Science Made Cool

Groundhog Day

Somehow, I feel as though I've already posted this . . .

Today is, as every radio DJ and morning news talker has been careful to remind us, Groundhog Day. "Punxsutawney Phil" did his thing at dawn this morning and saw his shadow. That means we're in for six more weeks of winter, right?

Probably not. According to the Stormfax weather 'blog, Phil has an accuracy rate of about 39%, which is to say, worse than flipping a coin.

It's also unclear to me how large the groundhog's area of prediction is supposed to be -- if it's accurate in Pennsylvania but not in Massachusetts, does that count as right or wrong? What if Eastern Pennsylvania gets an early spring but Western Pennsylvania gets walloped by an arctic air mass in April? What if Punxsutawney gets wintry weather until May but the entire northern hemisphere otherwise has an early thaw? Obviously more research is needed.

Anyway, until tomorrow, Happy Groundhog Day.

A Christmas Tradition

As we do every year about this time, we're linking to the coolest, oddest, and most resolutely un-ironic Christmas theme Web site in existence: the NORAD Santa Tracker. It's just a matter of hours now before the giant radars and Keyhole-series satellites get to work. There are animations, and -- my favorite -- live commentary from the officers and airmen at NORAD headquarters.

Britain Quits UFO Game

The United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence has announced it's closing down a 50-year-old project to investigate UFO sightings. (No, not these guys.) The justification is that the program hasn't accomplished anything, it costs money better used on other things, and (unstated but probably most important) it's a bit silly.

While I understand the reasoning, and approve of anything which makes paranormal crackpots froth at the mouth (which this is bound to accomplish), I have to say that I wish the British weren't doing this.

Why? Because in both military planning and scientific research the really interesting stuff is the things you don't expect. Sure, those reports of lights in the sky and flying saucers are almost always normal airplanes, or hallucinations, or pranks. But it's still worth checking out. If 9,999 reports are mistakes or hoaxes but the 10,000th is even something as mundane as a small plane smuggling heroin, then its worthwhile. In an age when the primary international danger is terrorism, I think it's odd for the MoD to decide they're perfectly safe watching the skies for conventional military attacks.

Ah, well. In my opinion this just means the British are getting complacent because they know The Doctor will always be around to bail them out. The Brigadier would be spinning in his grave.

 

Fish Tales in Sushi Restaurants

Confessions first – I love sushi. But getting hedonistic pleasure from biting into a firm, cold piece of fish paired with salty-sweet vinegared rice doesn’t mean that I also want to be chowing down on an endangered animal. Unfortunately, according to a study published in PloS ONE last week, there’s a good chance that the fish inside my tuna roll came from an endangered or threatened species.

There are eight species of tuna in the genus Thunnus, any of which may be served up as sushi: yellowfin, bigeye, longtail, blackfin, albacore, as well as the threatened Pacific bluefin and northern bluefin, and the critically endangered southern bluefin. Conservation organizations urge consumers to avoid eating any kind of bluefin tuna, but unless your ahi is a slice of the light-fleshed albacore tuna, it’s hard to tell which species you’re getting on your plate. Tuna species look different from one another when they’re whole fish, but slice them into filets and they all look pretty much alike. People may want to avoid eating endangered types of tuna, but they can’t do it effectively unless they can identify the fish in the restaurant or the market. (They could, of course, give up eating all tuna. But few people are willing to push their convictions that far.)

Jacob Lowenstein and his colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History tackled this problem by developing a DNA barcode system for all eight species of tuna. By looking for small, species-specific differences in the DNA sequence for a single protein – an important mitochondrial enzyme called cytochrome c oxidase – they developed a key that could match the DNA from a piece of tuna with the species of fish it came from. They tested the accuracy of their method by collecting samples from the places where most people meet tuna – sushi restaurants.

The Futility of Debunking

The big buzz in the world of crackpotdom right now is the impending End of the World in 2012. In case you've somehow missed it, the story is that the Mayan calendar (in this case the approximately 400-year "Long Count" cycle) is due to end in 2012; obviously that means Something Big And Probably Bad will happen then. At present the leading SBAPB candidate is a close encounter or even collision with the imaginary planet "Nibiru."

Debunking this is about as easy -- and as productive -- as debunking a six-year-old's worry that there is a monster under the bed. Which is to say, it's impossible. You can show the six-year-old there is no monster under the bed as many times as you wish, but if the six-year-old wants to believe, you won't be able to convince him.

NASA scientist David Morrison has an excellent PDF article available for free at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's Web site, debunking the 2012 myth like there's no tomorrow. Among other things, he points out how much of the current furor has been deliberately ginned up by the marketing department at Columbia Pictures to promote their upcoming film 2012 (which looks to be a pretty blatant knockoff of When Worlds Collide). Dr. Morrison's article is worth reading, but I'm afraid the only people who would be convinced by it are people who don't believe in post-Christian bogus millennialist viral marketing apocalyptic bullshit anyway.

That's the problem with all debunking of paranormal nonsense: debunking is by definition an appeal to reason, to hard evidence, to logic and common sense. People who think logically and want scientific evidence before they'll believe something won't fall for crackpottery in the first place. The believers are beyond the reach of the debunker's tools.

I've been wondering if other techniques might be more effective:  should debunkers fall back on simple scorn and mockery? Or make peace with existing established religions in order to combat the brushfire waves of idiocy which otherwise rage unchecked? Suggestions?

UPDATE: Phil Plait went through all this back in 2003 at his old "Bad Astronomy" Web site. See his savagely polite debunking of the "Nibiru" nonsense. And what did he accomplish? Six years later this garbage has moved from a couple of crackpots with Web sites to a major motion picture.

BOOM!

NASA continues its crazed vendetta against uninhabited planetoids. Early this morning the LCROSS probe smashed into the Moon at approximately 5,000 miles per hour. This wasn't an accident -- the goal was to use the impact of the probe's Centaur booster stage to throw up a plume of Lunar surface material, which the probe itself could analyze during the very brief moment it passed through the debris before hitting the surface.

They announced all this ahead of time, so it isn't a case of "it was supposed to do that" after a crash.

Why is there so much interest in what the Moon's surface is made of? Telescope and flyby observations have raised the possibility of water ice on or just below the Lunar surface in the polar regions (where intense sunlight of a two-week day can't boil it off into space). Water is useful for all sorts of things, including making rocket propellant and keeping astronauts alive. The more stuff one can find on the Moon, the less one must launch from Earth.

I understand the next fiscal year NASA budget will include a line item for one of these. Just to make sure. 

The Man Who Fed The World

Dr. Norman Borlaug died late Saturday, at the age of 95. If anyone deserved to end his life at a great age laden with honors, he certainly did. Dr. Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work in developing new crop strains which increased food production by as much as four times. His grains transformed India from a nation perpetually on the verge of famine into a food exporter.

One result of Dr. Borlaug's work has been to throw into clear focus the true causes of famines. Everyone now recognizes that low yields or crop failures alone aren't the cause. In the modern world it's blatantly obvious that famines are political events, usually involving men with guns somewhere in the heart of the matter.



 

Hugo Awards!

Our Crack Team of schmoozers and partygoers attended the 56th annual Hugo Awards ceremony at the World Science Fiction convention in Montreal. The results:

Best Fan Writer:  the talented Cheryl Morgan
Best Fan Artist:  the amazingly enthusiastic Frank Wu
Best Fanzine:  the unanticipated Electric Velocipede
Best Semiprozine:  the venerable Weird Tales
Best Related Book:  the venomous Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008, by John Scalzi
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form):  the charming Wall-E
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form):  the melodic Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
Best Editor (Long Form):  the impeccable David Hartwell
Best Editor (Short Form):  the irrepressible Ellen Datlow
Best Graphic Story:  the exciting Girl Genius!
Best Professional Artist:  the gentlemanly Donato Giancola
Best Short Story:  the inspired "Exhalation," by Ted Chiang
Best Novelette:  the Lovecraftian "Shoggoths in Bloom," by Elizabeth Bear
Best Novella:  the touching "The Erdmann Nexus," by Nancy Kress
Best Novel:  The inevitable The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

Congratulations to all the winners from Zygote Games!

White Knight to King's Rook

Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space line has unveiled their space launcher aircraft. The WhiteKnight Two made its debut at the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual show in Oshkosh this past week. White Knight will carry the suborbital (and maybe someday orbital) spacecraft SpaceShip Two to high altitude. There the spaceship will separate from the airplane and boost into space. Congratulations to all and best wishes.

And where will this happen? Will eager crowds line up at the perimeter of Mojave Spaceport to watch WhiteKnight take off? Maybe Orlando airport in Florida?

If you want to watch, pack plenty of sunscreen and leave your bacon at home. Virgin Galactic has made a deal with Arab investors to operate out of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

Footprints in the Dust

Happy Apollo Day! Forty years ago men from Earth went to the Moon. They "came in peace for all mankind." Eight others followed . . . and then nothing more. Except for a few footprints and instrument packages, the barren dust of the Moon is as undisturbed now as it has been for a billion years.

I suppose, in a weird way, we have Lee Harvey Oswald to thank for the fact that even those few footprints are there at all. Had President Kennedy not been assassinated, the lunar program he inspired might have died some time in the mid-1960s from budget cuts and more politically useful things to spend the money on. But Kennedy died and the space program lived on as his memorial -- until the goal of reaching the Moon was achieved and the program could be scaled down without any inconvenient complaints about betraying JFK's legacy.

When will the next human step onto the Moon? The current NASA plan calls for 2019 -- the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 -- but already there are problems with the Ares rocket, calls for program changes, and the sound of budget cutting knives being sharpened. My personal guess is that the "return to the Moon" will get pushed back, and pushed back, and pushed back, and never actually happen. There will always be some voting bloc more deserving of tax dollars, and the aerospace companies and NASA employees will have to be satisfied with more puttering around in low Earth orbit.

Some time around 2040, perhaps, a spacecraft will set down on the Moon's dusty surface, and human feet will make some new footprints, and a new flag will be hammered into the hard-packed regolith soil. But it won't be the Stars and Stripes.

The future belongs to those who actually go out and build it. Americans have decided not to attend. The future isn't ours anymore.