Blogs / Bad Astronomy

REALITY WINS IN COURT!

Three separate test cases were before special courts, all alleging that autism was caused by vaccines. The courts were set up by the government as part of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, done basically to look at the very rare cases where it was possible that vaccines caused some harm to the people inoculated. The cases started in 2007, and in all three courts, the rulings were basically identical: there is no cause to compensate parents of autistic children due to the vaccines those children received.

In other words, these three special courts all ruled that in these cases there is no scientific claim that vaccines cause autism.

In fact, in one ruling, a special master (the judge, essentially) said the parents of one troubled child had "been misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment." The claims of links between autism and vaccines were also cited as "speculative and unpersuasive."

Damn straight.

My heart goes out to these parents, looking for some sort of reason why their children are autistic. I can hardly imagine what that must be like. But it is absolutely 100% critical that in our emotional and utterly human outreach for an explanation that we do not grasp at the wrong ones.

Vaccines don’t cause autism. The science is extremely persuasive, and I would even say conclusive.

However, as I have said before, the vocal antivaxxers will not be persuaded by this. They are impervious to reason, impervious to evidence, and impervious to facts. They are not looking at this rationally, they have a religious fervor and nothing can sway them from that. Here is a quote from one article on the new rulings:

“I think it is a mistake to conclude that, because these few test cases were denied compensation, it’s been decided vaccines don’t play any role in regressive autism,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, the [National Vaccine Information] center’s president.

That is complete nonsense. It’s not been decided based on these rulings, it’s been decided based on many scientifically-produced tests looking for any link between vaccines and autism. These rulings were based on a few test cases, and those were unpersuasive legally. Scientifically, the results are extremely persuasive, if you happen to live in the reality-based community.

The point being that vocal antivaxxers don’t have property anywhere near there. This ruling will only make them dig in further, and double their efforts to make sure that children all across the planet become victims to diseases which can kill or debilitate them, diseases which can be prevented by the simple effort of getting a shot.

These rulings are incredibly important, and definitely cause for celebration. But the two things we must always remember to do: have sympathy for the parents in these situations (but not so much that we are swayed by unreasonable arguments), and be vigilant. The antivaxxers will not go away, and we must keep fighting. It cannot be overstated: the lives of our children are at stake here. This is nothing less than a pending global health crisis.

You may have seen links to this nifty thing called Wordle, which makes a "tag cloud" out of words; an image of the words where the size of the word displayed is scaled to how many times it appears in the text. It actually has some small use beyond just being nifty; I can dump in a blog post and see if I overuse words, or I could put in blog comments and see what words my readers focus on.

But really, it’s just cool. I wondered what would happen if I put in a chapter from my book, Death from the Skies!, so I dumped in Chapter 5: "The Bottomless Pit of Black Holes". This is what I got:

Interesting! The most common words aren’t surprising; it is a chapter about black holes destroying the Earth, after all. I don’t know what I’ve learned from this, except just possibly it’s easy to waste time on the web.

The original Wordle image can be found here.

I love George Hrab. He cracks me up. He’s funny, erudite, can put four Ecuadorean cupcakes in his mouth at once, sings awesome songs, and makes baldness teh hawt.

He also loves science, and that endears him to me even more.

He loves it so much, in fact, that he graciously wrote the theme song to 365 Days of Astronomy, the year-long daily podcast for the International Year of Astronomy. The podcast is created by you: anyone who wants to talk about astronomy and can record their voice.

The theme on the podcast site was abridged for time reasons, but now George has made available the whole darn thing. Give it a listen. It’s cool.

"And haven’t caused your ticker too much ventrical resistance" Wow. How can you not love lyrics like that?

And honestly, how many people do you know who can shoot fire out of their head?

<put on JREF hat>

Two very, very cool things:

1) I am very, very excited to let everyone know that registration for The Amaz!ng Meeting 7 will open on February 25! The James Randi Educational Foundation sponsors this meeting every year, and it’s become THE meeting for critical thinking, with close to 1000 people attending. We always have great speakers, and this year is no exception: our keynote is (squee squee!) Bill Prady, the executive producer for "The Big Bang Theory". Regular readers know of my love for both him and the show (like here, and here and here) and it didn’t hurt that he left a comment here once. Bill is a great speaker; he’s funny, smart, and a geek like us. He’ll be a tremendous addition to TAM 7.

We’ll also have lots of other great guests, including Jennifer Ouellette, Michael Shermer, My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™, and a slew of others. TAM 7 will be in Las Vega$ from July 9-12, 2009, at the South Point Hotel and Casino. You can already book rooms there and get a group discount if you tell them you’re booking for TAM 7 with JREF. Call them at 866-791-7626.

Stay tuned to the JREF website for more info as we announce it, and of course I’ll have tons of information here on Bad Astronomy as events progress.

2) And if that weren’t enough, let me also announce that we’re holding a TAM in London in October!

Yup. There is such a strong presence in England and environs that we decided to go international! So on October 3-4, 2009 we’re doing TAM London, and we have some truly brilliant speakers lined up, with more coming. I won’t say who we have or whom we’re still wheedling, but I will say that if you’re a skeptic in the UK you do not want to miss this one. We’ll have a website with registration info and all that set up soon.

In the meantime, there’s a Facebook group set up for it, and we’ll make sure info is fed there as it comes in. It already has more than 200 people signed up! You can also follow TAM London on Twitter.

I hope to see lots of BABloggees at these events. If you like my blog, you’ll love the TAMs. It’s a fantastic chance to meet lots of people: movers and shakers in the field, as well as just people who want to see reality for the way it is.

</JREF hat>

On my way to the airport to head to Pasadena last Thursday, I was in a bit of a hurry. I left on time, but several delays (getting gas, putting oil in the car, forgetting my PIN at the bank, and a half dozen more assininities) had me about 15 minutes behind. I got on a side road with no traffic lights to speed things up, hoping to catch up on lost time.

Sure. When I do things like that, usually some disaster occurs to slow me down. But this time, what slowed me down was made of awesome. I noticed something odd on one the very tall power line towers following the road; was that a pair of insulators on top? Or two birds? Yeah, birds. But geez, hawks aren’t that big. Could it be…

Oh yes, it could be.

See them there, at the top left? Maybe this will help:

Yeah, they’re bald eagles (click the pictures to enoblify them, and there are three more images of them on Flickr). I’ve seen what I thought were eagles at least twice in the past near here, but they were far away and it was hard to tell. I’ve been fooled by hawks before. This time, though, there’s no doubt.

I have no idea where this pair — are they mates? — are nested. There are no tall trees for literally miles around. Maybe they fly in from the foothills, but that’s at least four miles away. I don’t know how far they’re willing to travel to hunt; but the poles lie next to a vast open farming expanse which must have thousands of rabbits, mice, and other prey. We see foxes and coyotes along this area as well, so the wildlife spotting here is truly wonderful.

I certainly hope I see this pair again, and when I do, I hope to have with me either a better camera or my brother-in-law, who has an awe-inspiring camera and telephoto. I’d very much like to get better shots of these gorgeous and majestic birds.

I think I’m recovered from being in Pasadena last weekend. I say "I think" because it was so cool that even the usual exponential decay of excitement after a wonderful event still runs strong.

The panel, called The Mysteries of the Cosmos, was all about the limits of what we know in astronomy. The panelists — Andrea Ghez, Mike Brown, Debra Fischer, and Saul Perlmutter — all study things at those limits: extrasolar planets, supermassive black holes, Kupier Belt objects, and the eventual fate of the Universe itself. I was the moderator, an honor I am still chuffed over.

The day of the panel was fun. Discover Magazine, aka The Hive Overmind, was one of the sponsors, and will have a full spread on the panel in an upcoming issue. They wanted still photos of of all of us, so I got to be a model. Full makeup (using an airbrush, which was partially awesome and partially bizarre), eyebrow trim, pimple spackling, the whole works. Then lots of photos of me looking dorky, happy, dorky, pensive, dorky, dramatic, and then, finally, dorky.

I was whisked down to do a short series of video Q&A; the panel was to be taped, and they wanted some background material. That was fun, and having Mike Brown there behind the camera making faces at me helped.

I then had a few hours off, and got some work done (no rest, ever, for the weary). Eventually the five of us were brought together for a splash picture for the magazine, done Vanity Fair style, which was fun. I don’t think I’ve ever posed on a ladder with another astronomer before. There was that time in the 80s when I needed the money, but I hardly think that counts…

Finally, it was time for the panel. I was surprised to find myself nervous! I give lots of public presentations, and I honestly haven’t been nervous to go onstage in years. I get excited, of course, but c’mon, butterflies in my stomach? Please! On the other hand, there were quite a few friends in the audience, and the Overmind was depending on me to not totally screw this up, so yeah, I was nervous.

Despite that — and one or two fairly minor flubs on my part — I think it went really well. The four panelists were relaxed, happy, and did a great job with the questions I tossed at them. We then went for an audience Q&A that lasted about an hour, and that was terrific. We had some fantastic questions, including several from little kids (like age 7 or so) that the panel handled wonderfully. My sense of the audience was that they really had a good time, got a lot of laughs, and learned a few things… which was precisely the point.

There were at least 500 folks in the audience, including some BAtweeps, some old friends who came to see me, Jennifer Ouellette and Sean Carroll, and at least one actress. Who would that be, you wonder? Why, I’m glad you ask:

That’s Brea Grant, from "Heroes", who is something of an astronomy junkie. I found out she follows me on Twitter, and haven’t let my brother-in-law forget it ever since (he’s a big fan).

Sadly, I didn’t take many pictures. There really wasn’t much time for it, and most of what I have isn’t fit to publish (people caught in the act of talking, or blinking, or out of focus). When the event is covered in Discover I’m sure they’ll have great photos… and in fact, maybe I’m happy with that. I sometimes take too much time getting pictures when I should instead simply be enjoying the moment. That happened many times over the weekend, and I’m just happy to have been there and asked to participate.

So, to Henry, Tricia, Jackie, Darlene, the folks from the NSF, Chuck, and of course Mike, Andrea, Debra, and Saul: thank you for everything. That was a fantastic day. I can’t wait to read the Discover article and see the video!

And hey– if you were there and got pictures, put links to them in the comments!

Mars has depression.

Well, a depression. You’d have one too if you had a great gaping pit on your surface that seems to defy explanation.

A bowl-shaped pit on Mars. Click to brobdignangify (or get the original version). Courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

Isn’t that awesome in 3D? Use red/green glasses (red on the left) to see this in all its bichromatic anaglyphic glory. This is a red/green stereo pair from the HiRISE camera onboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, my favorite camera in the solar system right now.

This crater-like feature is located in what’s thought to be a mud flow, near a volcano. It’s almost certainly not an impact crater, since it lacks many of the features associated with impacts (no raised rim, for example). It looks like the surface collapsed, which makes some sense. There could have been water or ice under it, and some volcanic event happened to remove it, which also removed the support. Whoomf! Sink hole.

Concentric rings are common in such things, due to the way the material falls in on itself (watch a video of an ant lion digging a pit in sand and you’ll see similar features). But if you look around it, you see radial features called rays. Those are usually due to impact events which throw out streamers of materials! But rays are also usually thin, a layer of dust coating the surface. These rays have depth and width, as if they are from something flowing out of the pit.

I’m no geomorphologist, so I’m guessing, but I wonder if the collapse of the denser surface forced lower density water up, filling the depression with water and making it overflow the pit. Think of jamming a sock into a nearly full glass to get the picture. Or maybe water was squeezed out of the layers just below the surface, and it flowed away, boiling in the low pressure. What a sight that would be!

I don’t think it’s all that easy to say exactly what happened here. But the 3D view might give scientists some insight into what happened here — it provides them with the angle of the sloping sides, for example, as well as how much volume was lost, which can be used to get information about the collapsed material.

And in case you didn’t notice, the rippling in the very center? Those are sand dunes. So very cool.