North Korea's nuclear bomb test

I'm not a big fan of politics, but part of the story about North Korea's second nuclear bomb test caught my eye.

North Korea announced its underground nuclear test a little more than an hour after the U.S. Geological Survey reported a magnitude 4.7 seismic disturbance at the site of North Korea's first nuclear test. --CNN

And sure enough, here's the earthquake data from the USGS.

Windmill saves ski resort $450k/year

More land-using organizations should start putting up wind turbines, if the results from Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in Hancock MA is any indication. Putting up a single turbine is saving them $450,000 per year, around 1/3 of their energy bill. Fortunately for them, the windmill produces the most electricity during the winter when it's the most windy, and seeing as they're a sky resort it's also when they use the most electricity (primarily due to their snow-making machines). (I can't help but think that if more companies used turbines, that we'd slow global warming and ski resorts wouldn't need to make fake snow as much.)

Also interestingly during the summer months the turbine produces more electricity than the Jiminy Peak uses. It appears they have not actually worked out a buy-back program for the excess electricity (where their utility company would actually pay *them* if they produced more electricity than they used), so instead the excess power goes into the grid - where it is then used up by local residents, reducing their reliance on the power company, on fossil fuels (coal burning is the primary source of electricity even in the Northeast US), and even their electricity bills. So this project has helped not only the ski resort, but also the local community.

Just don't tell the bats - the action of the turbine results in extremely low pressure air behind the turbine, which then results in internal bleeding. Shame that every improvement in one field leads to a problem in another. Time will tell whether the net good outweighs the net bad.

Obama: candidate for skeptics

Obama had my vote from the minute McCain called a multi-million dollar planetarium an "overhead projector." Palin clinched it when she said that fruit-fly research was pointless, a sentiment echoed when McCain dissed bear research. But now, Obama has my heart too. When asked in an interview if he'd spoken to any ex-presidents,

...he responded that he had spoken to all former presidents "that are living... I didn't want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any seances." --CNN

*giggles*

And while we're nit-picking...

"[CERN spokesman] Gillies said the sector that was damaged will have to be warmed well above the absolute zero temperature used for operations so repairs can be made, a time-consuming process."

(emphasis mine)
CNN/AP article

1.9K is as far from absolute zero as 0.999c is from the speed of light. Neither absolute zero nor the speed of light are actually reachable. It's like saying "the winds from Hurricane Ike were infinitely strong" or "gasoline prices today were infinitely high." Neither of those are true, and doesn't get across the real information that would let people prepare properly. Similarly, saying that the LHC operates at absolute zero or at the speed of light just misses the point and is shoddy reporting.

Thanks for the many responses to my last post guys! Even if you don't agree with my perspective, I appreciate it when people take the time to think about the science involved, and where the language of science is different from everyday English. I'm hoping to make a post to address a couple points people made specifically, but don't hold your breath on it b/c I've got to write a few quizzes and grade some labs this weekend.

More bad science

More bad science from CNN/AP:

"...a statement by CERN, as the organization is known." Any reason to not give what CERN stands for, or at least what the organization is?

"The Large Hadron Collider was launched September 10, when scientists circled a beam of protons in a clockwise direction at the speed of light." While "launched" may be a poor choice of words, "at the speed of light" is outright WRONG, and shows that the author has a complete lack of understanding of the concepts "speed of light."

More on UC vs Christian schools

Whee, CNN Video now allows embedding!



(If the video has problems, try this link.)

The girl's statement that her school teaches the "theories" of both ID and evolution and therefore is less "narrow" is exactly the problem - ID is not a theory, it's a baseless conjecture without any evidence. A theory needs to be well-tested, with an overwhelming amount of physical evidence to support it, such that it is well-accepted by the scientific community. These students are clearly NOT being taught that crucial distinction, and therefore do NOT understand how science works.

Ohio: Not quite doomed

The Bad Astronomer is fond of the phrase "State: Doomed" in the context of State approving creationism in the classroom. He'd probably be happy to hear that Ohio is not doomed, or at least only a little doomed.

An Ohio school is firing a middle school science teacher for the joint sins of teaching creationism in the science class (including keeping a Bible on his desk), and burning a cross into a student's arm. Shame it took the student abuse for the other part to surface.

More poor science in the news

My goodness, is this CNN video misleading. The person who wrote this video is trying to make the point that older cars get better gas mileage than newer cars, when in fact the reality is that he's just supporting the known fact that smaller cars get better gas mileage than bigger cars. In both cases the person interviewed traded down in car size when they went to the older car - one guy went from an SUV to a smaller pickup truck, the other from a pickup truck to a sedan. Whoever wrote this article needs to go back to college and take a science course where they teaching about controlling the variables.

Asteroid 2007 WD5

Among all the hype about how asteroid 2007 WD5 has a 1 in 75 chance of hitting Mars on January 30 everyone's missing what I think is the most exciting part. According to NASA/JPL simulations it passed closed enough to Earth in early-/mid-October that our planet's own gravity is probably what actually slung it into Mars's path.

You know what's even more exciting?

We didn't discover it until November.

First steps of US on Global Warming

After a week of heated argument (and "boos") with other countries in Bali, US Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky finally agreed to an amended compromise statement. According to the NY Times,

The agreement notes the need for "urgency" in addressing climate change and recognizes that "deep cuts in global emissions will be required." Still, it does not bind the United States or any country to commitments on reducing greenhouse pollution.

CNN:

The EU wanted an agreement to require developed countries to cut their emissions by 25 to 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2020. The United States opposes those targets, along with Japan and Canada. The latest draft of the agreement removes the specific figures and instead, in a footnote, references the scientific study that supports them.

BBC:

The US and the EU earlier agreed that industrialised countries would not set firm emissions targets at this stage. The "Bali roadmap" initiates a two-year process of negotiations designed to agree a new set of emissions targets to replace those in the Kyoto Protocol.
...
The document coming out of the meeting, the "Bali roadmap", contains text on emissions cuts, the transfer of clean technology to developing countries, halting deforestation and helping poorer nations protect their economies and societies against impacts of climate change such as rising sea levels and falling crop yields. The roadmap sets the parameters and aims for a further set of negotiations to be finalised by the 2009 UN climate conference, to be held in Denmark.

So as far as I can tell, this is again an agreement with no teeth. The US has agreed to no tangible results whatsoever. It's progress in that we've agreed that Something Needs To Be Done and therefore are acknowledging that global warming is taking place, but all we've agreed to so far is to continue talking. Well, better that than nothing.

Fluorescing cats

Everyone's been up in arms about these cloned "glowing" cats and how they're horribly eerie because they glow. Well, I have to tell you they're not eerie at all because they're not really glowing, they're fluorescing!

"Glowing" is when the object stores up light energy and releases it later in the dark. "Fluorescing" is when the object absorbs light of one form (usually UV) and immediately releases it in a different form (usually visible light). These cats would be no fun at all unless you have a UV light source. Most "blacklights" are both UV and some visible violet, but the professional ones used in that photo are only UV, and so that's why it looks like there's no light at all; if they turned off their UV light the cats would immediately go dark, just like normal cats. If you don't use a blacklight regularly, you wouldn't see anything weird about the cats at all.

There now, don't you feel better about dropping a fortune on one of these cats once they become commercially available?

ETA: Here's a video about them on CNN, that shows their faces fluorescing (it appears it's only the skin that does it, not the fur), and explains why it's medically usful.

Nowak 1; NASA 0

A Florida judge Friday handed a legal victory to a former astronaut [Lisa Nowak] accused of assaulting a romantic rival [Colleen Shipman], ruling evidence found in her car and statements she made to police after her arrest were inadmissible at trial. ...no written consent was obtained to search her car.
...
On the audiotape of the interview [and Miranda rights], there was no audible response from Nowak on whether she understood that her statements could be used against her in court, and when she was asked whether anyone had threatened or promised her anything to get her to talk to police, [Judge] Lubet wrote. "Thus, there is nothing in either the audio recording or the transcript of the interview that demonstrates that defendant understood these two rights and waived them."
...
she was "subjected to a barrage of questions" beginning in the predawn hours and was questioned for six hours without being given the opportunity to sleep or make a phone call. "Defendant had not slept during the preceding 24 hours," the judge said.
...
Nowak's attorneys in August filed a notice of intent to rely on an insanity defense, saying in court documents her diagnoses include a litany of more than a dozen psychiatric disorders.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/11/02/nowak.ruling/index.html

As Foxtrot puts it, "And she made it into the astronaut corps how?"

Earthquakes

In case you haven't heard, a spate of earthquakes have hit the Sumatra region of Indonesia in the last 24 hours - more than 60 of them according to CNN. For the scientifically/geographically minded, here's a map of the region from the USGS in which color indicates how recent the quake was (red is most recent), and size of the box indicates magnitude. It's a little nuts how many of the >7 boxes there are.

FWIW, the biggest nuclear bomb ever exploded had as much energy as a 7th magnitude quake, and ever additional magnitude is more than 30 times more energy.

No significant tsunami as of yet thankfully - a 0.6m (2ft) one was confirmed yesterday, and there's rumors of a 1-3m (3-9ft) one but unconfirmed.

Smart is Sexy

Former child-actress Danica McKellar got sick of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears' examples and is publishing a book "Math Doesn't Suck" after she herself majored in Math in college. Get it for your daughters and neices.

Even Newton knew it

Science and religion are NOT opposed. Papers just revealed to the public in Jerusalem show Newton's calculation of the end of the world based upon the book of Daniel (no sooner than the year 2060), and the dimensions of the temple which reflect the cosmos.

And just because I'm feeling dorky and sleep deprived... Science and religion are not antiparallel, they're skewy.

Astro News Time

Astronomy article on the frontpage of CNN? Check!
Multiple astronomy articles on the frontpage of CNN? Check!
It must be that AAS Meeting time of the year. Check!

Interesting that they're both Geoff Marcy, poster child for exoplanets. I wonder if there isn't anyone else there or something - the Summer meetings are usually less well-populated than the Winter meetings. Interesting that Marcy's in the middle of an observing run during the conference, a coincidence made possible by the meeting being in Hawaii this year. And my stupid school gives me $300 a year for professional development funds. *grumble*

Oh foo, next year's meetings are in boring places, so even if I get that NASA grant (yeah, it's still pending *grumble*) it won't be that exciting. Too bad, 2009's are both in California.

DNA Testing and Identical Twins

It never occurred to me before, but one of the limitations of DNA testing is that it cannot distinguish between identical twins. In the linked article a woman may have had sex with two men who were identical twin brothers on the same night, conceived a child, and is now suing just one of the brothers for child support. As DNA cannot distinguish which of the two is the father, the judge reverted to the traditional eyewitness testimony and felt that the mother was the most reliable witness and therefore took her word that the interviewed brother is the father while he is claiming otherwise.

Similarly, if identical twin brothers were accused of raping someone, or a murderer with an identical twin had left some hair at a crime scene, in neither case could the culprit be positively identified by DNA testing. It's a shame, b/c we do know that eyewitness testimony is quite unreliable.

Melamine pet food follow-up

The guy in charge of the Chinese factory from whence the wheat gluten flour was sold to the US is claiming that he doesn't even know what melamine is. He's being held by Chinese authorities for 30 days, and after that will be either charged or released.

Yes, you read that right, it's wheat flour that was actually contaminated with melamine and cyuranic acid, and it was then mislabeled as wheat gluten or rice protein concentrate. It was this flour that made its way into the feed for hogs, poultry, and fish, and none of the news I've read addressed whether the flour could've made its way directly into the human food supply. Meaning that individuals can only avoid potentially contaminated products by eating home-grown or buying from trusted organic-type farms. I'm screwed.

The mechanism for death is that the melamine and cyuranic acid react in the kidneys, causing crystals, organ failure, and eventual death. Kidneys play an important role in homeostasis, including filtering out impurities in the blood, maintaining the proper acidity, blood pressure, and levels of electrolytes in the blood. Screwing with any one of those individually will kill you, all three...

Although the FDA has received 4,000 complaints of pet (cat and dog) deaths, only 17 have been confirmed.

LA Fires threaten Griffith Observatory

Dangit, they just finisher renovating that thing, and now a wildfire is raging through the park in which the observatory is located.

The park is in the Hollywood Hills, about 10 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. It includes golf courses, tennis courts, the city's zoo and botanical gardens and the copper-domed Griffith Park Observatory.

The bright orange glow of the fire provided a striking backdrop for the white facade of the observatory into the evening hours.

*crosses fingers*

"Pillow Angel" surgery was illegal

It's not often we hear follow-ups on headline news, so I figured I'd bring this one to y'all's attention: the surgery that removed "pillow angel" Ashley's uterus has been determined to have been against the law.

"Washington law specifically prohibits the sterilization of minors with developmental disabilities without zealous advocacy on their behalf and court approval," said Mark Stroh, WPAS [Washington Protection and Advocacy System, a private group vested with federal investigative authority for people with disabilities,] executive director, in a statement. The hospital has apologized and says they'll be more rigorous in the future, including ALL future treatments for Ashley herself. WPAS is not intending to prosecute.