Just some odds and ends for a Friday…
1) I’ll be doin’ the live video chat thing again on Sunday at 3:00 Mountain time as usual. I’ll have a post up an hour or two ahead of time with the embedded video player and all that.
2) Years ago, when I worked on STIS (a Hubble camera that took pictures and spectra of objects), one of my colleagues — actually, the head guy on the camera — had the idea of trying to observe the unlit part of the Moon with the camera. That part is lit, softly, by reflected Earthlight. By breaking the light up into a spectrum, we could see if it were possible to detect things like oxygen in the reflected Earthlight, and therefore detecting oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere, which itself is an indicator of life. It’s an odd concept: observing the Moon to try to detect life on Earth. But it’s a good test to see if there is a way to detect oxygen on planets orbiting other stars, and we think it would’ve worked. Sadly, the project didn’t get accepted by the Hubble committee that approved such things. But Lee Billings has an article up on this topic at Seed magazine’s site, extrapolating it to say that detect life on other worlds, we need to understand how they might detect us.
3) When I wrote the post last week about Presidential candidate John McCain’s superstitions, I had originally written a passage about McCain’s rumored VP candidates but decided to take it out. One of the rumors focused on Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana and the inspiration for me to post the cat and mouse DOOMED picture. Why? Because he’s a young-Earth creationist. He thinks ID should be taught in the classroom. And he has a lot of, uh, old-fashioned ideas on a whole passel of other topics, too. What’s funny is I took that whole part out of the blog post because it was too speculative. But now others are talking about Jindal as well. Sigh. I was too conservative. Had I left that passage in, I would have seemed prescient. Oh well.
4) Nancy Atkinson at Universe Today has written an interesting article: Congress Considering Additional Shuttle Flight and More Science Funding. I hadn’t heard this anywhere else, but she notes that Congress wants to add a Shuttle launch to the dwindling roster of flights to haul a very expensive and important scientific instrument to the International Space Station (imagine! Doing science on ISS!). I expect Mike Griffin to come out against it; he strikes me as not wanting to add any more flights to the schedule because it would be a massive pain, and change a ton of other procedures. Plus I don’t think he likes it when Congress tries to dictate to him what he should do with the Agency he was tasked to direct. FWIW, my own rep, Mark Udall (D-CO), introduced the bill to the House.
5) Last week, it came to light that the head of the EPA changed his mind on a decision about emission standards after he met with the White House. I took this to mean more Bush Administration interference with science, but a blog I read asked an interesting question: for those of us who interpret this as more White House meddling, was it the interference that upset us, or the way the decision went? In other words, what if the Administration had talked him into even tougher standards? Would we have been upset then? It’s still interference, but in the direction we want things to be.
And I thought, hmmm, I wouldn’t be as upset, though I’d still suspect duplicity. But that’s because this Administration has a long history of handling science not only poorly, but almost always acting against the best interest of how to do science. I wondered if maybe I was being too harsh, though, and perhaps prejudiced, but then my exact thoughts were pretty much shown to be true.
Sometimes I hate being right. It’s a burden.
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:41 pm
I am holding off opinion on Bobby Jindal until I learn more about him, all the links seem to be pretty biased against the guy and I will like to learn more without the tinted glasses. He may make a good VP, who knows, people rip of him for his inexperience but we have a single term Senator with no executive experience running for President, so that is rather unfair to bring up. I want to hear what Bobby Jindal has to say on the issues, if he is chosen.
Straight from the horses mouth and all.
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Here’s a link for you http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7385020.stm
One journalist’s recent fun experience of measles.
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Phil said: I was too conservative.
??????
Here’s a question that occurred to me today.
Wili the IDers try to use the upcoming game Spore as proof of their side?
For those who don’t know, Spore is a upcoming sim/game where you start with single celled organisms and guide their evolution all the up until they are complex beings with an interstellar empire. It’s basically the ultimate life sim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_%28video_game%29
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:17 pm
There IS one huge sign of progress in this year’s election season:=
Who keep’s getting the candidates in trouble? None other than their religious connections! Maybe the world IS starting to sort all this out, one ignorant religious fanatic at a time.
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:27 pm
– Quiet_Desperation
Thanks for pointing that game our for me, I now have another addiction waiting to happen.
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:32 pm
“Had I left that passage in, I would have seemed prescient.”
But now that you’ve posted your prediction after the fact, doesn’t that make you a psychic?
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:39 pm
BA: “And he has a lot of, uh, old-fashioned ideas on a whole passel of other topics, too.”
Please explain!
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Let’s remember that Obama didn’t even know what the Hanford site was.
And I’m glad that you “were right” because HuffPo agreed with you. Way to go with unbiased, rational investigation!
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:58 pm
So meddling is okay, but only when the meddler is on your side. I guess that works for you.
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:00 pm
This also puts Jindal in opposition to his Catholic church, which approves of the big bang theory, evolution, etc.
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I read the Huffington Post piece about the EPA and at the whole time, and through the end, I kept asking myself “Where’s the problem here?” I didn’t find one.
Why is it a problem for the White House to talk the EPA into doing something or not? (Assuming here that nothing illegal was done.) Maybe the White House gave good reasons for this guy to change his mind.
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:24 pm
old-fashioned ideas
Well… not *all* old fashioned ideas are bad. I’m fairly partial to “thou shalt not kill.”
Although I do consider it as “thou shalt not kill unless all options have been explored.”
And the whole “fire” idea still seems useful. Especially when all other options have been considered.
And the wheel. But I tease…
I did covet a neighbor’s wife, once, though. I’m sort of glad they moved. Who needs that trouble, especially since I think she had some similar ideas near the end?
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Let politicians run on their belief or disbelief in global warming. Then we’ll see.
Climate Change detected by Hubble.
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Jindal may be a religious kook but what he’s doing in Lousiana is nothing short of miraculous. I can take a little bit of religious nutbaggery when it comes with a generous helping of basic competence.
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Re Jindel
The sad part of this is that Mr. Jindel has a bachelors degree in biology from Brown, Un. I wonder if he ever took a course from Ken Miller.
May 24th, 2008 at 4:59 am
@papertiger:
You’d think the Jovians wouldn’t have any trouble finding hydrogen to run their SUVs on.
(Oxygen might be another matter . . . )
May 24th, 2008 at 8:31 am
On how we might feel if Bush meddled in the “right” direction:
During his first administration I was fooled embarrassingly frequently by what he said some new program would do. I kept thinking “Well, I guess he can’t be wrong all the time.”
After a few of those experiences, I decided that maybe he could. As you said, if he did something to help the environment or to promote good science, I would expect some kind of stealth foul play.
May 24th, 2008 at 8:57 am
As for the spectra of Earthshine – this was done in the infrared with a ground based telescope at University of Arizona by Dr. Maggie Turnbull and others at the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope.
The Astrophysical Journal paper is here:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/503322
There was a previous spectrum taken at Kitt Peak in the optical.