I disagree. It's nice to have them, but it's not important. What is important is to recognize when there's a significant discrepancy between the model and observation, but you don't have to know right off the bat how to interpret that. When double refraction was first measured, it was noted that it didn't fit the model of light then widely used, but they didn't have a "backup" model to step into place. Often, it's the anomalous observation itself that suggests the model. You can't conceivably have a contingency plan for every bizarre anomaly you might encounter when testing out a theory.
I think it's provocative that when string theory was highly regarded, the fact that it employed 10 or 11 dimensions was considered something deep and mysterious about it, but now that it is beginning to be criticized, that same fact is ridiculed (as it is in the cited review). I'm not equipped to judge string theory, but I don't like it when people decide what is worthy of respect based simply on how commonsensical it is. Too often, people are so unwilling to admit that there are things they may not ever be able to understand well enough to critique meaningfully. They insist that because it makes no sense to them, it must be nonsense.
That is nonsense, if you like. I'm all for informed criticism (and for all I know, the physicists mentioned in the review are indeed bringing that to the table), but the miasma of revisionist innuendo that surrounds that nucleus of scientific review isn't very productive. I suppose some of it is necessary to inform public policy regarding scientific research, but there ought to be much less posturing than there is.
I think, according to the IAU, the Moon is simply called "Moon," just as our planet is just called "Earth." The generic term for a body that orbits a larger non-fusor (that is, a non-star) is "satellite," ultimately (through French) from Latin satelles, meaning "attendant."
Nobody is mentioning it because it isn't true. Pluto is a (major) planet for the time being, at least until September, when the IAU will be deciding on a criterion, or set of criteria, for determining whether a body in orbit about a star (specifically, a fusor) is a planet.
The variation is only a fraction of a percent, hardly perceptible to the unaided eye. Perhaps if you wait long enough, the force of gravity will compress the globe into the right shape for you. Besides, the Earth isn't quite an oblate spheroid, either (by ellipsoid is usually meant a prolate spheroid, I think); the southern hemisphere is ever so slightly bulgier than the northern hemisphere.
Furthermore, this thing is supposed to be able to maps of other worlds, such as Mercury, whose oblateness is probably pretty minor.
I think you're mixing up two different parts of the attraction. The woman's head in the globe is a simple bust. Her features are then projected onto the bust, allowing her to "speak." A similar technique is used for Buzz Lightyear in the Emperor Zorg attraction (I forget the name) in Toon Town.
The following faces are done by employing concave faces (that is, caved inward, toward the wall) lit from below, rather than the more traditional convex faces lit from above. Because both concavity and lighting are inverted, the shadows are essentially the same in both cases, but with the concave faces, the figures appear to turn toward you as you move from side to side. It's a remarkably spooky effect, if you haven't encountered it before. It works better if you only look at it with one eye, or from further away. Closer up and with binocular vision, you can tell that the faces are concave.
The SoS is sort of like the woman's head in a globe, but writ much larger, and with a focus on science, rather than creepiness.
The projection need not be from the center of the globe. It could be from the bottom. The problem with that approach is that the image quality in the bottom half of the globe would be relatively poor. The way the system is designed now, most of the globe, maybe 75 percent, is better than the entire bottom half would be with a projection from the bottom of the sphere, and the mediocre parts of the current projection are much more limited than they would be, projected from the bottom.
That isn't quite the way that lenses work, however. You can't put a huge lens some distance away from the globe, and use the top part of the lens to project over the north pole, and the bottom half to project under the south pole. Instead, pretty much the entire lens is used to focus the image of the light source to any given point on the globe. You can illuminate more than half of the globe with a very large lens, but the parts at the periphery won't be as well illuminated, since only part of the lens can be used to focus light onto those points. For instance, with a lens twice as wide as the globe, the north pole will only be illuminated about 20 percent as well as the point on the equator facing the lens. Even in the limit of an infinitely large lens, the best you can do is 50 percent illumination of the pole.
I'm guessing that by six projectors, you mean to put them along each of the axes (that is, at the points of an octahedron, or the faces of a cube). That certainly works, but if you put them at the corners of a tetrahedron, you can also achieve complete coverage, provided your projectors are at least 3 radii away from the center of the sphere. Using six merely allows you to reduce that margin to the square root of 3. (I think. Someone please check my math.)
But, as it turns out, these folks aren't going for complete coverage. With all four projectors along the globe's equator, there cannot be coverage of the poles. My guess is that they don't care because (a) the top pole is blocked by the suspension wires, and (b) the bottom pole is typically difficult to access. Furthermore, in many cases, the poles reveal the least contrast in data.
By the way, the projected image at the periphery isn't as badly distorted as it might seem at first. As I recall, Mare Orientale on the Moon was first identified as a concentric circular formation, located on the edge of the Moon's visible face, when images taken from the Earth were projected onto a sphere. The detail wasn't bad at all! A similar method can be used, for instance, to divine the actual shape of Mare Crisium, and so on.
The point is that you don't have to trust the U.S. government in the case of AES. AES is a subset of Rijndael, whose entire specification is wide open (and not developed by the U.S., for that matter). You can verify for yourself that it is robust, or get someone you trust to do it for you, if you lack the expertise. You'd have to do that anyway with any algorithm.
In fact, I suspect that if the U.S. government (or at least, the NSA) wanted to snoop on you, they would only be too happy to let you pick your own encryption system. Chances are good it would be less resistant to snooping than AES. Of course, if you don't care about performance, you could always choose 3DES, which has been poked at for quite a while. But--oops--that's based on DES, which also was developed by the U.S. government (although it is loosely based on IBM's Lucifer).
I'm sure you're not entirely serious, but "archaic" and "obsolete" are obviously incorrect, since they are in current usage in the U.S. The U.S. system cannot be wrong (except from a technical elegance point of view), and it's not primitive in any meaningful sense. That leaves "irregular," which it certainly is.
Sorry. If it were up to me, we'd have standardized on metric a long time ago, but we're too busy legislating morality. So we'll have to get back to you on that.
I think the units used in the U.S. are actually an amalgam of various pre-Imperial systems. The U.S. gallon, for instance, is not equal to the Imperial gallon; it's a pre-Imperial gallon (back before the Sith took over).
My guess is that they will be looking for chemical signatures in the atmosphere of the planet, via absorption lines. That can tell you, indirectly, about the presence of life. For instance, one of the chemical indicators on the Earth is the presence of methane in an atmosphere containing significant amounts of oxygen. Ordinarily, methane "likes" to combine with oxygen to form water vapor and carbon dioxide. The reaction can go the other way, but it does so much slower. As a result, in a "dead" atmosphere, an equilibrium amount of methane exists, which is very tiny.
The Earth's atmosphere contains about 2 ppm of methane, by volume. Even that much methane, though, is out of equilibrium. It must therefore be continually replenished, ostensibly by life. We happen to know that it's largely biological in origin, from animals like cows. (I just wanted to mention "cows.") Now, that sort of thing doesn't have to be biological; it might, for instance, be volcanic, so that possibility has to be addressed: Biologically produced methane tends to be accompanied by ethane, while volcanic methane tends to hang around sulfur dioxide, and so on.
Eliminating volcanically produced methane doesn't mean that it must be life, because it might just be some non-life thing you haven't thought of. That's why it's useful to skim around the solar system, looking for the various non-life ways that methane might be produced, and how to tell the difference. At some point, if you're able to eliminate enough different alternatives, you begin to have confidence that you've detected life.
If that's the tack they're taking, it might explain why the detectors are looking in both the infra-red and the visible. Water vapor absorption lines are in the infra-red; methane absorption lines are in the visible. (They largely account for the color of Uranus and Neptune, for instance.) I look forward to seeing what they're able to see, even if they don't succeed in detecting signs of life.
Actually, I wonder if you can defeat this crack by shifting your hands by one key just for the password. It won't work if the sounds are entirely dependent on the keys, but my intuitive guess is that they aren't, and that the finger you use to press the keys also matters.
A couple of decades ago I spent a couple of summers working on implementing a relaxation algorithm to solve the same kind of problem in a different arena: font-independent OCR. Internal pattern matching was used to sort the characters into equivalence classes, and then a relaxation algorithm, fed with digram and trigram frequences, was used to solve the "cryptogram" for the letters. I wonder what method they're using these days...
John Hasler wrote: If you don't want your children to play such games don't let them do so. They are your children. You control them.
This evinces such a malevolent notion of raising children it's hard to believe anyone literally maintains this position.
Children are not (or at least, should not be) puppets. If you raise them as puppets, you will end up with either a drone, or someone who resents being treated like one.
Some children will want to buy a violent game, yes. It's the rare healthy adult who never experienced any kind of proscribed "urge." We become healthy adults in part because we learn the consequences of our actions.
Nonetheless, some consequences are simply too risky, so we decide that it's not a good idea to expose everyone to them. We don't allow children to buy alcohol, because they can get lethally intoxicated on much less alcohol, because they don't have the experience to notice when that's happening, and because if they were able to buy it themselves, it would be a lot harder for us sober, responsible adults (ahem, ahem) to ration that alcohol.
Violent games may not be as lethal as alcohol, but they're not something I'd want my 10-year-old to play. By restricting their purchase to adults, I reduce the number of places I have to watch from "all video game stores" to "any home console I'm not familiar with." The second set is much smaller than the first. At the same time, your ability to furnish the same games to your child is not very restricted at all, unless you are so busy that you cannot make it out to a video game store.
Since you are posting on slashdot, I presume that isn't the case.
Poul-Henning Kemp wrote: Whenever there is an astronomy story, there is some staggering beautiful "artists concept" color painting right next to it, and that picture has no scientific backing for 99% of its features.
So try to pull a modern kid out in the back yard and put their eye to a telescope and they will barely belive you when you tell them that they look at, because it looks nothing like in the papers.
I think you are confusing the claptrap targeted at beginning amateur astronomers with the astronomy material in most major newspapers/general magazines.
It is true that many astronomy articles are accompanied by a long-exposure shot by a large, meter-class telescope, and that you couldn't hope to see anything like that through an 8-inch telescope, but most people sadly will never look through an 8-inch telescope, or a 60 mm telescope, for that matter. The people who are really to blame in that regard are those who sell the 60 mm telescopes with the Hubble long-exposure images.
In regards to the original subthread, actually I don't feel that astronomy reporting is that bad, but neither is it that good. It might be because I'm very interested in astronomy and I take any inaccuracy somewhat personally. These days, I'm reading George Johnson's recent book on Cepheids, entitled Miss Leavitt's Stars. According to the inside flap blurb, Johnson is an award-winning science writer for the New York Times. Presumably, he's not just some hack.
I had gotten as far as page 6 when I encountered this little beauty: "Even [Orion's belt] is an accident of perspective. From other parts of space these three stars would form a triangle or their order would be reversed. Viewed from just the proper angle, all three of them would merge into a single light, an illusory triple star."
Ready, teeth? GNASH!
I defy anyone to take any three points that can be made into a triangle (and are therefore not collinear) and somehow see them as a single point. Granted, eyes aren't perfect and stars aren't point sources, so that if you look at them from far enough away, they'll appear to blend into a single point, and if you look at one from close enough up, it'll block out the light of the other two. But then it's not only so from "just the proper angle"!
Since it's a basic topic of this book that the stars aren't fireflies on a dark screen but suns strewn through three-dimensional space, it's at least a little depressing that a science writer can't get this right.
All this by way of saying that astronomy writing isn't all that hot.:)
Daniel Dvorkin wrote: One point that's touched on in TFA, but perhaps not given enough attention, is the spurious idea of "balance," usually personified by getting a few words from a serious scientist on one hand and a few paragraphs from a quack on the other.
Interestingly, I find that when I watch some of these "science" programs that often show up on the tube, I need the spurious balance because the people producing the show are basically ignorant of what makes a scientific proposition worthwhile. They don't know that anecdotal evidence is crap, that it's easy to select data here and there that supports practically any hypothesis you like.
Usually, this isn't a problem, because most of the quacks are pretty easy to pick out. But occasionally you have a skilled quack, who knows what kinds of things ring true, even if they aren't. Then I have to rely on "opposing counsel" to give me information on what the main interviewee has conveniently left out. It's pretty clear the producers have put in opposing counsel as a straw man foil, but even so, those few short moments on screen are enough for me to figure out what's what.
But I can tell, from programs on subjects on which I'm very knowledgeable (such as astronomy), that there is still pure smoke that is untagged as such. That tends to depress my confidence that I've properly identified the smoke in programs on subjects I'm not knowledgeable about (such as history).
Mike1024 wrote: Granted, some people believe evolution was guided by God, but if they're Christians (and there are a lot of christians in the US), that seems like a fine way to reconcile scientific fact with thier beliefs.
It's a way, yes, but I'm not sure it's a fine way. What does it mean to say that God guides evolution? Does anyone understand that in the same precise way that we understand natural selection?
Suppose I roll a dozen dice and record their sum. I do that a million times (by computer, one hopes!) and draw up a table of the results. Those results turn out to match, to a high degree of fidelity, the proportions represented by the normal distribution. It's such a good match that it's too fantastic to be mere coincidence.
One way to explain this outcome is that the roll of each die is uniformly distributed over the six possible values, and that the dice roll independently of each other, as well as of past rolls. Once one completely apprehends these basic principles, the fact that the normal distribution pops out the other end is unavoidable.
Or, we could explain it by saying that God guides the dice to follow the binomial distribution. To use a ludicrous line of reasoning, one might say that a formula containing a few figures arranged this way and that is so divorced from the physical reality of two dice that the only way they could have anything to do with one another is if someone intentionally arranged matters that way.
On the other hand, is it all that ludicrous? I could put it to you that the interactions of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine arranged this way and that is so divorced from the physical reality of evolving organisms that the only way they could have anything to do with one another is if someone intentionally arranged matters that way. Well, that's basically the watchmaker's argument--recast and a bit distorted, but in a form that would be supported by many.
What's more, explaining the roll of a dozen dice in terms of the rolls of the individual dice allows us to understand something complex in terms of something simpler, but attributing it all to some outside intelligence just postpones the problem. Why should that outside intelligence choose the binomial distribution? Why doesn't he or she pick something more easily digested, like the uniform distribution? How very inconsiderate of the Outside Intelligence!
I think that if people understood natural selection as well as it deserves to be understood, they would see that it must lead to evolution of some form. That doesn't prove that natural selection is the right explanation, for there could be others. Many people feel a need for an outside designer, however, because they find the theory of natural selection to be basically untenable--they don't see that it necessarily leads to evolution. If they really comprehended what natural selection means, they would no longer feel rationally compelled in that way. Of course, they might feel emotionally compelled. We can't very well do a whole lot about that, and I don't think we need to try.
We do need to try, however, to enhance people's understanding of natural selection. Unfortunately, I'm very pessimistic about people understanding natural selection well anytime in the near future. To do so, they would have to understand probability, statistics, some physics and chemistry, and let's face it, most people find this as appealing as boiled Brussel sprouts. Not saying we shouldn't work toward that, but I'm not especially hopeful.
To pull this back out of the narrow focus, I believe that lots of people oppose natural selection, or any of a number of other (popularly, not scientifically) contentious theories, because they see religion being marginalized. Many phenomena that we previously saw as miraculous evidence of an everpresent deity can now be seen (they are told) as the straightforward result of rather dry, scientific principles. A flower isn't pretty because someo
Slashdot Mirror
Jurassic Park (#2) holding on line two.
...his iPod must have been an iPoS.
Too obscure even for Slashdot? Oh well, it got a chuckle out of me.
FBI Suspects Charo in Moon Mutilation!
Good one.
It's important to have alternative hypotheses...
I disagree. It's nice to have them, but it's not important. What is important is to recognize when there's a significant discrepancy between the model and observation, but you don't have to know right off the bat how to interpret that. When double refraction was first measured, it was noted that it didn't fit the model of light then widely used, but they didn't have a "backup" model to step into place. Often, it's the anomalous observation itself that suggests the model. You can't conceivably have a contingency plan for every bizarre anomaly you might encounter when testing out a theory.
I think it's provocative that when string theory was highly regarded, the fact that it employed 10 or 11 dimensions was considered something deep and mysterious about it, but now that it is beginning to be criticized, that same fact is ridiculed (as it is in the cited review). I'm not equipped to judge string theory, but I don't like it when people decide what is worthy of respect based simply on how commonsensical it is. Too often, people are so unwilling to admit that there are things they may not ever be able to understand well enough to critique meaningfully. They insist that because it makes no sense to them, it must be nonsense.
That is nonsense, if you like. I'm all for informed criticism (and for all I know, the physicists mentioned in the review are indeed bringing that to the table), but the miasma of revisionist innuendo that surrounds that nucleus of scientific review isn't very productive. I suppose some of it is necessary to inform public policy regarding scientific research, but there ought to be much less posturing than there is.
I think, according to the IAU, the Moon is simply called "Moon," just as our planet is just called "Earth." The generic term for a body that orbits a larger non-fusor (that is, a non-star) is "satellite," ultimately (through French) from Latin satelles, meaning "attendant."
Nobody is mentioning it because it isn't true. Pluto is a (major) planet for the time being, at least until September, when the IAU will be deciding on a criterion, or set of criteria, for determining whether a body in orbit about a star (specifically, a fusor) is a planet.
The variation is only a fraction of a percent, hardly perceptible to the unaided eye. Perhaps if you wait long enough, the force of gravity will compress the globe into the right shape for you. Besides, the Earth isn't quite an oblate spheroid, either (by ellipsoid is usually meant a prolate spheroid, I think); the southern hemisphere is ever so slightly bulgier than the northern hemisphere.
Furthermore, this thing is supposed to be able to maps of other worlds, such as Mercury, whose oblateness is probably pretty minor.
I think you're mixing up two different parts of the attraction. The woman's head in the globe is a simple bust. Her features are then projected onto the bust, allowing her to "speak." A similar technique is used for Buzz Lightyear in the Emperor Zorg attraction (I forget the name) in Toon Town.
The following faces are done by employing concave faces (that is, caved inward, toward the wall) lit from below, rather than the more traditional convex faces lit from above. Because both concavity and lighting are inverted, the shadows are essentially the same in both cases, but with the concave faces, the figures appear to turn toward you as you move from side to side. It's a remarkably spooky effect, if you haven't encountered it before. It works better if you only look at it with one eye, or from further away. Closer up and with binocular vision, you can tell that the faces are concave.
The SoS is sort of like the woman's head in a globe, but writ much larger, and with a focus on science, rather than creepiness.
The projection need not be from the center of the globe. It could be from the bottom. The problem with that approach is that the image quality in the bottom half of the globe would be relatively poor. The way the system is designed now, most of the globe, maybe 75 percent, is better than the entire bottom half would be with a projection from the bottom of the sphere, and the mediocre parts of the current projection are much more limited than they would be, projected from the bottom.
That isn't quite the way that lenses work, however. You can't put a huge lens some distance away from the globe, and use the top part of the lens to project over the north pole, and the bottom half to project under the south pole. Instead, pretty much the entire lens is used to focus the image of the light source to any given point on the globe. You can illuminate more than half of the globe with a very large lens, but the parts at the periphery won't be as well illuminated, since only part of the lens can be used to focus light onto those points. For instance, with a lens twice as wide as the globe, the north pole will only be illuminated about 20 percent as well as the point on the equator facing the lens. Even in the limit of an infinitely large lens, the best you can do is 50 percent illumination of the pole.
I'm guessing that by six projectors, you mean to put them along each of the axes (that is, at the points of an octahedron, or the faces of a cube). That certainly works, but if you put them at the corners of a tetrahedron, you can also achieve complete coverage, provided your projectors are at least 3 radii away from the center of the sphere. Using six merely allows you to reduce that margin to the square root of 3. (I think. Someone please check my math.)
But, as it turns out, these folks aren't going for complete coverage. With all four projectors along the globe's equator, there cannot be coverage of the poles. My guess is that they don't care because (a) the top pole is blocked by the suspension wires, and (b) the bottom pole is typically difficult to access. Furthermore, in many cases, the poles reveal the least contrast in data.
By the way, the projected image at the periphery isn't as badly distorted as it might seem at first. As I recall, Mare Orientale on the Moon was first identified as a concentric circular formation, located on the edge of the Moon's visible face, when images taken from the Earth were projected onto a sphere. The detail wasn't bad at all! A similar method can be used, for instance, to divine the actual shape of Mare Crisium, and so on.
The point is that you don't have to trust the U.S. government in the case of AES. AES is a subset of Rijndael, whose entire specification is wide open (and not developed by the U.S., for that matter). You can verify for yourself that it is robust, or get someone you trust to do it for you, if you lack the expertise. You'd have to do that anyway with any algorithm.
In fact, I suspect that if the U.S. government (or at least, the NSA) wanted to snoop on you, they would only be too happy to let you pick your own encryption system. Chances are good it would be less resistant to snooping than AES. Of course, if you don't care about performance, you could always choose 3DES, which has been poked at for quite a while. But--oops--that's based on DES, which also was developed by the U.S. government (although it is loosely based on IBM's Lucifer).
I'm sure you're not entirely serious, but "archaic" and "obsolete" are obviously incorrect, since they are in current usage in the U.S. The U.S. system cannot be wrong (except from a technical elegance point of view), and it's not primitive in any meaningful sense. That leaves "irregular," which it certainly is.
Sorry. If it were up to me, we'd have standardized on metric a long time ago, but we're too busy legislating morality. So we'll have to get back to you on that.
I think the units used in the U.S. are actually an amalgam of various pre-Imperial systems. The U.S. gallon, for instance, is not equal to the Imperial gallon; it's a pre-Imperial gallon (back before the Sith took over).
My guess is that they will be looking for chemical signatures in the atmosphere of the planet, via absorption lines. That can tell you, indirectly, about the presence of life. For instance, one of the chemical indicators on the Earth is the presence of methane in an atmosphere containing significant amounts of oxygen. Ordinarily, methane "likes" to combine with oxygen to form water vapor and carbon dioxide. The reaction can go the other way, but it does so much slower. As a result, in a "dead" atmosphere, an equilibrium amount of methane exists, which is very tiny.
The Earth's atmosphere contains about 2 ppm of methane, by volume. Even that much methane, though, is out of equilibrium. It must therefore be continually replenished, ostensibly by life. We happen to know that it's largely biological in origin, from animals like cows. (I just wanted to mention "cows.") Now, that sort of thing doesn't have to be biological; it might, for instance, be volcanic, so that possibility has to be addressed: Biologically produced methane tends to be accompanied by ethane, while volcanic methane tends to hang around sulfur dioxide, and so on.
Eliminating volcanically produced methane doesn't mean that it must be life, because it might just be some non-life thing you haven't thought of. That's why it's useful to skim around the solar system, looking for the various non-life ways that methane might be produced, and how to tell the difference. At some point, if you're able to eliminate enough different alternatives, you begin to have confidence that you've detected life.
If that's the tack they're taking, it might explain why the detectors are looking in both the infra-red and the visible. Water vapor absorption lines are in the infra-red; methane absorption lines are in the visible. (They largely account for the color of Uranus and Neptune, for instance.) I look forward to seeing what they're able to see, even if they don't succeed in detecting signs of life.
Actually, I wonder if you can defeat this crack by shifting your hands by one key just for the password. It won't work if the sounds are entirely dependent on the keys, but my intuitive guess is that they aren't, and that the finger you use to press the keys also matters.
A couple of decades ago I spent a couple of summers working on implementing a relaxation algorithm to solve the same kind of problem in a different arena: font-independent OCR. Internal pattern matching was used to sort the characters into equivalence classes, and then a relaxation algorithm, fed with digram and trigram frequences, was used to solve the "cryptogram" for the letters. I wonder what method they're using these days...
John Hasler wrote:
If you don't want your children to play such games don't let them do so. They are your children. You control them.
This evinces such a malevolent notion of raising children it's hard to believe anyone literally maintains this position.
Children are not (or at least, should not be) puppets. If you raise them as puppets, you will end up with either a drone, or someone who resents being treated like one.
Some children will want to buy a violent game, yes. It's the rare healthy adult who never experienced any kind of proscribed "urge." We become healthy adults in part because we learn the consequences of our actions.
Nonetheless, some consequences are simply too risky, so we decide that it's not a good idea to expose everyone to them. We don't allow children to buy alcohol, because they can get lethally intoxicated on much less alcohol, because they don't have the experience to notice when that's happening, and because if they were able to buy it themselves, it would be a lot harder for us sober, responsible adults (ahem, ahem) to ration that alcohol.
Violent games may not be as lethal as alcohol, but they're not something I'd want my 10-year-old to play. By restricting their purchase to adults, I reduce the number of places I have to watch from "all video game stores" to "any home console I'm not familiar with." The second set is much smaller than the first. At the same time, your ability to furnish the same games to your child is not very restricted at all, unless you are so busy that you cannot make it out to a video game store.
Since you are posting on slashdot, I presume that isn't the case.
Poul-Henning Kemp wrote:
Whenever there is an astronomy story, there is some staggering beautiful "artists concept" color painting right next to it, and that picture has no scientific backing for 99% of its features.
So try to pull a modern kid out in the back yard and put their eye to a telescope and they will barely belive you when you tell them that they look at, because it looks nothing like in the papers.
I think you are confusing the claptrap targeted at beginning amateur astronomers with the astronomy material in most major newspapers/general magazines.
It is true that many astronomy articles are accompanied by a long-exposure shot by a large, meter-class telescope, and that you couldn't hope to see anything like that through an 8-inch telescope, but most people sadly will never look through an 8-inch telescope, or a 60 mm telescope, for that matter. The people who are really to blame in that regard are those who sell the 60 mm telescopes with the Hubble long-exposure images.
In regards to the original subthread, actually I don't feel that astronomy reporting is that bad, but neither is it that good. It might be because I'm very interested in astronomy and I take any inaccuracy somewhat personally. These days, I'm reading George Johnson's recent book on Cepheids, entitled Miss Leavitt's Stars. According to the inside flap blurb, Johnson is an award-winning science writer for the New York Times. Presumably, he's not just some hack.
I had gotten as far as page 6 when I encountered this little beauty: "Even [Orion's belt] is an accident of perspective. From other parts of space these three stars would form a triangle or their order would be reversed. Viewed from just the proper angle, all three of them would merge into a single light, an illusory triple star."
Ready, teeth? GNASH!
I defy anyone to take any three points that can be made into a triangle (and are therefore not collinear) and somehow see them as a single point. Granted, eyes aren't perfect and stars aren't point sources, so that if you look at them from far enough away, they'll appear to blend into a single point, and if you look at one from close enough up, it'll block out the light of the other two. But then it's not only so from "just the proper angle"!
Since it's a basic topic of this book that the stars aren't fireflies on a dark screen but suns strewn through three-dimensional space, it's at least a little depressing that a science writer can't get this right.
All this by way of saying that astronomy writing isn't all that hot. :)
Daniel Dvorkin wrote:
One point that's touched on in TFA, but perhaps not given enough attention, is the spurious idea of "balance," usually personified by getting a few words from a serious scientist on one hand and a few paragraphs from a quack on the other.
Interestingly, I find that when I watch some of these "science" programs that often show up on the tube, I need the spurious balance because the people producing the show are basically ignorant of what makes a scientific proposition worthwhile. They don't know that anecdotal evidence is crap, that it's easy to select data here and there that supports practically any hypothesis you like.
Usually, this isn't a problem, because most of the quacks are pretty easy to pick out. But occasionally you have a skilled quack, who knows what kinds of things ring true, even if they aren't. Then I have to rely on "opposing counsel" to give me information on what the main interviewee has conveniently left out. It's pretty clear the producers have put in opposing counsel as a straw man foil, but even so, those few short moments on screen are enough for me to figure out what's what.
But I can tell, from programs on subjects on which I'm very knowledgeable (such as astronomy), that there is still pure smoke that is untagged as such. That tends to depress my confidence that I've properly identified the smoke in programs on subjects I'm not knowledgeable about (such as history).
Mike1024 wrote:
Granted, some people believe evolution was guided by God, but if they're Christians (and there are a lot of christians in the US), that seems like a fine way to reconcile scientific fact with thier beliefs.
It's a way, yes, but I'm not sure it's a fine way. What does it mean to say that God guides evolution? Does anyone understand that in the same precise way that we understand natural selection?
Suppose I roll a dozen dice and record their sum. I do that a million times (by computer, one hopes!) and draw up a table of the results. Those results turn out to match, to a high degree of fidelity, the proportions represented by the normal distribution. It's such a good match that it's too fantastic to be mere coincidence.
One way to explain this outcome is that the roll of each die is uniformly distributed over the six possible values, and that the dice roll independently of each other, as well as of past rolls. Once one completely apprehends these basic principles, the fact that the normal distribution pops out the other end is unavoidable.
Or, we could explain it by saying that God guides the dice to follow the binomial distribution. To use a ludicrous line of reasoning, one might say that a formula containing a few figures arranged this way and that is so divorced from the physical reality of two dice that the only way they could have anything to do with one another is if someone intentionally arranged matters that way.
On the other hand, is it all that ludicrous? I could put it to you that the interactions of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine arranged this way and that is so divorced from the physical reality of evolving organisms that the only way they could have anything to do with one another is if someone intentionally arranged matters that way. Well, that's basically the watchmaker's argument--recast and a bit distorted, but in a form that would be supported by many.
What's more, explaining the roll of a dozen dice in terms of the rolls of the individual dice allows us to understand something complex in terms of something simpler, but attributing it all to some outside intelligence just postpones the problem. Why should that outside intelligence choose the binomial distribution? Why doesn't he or she pick something more easily digested, like the uniform distribution? How very inconsiderate of the Outside Intelligence!
I think that if people understood natural selection as well as it deserves to be understood, they would see that it must lead to evolution of some form. That doesn't prove that natural selection is the right explanation, for there could be others. Many people feel a need for an outside designer, however, because they find the theory of natural selection to be basically untenable--they don't see that it necessarily leads to evolution. If they really comprehended what natural selection means, they would no longer feel rationally compelled in that way. Of course, they might feel emotionally compelled. We can't very well do a whole lot about that, and I don't think we need to try.
We do need to try, however, to enhance people's understanding of natural selection. Unfortunately, I'm very pessimistic about people understanding natural selection well anytime in the near future. To do so, they would have to understand probability, statistics, some physics and chemistry, and let's face it, most people find this as appealing as boiled Brussel sprouts. Not saying we shouldn't work toward that, but I'm not especially hopeful.
To pull this back out of the narrow focus, I believe that lots of people oppose natural selection, or any of a number of other (popularly, not scientifically) contentious theories, because they see religion being marginalized. Many phenomena that we previously saw as miraculous evidence of an everpresent deity can now be seen (they are told) as the straightforward result of rather dry, scientific principles. A flower isn't pretty because someo