The Evil Eyebrow

Category: Science & Space

  • "I claim this dust mote in the name of…"

    An unprecedented opportunity to contribute to the state of astro-geology is being presented by the University of California at Berkely. You can participate in their stardust@home project to analyze aerogel images for interstellar dust grains that were returned to Earth a few days ago aboard the NASA mission Stardust.

    If you pass the training course and spot a legitimate dust track, you get to name that bit of supernova debris.

    I hesitate to suggest my default name of “Bob” because it seems like an ancient sample of the universe needs a more resounding name. “Robert” might be more appropriate…

  • Galactic Fireworks

    Cartwheel Galaxy composite as put together by Cal Tech

    The Cartwheel Galaxy is a spectacular galaxy. It was recently (in astronomic terms–something like 100 million years ago) run over and penetrated by a smaller galaxy which set off a round of star formation. For all the details from CalTech about the galaxy and how the put the image together, click on the thumbnail.

  • It Rocks! Literally!

    Check out PartiallyClips for a rockin’ good cartoon.

  • Argument by Incredulity

    A British philosopher was quoted in the Atlanta Journal Constitution today saying, “A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature.” This philosopher, Antony Flew, has been a devout atheist (if that is not an oxymoron) for a good while now. Check out his wikipedia entry for more information.

    Deeper in the article comes what makes me wonder what the heck this guy is doing? If he is as respectable and educated as he apparently is, why is he making this “Argument from Incredulity” as quoted here? “‘It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.”

    The Argument from Incredulity is defined is several locations: Talk Origins, EvoWiki, and others. The one I like the best is from Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, which I will briefly paraphrase.

    The example of the polar bear being white has been used as an argument against natural selection. The argument goes, “Polar bears have no need to be white because they don’t need to hide from anything. I find it hard to believe they evolved that way therefore they must have been designed.” Whereas what they really mean is, “I, sitting here in my chair, with no experience concerning polar bears or the arctic, can think of no reason off the top of my head for polar bears to be white.” Mr. Dawkins uses one example of a selective pressure on polar bears to indicate there are perfectly good reasons for polar bears to be able to blend into the arctic landscape: the prey they hunt will run if they see a big ravenous bear coming, so it makes good sense for polar bears to be white.

    I won’t get deeper into the quote, particularly concerning “…evolution of that first reproducing organism,” because I’m not qualified to discuss it, but a renowned philospher who says he has “scientific” reasons for acknowledging the existence of a divine designer should know better than to use this argument.

  • Tangled Bank

    The Tangled Bank

    For those of you not yet familiar with the concept of the blog carnivals, I’m not going to tell you about them. Instead, I’ll let you follow the links and discover for yourself.

    Instead of reading about blog carnivals, you can go to one and experience it! Try Tangled Bank on for size which is a carnival with a Science/Medicine theme.

    Here is the latest Tangled Bank, #42, hosted by Dogged Blog (some of my friends might be interested in following this blog for its dog focus). It has some fascinating articles about veterinary work, and one wholly scary one about variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human version of bovine spongiform encephelopathy (mad cow disease).

    This item was the main reason for this post. Of all the diseases I’m aware of, I think vCJD scares me the most. Cancer sucks, yes. Malaria kills millons, yes. But, vCJD infects you with a protein that can’t be killed by standard sterilization processes and then you slowly develop depression, dementia, and coordination problems followed relatively quickly by death. No cure exists.

    This article briefly talks about spontaneous prion formation that might lead to vCJD in humans, but experts think that infected nervous system tissue from cattle causes most human cases. If you follow the link above, or from Tangled Bank, you will find a researcher who reports that prions have been detected in sheep mammary glands. You know, those things that produce milk for all us milk drinkers. I’m going to be depressed if I have to give up drinking milk for fear of getting this disease.

    This is all very irrational on my part, as I voluntarily commute alongside 20,000 other deadly weapons twice a day. I know that my chances of being killed by vCJD are lower than my chances of being hit by a falling jetliner, but that doesn’t effect how I feel.

  • Freaky Cool Asteroid!

    Monday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is of asteroid Itokawa, which is currenlty being examined by a Japanese spacecraft named Hayabusa. This is a fascinating mission which involves a sample return, but that’s not why I’m writing this…

    Take a look at the image. The asteroid is nubbly! No craters! No smooth surface! It looks like you can see rocks and stuff all piled up! Way stinking cool!

    Here are images from the Japanese Space Agency site. If you can read the japanese, you can translate for me. Look at the smooth surfaces next to the rocky nubbs. Wow.

    I assume the Japanese page is talking about landing sites for Hayabusa. It looks that way anyhow.

  • Thin Member Fracture (a.k.a. Fun with Spaghetti)

    What do you do during your lunch break?

    Today, I decided to check out who was awarded the 2005 Ig Nobel Awards and for what.

    My favorite one of these was the alarm clock that runs away and hides, which I heard about on NPR a few weeks ago. I think it was on Morning Edition; you should be able to find a transcript.

    That was not, however, what I did with my lunch break. Instead I watched movies about the brittle fracture of thin members or “why does spaghetti break in more than one place?”

    This was clued in to me from The Panda’s Thumb.

  • Complete Lunation

    The Astronomy Picture of the Day for November 13, 2005 is spectacular!

  • NY Times' Bitch

    Sometimes I feel like I’m the NY Times’ Bitch because so many of the leads I get for blog postings comes directly from their online news service.

    For example! Today they have an article about…Bird Flu [ominous music, kettle drums, etc]. Specifically about some questions raised by researchers into the 1918 Influenze epidemic that killed so many people. Questions such as, “Does the H5N1 virus actually have the capability to cause a human Pandemic?” and “What bird did the 1918 bird-type flu come from?”

    It seems that there are some things about the current bird flu scare that no one has mentioned in my hearing. Such as that a large number or rural asians already have antibodies to H5N1, meaning they’ve already been exposed ergo no large pandemic.

    Don’t forget to use Bug Me Not to avoid those pesky mandatory signups. I’m registered with NY Times, but only so they’ll send me an email with headlines everyday.

  • Never Look at the Sun!

    Never Look at the Sun! Especially with a telescope in between you and it. Don’t believe me? Try the link and see what happens to a conspicuously eyeball-sized grape that is placed in front of the eyepiece of a solar telescope.

    This link seconded to me through the Bad Astronomy Blog.