Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

It is important to say: Phil Plait! About time.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Indeed! What a great surprise when I clicked over to here. And with Carl, no less. Let's have Round 2 as soon as possible.

BTW, Carl: You got a shoutout right on this site from BH.tv community member Nate for your own recent stellar debunking work. (Well, more terran than stellar, to be picky.)

And Phil: Congrats on the Time Top 25 Award. (Is PZ jealous?)

Some links mentioned
 

-- Phil's many times updated, data-aggregating post on the Texas fireball

-- Phil's "what we know so far" post, summarizing the above

-- Phil's update, with video of the fireball. (The runners are hilarious -- looks like a panicked mob quelled with a massive infusion of Xanax.)

-- video of the Edmonton meteorite, as captured by a police dashboard camera

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Zimmer is awesome; very informative. Please have him on more often.

Buzz Aldrin
 

In case you have not seen it, the video of 78 year old Buzz Aldrin clocking 34 year old Bart Sibrel. I don't think it is a good idea to call someone like Aldrin "a coward and a liar and a thief."

Re: Buzz Aldrin
 

Thank you, thprop. That was very refreshing.

Re: Buzz Aldrin
 

I know it's wrong for me to enjoy this as much as I do, but what a beautiful moment!

Re: Buzz Aldrin
 

I don't think violence accomplishes much but sometimes it has a very cathartic effect. Sibrel attempted to have Buzz charged with a crime, but the Beverly Hills authorities declined. The BBC had a very thorough account of the incident.

Slight correction - this happened on September 9, 2002, when Buzz was much younger - 72. From Phil's post on the incident:

Re: Buzz Aldrin
 

Fun diavlogue, but I think Plait's enthusiasm carried him away at times. He gets the causality of fear of terrorism backwards- people didn't just shrug after 9/11 until color coded warnings appeared and started scaring them, color coded warnings appeared because people were scared and the government needed to look like it was doing something to address that.
The LHC thing was also a facile dismissal of people's fears. I don't doubt that the current calculations show it to be impossible, but these are the calculations that have already been done wrong at least once. To pretend like there's no chance they were messed up again just costs you credibility with anyone who's thinking critically about what you're saying.

Re: Buzz Aldrin
 

I disagree with your assertion about the LHC. People's fears were whipped up by knaves and charlatans. In the absence of attention grabbing stunts like the lawsuit filed in Hawaii(!) seeking a restraining order against CERN (in Switzerland) nobody would have felt any reason to feel afraid. The LHC was far from the first big accelerator, and wasn't even the largest for which ground was broken.

The guys responsible for creating all of the noise were clowns with no legitimate point.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Some new blood for the science section! Let's see if they can keep up with the two old turtles. ;)

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Awesome diavlog. Although I would have expected John or George to host something on "skepticism." But Carl was great and Phil was a great new face. I look forward to part 2, and 3...

Note to our bloggingheads overlords: this is the second or third diavlog in as many days where several links or items mentioned were not shown in the sidebar.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

And did you notice that you still sit atop the viewer generated dingalinks? This also hasn't been updated for nearly 2 weeks. Maybe it's a wildcat strike?

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Yeah, I noticed that too. Though I prize my position at the zenith of bloggingheads dingalink-dom, I'm also itching for new DL's.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Some here, if you missed them.

Re: Buzz Aldrin
 

The point isn't so much how things would happen in the absence of this kind of protest, but the plausibility of scientists being able to self-regulate, which I think is hurt by blithely professing complete certainty in figures which contradict the previous figures he was completely certain of. I know being a PR guy for the scientific establishment isn't exactly Plait's job description, but I don't think it's asking much for him to take a step back and talk realistically about the chance for human error in the calculations or the theory or the construction and operation.

Re: Buzz Aldrin
 

pampl, I honestly don't understand how this applies to Plait's points about the LHC. The chance for human error was exactly the same for the LHC as it was for every other human endeavor since the beginning of time. The chance that those errors would lead to the end the world were also exactly the same as it was for those other projects - pretty much zero.

There are regularly higher energy collisions (by orders of magnitude) in the upper atmosphere than will ever be achieved by the LHC. The cumulative magnitude of those collisions so dwarfs the LHC's potential that the net increase caused by the LHC is essentially zero. There's nothing unique or extraordinary enough about it to have warranted the concerns.

Re: Buzz Aldrin
 

I wasn't talking about whether the concerns were warranted. It'd look just as bad any time someone said he's doing something with an infinitesimal chance of widespread destruction and, after meeting with resistance from a handful of people, said he was wrong and actually there's no chance at all. It's more important now, I guess, as experiments get scarier sounding, information becomes more wide spread, and people demand more democratic control over the fate of their lives. That's not really relevant to the criticism itself, just a reason why it's a IMO it's a more serious blunder nowadays.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

So, not being very scientifically inclined but interested nonetheless, I try to keep up with Science Saturdays and clicked on Phil’s Bad Astronomy link. And what do I see on the front page immediately? A music video tribute set to my favorite-est TV show of all time – FireFly! Here I am trying to learn something tangible about astronomy and right away I get sucked into what seems to be an homage to Inara Serra, the space courtesan. I tried! I can only grasp one scientific item at a time so the video was all I came away with from the site, but I’ll make another attempt maybe next week.

I also recently bought Carl’s Parasite Rex based on everyone’s raves a while back. I’m still not sure if I got it because I want to read it or I want to be the kind of person who reads it, but I know that I’ll read it.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Two more additions to the long list of reasons to like you.

I highly recommend, either before reading or after, listening to Carl's appearance on This American Life, conducted right after P. Rex was released. Listening to Ira Glass get progressively more horrified is hilarious. That interview was what spurred me to buy the book.

If you're pressed for time, Carl's part is Act II, starting at 24:30, but the whole show is good.

The Last Word on the LHC
 

Via Joanne Hewitt: from Abstruse Goose.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Wow, really enjoyed this. I keep looking forward to Science Saturday bhtv more and more; We need an occasional Science Wednesday or something to help me make it through the week.

Definitely get Phil back here sometime; He was excellent!

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

It is a great interview - and ends spectacularly.
Ira Glass asks - "Mr. Zimmer, whose side are you on?"

Ira goes on to call Parasite Rex "the perfect reading material if you ever want to have a long talk with an eight year old boy."

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Such a great show. I still find myself singing (in inadvertently humming) music from the show even though it has been awhile since I have seen an episode. (the theme song, "Hero of Canton", etc.) Probably has something to do with watching every episode so many times, haha.

Fox could have had a gold mine on their hands with that one, but really screwed the pooch in how they handled it. (meddling with production, not airing the pilot to set up the characters and airing the others out of order, etc.) I keep hoping they will make a sequel to Serenity (or better yet a trilogy), but I am expecting disappointment.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Jeez, thprop. Ever heard of putting SPOILER ALERT at the top of a post like that?

;^)

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Wondering if Bad Astronomy was the same website that I saw years ago which did things like explain why the hilariously bad opening of Contact (the film) was bad science. I may have it confused with another.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

http://www.samefacts.com/archives/darwin-1-sm.gif

http://www.mikero.com/blog/2009/02/20/more-darwin

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Minor nitpicks, but not too harsh, it appears.

Maybe you were thinking of the right site, but another movie?

Why did you think the opening of Contact was "hilariously bad?"

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

!!!!!

Totally stealing that.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Knew you'd like it. :)

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Nice! I saw that on Pharyngula the other day and thought it was killer.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Whither ' taken out of context' ? I've also have noticed this . . . very perturbing. (Will I actually have to start posting substantive comments now?!) And, even worse: the 'highlights' that have been published the last couple of weeks on the main page have been stolen from user generated content! 'Bankers aren't pirates' was from one of our fellow posters (can't remember who right now) and 'Costly Inquiry' was stolen from, well . . . ME.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Thanks! That's the site. It says it was last updated last year but I'm pretty sure I read it in the early part of this decade.


No, that's the one. I just thought it was pretty funny to say (among other things) that you could go to Saturn and dial up Jack Benny, Walter Winchell or Fibber Mcgee.

Explained above. As to the film itself, even after cataloguing about ten significant science gaffes, the reviewer says something rather extraordinary:

"Those of you familiar with my reviews know that I take a dim view of science errors in movies. However, I loved ``Contact'' and so I am willing to give it more leeway. Does that sound unfair? Too bad! It's my website!"

As a lifelong film fan this has always been one of my pet peeves, reviewers willing to overlook bad filmmaking because they approve of the message. The message in Contact struck me as rather hollow and silly, but I think Jonathan Rosenbaum says it much better than I.

Whether it's space nannies prompting early man to bash each other over the heads with bones, or extraterrestrials sucking an earthling across the galaxy to plant them in the middle of Club Med, ham-handed space philosophy has always lowered the value of space travel fiction.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Your memory is almost certainly correct in spirit, if a little exaggerated. I expect Phil would have reviewed it soon after it was released. It looks like he added more thoughts later; e.g., there is an explicit note at the beginning of one paragraph saying "[NOTE (May 11, 2000) ..."

However, to be precise, the movie came out in 1997. (Hard to think that "twelve years ago" only gets you back to the late '90s, isn't it?)

I can't really disagree with any of that. I would point out that just as it's easy to catch (and be bothered by) scientific shortcomings, it's also legitimate to downplay the significance of points where scientific accuracy is traded off for poetic license and better-paced story-telling.

To my mind, the opening sequence of Contact is excusable because it gets across a point key to a later part of the story -- that Earth's radio transmission leakage has been going on for decades -- succinctly, and as importantly, in a visually appealing way. To the latter point, I find this sequence to be in the same spirit as the opening title sequence of the original Star Trek series -- obviously, a spaceship does not make a whooshing sound, but adding it in makes the scene more dramatic.

To the former, I'll recall that the most frequent complaint I heard about Jurassic Park was the expository scene where the hows and whys of the genetic engineering were presented. I didn't mind it, but the consensus seemed to have recoiled in horror, being reminded perhaps of past science classes. So, directors are always looking for didactic shortcuts, and I give them a pass when it's only a supporting point serving some larger one, and I think Phil did, too.

Rosenbaum's review was good (thanks for the link) and I agree with his starting thesis, that MiB is arguably better, in part because of the way it deals with adhering (or not) to plausible scientific extrapolation. However, I'd say that if you go into a movie already predisposed to dislike it, as Rosenbaum did due to his distaste for Zemeckis and Forrest Gump, it's no great feat to pick it apart. (And by the end of the review, he seems to have taken the opportunity to vent his dislike for a whole lot of other things, which got tedious.)

I went into Contact not having seen Gump, and more importantly, having read and loved the book, so I wasn't looking to nitpick the scientific failings. (I was more bothered by the obeisance to the First Law of Hollywood -- that every movie must have a plain vanilla love story. It would have been more to my taste to portray Joss the way he was in the book, where he and Arroway did have a relationship that grew in complexity, and was all the more interesting because it wasn't driven by hormones.)

There was one gaffe that did strike me when I first saw the movie. I went to see the movie the day it was released, with a bunch of friends from work, all of us playing hooky. We were all in the business of using computers to do signal processing. In the scene where the alien message is first noticed, and the people pounding keyboards in the room are able to respond to Arroway's commands and -- clickety, clickety, clickety -- instantly filter and otherwise process the data, and produce gee-whiz graphics to boot, our entire group erupted in laughter, much to the mystification of those around us.

It's always hard to say when one is being righteously critical and when one is guilty of nerdgassing. And, as I said above, the dividing line is further blurred by how one goes into a given movie. So, I can accept your beefs as beefs, and not unjustified quibbles, but I, like Phil, was not bothered by them.

Did you read the book? The book is way better.

One last thing:

An interesting choice of word: nannies. The conceit of an outside agency directing humankind's evolution seems just as acceptable to me as any of a number of other scifi plot devices. As with, say, FTL travel, I'm willing to take a dubious starting point as axiomatic for the sake of the rest of the story. I wonder why this comes off as politically objectionable to you. If it does, I mean -- maybe you didn't mean to bring to mind nanny state -- but from your earlier mention of the "message" of Contact, I'm thinking your choice was conscious.

It seems that you're more sensitive to political undertones than I am when it comes to movies. Unless I'm being beaten over the head with a message, I usually miss what other people see. I guess I mostly go to the movies with the same mindset I adopt when I read thrillers: just entertain me by telling a good story. I suppose I'm not really a film fan in the sense that you are.

Anyway, again I'll ask, did you read the book? (I presume we're talking 2001 here.) I thought Clarke presented the aliens not so much as nannies but as gardeners (and I think he used that exact word) -- where they found the seeds of intelligence in their travels around the galaxy, they'd add a little fertilizer to help it grow. Their motivations are not so much directing those they help along any particular path as seeing what they'll turn into once they get smarter. In the book, the immediate consequences of the brain boost from the monolith are a lot more detailed, and have almost nothing to do with clubbing each other over the head.

In general, I think we're on the same page as far as impatience with how most major scifi movies are made. Unfortunately, I don't think we'd get to see very many of this genre if the directors were allowed to appeal only to our sensibilities. I try, therefore, when I go to see a major Hollywood scifi flick to put the nerd-critic part of my brain in neutral, but I have to admit, if I start not liking the movie for other reasons, I'll fully indulge putting it into overdrive.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

These guys talk about creationism and the lunar landings in the same breath. The first is subject to scientific enquiry but the second is not. The fact is that most people are scared to death of being thought of as crackpots and are therefore unwilling to admit to doubts about whether man has ever walked on the moon. It is also true that there would have been a major political motive for faking the landings. There is also no way of proving that the landings did in fact take place. If, using the same technology available in the 1960s, NASA (or anybody) is able to replicate the landings, that would take the wind out of the sails of the lunar-skeptics. Until that is done, there is enough reason to be skeptical. If these guys are real skeptics, they should be willing to explore the evidence that runs contrary to popular opinion. It is simply not enough to debunk unpopular theories by questioning the evidence presented -- true science involves finding your own evidence and subjecting it to rational enquiry.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Completely disagree. The first is not subject to scientific enquiry, while the second one is.

Creationism is a belief in something for which there is a reasonable argument, given the way our brains are wired, for which there is no evidence. You either accept by faith that there is/was a Creator or you do not. One can make a scientific case against the Young Earth variant, and one can also make a scientific case that we have no need of the Creator hypothesis to explain evolution or even the beginning of life, and one can even believe in the scientific explanations and still not be dissuaded from thinking that a Creator set up (and maybe even watches over) the whole system. However, one cannot even begin to make a case that would disprove the existence of a Creator. This, fundamentally, is the objection to teaching Creationism in a science class: because it is not amenable to the rules of scientific enquiry.

By contrast, the question of whether the Moon landings were real or faked is indeed amenable to being discussed according to the rules of science. We have a boatload of evidence, from rocks to video tape to eyewitnesses, and when all of that is taken into account, we can reach for the first tool in any scientist's toolbox: Occam's Razor. That is, given everything we have at hand, is it more parsimonious to believe the landings really did happen, or that a conspiracy involving millions of people operating over the better part of two decades has still not sprung a leak?

You're perfectly free to believe the latter, and insist that the giant pile of evidence fails to prove anything, but this is even more non-scientific than the feeblest bleatings of the Discovery Institute.

And no. I am not going to debate the "reasons" you have for being "skeptical" about the Moon landings. Go read Phil Plait.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

I will ignore your insults but the fact is that your conviction that the lunar landings did take place is based on your wish to believe, not the 'mountain' of evidence that presumably exists. All this sounds very much like religious faith to me, i.e. unprovable. Unfortunately, that is what has characterized the debate on over the lunar landings -- an unwillingness on the part of the 'believers' to accept that there is no way of proving that the event did in fact take place unless it is replicated using the same technology that presumably got us there in the first place.

And, by the way, it wasn't my intention to argue that creationism could be proven correct, just the opposite. The basic tenets of the biblical account - the earth being 7,000 year old etc, can be shown by modern science to be incorrect.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

Please don't.

Wow. You know how to co-opt the language of real skeptics. In other news, the Disco'tute peeps know how to talk science-y.

Unfortunately for you, the only debate is in your twisted little mind. Go away.

Re: Science Saturday: Astronomical Edition
 

That was nicely presented, Brendan. (Hobby horse alert!) I'd add a few small observations. The opening radio sequence was metaphorical, not literal - just a device to help make obvious the point of the sequence. In that sense it's really not unscientific, just poetic license. It's forgivable for exactly the same reason that an audible space explosion is not. That is, it exists to get across a valid (and necessary to the plot) scientific idea to the audience.

Think about General Grievous, the wheezing alien in Revenge of the Sith, cackling as he's ejected into vacuum and competently maneuvers himself into an escape vehicle, or the insta-blooming "Genesis Planet" in The Search For Spock. Annoying physics blunders exist as failures of the imagination.

Occasionally exaggerating an effect, or inventing a speculative physical law that fundamentally interacts with the plot really aren't sins if they're carefully crafted and serve a purpose.