Do you wash your hands after using the bathroom? No? Why the hell not?

In the 1840s (the 1840s, folks, 160 years ago), Ignaz Phillip Semmelweis figured that washing hands before surgery would cut the infection rate of patients… and this was decades before germs were tagged as the cause of diseases.

Our bodies harbor vast numbers of germs, and a lot of them just love to hang out in our nether regions. Here’s a fun thing to know: human feces are 75% water, but of the remaining 25%, the majority is composed of live and dead bacteria. Yum! The simple act of washing your hands after getting rid of your latest quota of feces will get rid of the majority of those germs that might have made it, somehow, onto your hands. And from there to the flush handle, and to the doorknob, and to whatever else you touch for the next three hours until you wash your hands. Do you use a pencil or pen at work? Do you chew on the end sometimes, putting the pencil in your mouth, the pencil you held in your hands, after touching the doorknob, the flush handle, your fecal bacteria?

I believe I have made my point.

So now you decide to wash your hands. What about that guy you saw leaving the public bathroom as you went in?

Good question. To answer it, Wirthlin Worldwide conducted a survey in 2003 to see what people did in airport bathrooms. The result? About 1/4 of the men and 1/6 of the women leave a bathroom without washing their hands. I have no idea if they accounted for people going in to check their makeup, to brush their teeth, etc. Still, this is an appalling statistic. We’ve known about the efficacy of washing our hands for 16 decades now!

Sheesh. Wash your hands, folks. And use soap. Just rinsing doesn’t help, and in fact it hurts– wet hands are a great place for breeding more microscopic critters.

I’ll leave you with this bit from the article linked above. I was curious about how the study was done. The article says:

The survey … observed 7,541 people in public washrooms in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Miami, and Toronto.

No details on how this “observation” was done in the article. Yikes. The next time you see someone loitering in the bathroom at an airport with a clipboard and a hawk-like gaze, peering at people oddly and furtively as they enter and leave the bathroom… thank him.

What’s that, you ask? You want more inane pictures of my Australia trip from 2004?

Why, I can help you.

Remember the scene in the original Matrix when Morpheus and Neo are in “the Construct”? They’re at a fountain, with people walking by, bumping into Neo. Here’s a picture to jog your memory:

Yes, I stole that picture off the Internets, as I don’t have any illegal frame-grabbing software for my DVDs. And no, I’m not sure why those people have their heads circled, nor is it important to this story, though no doubt I’ll get comments on it.

So anyway, in the next moment, a blonde in a red dress walks by, distracting Neo:

Ah, now you remember.

Well, that fountain, called the Martin’s Place Fountain, is in Sydney, Australia. I visited there on my first day of the trip. Little did I know people would be shooting at me, and I would have to dodge bullets a la the Matrix:

That should fulfill your silliness quotient of the day.

BREAKING NEWS: The launch has been scrubbed today due to a sensor failure: more info here. It’ll be Sunday at least before they can attempt another launch. I’ll blog about it when it happens. Stay Tuned.

Yeah, duh, like there’s other space news right now!

Like everyone else, I’ll be watching the launch today at 3:51 p.m. (Eastern). Every space blogger and news site has more info, so I’ll just direct you to NASA’s Return to Flight page and the Virtual Launch Control Center, which has current news (at 12:25 Eastern time, the astronauts had reached the launch pad).

I’ll update this entry here as things progress.

(Times are all Eastern)

12:45 p.m. Some of the astronauts are onboard Discovery and are getting strapped in.

1:34 p.m. DRAT! A hardware problem (a low level fuel sensor was misbehaving; it’s one of four, but they all need to be working) has scrubbed the launch for today. The astronauts are disembarking the Shuttle.

2:09 p.m. The astronauts have left the Shuttle. There will be a press conference no earlier than 4:30 p.m. to discuss what happened and what happens next.

I will have more info shortly.

Despite my better judgment, I went to see "War of the Worlds". I didn’t want to see it because, honestly, I think Tom Cruise has lost his mind, and is totally brainwashed by the cult of Scientology. I have no desire to give them any more money. However, my old friend Seth Shostak asked if I’d watch it and comment on it on his Are We Alone? radio show, so I went to see it.

I actually enjoyed it, for the most part. I won’t go into details here on the BABlog since I have a lengthy review of it on the main site. The bottom line: not a bad flick, could use some serious improvements, but it was very tense and exciting.

I still miss Clayton Forrester, though. He’s top man in nuclear and astrophysics! He knows all about meteors!

This is why my office is cooler than yours:

Whenever some 7 foot tall monster has the back of my favorite neck against the wall, or some twinkie Moon Hoax believer is assaulting my sensabilities, I just remember what Jack Burton or Buzz Aldrin would do.

Then I smile to myself and think that if my own big troubles seem too much to handle, I should walk a mile in someone else’s moon boots.

Note 1: This entry is featured in the 32nd Tangled Bank science blog carnival.

Note2 : I suppose you can think of this as third in a series of Deep Impact posts. It may be the last one for a while, but this mission has made me do a lot of thinking, so I reserve the right to keep writing!

I get a lot of questions from people asking why we should fund space travel. There are lots of answers to that, including the obvious (to me, at least) points about how our lives are much, much better due to the exploration of space (think for a moment what things would be like right now without satellite technology; tech that was developed by– surprise– the space program), what we’ve learned about the Universe, what we’ve learned about the Sun and how it affects us (directly and hugely, including causing power outages during solar eruptions), what we’ve learned about Earth’s climate from simply going up and looking back down… and the list goes on.

But there is also a deeper impact. A much deeper one, a profound one.

It may not be universal in all humans, but exploration is a survival trait. When the climate changed, got colder, early humans who got up off their butts and went traveling, looked around corners, set off for new ground– they survived. Ones who sat tight and tried to wait it out probably didn’t do so well. Standing on our tiptoes and looking over an obstacle is, in a very real sense, what makes us human. Space travel is an extension of that. What greater obstacles than the Earth’s gravity, the vacuum of space?

But there’s something else, too. Space travel inspires us. When it’s understood, when it’s comprehended, when it’s internalized, it propels us to new heights both literally and figuratively. It makes us better people.

It certainly made a group of school kids in Minnesota better people. Their teacher, Dee McLellan, was inspired by Deep Impact. She thought about how much copper was used in the impactor which hit the comet, and wondered how many pennies it would take to make that much weight. She told her 7th grade Earth science class this, and they made it a project: collect as many pennies as they could to equal that weight.

And they made it! They got 300 pounds of pennies, the actual weight of the copper in the impactor. But it’s the next part that really inspires me: they sent the money they collected to their sister school in the Ukraine, where money is even tighter than it is in our own US school system.

The kids worked hard, and they did good. Inspired by the space program, they helped children they’ve never even met. Even though they’re just starting to explore science and space, they were able to make a difference, and they made it clear across the planet.

… but you know, this planet seems a whole lot smaller when humans send ships across the solar system, just so we can peek around a corner and see what’s there.

The Deep Impact impactor slammed into comet P/9 Tempel 1 right on the money last night! It was amazing. Imagine: a comet orbiting the Sun at 30 kilometers per second is hit by a probe moving at 10 km/sec, and images were taken by yet another instrument sweeping past the whole event.

We humans are pretty smart.

Here’s an animation of images taken from the impactor as it went in. Very cool.

Images are pouring in from everywhere: from the Deep Impact mission itself (run, do not walk, to see those images!), Hubble, XMM-Newton, the European Southern Observatory… it’s great. I was with a group last night, and we took some images using our 14″ telescope. Once I have them analyzed I’ll post them, but it’ll be later this week.

The science is pouring in as well. Water was detected by XMM-Newton (once again showing the antiscientists are dead wrong about comets). The plume will be analyzed by for days; the images of the nucleus are fascinating, showing flattened craters, which hint at the surface composition. We’ll be hearing about new ideas for weeks, and studies will go on for years.

Science rocks.

Congrats to the Deep Impact team!