Dark shadows

After yesterday's rather depressing post about politics, today we're going to turn our eyes away from the troubled and turbulent Earth and out to the skies.

"The more we look, the more we see" sounds like a tautology, but it the realm of the sciences, it isn't.  Sometimes it takes training, and careful examination of what's in front of you, even to know exactly what it is you're looking at.

This is especially true in astronomy.  Consider that in only four hundred years, we've gone from:

• stars being equidistant points of light on a sphere with the Earth at the center;
• to recognizing that stars are, in fact, not all the same distance away from us, and their apparent motion comes from the combination of Earth's rotation and its circling the Sun;
• to realizing that even the nearest stars are incredibly far away;
• to discovering that the Sun is a star -- and the stars are suns -- and they're all made of more or less the same stuff;
• to the shocked understanding that galaxies are millions of light years away, are composed of billions of stars -- and there are trillions of galaxies, almost all of which are rushing away from us at breakneck speeds.

Along the way, we've discovered hundreds of different celestial objects and phenomena, some of which are positively mind-boggling, and many of which we still have yet to explain completely.

The topic comes up because of an article I read yesterday by astronomer Phil Plait.  I discovered Plait a few years ago because of his excellent website Bad Astronomy (about myths and misconceptions concerning the skies).  I've also read several of his books, and he's an excellent example of a scientist who is also highly skilled at bringing cutting-edge science to us interested laypeople.  (I especially recommend Death from the Skies!, about which writer Daniel H. Wilson said, "Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan.  Frightening, yet oddly exhilarating.")

In any case, Plait's article is entitled "What Is Inside Our Galaxy's Darkest Places?", and is about dust clouds.  I knew at least a little about celestial dust clouds, which are thought to be the raw materials that can eventually collapse to form stars and planets, something I touched on in a post last week.  But there was a lot in the article that was new to me -- and intriguingly weird.

The dark dust clouds Plait describes are called Bok globules, after astronomer Bart Bok who studied them, and there are estimated to be millions of them in our galaxy alone.  And "dark" is something of an understatement; the dust and gas they contain reduces the intensity of any light coming through them by a factor of fifteen trillion.  The result is that they look like a black, starless blotch in the sky.  I was immediately reminded of the Black Thing from Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time:

"That shadow out there."  Calvin gestured.  "What is it?  I don't like it."

"Watch," Mrs. Whatsit commanded.

It was a shadow, nothing but a shadow.  It was not even as tangible as a cloud.  Was it cast by something?  Or was it a thing in itself?

The sky darkened.  The gold left the light and they were surrounded by blue, blue deepening until where there had been nothing but the evening sky there was now a faint pulse of a star, and then another and another and another.  There were more stars than Meg had ever seen before.

"The atmosphere is so thin here," Mrs. Whatsit said, as though in answer to her unasked question, "that it does not obscure your vision as it would at home.  Now look.  Look straight ahead."

Meg looked.  The dark shadow was still there.  It had not lessened or dispersed with the coming of night.  And where the shadow was, the stars were not visible. 

Of course, Bok globules are just dust clouds, not the distilled essence of evil.

I hope.

Barnard 68, a Bok globule about five hundred light years from Earth [Image credit: European Southern Observatory]

But the thing that amazed me the most about these dust clouds was how little matter they actually contain, and yet how good they are at blocking light.  Plait tells us that they average about a million molecules per cubic centimeter -- which seems like a lot until you find out that air at sea level contains ten trillion trillion molecules per cubic centimeter.  But despite their thinness, if you put the Sun a half-light-year away from the Earth -- so, only a little more than ten percent of the distance to the nearest star --and put a typical Bok globule in between, the Sun's light would be so attenuated it wouldn't be visible to the naked eye.

Which is why I started with "the more you look, the more you see."  Or -- more accurately, in this case -- the more you look, the more you realize how much we might not be seeing.

In any case, I don't want to steal any more of Plait's thunder, because you should all read his article, which is wonderful fun (and is linked above).  And if you're on Bluesky, subscribe to him, because his posts are awesome.

So that's today's cool new thing I learned about the universe.  Which is also valuable because it takes my mind off what's happening down here.  All in all, things seem to look up when I do.

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Government retweets

Remember what I said about how every time I think things in our government have reached the absolute nadir, someone just raises the nadir-bar?

Witness the fact that the official Twitter account for the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology just two days ago retweeted a slanted, cherry-picked, and otherwise fallacy-filled climate denialism piece called "Global Temperatures Plunge, Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists" that appeared in...

... Breitbart.

Yes, Breitbart, the "news" source that astronomer and blogger Phil Plait calls a "racist, misogynistic über-right-wing site that calls itself a voice for the 'alt-right' movement" and Slate senior editor Jeremy Stahl said is composed of "neo-Nazis in suits and ties."

Needless to say, the Breitbart article is full of half-truths and outright lies.  Its author, James Delingpole, is one of the worst of the climate change deniers, and apparently will say or do anything up to and including manipulating data to convince people that what we're doing isn't endangering the long-term habitability of the Earth.  Plait has taken on Delingpole before, and sums up his argument (if I can dignify it by that name) that scientists have no idea why the climate is undergoing wild swings as being "like seeing a corpse with a bullet wound to the head and saying 'Except for the bullet wound to the head, you cannot come up with a convincing explanation why this person is dead.'"

This bit isn't anything new, of course.  No matter how sound the science is, there will always be people who will cover their eyes and pretend the evidence doesn't exist.  (Explaining why we still have people who claim that there's no good evidence for evolution.)  But this has taken on a new and sinister twist, now that we have elected officials -- hell, an entire committee -- that see fit to distribute this horseshit as if it has any scientific validity at all.

[image courtesy of NASA]

It would be appalling enough if it was any congressional committee, but the fact that it is the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology moves it out past "appalling" into that rarified stratum that can only be labeled "horrifying."  The people in government who are overseeing funding and regulation for science research are not only denying the actual science, they are contributing to the general misunderstanding of science by the citizenry by sending out links on social media from fringe websites with no credibility whatsoever.

Or, as Plait put it, "The stakes here are as high as they can get.  Climate denialism by Breitbart now gets the imprimatur of the federal government."

So once again, let me reiterate: the scientists themselves are in no doubt whatsoever that climate change is real, and is anthropogenic in origin.  Any doubt about that was laid to rest over ten years ago.  What they are still unsure about is how high the temperatures could get, how quickly they'll get there, and when the predicted outcomes (such as the collapse of the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland) will happen.

But in doubt about the warm-up itself?  No.  You only hear that from people like the chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Lamar Smith, who as of 2015, had received over $600,000 in donations from the fossil fuels industry.

So I encourage you to get in touch with the members of the committee, especially those of you who live in the districts they represent.  They are:

Republican Members (22)

Democratic Members (17)

Lamar Smith, Texas* Frank D. Lucas, Oklahoma** F. James Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin+ Dana Rohrabacher, California Randy Neugebauer, Texas Michael T. McCaul, Texas Mo Brooks, Alabama Randy Hultgren, Illinois Bill Posey, Florida Thomas Massie, Kentucky Jim Bridenstine, Oklahoma Randy Weber, Texas John R. Moolenaar, Michigan Steve Knight, California Brian Babin, Texas Bruce Westerman, Arkansas Barbara Comstock, Virginia Gary Palmer, Alabama Barry Loudermilk, Georgia Ralph Lee Abraham, Louisiana Darin LaHood, Illinois Warren Davidson, Ohio *Full Committee Chair +Chairman Emeritus **Vice Chair/Committee

Eddie Bernice Johnson, Texas++ Zoe Lofgren, California Daniel Lipinski, Illinois Donna Edwards, Maryland Suzanne Bonamici, Oregon Eric Swalwell, California Alan Grayson, Florida Ami Bera, California Elizabeth Esty, Connecticut Marc Veasey, Texas Katherine Clark, Massachusetts Don Beyer, Virginia Ed Perlmutter, Colorado Paul Tonko, New York Mark Takano, California Bill Foster, Illinois Vacant ++Full Committee

If you do, keep it brief, keep it science-related, and keep it polite.  But let them know that it is unequivocally wrong to persist in this denial of accepted, evidence-based science, especially given the potential consequences.  I don't expect you to convince Lamar -- money talks, after all -- but maybe if a little pressure is brought to bear, at least they'll stop retweeting Breitbart.

Defending science vs. defunding science

I keep wanting to bring you some good news, honestly I do.  But lately all I've seen is more reason to fuel my inner pessimist.

The latest assault on any Pollyannas that are still floating around comes from Bob Walker, senior adviser to President-elect Trump, who has stated the incoming administration's intent to defund NASA's Earth Sciences Division.  In an interview with The Guardian, Walker said:

NASA’s Earth Science Division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.

Which might, on first glance, not sound that bad, just a defunding of one program in favor of another...  Until you realize that the Earth Sciences Division is the branch of NASA that is studying climate change.

Then, if you're like me, you have an "aha" moment.

Walker went on to say:

My guess is that it would be difficult to stop all ongoing NASA programs but future programs should definitely be placed with other agencies.  I believe that climate research is necessary but it has been heavily politicized, which has undermined a lot of the work that researchers have been doing.  Mr Trump’s decisions will be based upon solid science, not politicized science.

In other words, the climate scientists have not come to the conclusion the President-elect and his advisers want, so time to pull funding from the bastards and hand the money to agencies that will come to the politically expedient conclusions.

And who, exactly, is at fault for "politicizing" climate science?  It certainly isn't the climate scientists themselves, who are simply studying the data itself (i.e., the facts) and would be much happier if the politicians and petroleum lobby would just butt the hell out.  It's legislators like James "Senator Snowball" Inhofe and Lamar "Harass 'Em Till They Give Up" Smith.  And, it must be said, the President-elect himself, who went on record as saying that climate change was a "hoax perpetrated by the Chinese."

Hell, climate change denial is a part of the Republican Party platform.  They have received millions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry to finance a disinformation program, all too similar to the one waged against the medical establishment by the tobacco industry to weaken the public perception of the connection between smoking and cancer.

Oh, but do go on about how the nasty liberals and crooked climate scientists are the ones who politicized this.

[image courtesy of NASA]

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy was unequivocal about what a terrible move this is:

If this slashing of NASA Earth science comes to pass, it will be a disaster for humanity.  This is no exaggeration: NASA is the leading agency in studying the effects of global warming on the planet, in measuring the changes in our atmosphere, our oceans, the weather, and yes, the climate as temperatures increase.  They have a fleet of spacecraft observing the Earth, and plans for more to better understand our environment.  That’s all on the chopping block now.

Equally strong were the words from Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research:

It could put us back into the ‘dark ages’ of almost the pre-satellite era. It would be extremely short sighted...  We live on planet Earth and there is much to discover, and it is essential to track and monitor many things from space.  Information on planet Earth and its atmosphere and oceans is essential for our way of life.  Space research is a luxury, Earth observations are essential.

Interesting that all of this is taking place during a year when there has been record heat and drought and a record low in the Arctic sea ice.  Interesting, too, that the military industrial complex has no problems whatsoever in accepting this "politicized science;" this summer a top military advisory board stated that climate change was a "threat to national security" and that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's most recent report was a "clarion call to action."

So there you have it.  Another reason for weeping into your coffee, at least if you have respect for science and give a damn about the long-term habitability of the Earth.  Me, I'm just apprehensive about what I'm going to find out when I read the news tomorrow.

Fear, research, and Gardasil

It is a general rule of human behavior that it is way easier to make people afraid of something than it is to convince them that what they fear is harmless.

This principle works on all scales.  The dubiously-ethical "Little Albert experiment," performed back in 1920 by John B. Watson and Rosalie Raynor, showed that you can classically condition humans with no difficulty at all -- the test subject, a nine-month-old nicknamed "Little Albert," was conditioned to fear white rats.  It worked all too well.  The baby developed a fear not only of white rats, but other furry objects (including a teddy bear).

When the test subject was tracked down years later, he was found to have an irrational phobia of dogs.

You can see this same tendency working all the way up to a conditioned fear of "the other" -- other races, ethnic groups, religions, political parties -- a fear that politicians frequently capitalize on to galvanize their supporters, and which once instilled is almost impossible to eradicate.

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes some sense.  The evolutionary cost of mistakenly fearing something that's harmless is far lower than the cost of mistakenly not fearing something that's dangerous.  If from a skeptic's standpoint, the tendency is maddening, at least it's understandable.

Even knowing this, I was pretty pissed off by the reactions I saw to a recent study that was highlighted in Phil Plait's wonderful blog Bad Astronomy -- Plait's article was titled, "Gardasil: More Anti-Vax Nonsense Collapses Under the Gaze of Reality."  In it, we hear about a study that did a large-sample-size test of side effects from the anti-HPV vaccine Gardasil, and found...

... nothing.  Nada.  None of the horrible side effects you hear from the anti-vaxxers, which include complex regional pain syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia.  Any incidence of disorders following the administration of the vaccine was no higher than the background rate for unvaccinated teens.

Add to that the fact that Gardasil prevents infection by HPV, which is directly linked to cancer of the throat, cervix, penis, and vagina.  Of these, cervical cancer is the most common; of the 12,900 new cases of cervical cancer diagnosed each year, an estimated 4,100 women will die of it within three years of diagnosis.  So, no common adverse side effects from Gardasil, and the benefit of protecting your children from dying of cancers that are largely preventable.  No brainer, right?

Apparently not.  Here's a selection of responses I saw to the Phil Plait article:

• I don't care what the research says.  I'm not taking that kind of chance with my children.
• Nothing has no side effects.  The risk still isn't worth it.  The pharmaceutical companies cover up the dangers.
• Why would we believe this when the medical research changes daily?  Saturated fat is bad for you, then it's not.  Sugar is bad for you, then it's not.  So they tell us this vaccine is safe, tomorrow it won't be, and then it's too late because you already gave your kids the vaccine.
• Of course they say this.  Gardasil brings in millions of dollars a year.  They have a vested interest in convincing us it's safe.

And so on and so forth.  What, does the research only convince you when something is unsafe?

Let me put this as plainly as I know how.  There is no evidence that vaccinations are dangerous, and that they increase your likelihood of any of the various disorders that anti-vaxxers want you to believe are a result.  There have been repeated large-scale studies by different researchers in different research facilities that have confirmed this result over and over.  Further, do you really want to go back to the day when people died of measles, typhoid, and diphtheria, and those who survived polio were sometimes confined to an iron lung for the rest of their lives?  We now can prevent all of those diseases, and have for the first time come up with a vaccination that prevents cancer.

To refuse to have your children protected against these deadly diseases is tantamount to child endangerment.

And I would like it if, for once, people would overcome their tendency to believe fears more strongly than reassurances, and accept what the scientists have been saying for years.

Whole lot o' shakin' going on

To all of my readers in California:  I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but you're all gonna die.

I know, I know, I should have told you about this sooner, so you could do something about it, but I didn't even know about it myself until yesterday, and by then it was too late.  I mean, just think if everyone had tried to leave the state yesterday evening.  The traffic would have been worse even than usual, and where would they all have gone?  I mean, it's not like Oregon wants 'em.

If you're wondering what all this is about, I'm referring, of course, to the fact that California is going to be destroyed by an earthquake today.  9.8 on the Richter scale, no less, and caused by the alignment of Mercury and Venus, or something.  Scary shit.

How do I know this?  Well, there's this article in IN5D Esoteric Metaphysical Spiritual Database, which as authoritative sources go, is pretty much unimpeachable.  In it, we learn that Nostradamus predicted this, and since Nostradamus's predictions have proven as accurate as you'd expect given that they're the ravings of an apparently insane man who did most of his writing after a bad acid trip, we should all sit up and pay attention.  Here, according to IN5D, is the quatrain in question:

Le tremblement si fort au mois de may,
Saturne, Caper, Jupiter, Mercure au boeuf:
Vénus aussi, Cancer, Mars, en Nonnay,
Tombera gresle lors plus grosse qu’un oeuf. 

English translation: 

The trembling so hard in the month of may,
Saturn, Capricorn, Jupiter, Mercury in Taurus:
Venus also, Cancer, Mars, in Virgo,
Hail will fall larger than an egg.

The site goes on to clarify:

On May 28, 2015 towards the end of the day UTC time, and continuing on May 29, there will be a series of very critical planetary alignments whereby Venus and Mercury are really being charged up on the North-Amerca [sic] / Pacific side.

Wow.  Pretty scientific.  Bad things happen when Venus and Mercury get "really charged up."  Time to get outta Dodge, apparently, not to mention Los Angeles.

Okay, astronomer Phil Plait says we should all calm down.  In his wonderful column Bad Astronomy in the magazine Slate, he says:

First, there is simply no way an alignment of planets can cause an earthquake on Earth. It’s literally impossible. I’ve done the math on this before; the maximum combined gravity of all the planets under ideal conditions is still far less than the gravitational influence of the Moon on the Earth, and the Moon at very best has an extremely weak influence on earthquakes. 

To put a number on it, because the Moon is so close to us its gravitational pull is 50 times stronger than all the planets in the solar system combined. Remember too that the Moon orbits the Earth on an ellipse, so it gets closer and farther from us every two weeks. The change in its gravity over that time is still more than all the planets combined, yet we don’t see catastrophic earthquakes twice a month, let alone aligning with the Moon’s phases or physical location in its orbit.

He goes on to say that Mercury and Venus aren't aligning anyhow, at least not the way the prediction claims (I mean, they're always aligned with something; two objects always fall on a straight line, as hath been revealed unto us in the prophecies of Euclid, and said line includes an infinite number of other points).  So the whole thing is pretty much a non-starter.

This hasn't stopped it from being shared around on social media, of course.  It'd be nice if articles like Phil Plait's would get shared around as often as the idiotic one in IN5D, but that, apparently, is not how things work.  People still gravitate toward predictions of doom and destruction, even though said predictions have had an exactly zero success rate.

So my guess is that if you live in California, you have nothing to worry about above and beyond the usual concerns over wildfires, mudslides, droughts, earthquakes, and Kylie Jenner spotting 75 chemtrails in the sky and posting a hysterical claim that they're killing honeybees.

The usual stuff, in other words.

Calling a fraud a fraud: James McCormick and the bomb dowsers

I know I tend to write about frustrating topics -- my usual fare is illogic, irrationality, gullibility, hoaxes, and general foolishness.  And it's got to be wearing, at times, to read a non-stop parade of human craziness and credulity.  So it's heartening to me that today we'll start the day with a positive story -- a story of the triumph of science over woo-woo nonsense.

You may have heard about James McCormick, the man who developed a "bomb detector."  The device, he said, worked on the same principle as a dowsing rod; it was a metal antenna that sits in a hole in a plastic sleeve, and it detects the "electromagnetic disturbance" created by the bomb and swivels toward it.  (The whole thing is described in detail in Phil Plait's wonderful blog Bad Astronomy, in an article called "Dowsing for Bombs" that then appeared in Slate.)

You can see how such a device, if it worked as advertised, would be invaluable to the military.  The problem is, it didn't work.  The whole thing was basically just a plastic handle with a ten-dollar Radio Shack antenna glued into a rotating plastic cylinder.  But the military was suckered right in -- to the tune of between $16,500 and $60,000 per device.  Well, it wasn't long before the people in charge realized that they'd been sold a bill of goods; as Plait said, the devices "might as well have been crayon boxes full of rocks.  They were useless."

And, they cost lives.  The Iraqis began to use them at terrorist checkpoints, and (of course) their reliance on them caused them to miss bombs -- including one incident where terrorists sneaked two tons of explosives past a checkpoint, right past McCormick's dowsing rods, resulting in 155 casualties.

Well, the military finally wised up, and McCormick was arrested and charged with fraud.  And last week, he was convicted.

This should be a cause for celebration by skeptics the world over -- that finally, a major governmental institution has seen to it that science triumphs over the peddlers of woo-woo.  But I do have a question, however, that tempers my jubilation.

Why stop at McCormick?  If what he was doing is fraud -- in the sense that he was knowingly hoodwinking the gullible, making claims that were demonstrably false, and becoming filthy rich in the process -- then so are the homeopaths.  So are the psychics, the astrologers, the faith healers.  And yet we still have psychics like Theresa Caputo, the "Long Island Medium," who is booked for readings two years ahead and allegedly charges $400 for a thirty-minute reading over the phone.  (I say "allegedly" because she doesn't reveal her fees publicly; all we have to go by is claims by former clients.)  We still have astrologers like Susan Miller, "astrologer to the New York City fashion set," whose astrology website gets six million hits per month.  (If Skeptophilia gets six million hits in my lifetime, I will die a happy man.)  We still have faith healers like Peter Popoff, who was roundly debunked by James Randi and yet who still attracts tens of thousands of hopefuls to his "healing ministries."

We still have homeopathic "remedies" sold online -- and over the counter in damn near every pharmacy in the United States and western Europe.  Worse, there are groups like "Homeopaths Without Borders" making sure that their useless, discredited sugar pills and vials of water get distributed to needy (and poorly educated) people in places like Haiti, Honduras, and Guatemala, where they are used by the ill in place of actual, effective medications.

How is James McCormick guilty of fraud, and these people are not?

Oh, I know the difference is in who McCormick defrauded.  "Don't piss off the military-industrial complex" is a pretty good guide for life.  But even though the woo-woos of various stripes aren't ripping off the US Army -- they're just ripping off ordinary slobs like you and me -- the principle is the same.  They're making claims that are unscientific bullshit, are charging money for their useless services, and yet they seem to get away with it, day after day and year after year.

Okay, I know I said I was going to be positive, here.  And honestly, I'm glad that they nailed McCormick -- he richly merits everything he gets.  And perhaps this will act as a precedent; maybe the fact that the courts stood by reputable, testable science, and identified fraudulent woo-woo as such, will be one step toward pasting that same label on other deserving targets.

The bottom line is: the good guys won, for a change.  Let's hope that it's a trend.