Boldly going backwards

In the past few months, I can't escape the feeling that we here in the United States have thrown the throttle into full reverse.

I mean, consider it.  We've gone from having a president who respected and trusted scientists to one who just two days ago gave a speech about reviving the National Space Council that was so blitheringly stupid that it was somewhere in that rarefied atmosphere beyond cringe-worthy.  And he gave said speech in front of legendary astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who stood there the entire time with a "what the fuck is wrong with you?" look on his face.  Here is a sampler:

And security is going to be a very big factor with respect to space and space exploration.   At some point in the future, we’re going to look back and say how did we do it without space?...  We know what this is, space.  That’s all it has to say, space.  There's a lot of room out there, right?  This is infinity here.  It could be infinity.  We don’t really don’t know.  But it could be.  It has to be something, but it could be infinity, right?

I defy you to listen to the whole thing without saying, "Merciful heavens, you are the most idiotic creature in the entire known universe."

If that's not enough evidence that we've gone into regress, we have the resurgence of paranoia over godlessness.  This was one of the hallmarks of the 50s -- in fact, it was the atheism of the communists, especially in Russia, that spurred our leaders to mandate the words "In God We Trust" on our currency and "One Nation Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.  And now, we're once again sinking deep into fear talk -- and a consequent angry backlash -- regarding the diminishment of influence of Christianity.  Trump had something to say about this, too, this time at a "Freedom Rally" at the Kennedy Center:

My administration will always support and defend your religious liberty.  As long as I am President, no one is going to stop you from practicing your faith or from preaching what is in your heart...  Our earthly rights are given to us by God, and no force can take those rights away...  Families and churches, not government officials, know best how to create a strong and loving community.  In America, above all else, we know this; we don't worship government, we worship God.  Our religious liberty is enshrined in the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights.  The American founders invoked our creator four times in the Declaration of Independence.  Benjamin Franklin reminded his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention to begin by bowing their heads in prayer.  I remind you, we’re going to start saying Merry Christmas again.

So there you have it.  We're already talking about the "war on Christmas."

In July.

But nowhere is the rush backwards more evident than in the resurgence of "religious liberty laws," which are (one and all) designed to assure the liberty of Christians to do whatever they damn well please, at the expense of anyone they disapprove of or wish to discriminate against.  Just last week, in fact, one of them succeeded in being signed into law in the state of Florida -- House Bill 989, which allows people to object to (and exempt their children from) specific instructional materials in public schools.

And guess which two have already come up?  You'll never guess.

Climate change and evolution.

One supporter of the bill said, in some outrage, "I have witnessed students being taught evolution as fact ... rather than theory ... I have witnessed children being taught that global warming is a reality."

If you can imagine.  How dare science teachers teach science as if it were actually correct?

The success of HB 989 is empowering anti-science groups in other states to launch their own efforts to hamstring science education in public schools, thereby ensuring that yet another generation will be raised without a basic understanding of the scientific method.

Which, I suppose, plays right into the hands of Trump et al., because it's hard to see how anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of science could support someone who is so obviously a near illiterate.

I'm trying hard not to be discouraged about all of this, because despair is rarely a catalyst for anything other than curling up in a corner and sobbing.  But right now, our regression into the superstition and paranoia of our past is seeming overwhelming -- and profoundly frightening.  I can only hope that saner heads will prevail, and that the damage done in the interim will be fixable.

But at the moment, all I seem to be able to do is to watch as the daily horror show unfolds in front of me, and try not to weep.

Alien press release

People who are in the know about artificial intelligence research have quipped that true AI is "twenty years in the future -- and always will be."  I'm beginning to think that the same is true for the discovery of extraterrestrial life.  Every time something has seemed promising -- from the experiments designed to find microbial life on Mars conducted by the Viking landers in the 1970s, to the peculiar "Wow!" signal, to anomalies like the weird intensity fluctuations of "Tabby's Star" -- the results have all been labeled "inconclusive."  The fact is, we don't have any good evidence for extraterrestrial life besides the purely probabilistic argument of the Drake equation, and even that doesn't come close to answering physicist Enrico Fermi's question, "Where is everyone?"

So when the worldwide hacking group that goes by the sobriquet "Anonymous" announced a couple of days ago that they had intelligence that NASA was about to announce the discovery of clear proof of extraterrestrial life, I didn't exactly jump for joy.  In fact, my first thought was, "Boy, either Anonymous got hoodwinked, or their standards are slipping.  Or both."

But as usual in the world of skepticism, judge for yourself.  Here's what they said:

Latest Anonymous message in 2017 just arrived with a huge announcement about the Intelligent Alien Life! NASA says aliens are coming! 

There are many who claim that unofficially, mankind has already made contact with aliens and not just little micro-organisms floating around inside a massive alien ocean, but advanced space-faring civilizations.

Twenty-five years ago, we didn't know that planets existed beyond our solar system. Today we have confirmed the existence of over 3,400 exoplanets that orbit other suns, and we continue to make new discoveries. We are on the verge of making one of the most profound, unprecedented, discoveries in history.

Along the way they cite Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate as evidence, ending with an exhortation to watch for an upcoming press release.

No one would be as excited as me if this turned out to be true.  I've been pining away for hard evidence of extraterrestrial life since I was a kid.  But my feeling is that if NASA had evidence, they wouldn't be playing coy, and they wouldn't have let themselves get scooped by Anonymous.

So just a hunch, but I think this'll turn out to be a bust.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

On the other hand, maybe it's just that NASA has had other fires to put out since last week, when noted raving loony Alex Jones had a guest named Robert David Steele on his radio show InfoWars.  It may well that Jones got Steele on his show so that he would look sane by comparison, because what Steele claims is that NASA is holding a colony of human children on Mars for the purposes of slave labor:

We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride.  So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.

And instead of guffawing directly into Steele's face, which is what I would have done, Jones responded as if what he'd said made perfect sense:

Clearly they don’t want us looking into what is happening.  Every time probes go over they turn them off...  Look, I know that 90 percent of the NASA missions are secret and I’ve been told by high level NASA engineers that you have no idea.  There is so much stuff going on.

Steele, encouraged by this, zoomed off even further into CrazyTown by saying that the children weren't just being used for slave labor:

Pedophilia does not stop with sodomizing children.  It goes straight into terrorizing them to adrenalize their blood and then murdering them.  It also includes murdering them so that they can have their bone marrow harvested as well as body parts.

Yup.  "Adrenalizing their blood."  Whatever the fuck that means.  Maybe Alex Jones does, because he responded, "Yes.  It's the original growth hormone."

So NASA figured they'd better respond.  Guy Webster, spokesperson for the Mars exploration program, answered the allegations a couple of days ago, and you can almost hear the long-suffering sigh in his voice:

There are no humans on Mars.  There are active rovers on Mars.  There was a rumor going around last week that there weren’t.  There are.  But there are no humans.

He stopped short of saying, "So will you people go back to your previous occupation, which was probably pulling at the straps of your straitjackets with your teeth, and let us get back to doing actual science?"

Anyhow, that's what's new from the world of astronomy.  As far as the Anonymous announcement, I hope like hell I'm wrong.  Maybe NASA is gearing up to tell us they've finally found evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.  That'd be awesome, especially considering that Alex Jones is pretty good evidence that ordinary terrestrial intelligence is in short supply.

Ghost baby

In the "Loyal Reader One-Upmanship" department, over the last couple of days we have had here at Skeptophilia an escalating series of topics suggested by fans.  First, we had the one about "sound-induced orgasms."  That prompted another reader to send me a link to an article about "astral sex," so I wrote about that yesterday.  And just this morning I got yet a third email, this one with the rather hysterical message, "I THOUGHT YOU SAID ASTRAL SEX NEVER RESULTED IN PREGNANCY???!!!!  WELL, EXPLAIN THIS, BUB!!!!" along with a link to an article about a couple in Plymouth, England whose apartment is being haunted by a "ghost baby."

I suppose his concern is logical enough.  I mean, what would astral sex produce if not "ghost babies?"  It does raise some purely biological questions such as how someone's spirit would give birth, not to mention things like ghost baby gestation period, how genetics works in the spirit world, and so forth. Not to mention the issue of custody if one of the spirit parents decides to disappear in a swirl of ectoplasm.

Be that as it may, the article tells us about a British couple who is remarkably blasé about the fact that they're being haunted by a ghostly infant, which is doubly strange because said spirit baby has been seen in the crib of their own real, flesh-and-blood baby.

What Haigh and Evans saw on the baby monitor.  The yellow circle is a little superfluous, don't you think?

I don't know about you, but however open-minded and accepting I am, I would draw the line at having my kid sharing a bed with a ghost.  But the couple, Laura Haigh and Dean Evans, don't seem especially concerned how a ghostly visitor might affect their son, Sebastian.  They were certainly alarmed enough when it happened the first time.  Haigh says she and Evans saw something peculiar on the baby monitor, a shape next to their sleeping son who appeared to be waving things and moving around:

When I noticed this face appear in the corner of his cot I got my sister to look on Skype and there was nothing there at all.  Sometimes [Sebastian] brings a teddy to bed with him so at first I thought it could be that, but this just looks weird. 

Dean said straight away, 'it will be just a teddy' and went straight upstairs.  However he was a little bit gobsmacked that there was nothing there but it was still appearing on the monitor.  He was a bit spooked as he doesn't believe in that kind of thing and just can't explain it. 

He usually says 'don't be silly' about anything like this.  This has opened his mind a little but he doesn't like to talk about it much.  He just kept asking on the night 'has it gone yet?' as he was a bit freaked out.  I have checked out the camera and I'm sure there's nothing wrong with it. 

Friends think it's really creepy.  Whatever it was stayed in the cot until 1.30am and disappeared when I went to feed him.  But during the night it moved positions.

Yes, you read that right: this couple saw a ghostly figure leaping about in their son's crib, and they left the baby in the crib.  For hours.  I don't know about you, but if I saw something like this, "a bit gobsmacked" would be putting it mildly.  Honestly, I'd have grabbed my kid and my significant other, and gotten right the fuck out of the house.

And that's coming from a guy who doesn't believe any of this stuff.

But belief is one thing, and risking my kid's safety is another.  My general response in situations like this is "panic first, think afterwards."  I figure if I freak out and run, there'll be plenty of time later to sit down and ponder it rationally and have a good laugh at my own gullibility.  On the other hand, I've watched enough horror movies to know that the guy who says calmly, "Come on, it's safe, there's nothing here" is always the first one to get eaten by the monster.

So I find their reaction completely incomprehensible.  Unless, of course, they're making the whole thing up for attention, which upon reflection seems the likeliest explanation.

Anyhow, the upshot of it all is that you can't even have some hot astral sex without worrying about pregnancy.  It's a shame, really, since real sex is fraught with risks of various kinds, and here I thought that at least the astral variety would be safe and fun.  I guess the conclusion is that if you decide to send your soul out to look for a hookup, you should still use protection.

Although it does open up the question of how you get a condom on a spirit.  But if yet another loyal reader has found an article about birth control in the spirit world, I don't want to know about it.  Seriously.  This has gone far enough.

The spirit is willing

Yesterday's post, wherein a set of musical pitch combinations that was supposed to induce a "mind-blowingly intense hands-free orgasm" ended up inducing nothing more than a puzzled frown and a head-tilt, prompted a loyal reader of Skeptophilia to send me an email saying, "Well, if the 'binaural beats' didn't juice up your libido, maybe 'astral sex' will."  And he provided a link to a page on the site Mysterious Universe called, "Astral Sex is the Latest Thing in Out-of-Body Experiences."

My first thought was to wonder how astral sex would work, given that sex is one of those things that (insofar as I understand it) pretty much requires that you and your significant other both have bodies. But according to "astral projection specialist" Steve G. Jones, the whole point is that with "astral sex," you're "more than naked," and you and your friend kind of merge your souls together, or something.

Which brings up a number of questions, first and foremost of which is, how do you become an "astral projection specialist?"  Do you go to Woo U. and major in Soul Travel?  Most importantly, how do you study a phenomenon which even the Wikipedia page labels unequivocally as evidence-free pseudoscience?

That, of course, doesn't stop Steve G. Jones, who says that "astral sex" is totally real, and he gives us some fascinating details on how it's done.  Instead of foreplay, you spend the time beforehand "getting into a meditative state that is somewhere in the sweet spot between awake and asleep."  Then, apparently, you just float together, and proceed to engage in some out-of-body bow-chicka-bow-wow.  It doesn't end in orgasm, however, at least not in the usual sense:

That intertwining depends on how adept you and your partner are at astral projection. The merging of souls or energy is the ‘orgasm’ that is reportedly a combination of both physical and astral pleasure that is said can still be felt after each person returns to their physical bodies.

Which I guess is fine if that's what you're after.

Then we're cautioned that there's a sketchy side of "astral sex."  Because you're out-of-body when you're doing it, there's nothing (except for morality) to stop you from merging with someone while they're asleep, without their permission.  The result for the unwitting object of your attention is that they'd dream of having actual sex with you, but it's really not something you should do.  It's critical, Jones says, to ask the permission of the person you're intending to get down-and-dirty with.

I wonder how that'd go, don't you?  You're in a bar, looking for a hookup, and propose to the nice-looking person sitting next to you that you'd like to seal the deal with them.

"So we'll both go to our respective homes," you say, "and meditate for a while, and meet in the astral plane for some hot spirit-on-spirit action."

I don't know about you, but if someone approached me with this kind of proposal, I would suddenly remember a pressing engagement elsewhere.

But the possibility of non-consensual astral sex isn't the only hazard of playing the etheric field, says Steve G. Jones.  Besides unscrupulous human spirits, there are also demons who are eager to have their way with you.  And both genders are at risk.  There are incubi, lustful male spirits looking for human women to couple with, and succubi, the female equivalent who are trying to find a human man.  No matter how horny you are, Jones cautions, it's best to stay away from these entities, because they can "sap your energy."

Charles Walker, Incubus (1879) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So you'd think that the astral plane would somehow be more refined and genteel, but what goes on there doesn't strike me as any better than your typical nightclub.

Anyhow, there you have it.  If yesterday's libido-enhancing "binaural beats" didn't do it for you, there's still the possibility of "astral sex," which at least has the advantages of not passing along STDs and having zero risk of pregnancy.  I doubt it'll ever replace the real thing, however, regardless of how nice a "spirit orgasm" is.

The beat goes on

A loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link yesterday with the question, "Could there be anything to this?"

The link was to a website called "Binaural Beats: A Meditation Shortcut."  The idea, apparently, is that you listen to two sounds simultaneously, which differ slightly in frequency (the example given was a 114 hertz tone in the left ear and a 124 hertz tone in the right).  This will result in your hearing a "beat frequency" or "binaural beat," whose frequency is equal to the difference between the two (in this case, 10 hertz).

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So far, nothing too strange, and a phenomenon that would be familiar to anyone who has tried to tune the strings of a guitar.  But what this site, and others like it, claim is that the induced beat frequency will change the frequency of your brain waves, and cause... well, all sorts of things.

The site he sent says that it will bring on a "meditative state:"

When you listen to sounds of a certain frequency, your brain waves will synchronize with that frequency.  You entrain every time you hear a musical beat that has you bobbing your head or tapping your foot. 

By listening to MP3s or CDs that produce brainwave entrainment, you can induce a desired brainwave pattern quickly and reliably.  Binaural beats is one of the most popular methods to utilize the phenomenon of brainwave entrainment... 

Using binaural beats provides an easy shortcut.  All you have to do is put on a set of headphones or earbuds, relax, and listen.  For many people, this brings their brains into the same state as deep meditation quickly.

Which was interesting enough, so I decided to do a little digging.  I found out quickly that meditative states aren't the only things that binaural beats allegedly can induce.  If you hit the right binaural beat frequency, supposedly you can:

• lucid dream
• boost your memory
• get past creative blocks
• (safely) simulate the mental effects of drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and ecstasy
• lose weight and increase your metabolic rate
• jumpstart your physical and mental energy levels
• have a "mind-blowingly intense hands-free orgasm"

So naturally, I had to investigate all this.  I skipped the first three, given that (1) I already sleep poorly and have weird dreams, and have no particular desire to make this any worse, (2) I'm too impatient to conduct a long enough experiment to see if my memory improves, and (3) I do pretty well in the creativity department already.

The fourth one, on the other hand, was intriguing.  I thought it might be interesting to see if I felt high and/or stoned after listening to some tones going "wah-wah-wah" in my ears, so I gave it a shot.

If a sample size of one means anything, I can report back... nothing.  I didn't feel any loopier after listening to drug-simulating binaural beats for fifteen minutes than I did before.  So I went on to the "jumpstart your energy levels" one (I really don't need to lose weight), and once again... nada.

Then -- purely in the interest of scientific research, of course -- I had to try the last one.

I found two places that supposedly had orgasm-inducing binaural beats.  Listening to the first one was about as arousing as listening to a washing machine on spin cycle.  So I thought, "Maybe my sex frequency isn't attuned to that one, or something."  So I clicked on the second one, and I found out that on this recording, the binaural beat frequency was overlain with the sounds of a couple in the throes of noisy, and apparently extremely pleasurable, sex.  (And no, I'm not going to provide a link.  You'll have to track that one down yourself.)

So it was not exactly a well-controlled experiment.  Of course, I didn't listen for all that long, because otherwise my wife would have come down to my office to see what the hell I was doing down here.  ("Research, honey!  Empirical research!  Really!")

In any case, my own investigation of binaural beats was kind of a bust.  So I decided to see if there'd been any good studies done of the effect, and I found a site that had what seemed to me to be fair and unbiased summaries of the research.  And the general conclusion is...

... it doesn't seem to work. Most of the effects recorded were small and very temporary, and the consensus is that your expectations going into the experience have a major effect on what you'll get from it.  If you think it's going to relax you, then you relax.  If you think it's going to energize you, then you're energized.  If you think you're going to have a spectacular orgasm...

... well, you get the idea.  Although I have to add that throwing in the sex noises was hardly fair.

I suppose the whole thing is harmless enough, of course, and if it helps you to attain whatever it is you're after, then more power to you.  I've done a bit of meditating over the years -- never consistently enough to make it a practice, but enough to get the flavor of it -- and found it to be great for calming the mind and centering the body.  If "binaural beats" helps you to get there faster and deeper, cool.

As for the rest of it -- have fun experimenting, but if you're approaching it skeptically, keep in mind that the results might be less than "mind-blowingly intense."

Sinking the ark

I guess Ken Ham is finally seeing the handwriting on the wall with respect to "Ark Encounter," his $92 million temple to young-Earth creationism in Williamstown, Kentucky, given that the number of visits it's received during its first year is only about 60% of what he and his financial partners had predicted.

The Ark Encounter parking lot on a typical day

But if you thought that this realization was going to lead to some kind of epiphany on the part of Ham et al., vis-à-vis the fact that spending huge amounts of money to convince the general public that a rather perverse fairy story is science was not a great investment strategy, you are fated to be disappointed.  Because Ham doesn't blame himself for Ark Encounter's dismal performance.

He blames us atheists.  Of course.  Ham said:

Sadly, they are influencing business investors and others in such a negative way that they may prevent Grant County, Kentucky, from achieving the economic recovery that its officials and residents have been seeking.  Why so many lies and misinformation?  Simply because we are in a spiritual battle, and the intolerant secularists are so upset with such world-class attraction like the Ark (and Creation Museum) that publicly proclaim a Christian message.  They will resort to whatever tactics they deem necessary to try to malign the attractions.

No, Ken, honestly we see this as more of a "battle against anti-scientific bullshit," and I find the lack of interest the public is showing a welcome ray of sunlight in a year that has otherwise been pretty dismal.  And I'd love to claim responsibility for Ark Encounter's falling on its face, but I honestly think it's more that people deep down realize that the idea of a 600-year-old man and his family getting two of every kind of organism on Earth, including gorillas from Uganda and mountain lions from the Rocky Mountains, and keeping them all fed and happy on a boat whose dimensions would have (by one estimate I saw) given each creature 6.5 square millimeters of space to roam around in, followed by it raining enough to cover the whole Earth and then the water just kind of disappearing, is really fucking stupid.

But people like Ken Ham won't get within shouting distance of that as an answer, so they have to find something else to blame.  And if it's not the atheists, maybe it's... fake news:

Nowadays, it seems very few reporters in the secular media actually want to report facts regarding what they cover as news.  I’ve found that not only do these kinds of reporters generally do very poor or lazy research, they will actually make things up for their agenda purposes.

Yes, those evil reporters with their agenda purposes!  I'm quite sure that a reporter without an agenda purpose would have reported the above photograph as showing a completely full parking lot, much the way that if you looked at the photos of the less-than-impressive crowds at Donald Trump's inauguration just right, and tilted your head a little, he had the best-attended inauguration ceremony ever.

Keep in mind that all of this less-than-impressive performance was with a tremendous influx of public tax money.  Amazingly, legislators decided again and again to give their support to this project, despite the clear intent of the place to proselytize.  According to an analysis by the organization Church & State:

[Ark Encounter received] $18 million in state tax incentives to offset the cost of the park’s construction; a 75 percent property tax break over 30 years from the City of Williamstown (a town of about 3,000 near where the park will be located); an $11-million road upgrade in a rural area that would almost exclusively facilitate traffic going to and from the park; a $200,000 gift from the Grant County Industrial Development Authority to make sure the project stays in that county; 100 acres of reduced-price land and, finally $62 million municipal bond issue from Williamstown that Ham claims has kept the project from sinking.

If I lived in Kentucky, I would be raising hell over this.

Of course, there's a wryly funny side to the whole thing, and that's that Ham and his pals believe that the project was built because it was part of god's divine purpose and holy plan, and yet a few atheist bloggers, secular organizations, and reporters were apparently sufficient to thwart the Omnipotent Deity's intent.  Kind of calls into question god's ability to make stuff happen, doesn't it?  He's coming off more like one of the inept bad guys in an episode of Scooby Doo, whose plans to get rich off a haunted carnival came crashing down when Shaggy pulled off his mask.  I bet Yahweh is up there right now, scowling and muttering, "Ken and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for you crazy kids and your mangy mutt!"

Anyhow, my general feeling is that it couldn't have happened to a more deserving individual, and I wish him many more years of this kind of turnout.  Now we just need to make sure that this same load of nonsense doesn't end up in public school science curricula, in the guise of "religious freedom."

We may be winning this battle, but the war's far from over.

In the dark

To further investigate our general topic of people giving woo-woo explanations to damn near everything, today we investigate: The Dark.

First, a brief physics lesson.

Things are generally called "dark" for one of two reasons.  First, there are objects whose chemical makeup results in their absorbing most of the light that falls on them.  Second, there are things that don't interact with light much at all, so they neither absorb nor reflect light -- light passes right through them.  An example of the first would be a charcoal briquet.  An example of the second would be interstellar space, which is sort of dark-by-default.

This whole thing comes up because of the discovery of an extrasolar planet with the mellifluous name TrES-2b.  TrES-2b orbits the even more charmingly named GSC 03549-02811, a star about 718 light years away.   More interestingly, it has the distinction of being the darkest extrasolar planet yet discovered.  David Kipping, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, stated, "TrES-2b is considerably less reflective than black acrylic paint, so it is truly an alien world."

Artist's conception of TrES-2b [image courtesy of of NASA/JPL-Caltech and the Wikimedia Commons]

That was all it took.  Whereas my reaction was, "Huh!  A Jupiter-sized charcoal briquet!  That's kinda cool," the woo-woos just couldn't resist wooing all over this story.  We now have the following speculations, all from websites owned by people who probably shouldn't be allowed outside unsupervised:

• TrES-2b is made of antimatter, and we shouldn't go there because it would blow up.  We know it's antimatter because antimatter has the opposite properties to matter, so it's dark. 
• TrES-2b is made of "dark matter," and yes, they're not just talking about stuff that's black, they're talking about the physicists' "dark matter," about which I'll have more to say in a moment. 
• TrES-2b is dark because it's being hidden by aliens who are currently on their way to Earth to take over.  Lucky for us we spotted it in time! 
• TrES-2b is hell.  No, I'm not making this up. 

Well. You just opened the floodgates, now didn't you, Dr. Kipping?

The first two explanations left me with a giant bruise on my forehead from doing a faceplant while reading.  At the risk of insulting my readers' intelligence, let me just say quickly that (1) antimatter's "opposite properties" have nothing to do with regular matter being light and antimatter being dark, because if it did, the next time a kindergartner pulled a black crayon out of the box, he would explode in a burst of gamma rays; and (2) "dark matter" is called "dark" because of the second reason, that it doesn't interact with much of anything, including light, so the idea of a planet made of it is a little ridiculous, and in any case physicists haven't even proved that it exists, so if some astrophysicist found a whole freakin' planet made of it it would KIND OF MAKE HEADLINES ALL OVER THE FUCKING WORLD, YOU KNOW?

Sorry for getting carried away, there.  But I will reiterate something I have said more than once, in this blog; if you're going to start blathering on about science, for cryin' in the sink at least get the science right.  Even the least scientific woo-woo out there can read the Wikipedia page for "Dark Matter," for example, wherein we find in the first paragraph the sentence, "The name refers to the fact that it does not emit or interact with electromagnetic radiation, such as light, and is thus invisible to the entire electromagnetic spectrum."  (Italics mine, and put in so that any of the aforementioned woo-woos who are reading this post will focus on the important part.)

And I won't even address the "secret alien base" and "hell" theories regarding TrES-2b, except to say that it should come as a relief that the evil aliens or Satan (depending on which version you went for) are safely 718 light years away.  To put this in perspective, this means that if they were heading here in the fastest spacecraft humans have ever created, Voyager 1, which travels at about 16 kilometers per second,  it would still take them eleven million years to get here.

In any case, I guess it's all a matter of how you view what's around you.  I find the universe, and therefore science, endlessly fascinating, because what scientists have uncovered is weird, wonderful, and counterintuitive.  I don't need to start attaching all sorts of anti-scientific bunk to their discoveries -- nature is cool enough as it is.

Okay, thus endeth today's rant.  I will simply end with an admonishment to be careful next time you barbeque.  I hear those charcoal briquets can be made of antimatter, which could make your next cook-out a dicey affair.  You might want to wear gloves while you handle them.  Better safe than sorry!