Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I’m very pleased to hear that TAM London DVDs are now available for pre-order!

W00t!

They have 12 hours of skeptical and scientific wonderfulness on them, including performances by James Randi, Richard Wiseman, Brian Cox, Ariane Sherine, Simon Singh, Jon Ronson (who wrote Men Who Stare At Goats), as well as exclusive interviews, backstage footage, and lots more.

To give you an idea of what it’s all about, event organizer Tracy King (whom I thank very much for putting this together) has posted a preview on YouTube:

Yeah, you want this. And proceeds go to the JREF, so it’s a good cause, too! So go! Get yer DVD!

We’re having a big problem in America these days, with the forces of antireality on the march to deceive our children. Evolution is a big target for them, of course, and I need not belabor the battle here.

But what can we do? We need to excite kids about the real world, and about evolution in particular. And we need to do it in a wonderful way, grabbing their attention, staying positive, and revealing all the beauty and majesty of the way life has self-propagated on this planet of ours.

Daniel Loxton has come to the rescue! He’s the brain behind Skeptic Magazine’s Junior Skeptic, a terrific feature designed to get young kids thinking. His experience putting that together is clear in his new book, Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be. This book has everything for younger readers: excellent writing, simple yet compelling layout, and a diversity of topics in evolution and its related studies which give the reader a solid background in evolutionary biology. That’s critical, as it gives them a basis on which they can build when they read more about the topic.

And Daniel covers a lot of topics, like transitional fossils, population growth, diversity of species, how we know that life changes over time, mutations, natural selection, and more. He even deals simply and efficiently with the topic of religion at the very end, telling the reader to talk to family, friends, and religious leaders about it. While I might disagree with him a bit (really, just a bit) over the boundaries of religion and science we’ve had a few discussion on Twitter about this — I think he deals with the topic elegantly in the book. After all, the book isn’t about religion, and instead of being arrogant or dismissive, he relies on the book itself being an effective treatment of the topic. I think that was a shrewd move.

And I simply cannot praise the illustrations enough, which were done by Daniel himself. WOW! The drawings are simply magnificent; the Archeopteryx on the cover will grab any kid’s attention, as will the gorgeous T-Rex on the first page. My favorite drawing was this one, which he also uses as a banner for the book:

It shows two women of different eras, and it beautifully demonstrates our similarities and differences. And the woman on the right is an actual human — Daniel’s wife! — something of a well-known skeptic herself. I bet if you come to TAM with a copy of the book, you can find her yourself and get both her and Daniel to sign it…

I think this book is absolutely terrific, and if you’re looking for a simple statement about it, then how about this? Simply put, I would’ve loved this book when I was a kid. It would have made me want to be a scientist.

You can get buy a copy of Evolution through the Skeptics.com website, or if you donate $100 they’ll send you a copy for free. I know, it’s not really free then, but you’ll be helping out a good group of skeptics, so it’s a good thing to do. If you prefer, it’s also available on Amazon and Amazon.ca.

My suggestion: buy several copies and give them away as gifts to kids. And maybe one for your local school as well. I know they could use it there.

We have another MAJOR win for reality and skepticism, folks. And this is a good one: Meryl Dorey just announced she’s stepping down as head of the Anti Australian Vaccination Network, and that the AVN itself may shut down.

Ah, the hits keep on a-comin’.

Regular readers may remember Ms. Dorey, that hero of the antivaxxers who has twisted the truth about vaccinations so much it’s shocking her tongue hasn’t turned into a Möbius strip. She has said no one dies from pertussis anymore… when little four-week-old Dana McCaffery died of that very disease, because herd immunity in her area of Australia was so low. Dorey is an HIV denier. She thinks doctors lie and poison babies. She viciously defames those who disagree with her. It goes on and on.

The timing of this announcement is very interesting, seeing as how the Australian Skeptics have been hammering at Dorey and the AVN, and in fact Dorey and the AVN may be held accountable for breaking Australian laws about dispensing medical advice without a license; they are currently under investigation by the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission.

They’ve also been getting a lot of negative publicity, which is the very, very least that they deserve. My friend, the tireless Rachael Dunlop, has been instrumental in exposing the truth about Meryl Dorey, and is largely responsible for holding Dorey’s and the AVN’s feet to the fire.

Reading Dorey’s statement on the AVN blog is actually rather interesting. She says:

I am getting older; my children have missed out on so much so I could run the AVN; and at this stage in my existence, I need to be able to work on this subject and still have a life. Without a large injection of capital behind me, I simply cannot continue.

In other words, she’s leaving to spend more time with her family. Hmmmm. Also, her use of the word "injection" nearly made every molecule in my irony gland explode at the speed of light.

OK, no more snark. Dorey, in that blog post, is asking someone to step up and take her place. I have no doubt someone will, so I expect the AVN will go on without her, spreading their falsehoods, slathering their fearmongering over an unsuspecting and trusting audience, and helping thousands of Australian babies be exposed to pertussis, measles, mumps, polio, and all sorts of other preventable diseases that would have been otherwise eradicated by simple vaccinations.

I can hope, though, that without Dorey’s voice, the AVN will be far weaker, and if the charges against them hold up, they may fall apart entirely. That would be a very good thing indeed.

So whaddya know? Dorey claims she wants to save people’s lives. This move on on her part may finally do it.

Tip o’ the syringe to HappySinger and the Young Australian Skeptics for this news.

These. Are. Brilliant.

Dear Media, Dear Homeopathy, and Dear Astrology are three polite letters written by, um, Science. Well, really, "the personification of the abstract concept of Science, just to clarify," as he says in his own letters.

These are funny, dead on, satirical, clever, and dagnabbit I’m ticked I didn’t think of this first. Oh well. To be honest, I’m just glad someone did. Oh– they are ever-so-mildly not safe for work, but just for language, not content.

These won’t convince any believers, of course. But they do make excellent points, and they’ll help rally the troops, I think. That’s pretty important too! I hope he writes more.

Oh, this is wonderful to hear: The Lancet — a leading UK professional medical research journal — is retracting the paper published by Andrew Wakefield back in 1998 that linked vaccines with autism.

The paper has been found to be multiply and fatally flawed, with Wakefield and his work being thoroughly discredited. As the Lancet editorial itself states:

Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al. are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation. In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.

That’s great news, especially after Wakefield had his head handed to him last week by the GMC over his unethical and irresponsible behavior that led to this horrible paper being published in the first place.

The Lancet statement is a bit bloodless… but they are a professional research journal and not a blog, so it’s not appropriate for them to call out Wakefield in more emotional — and utterly deserved — terms. It’s up to the blogs to call out Wakefield for his tireless efforts in creating of the modern antivaccination movement, which is becoming so successful that measles, mumps, pertussis, and other preventable diseases are on the rise again. And to note that not only was his research wrong, but that he may have faked his data. And to say that he has a huge conflict of interest here, since at the time he was involved in creating an alternative to vaccination that would make him very, very rich if people became scared to vaccinate their kids. And to inform people that Wakefield was in the pocket of lawyers trying to sue the vaccine industry. And to basically call out the entire antivax movement for the incredible damage they have done and continue to do to public health.

All that’s left now is for the GMC to officially sanction Wakefield, disbar him, essentially, to finish this all up officially.

Of course, that won’t even slow Wakefield or the antivaxxers. They don’t care for the real world, based on evidence and fact. They are, for all intents and purposes, religious zealots now, believing in Wakefield, Jenny McCarthy, and the rest with such fervor that there is literally no amount of evidence that can ever sway them. And they will continue to spin, fold, and mutilate the truth, while we watch as diseases rise back from the dead, infecting hundreds of thousands of people, and killing many of them.

Never forget what’s at stake here. Never.

My thanks to the many, many BABloggees who sent me email or tweeted about this.

On February 18 – 20, in my home town of Boulder, Colorado, the Lunar and Planetary Institute is holding a very interesting conference called The Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference 2010 (NSRC2010). It’s to promote the awareness of the coming revolution in access to space provided by private companies.

This revolution is not only coming, it’s practically here. I know some folks who plan quite seriously to be launched into space next year. If you’re interested in this field, then this is the conference you want to attend:

NSRC2010 will provide a forum to learn about the research and EPO [Education and Public Outreach] capabilities of these new systems, their experiments, and EPO integration processes. NSRC2010 will also provide input on vehicle design requirements for science and education.

That sounds like a fascinating meeting to me. I’m hoping to attend myself, but I’m unsure if I’ll be in town then; I’ll know more soon and let y’all know here. I really want to go; a lot of solid people are running this, including my friends Alan Stern and Dan Durda, as well as many other space scientists. Sponsors include Virgin Galactic, the United Launch Alliance, and Space X! So we’re talking serious contenders here.

I hope to see some BABloggees there. The future of space travel may very well be in our hands, and this meeting will help put it there.

Last week, the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) sky survey program, designed to sweep the heavens looking for near-Earth asteroids, spotted something really weird; an elongated streak that looked as if two asteroids had collided. Just days later, Hubble was pointed at the object, and what it saw was really really weird:

[Click to armageddonate.]

This is a false-color image showing the object, called P/2010 A2, in visible light. The long tail of debris is obvious; this is probably dust being blown back by the solar wind, similar to the way a comet’s tail is blown back. What apparently has happened is that two small, previously-undiscovered asteroids collided, impacting with a speed of at least 5 km/sec (and possibly faster). The energy in such a collision is like setting off a nuclear bomb, or actually many nuclear bombs! The asteroids shattered, and much of the debris expanded outward as pulverized dust.

Now, let me just take a moment and say HOLY HALEAKALA WHAT WE’RE SEEING HERE IS THE COLLISION BETWEEN TWO PREVIOUSLY UNDISCOVERED ASTEROIDS THAT EXPLODED LIKE THERMONUCLEAR WEAPONS WHEN THEY IMPACTED!!!

Phew. OK, I feel better. I needed to get that off my chest.

First off, to be clear we’re in no danger from this event. It was really far away (in human terms; 140 million km or 90 million miles — the object’s orbit keeps it farther from the Sun than Mars — so we’re not about to get pummeled with debris. And while the explosion energy was quite large — certainly much larger than any weapon ever detonated on Earth — it wasn’t radioactive, in case you’re worried about that sort of thing. This was a kinetic explosion, caused by a high-speed collision, and not an actual detonation of any kind.

Looking at the image, the bright spot to the left is most likely what’s left of one of the two asteroids, a chunk of rock estimated to be a mere 140 meters (450 feet) across. In the press release they’re not clear about the curved line emanating to the right of the nucleus. It may be — and I’m spitballing here — dust blown back from a stream of chunks, since the tail is broad and appears to originate from that swept curve, and not from the nucleus itself. The other filament perpendicular to the curve is from yet another piece of debris.

Despite how much this looks like a comet, ground-based observations indicate no gas is present, meaning this was from asteroids colliding, not comets, which have significant amounts of ice which turn to gas near the Sun. The collision energy was high enough to produce a lot of gas if any were present. That clinches this being an asteroid impact.

Also, the orbit of the object indicates it’s an asteroid, and it appears to be part of a well-known group of asteroids called the Flora family, which share similar orbital characteristics, and are probably remnants themselves of an ancient breakup of a much larger parent asteroid.

Nothing like this has ever been seen before. Sure, Hubble and about a hundred other telescopes observed the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slam in to Jupiter in 1994, but that was different than seeing two asteroids hit. Asteroids are small, and very very far apart on average (don’t believe scenes like that in "Empire Strikes Back"), so a collision like this is extremely rare, and catching it from such a great vantage point rarer still. But we have a lot of eyes on the sky, and the more we watch the more we’ll see.

And we’d better. An object 140 meters across hitting the Earth would, to be technical, suck. Hard. Whatever caused Meteor Crater in Arizona, an impact scar over a kilometer across, was itself probably about 40 meters across. An object like 2010 A2, which is three times the diameter, would have 20 -30 times the mass, and do considerably more damage. I’m glad groups like LINEAR are out there patrolling the skies for such things. We need to learn as much as we can about these asteroids, so that we can prevent the next Meteor Crater from occurring.