Reader Psyberdave sent me a note about a website he found. I usually don’t blog about such things, but geez, sometimes it’s best to air stuff like this out. Cabotia.com is one of those crackpot websites that when you read it, you can’t really make yourself believe it’s for real.

He’s a geocentrist.

No, really.

Now, to be honest, like I said he might be joking. I can’t tell if the guy is seriously a geocentrist or not. Can you?

He describes his take on how lunar and solar eclipses work using heliocentrism, and it’s, well, it’s classic crackpottery:

In the heliocentric system it is IMPOSSIBLE to have phases of the moon without having a major solar and lunar eclipse at least twice every month. The spinning earth can’t save them this time because the shadow would just move with the turning earth and more people could view this spectacular heavenly display twice a month.

Well, he’s got me there. There’s no way I could explain that without resorting to having the Moon’s orbit tilted with respect to the Earth’s by about 5 degrees. No way at all.

Sigh. Well, if you can keep from clawing your eyes out, go ahead and give that site a go. But I warned ya!

Online quizzes can be fun, but not always in the way the creators meant.

You Passed 8th Grade Science

Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!

So I got a perfect score; I did in fact pass 8th grade science (about a billion years ago). However, I wonder if the people who created the quiz would pass! For example, here is a screen shot of one of their questions:

You tell me. What is the charge on a neuron? As you can see, I guessed they meant "neutron" and I was right. After all, neurons do pass electric charge!

Also, another question was poorly phrased. It was:

8. What causes the tides on Earth?

* The wind currents
* The gravitational pull of the moon
* The tilt of the Earth’s axis
* The speed at which the Earth rotates

While the gravity of the Moon is the main cause of gravitational tides, the Earth’s rotation does play a significant role in tides.

So I got an A+, but I give the quiz writers a C.

Tip o’ the propeller beanie to Ian Musgrave for this.

That may seem like an inflammatory headline. It probably won’t after you read this.

A week or so ago I got an email from someone with the Union of Concerned Scientists — a watchdog group of scientists who, among other things, keep track of science abuses — saying they had released the results of a survey about science abuse at the Food and Drug Administration. Scientists at the FDA had responded to the survey, and many said that their opinions were ignored and even suppressed if they disagreed with results the FDA wanted.

Since this wasn’t really my field, I didn’t respond to the email. Obviously, I’ve changed my mind. With what went down at NASA over the George Deutsch affair, and with everything else we’re seeing from this antiscience government, I’m realizing that any scientific suppression is fair game for me to air out here.

What also changed my mind was reading Michael Stebbins’ article in Seed magazine about this: The FDA Is a Cauldron of Discontent. It’s a short article, but damning in its implications. And the webpages documenting this at the UCS are even scarier. Here’s a choice quotation:

“Scientific discourse is strongly discouraged when it may jeopardize an approval. . . . Whenever safety or efficacy concerns are raised on scientific grounds . . . these concerns are not taken seriously.”

What has happened to us? The scariest thing about that quotation, to me, is that it wouldn’t surprise me to hear it from a scientist in any number of government agencies. Scientific suppression is that widespread, and covers that wide a swath.

The FDA is directly responsible for approving drugs that we all take. Our lives depend on this! Stebbins, the author of the Seed magazine article, also writes a good blog called Sex, Drugs, and DNA, rang the alarm about this FDA suppression, and he complains:

Somehow every major news agency and most major newspapers missed the story. This is perplexing to me.

Sadly, it doesn’t surprise me. Even though the New York Times broke the story on NASA and George Deutsch, and it was extensively covered by science blogs, when I talked about this at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St. Louis in February, most scientists there had not heard of Deutsch. I found that although the scientists were very concerned about the suppression of science by this Administration, specific examples outside their own field were unknown to them.

This concerns me a great deal. How do we fight something if we don’t have the big picture?

One way is to educate yourself, of course. I read a lot of blogs– my blogroll on the right hand side of this page has a list of some of the blogs that fight antiscience. They have links to others, and so on. It doesn’t take very long to skim all those blogs, especially if you use an aggregator like Bloglines or any number of others. These blogs are not just people in their pajamas banging away on their keyboards; many of these are from respected scientists, science journalists, and people in the trenches who are fighting this war on science.

Hmmm… I almost wrote "encroaching storm" there in that last line, but that’s not accurate: we’re in the storm right now, and it’s at full gale. Science is sacrificed constantly today for political reasons, and it must stop.

Mid-term elections are coming up in November. Investigate your Senator and Congressperson. Find out where they stand on these and other important issues, and on November 7, 2006, take a stand.

I will. Suppressing science is the very essence of antidemocracy– it keeps the public in the dark about reality. Knowledge is our strength, and the ballot box is our weapon.

I’ll leave you with this, from Thomas Jefferson:

"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."

Who doesn’t love a spiral galaxy? Majestic, sparkling, lovely to behold… I could go on and on about the marvelous and wondrous science behind them; how spiral arms form, why stars are born there, and how the passage of a nearby galaxy can disturb their graceful symmetry.

But instead, I’ll just point you to the European Southern Observatory collection of disturbed spiral galaxies and simply let you absorb their beauty.

Sigh.

I want to send out a hearty CONGRATS to the brilliant engineers and scientists on the Mars rover team: Spirit just passed it’s 900th sol (Martian day) on the Red Planet. It was designed to last for only 90 sols, so it has endured for a solid factor of 10 times what the original specs called for. When was the last time you had a device last 900% longer than the warranty? I had a router blow out last night that I bought just a few months ago, and it’s not sitting on a planet millions of kilometers away, weathering sandstorms and subzero temperatures.

The other rover, Opportunity, will have its 900th sol in a couple of weeks.

Wow. Smart people: gotta love ‘em.

Whenever I’m outside, and I happen to know where the Moon should be, I look for it. Sometimes it’s a waning gibbous phase, low in the west at sunrise. Or it might be a half Moon, high in the south at sunset. My favorite is the thin crescent, a "fingernail" Moon, hanging near the horizon.

The thinner the crescent, the harder it is to see. That’s because when it’s really thin it’s just hard to find, of course, but also because the thinner it is, the closer it must be to the Sun in the sky. We see lunar phases because the geometry of the Earth-Moon-Sun system changes, and the phase depends on where the Moon is relative to the Sun. A thin crescent is always surrounded by bright sky, and is also near the blinding Sun. That’s quite a gauntlet to pass!

It’s tough to photograph, too, which is why that image above is so remarkable. The Moon was about 24 hours from being new — meaning that in only a day it would be at the closest point to the Sun in the sky — when that picture was taken. The picture is eerily lovely, but to my eye, is all the more cooler because of the circumstances under which the photographer got it. The story is written on the wonderful Lunar Picture of the Day website (tip o’ the dew shield to Chuck Wood from LPOD — with whom I recently had lunch — for the picture). Give it a read– you might want to try for a young Moon sometime yourself!

While searching the web looking for an answer to a reader’s question, I stumbled on a page that links to my Bad Astronomy site. This wasn’t hugely surprising; lots of pages link here (usually in the lines of "Disinfo spook NSA NASA shill Phil Plait says…").

What surprised me was that it was from the United States House of Representatives! Sorta. The Science is fun! page is sponsored by the Democratic Caucus of the House Science Committee.

So, as usual, the antiscientists have it all backwards: I’m not a mouthpiece for the gummint, the gummint is shilling me!