dreadgeekgrrl

So, tomorrow, at 4:30 AM PST the LCROSS satellite will impact the Moon. (I’ll be up with my telescope to watch should be GREAT viewing conditions) Below is just one of the more sane comments posted on the web site (yes, this was one of the more sane ones). The scientific ignorance on display is absolutely breathtaking.

Bomb the moon? Are we insane? Are we space cowboys now? Why is everything we do to be bomb?
The moon shares a delicate etheric web with earth, which is why she controls the ebb and flow of tides, the menstrual cycle in women, enhances growth at night, responsible for gravity, and excites passion to poetry when gaze at. Bomb the moon? How about Bomb NASA! and save trillions of dollars of taxpayers money to be use to pay off our debt, help create universal healthcare, stimulate economic growth, and a dozen other matters of national urgency. NASA is not necessary anymore. It is outmoded, outdated, and without any real purpose.

Here are the numbers my colleague, Richard and I worked up:

   73459000000000000000000 kg  (Moon)
                      2366 kg  (Maximum mass of LCROSS Centaur Impactor)

                      3000 kg  (Hummer H2)
                         0.00000000000000009662532841448 kg (the "bug")

Mass of an average bacterium: 1 picogram. Weight of the "bug" above: 0.09662532841448 picogram.

So... if 1/10th of a bacterium hits the windshield of a Hummer, does it swerve?


Part 2:

So, I got up at 4:00AM (ouch!) and took my telescope out in the backyard on the hopes of being able to see the impact and the plume. Unfortunately, because I’m in Portland, it became overcast about 4;25 so I wan’t able to resolve much of anything. Frustrated, I went back inside to watch it on NASA TV which turned out to be anti-climatic. In my hopeful naivete that intellectual honesty is not just two, completely unrelated words in the dictionary, I went back to HuffPo to see what, if anything, the doomsayers were saying on the subject. Needless to say, my hope that someone anyone might have the courage to say “well, guess I was wrong” was ill-founded.

One person, SUSANINCOLUMBIA, posted a heartfelt and completely wrong-headed lament stating that she would “never be able to look at the moon in the same way”. Another poster, posted that “even though there was no reaction yet” there was sure to be one because “for every action there is a reaction”. The irony of her invocation of Newton’s Third Law was, apparently, entirely lost on her. I attempted to explain that there had been a reaction, which was the debris plume ejected from the lunar surface, and that this was the very reaction that NASA and every scientifically literate poster (all 9 or 10 of us) on that thread had predicted there would be.

At this point I began to despair. Not because the Moon would have its revenge in some vague, unspecified manner, but because I had believed that after the Bush administration and the reign of the non-reality based conservatives, the Progressives had ‘gotten it’ and decided to be the reality-based political faction in America. HuffPo has convinced me that, in fact, reality has no political constituency in America. These same people, who I have no doubt express frustration that conservatives reject the science of climate change for no scientifically adequate reason completely ignore the math and the physics of the LCROSS mission. Instead of ‘being humble before the data’ (which is readily available) they instead go on about vague prophecies of doom that will befall humanity or, just as stupidly, they draw a distinction between a meteorite hitting the Moon and a satellite hitting it as if the physics of those two events are fundamentally different, governed by different laws.

At one point, I had an epiphany that some of the opposition was the reflexive anti-Americanism that conservatives so often accuse liberals and progressives of indulging in. I began to muse upon the question of “what would the reaction be if it had been, say, India or Pakistan or China or Brazil?” I imagine that there would have been nary a peep or worry but because it was Americans this action had to be opposed. Why? Because it was, laughably, militaristic. That’s right, gentle reader, a physics experiment no more different, really, than dropping a stone into a lake observe the water ejected was an act of aggression. It made me embarrassed to be a Progressive, quite honestly.

I have known, for quite some time now, that Americans are scientifically illiterate but every time I think I have a grasp on the breadth and depth of the problem, something like this happens and I realize that we are in much more dire straits than I had imagined we could be.

To reiterate, opposition to the LCROSS mission falls into the falling species

• The Moon will be knocked out of its orbital position.
• It will throw off “the balance of the Universe” or the tides or gravity or women’s menstrual cycles or astrology.
• It is an ‘act of aggression against the beautiful moon, the only one we have’.
• It will lead to “Wal-Mart and Disneyland on the Moon” (SUSANINCOLUMBIA again)
• The militarization of the moon (Einstein10--on whom more later)
• “A reaction and it will be bad”
• It will throw the moon off by ten or twenty feet and this will affect the tides (Einstein10 again)
• We have no right to mess up the pristine moon until we learn how not to mess up the Earth (The typical anti-space program, anti-science mantra of the scientifically ignorant.)
• The Americans are doing it therefore it is bad.

The problem with all of those arguments is that not a single one of them is specific. In fact, to call them vague is to give them altogether too much credit for being coherent thoughts at all! What’s more, they are all based on pure emotionalism. Not emotion but emotionalism. By that I mean that they are driven not by any facts carefully considered but merely by “I don’t like this”. All of the reasons are, in point of fact, backfill to attempt to justify a position that is entirely unjustifiable.

One poster even invoked the ‘hollow moon’ idea. Yes, the purpose of the mission isn’t what NASA stated it was but to determine if the Moon is hollow. Naturally, he invoked the ‘Great Scientific Conspiracy’ to cover up the truth. Now, what I find fascinating about this little gem is that it perfectly illustrates one of the problems with anti-science in almost all of its forms. On the one hand, scientists are, if anti-scientists are to be believed, a bunch of incompetent boobs stumbling about trying to find new and ever more expensive ways to piss of Nature. On the other hand, they are fiendishly secretive and capable of maintaining such perfect operational security that the NSA, KGB and Mossad can only look upon their opacity with awe, envy and wonder. It would appear that the scientific community can carry on conspiracies of such fiendish and byzantine nature that only the most dedicated can even suss them out or understand their convolutions. Yet, these same scientists can’t seem to get correct the mass of the moon, or explain its tidal locking, or the flight of bumblebees, or the evolution of species. One would think that their utter incompetence would preclude being able to maintain such incredible levels of secrecy but apparently not.

Then there was Einstein10 who does what anti-science proponents do so much, namely invoke the name of a Great Scientist, almost always Einstein and then quote him, almost always out of context, from his letters or from “Ideas and Opinions”. All this while being almost entirely unaware of or interested in his prodigious body of scientific work or the implications thereof. Einstein10 was one such poster on HuffPo. When challenged, he would quote Einstein at us but when challenged to provide a single prediction of specific doom OR to even give a description of either Special or General Relativity in his own words, he would either disappear or simply quote more Einstein. It is insulting to the memory of a truly great scientist to treat him this way in the name of “respect” but there’s not much that can be done about disrespect for the memory of the dead.

I will say that the last 36 hours on HuffPo has given me a much better understanding of why PZ Meyers of Pharyngula and Steven Novella of the New England Skeptics Society are encouraging scientists and scientifically literate people to boycott Huffington Post. In-between the decidedly pro-woo spin given to articles related to medicine and health and the pervasive anti-science culture there, I imagine that both Drs. Meyers and Novella are trying to keep a generation of scientists from going to an early grave, either from repeated blunt-force trauma to the head from banging on the desk or from aneurisms vessels brought on by sudden spikes in blood pressure.

Oh and although I doubt anyone reading my blog needs to be told this, the Moon does not cause gravity. Gravity is caused by the warping of space-time by mass. The Moon and the Earth are bound to one another because of their gravitational masses, and both were created by gravity and held together by gravity but the Moon does not cause gravity here on Earth and the Earth does not cause gravity on the Moon.

Stay rational.

So I was on the train heading downtown to take my Mac to the Apple store for repairs and I got into a conversation with a man about the Dawkins book (The Greatest Show on Earth) that I was reading and his astronomy magazine. It turns out he's a bio-statistician at Kaiser Permanente and when I told him that I was studying for an advanced degree in bioinformatics he gave me his card and told him to contact him when I was closer to graduation--along with trying to sweeten the idea by telling me about some of the very, very cool toys they have at their disposal! I LOVE being a science geek!

        

        "Skepticism or debunking often receives the bad rap reserved for activities--like garbage disposal--that absolutely must be done for a safe and sane life, but seem either unglamorous or unworthy of overt celebration.” (Stephen Jay Gould)


Skepticism and skeptics get a bad rap. So I am standing here today to say that I'm a skeptic and I'm proud. Skeptics are mentally from the state of Missouri, the Show Me state. We are people in love with asking questions and whose curiosity is, typically, wide ranging. When skeptics start asking questions about some sacred cow or another, it isn't because we are mocking or ridiculing others nor is it because we don't have an open mind. It isn't that we don't take others ideas or beliefs seriously. We assume that the World, all that we can be aware of in some way, at some level, is real. By real I mean something to which any reasonable person would have to grant at least provisional agreement to.

        Most of the time, most people are skeptical about those things they find foreign, strange or different.

        Hurry, hurry, hurry! Step right up tune your ears and open your minds! It's the diet break-through of the century! This diet will lower your risk of cancer and heart disease, help you live longer, prevent colds and flu and assist your body in healing if you're injured! What is this miracle diet, you ask? Is it based on Atkins or South Beach? No! It's Dr. Davis’ Patented Yogurt Diet! That's right, you eat Yogurt or yogurt based foods, three times a day, every meal. Why I've been on nothing but yogurt for 15 years and I still look 30 even though I'm much, much, much older than that! Yes, ladies and gentleman yogurt has all the cultures, nutrients and vitamins that a body needs at every stage of life. Just buy my book, “Yogurt for a More Cultured You” and attend my seminars “Yogurt, the Miracle Food” and you'll be on your way to a longer, healthier, more active life!         

        Now, what was wrong with that? Chances are that, at least once in that little spiel, you said “yeah, right”. If I were really selling something, you might find yourself wanting to how one could eat yogurt and nothing but yogurt and stay healthy. You might wonder if I really ate only yogurt. You might begin to wonder how much older than 30 I really am. That is skepticism. If I were selling this on TV you might want to know what an organization like Consumer Reports or even WebMD had to say about eating only yogurt. You might Google for 'yogurt diet' and see what kind of information came back. The last thing you would probably do is take my word for it and shell out money to me.

        Skeptics are people who have a simple trust in the Universe and it is this; that the Universe is going to be both more clever than we are and reliably consistent most of the time. What that means is that while, as Hamlet said to Horatio, that there are stranger things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, we can also count on certain things. “You can't unbreak an egg.” “The firmness of the Earth” “Like the sun rising in the East and setting in the West...” these are all statements testifying to the regularity of the Universe. That regularity means that we can expect, for instance, cause and effect to work most of the time in most situations.

        Don't get the idea that skeptics think we know everything or that we just reject ideas out of hand. Do you believe that there is life on another planets? Do you believes that there is intelligent life on other planets? Do you believes that aliens visit the Earth?

        Now, I believe—although I have no proof and very little evidence—that it is very likely that there is life elsewhere in the Universe. I think it is possible, although less likely, that there is life elsewhere in our solar system. I think it is probable that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. It is vanishingly unlikely that the planet has been visited by aliens. The reason I say that is that there is no good evidence for aliens having visited the planet.

We are the watch men who guard against bad ideas in order to discover good ideas, consumer advocates of critical thinking who, through the guidelines of science, establish a mark at which to aim.

Jenny McCarthy's Autism Crusade: Healing, Hope... And Controversy

Jim Carrey: The Judgment on Vaccines Is In???

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-carrey/the-judgment-on-vaccines_b_189777.html

Since when did Jim Carrey become an expert on vaccinations, clinical trials and the scientific method? Yesterday I was horrified to look at Huffington Post and see, on the front page, the article linked to above. Here’s the thing, this has been studied in multiple instances and no causative link between autism and the schedule of vaccines has been found. None. Zip. Nada. Bupkis. Yes, I know that Jenny McCarthy says that there is and so does Jim Carrey but that doesn’t mean that they have bugger-all idea of what they are talking about. Rather, it means that they have bought into a lot of woo ideas about science and medicine and have also imbibed the conspiracy theory view that there are these sinister forces moving behind the scenes. Neither holds any water what-so-ever. My concern is not for those people who are educated in the relevant science enough to know the difference between evidence-based and woo-based medicine. Rather, my concern is for those kids who rely on herd immunity for their own safety because they can’t get vaccinated. The rest of us being vaccinated is all that protects them.

Perhaps it’s just me but I think that perhaps Mr. Carrey and Ms. McCarthy might want to actually read some of the actual literature. Anecdotal evidence is not something to rely on in making public policy.