In other climate news, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) — which represents tens of thousands of science teachers in the US — has apparently refused the gift of 50,000 DVDs of "An Inconvenient Truth" for its members (the linked article at the Washington Post was written by one of the producers of the film). I have not seen this movie (I plan to), but I know that environmental scientists seem to support it. Since I am not that particular flavor of scientist, I’m moved to listen to those who are. It seems odd to me that the NSTA would refuse the gift. From the WaPo article, NSTA said:

Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place “unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.” One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp.

Wow. I mean, really. Wow.

If they wanted to say that they didn’t want to participate in a political debate, I might find that acceptable, except that I get the NSTA newsletter, and they have political notes in it quite often. Also, according to this poster at the NSTA discussion board, they distribute educational videos produced by the oil industry.

Then there is this, also from the WaPo article:

NSTA’s list of corporate donors also includes Shell Oil and the American Petroleum Institute (API), which funds NSTA’s Web site on the science of energy. There, students can find a section called “Running on Oil” and read a page that touts the industry’s environmental track record — citing improvements mostly attributable to laws that the companies fought tooth and nail, by the way — but makes only vague references to spills or pollution. NSTA has distributed a video produced by API called “You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel,” a shameless pitch for oil dependence.

I used to be a member of the NSTA but let my membership lapse due to my own laziness. However, I am now reconsidering ever renewing it. The NSTA does a huge amount of really good work, but if this is true it’s appalling. Avoiding angering a sponsor is understandable, but this would be standing in the way of open debate and in fact looks like they are swayed by the sponsor the other way. That, to me, does not sound like science at all.

Hopefully more information will air out about this soon. In general I support the NSTA’s mission, of course but these questions need to be answered.

Note: After writing this essay Sunday night, I saw that PZ Myers has similar thoughts. Also, Sara Robinson has some harsher words for the NSTA. And to do an end-run around any global warming deniers who will post in the comments, take a look at RealClimate.

Regular readers may be familiar with James Hansen, a climatologist who works for NASA. He has been tireless in advocating that we do something about global warming before it does something to us (if it isn’t already too late), and is an outspoken critic of the Bush administration which, to be honest and fair, is the most antiscientific administration ever seen in this country.

Hansen has written an article about his dealings with this increasingly antiscientific government. This is an interesting and infuriating article; I want to scream when I read things like this. Reuters has more on Hansen as well.

In the meantime, the Bush administration is being taken to court over global warming. This is also interesting, as the case rests on the details of the 1970 Clean Air Act and whether the EPA can regulate emission of carbon dioxide. An appeals court was split on the decision, so the Supreme Court is taking it up. I’ll be very curious to see how this turns out. While I think the Bush White House is guilty as sin on a long long list of antiscience endeavors, global warming is probably the least likely place they will budge, given how much money is behind denying the reality of it. But maybe with this court case, the climate will indeed change.

Coming up later today: Chilly Climate, Part II

Oops! I forgot to tip my sun-blocking straw garden hat to long time BABloggee and BA friend Cindy Taylor for sending me the link to Hansen’s article.

Every once in a very great while, a major American news outlet publishes an article that actually makes sense and is related to critical thinking.

Time magazine put this one on its cover.

Good for them. Our inability– or more precisely, our lack of cultivation for the ability — to think clearly is crippling this country, and really the whole planet. In general, the media feed this crisis by concentrating on scary things that are very low probability. To be fair, they also constantly warn us about eating badly, driving badly, living badly, just being, well, bad, but that is something of a background hum against the shrill screams of talking heads trying to elevate our blood pressure over unlikely scenarios. As the article points out, no one in the US has died of bird flu, and yet we hear about it all the time. Sure, it’s a threat, but not nearly as big of one as the regular flu.

More people die in a month in traffic accidents in the US than died on September 11, 2001 — and more people die of smoking-related illnesses in three days. I think that’s a fascinating thing to keep in mind, especially when you hear our government talking about that day.

An analogy: when I clear off my hard drive because it’s filling up, I could sit down for hours and clear off every dumb 7kb text file I have, or I could delete a single 250 Mb video in three seconds.

That’s perspective — knowing what to concentrate on and what not to worry about so much. We need to keep that perspective, and carefully cultivate in kids. I know I am victim of distorted perspective myself, so I imagine it’s worse in people not experienced in focusing a skeptical eye on things.

Even knowing about it is half the problem. Questioning your perspective is always good.

In fact, it’s the irony of ignorance: if you know you’re ignorant, you’re on the road to curing it!

This is completely and utterly off-topic, but it’s Sunday, I’m having very irritating Windows problems, and Andy is a friend of mine:

Don’t buy a Zune for the holidays. Or ever.

This review is funny, articulate, and very biting. Andy Ihnatko is a god among electronics geeks, and reading that review you’ll see why. I love the way he writes. He has a funny blog, too.

I met Andy years ago at a meeting in Colorado, and we hit it off instantly (not the least of which because we are both wildly in love with Barbara Thompson who introduced us). I felt smarter just being near him, because his level of intelligence and cleverness just lifts the ambient level in his vicinity. And this is in no way a means to suck up to him and his Olympus-like status. I think. I’ll note that at that conference, he was able to slap down a Moon Hoax believer better than I could, which should really invoke feelings of murderous jealousy in me and not admiration, so there you go. He really is that cool.

If someone jumped off a blog cliff, would you jump too?

I can easily hear this phrase rattling around in my mind whenever some blog meme goes around. Most are silly ("Name three books you’ve read this month") and some are useless. But a lot of bloggers happily jump off that precipice.

I rarely do, and this one really is useless, but I couldn’t resist: I’m an A-lister! Ironically, this makes the BABlog a "very high authority group", which is funny, since I constantly tell people to question authority.

But actually, this makes me happy since on another site I only rate the C-list. I guess I get a B average then. I graduate college with a B average, so I’ll take it.

So you didn’t see too many Leonids last week, didja? Too bad; me neither. But some locations worked out pretty well.

Like Arizona, at Kitt Peak observatory Mt. Hopkins. They have very dark skies there, and lots of telescopes. They also have an all-sky camera; a fisheye lens hooked up to a sensitive camera that points straight up. On November 19 it caught lots of meteors, and as you can see in the downloadable video.

This video rocks.

Things to note:

1) You don’t really start seeing meteors in the video until after local midnight. That’s because that’s when the part of the Earth you’re standing on is facing into the direction the Earth itself is headed into space. Sound weird? Think of it this way: when driving in the rain, the rain hits the front windshield but very little hits the back. You get hit with more rain if you face forward, into the direction the car is headed. Same thing with the Earth. I really need to draw this up someday since I wind up explaining it so much.

2) At about 02:51, the screen flashes with a really bright meteor. Then, in the lower right part of the frame, you’ll see that it left a spectacular trail. The upper atmospheric winds twist it all up, and it takes a full hour to blow across the sky, all of which is in the video. Amazing.

3) There’s another one at about 05:30, but not as bright and persistent as the earlier one.

4) This is cool: meteors appear to radiate away from a point in the sky, which has to do with the way the Earth’s orbit intersects theirs. The Leonids appear to come from Leo (hence their name), which, in the video, is near the top of the screen. The Taurids are another meteor shower that come from the direction of, duh, Taurus, which is near the bottom (just above and to the right of Orion). That shower peaks around the same time as the Leonids, and you can see meteors from both showers in the video. You can easily see the difference between the two because the Leonids move top to bottom, and the Taurids move right to left. Note that the Leonids tend to zip across the sky much faster than the Taurids do! That’s because we are smacking into the Leonids head-on, and the Earth’s orbital speed adds to the Leonids. The Taurids come in from the side, so to speak, and so they appear to move much more slowly.

Very cool.

Tip o’ the dew shield to friend and BABloggee Adria Updike.

Alternate headline: Teeing Me Off

Well, despite many protests (here and here, for example) Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin went ahead and hit a golf ball off the International Space Station.

It was a stunt paid for by a golf club company, and the cash-strapped Russian Space agency eagerly accepted the money. I am of two minds about this, since I like the idea of private companies supporting space travel, but I also think it can go too far. Hitting the golf ball into space was a silly gimmick, but I also think it’s stupidly dangerous. It only massed three grams, but at orbital speeds it could destroy another satellite. The odds are low, but why purposely increase the amount of junk floating in space?

The company has already jumped in and, according to a peeved-sounding NASA official, grossly exaggerated what happened, too:

That drive went 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) — or will by the time it eventually comes down in a couple years — said Nataliya Hearn, the president of Element 21 Golf Company. [...]

That’s a huge exaggeration, according to NASA’s lead spacewalk flight director, Holly Ridings. She said NASA’s calculations are that golf balls would only stay up two to three days, which would put the drive closer to a mere million miles (1.6 million kilometers).

I’ll say I’m surprised the ball will come down as quickly as a few days. That implies it will dip pretty low into our atmosphere, which will slow it and drop it more. I wouldn’t think a guy in spacesuit would be able to hit it hard enough to change the orbit of the ball that much.

Anyway, I can’t leave this issue without noting some Bad Astronomy by NASA:

NASA spacewalk commentator Rob Navias, who was not broadcasting in golf’s traditional hushed tones, noted that Tyurin’s shot sliced to the right.

That’s a joke, of course, but the pedant in me must point out that a golf slice happens due to the way the spinning golf ball interacts with the air. There’s no air up there. That’s why, in space, no one can hear you yell "Fore!"

Anyway, I fear this will not be the last of the dumb things done to make money in space. I’m not sure how much to worry about space banners, for example, which will be big lit-up banners in orbit hawking commercial products; this has been proposed realistically and could do serious damage to ground-based astronomy. The list goes on and on. I’m not a big fan of regulating what goes on in space, but if garbage like this golf shot keeps up, I may change my mind.