Blogs / Bad Astronomy

When it rains, it pours:

On the main CNN.com webpage is a banner saying "[Breaking News] NASA says it has found wires which may have been deliberately cut on computers bound for the international space station."

And that’s it. No listing of source, no info, just that.

More when I find out more. Sigh.

Hat tip to Doodler at the BAUT Forum.

This is astonishing.

According to an article in Aviation Week, on at least two occasions astronauts who were intoxicated — drunk — were allowed to fly on the Space Shuttle [As pointed out in the comments below, the AW article never specifically says they flew on the Shuttle, just that they flew. Many astronauts train in planes, for example, so I jumped to a conclusion myself! I feel it’s somewhat mitigated by knowing that lots of other folks did too. However the article does go on to say that some astronauts were intoxicated within 12 hours of launch, which is against the rules.]

A panel reviewing astronaut health issues in the wake of the Lisa Nowak arrest has found that on at least two occasions astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons and other astronauts warned they were so intoxicated that they posed a flight-safety risk.

The panel, also reported “heavy use of alcohol” by astronauts before launch, within the standard 12-hour “bottle to throttle” rule applied to NASA flight crew members.

I am at a loss for words. I mean, seriously. I know a few astronauts, and I would swear up and down that the last thing they would ever do is drink before a flight. It’s hard to believe anything like this could happen, but the panel — composed of "military and civilian government physicians, psychologists, lawyers, safety experts and astronauts under the chairmanship of U.S. Air Force Col. Richard Bachmann, dean of the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine" — found otherwise.

All I have to go on here is this article in Aviation Week. To be fair, AW generally gets good inside info, though they have been known to stumble here and again. Given the nature of this story, and only having one source, I wasn’t sure whether to publicize it or not. So I want to be clear that it is way too early to speculate here about fault, veracity, or anything else. But this is really, really important news, and needs to be aired out. It may be a few weeks before we hear more, however.

And please folks: try to keep the conclusion-jumping to a minimum in the comments.

Update: FWIW, USA Today is also reporting on this, but they only have the AW article as a source as well. They do say that the report from the panel will be released Friday at noon. Interestingly, NASA is holding a press conference at noon (Eastern) Friday about astronaut health issues.

Update 2: The Huffington Post has some more info.

I read with great interest an Associated Press article about Oscar the Cat, a 2 year old feline in Providence, R.I., who lives in a nursing home and who, according to the staff there, can accurately predict when a patient is near death.

Stories like this abound, of course, but they are usually very credulous, claiming psychic abilities or some such silliness. One BABlogee who sent this to me (cough cough Emily cough cough) mentioned the article had an unusually skeptical bent. I am skeptical of claims of skepticism, so, skeptically, I checked it out.

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In my recent post about my advertising survey, lots of people commented on some of the more irritating ads. I am not a big fan of ads that flash, or obscure text, or change size, or go against the mission of this site, or in other ways distract me from what I’m reading — I mean, of course any ad is distracting, but having Scarlett Johansson whisper in my ear is a different kind of distraction from having Donald Trump bellowing in it.

If you get my meaning there.

I have some control over what ads play and what don’t. If you find a particularly irritating one, post a comment in this thread. Let me know as much info as you can — what it is advertising, what spot it was in (the header, the sidebar…), any miscreant behavior — and I’ll look into blocking it (if I agree with you, of course).

Last week, I attended a talk at the local Boulder Fiske Planetarium dealing with debunking the Moon Hoax. It was given by Stu Robbins, an astronomer who frequents the BAUT forum. I was really looking forward to this, since it’s always good to see how others approach the problem.

I wasn’t disappointed. He went into a lot of detail over many of the Moon Hoax claims, and did a great job debunking them. The talk was informative and funny (he showed clips from Penn and Teller’s Showtime program, um, "Bulls Hit" — heavily bleeped — which included yours truly) and the audience loved it. As a matter of fact, he said a few things which made me realize I need to update my own talk on the topic! We all hung out for a while chatting about it and laughing. If you ever get a chance to see his talk (and I just learned he’ll be giving it at the pre-party before the Denver Skeptic’s Camp) you should take it.

As you may have noticed, I have ads running on this site. I was hesitant to add them initially, but have found that the expense of running the site (coupled with my time) makes them necessary. With the site redesign I’ve been able to fiddle with them a bit, making them less intrusive and all that, while still (of course) making them viewable.

Anyway, one of the things advertisers like to know are what kind of people read my site — besides the obvious things, like how smart, attractive, and superior you are in every way.

There is a survey available to help them with that. It’s anonymous, and only takes literally a couple of minutes. If you have the time, please take a moment to fill it out. To get good statistics they need a few hundred submitted. Only take it once, please, and the usual yada yada. But I’d appreciate it if you would.

Thanks.

Via the DefCon blog comes that news that Texas governor Rick Perry has appointed a creationist to head the Texas State Board of Education.

I’ll give you a moment to clean off your screen. Yes, you read that right.

At first I thought, "No, not even a politician in Texas could possibly do something that dumb, that contrary to reality, that horrifying to their kids. DefCon Blog must have gotten it wrong!"

And then I did a few searches. DefCon Blog got it right. According to the Dallas Morning News:

Texas Freedom Network president Kathy Miller … noted that in 2003, Dr. McLeroy was one of four board members who voted against proposed high school biology textbooks because he felt their coverage of evolution was “too dogmatic” and did not include possible flaws in Charles Darwin’s theory of how life on Earth evolved from lower forms.

That is straight out of the creationist tactics notebook. In case you’re not sure, the article goes on to quote McLeroy:

“It is wrong to teach opinion as fact,” he said.

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