flu in the US, after all. So no, we astrophysicists are not trying to treat you like a child, we're trying to explain to you what these odds mean.
(Note that no one is saying that we shouldn't look at ways to protect ourselves from asteroids in general. But this particular politician's claims and sources seem questionable and I, for one, don't think he's going to lead us to any real improvements in our protection.)