Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

On October 30th 1938 Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the air convinced several million Americans that we were being invaded by creatures from Mars.

He was told by the bosses at CBS, dealing with the panic he caused, to tell the audience at the end of the program that it was only a joke. His off the cuff “apology” is a classic. It still has valuable advice 71 years later on this last day of October…

CBS Radio October 30, 1938- Orson Welles:

Starting now, we couldn’t soap all your windows and still all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears ,and utterly destroyed the CBS.

You’ll be relieved (I hope) to know that we didn’t mean it, and both institutions are still open for business.

So good night everybody and remember for the next few days the terrible lesson you leanred tonight.

That grinning, glowing globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and no-body’s there….

That was no Martian!

It’s HALLOWEEN!

You can hear a recording of the above as it was broadcast here:

Orson Says Sorry (mp3)

Thanks to plognark for this- You can buy the t-shirt by clicking the image!

When I wrote a post last month called What do Climate Scientists think of Senator Laughing Stock, I hesitated at pressing the publish key. I try to keep these posts about science and stay away from politics. What CO2 is doing to our climate is a purely scientific question. How we act to fix the problem is a political question.

I stay away from political questions!

James Inhofe, the senior Senator from Oklahoma has spent the last several years trying to convince his fellow Senators and his fellow Oklahomans that the scientists are all wrong. He knows, you see, that it’s all a gigantic hoax.

The next thing you know, we will be told that pro wrestling is real and landing a man on the Moon was faked! This of course has nothing to do with the fact that he made is millions in oil.

Nothing at all. He really believes it!

If he were advocating some cap and trade scheme or pushing for more drilling, I would say nothing. That is policy. Policy bores me. I like science.

Using his position to try and convince people that his nutty idea that we are all victims of a giant conspiracy have made him the laughing stock of the scientific community. So EVERY major scientific body on Earth is wrong and Senator Laughing Stock is right.

Go into an empty room and ask yourself if that makes sense. You do not have to tell anyone what your answer is. Just think about it for a minute and tell yourself what you think of that.

Unless you have a pile of National Enquirer magazines and a set of books on how the mob/aliens/Castro/CIA/Johnson/Russia killed Kennedy, I think I know what your answer will be.

Now it appears his fame is spreading further. He is rapidly becoming the laughing stock of the Senate on both sides of the aisle.

Enter the Washington Post this past week

Sad really.

Dan

The folks at the National Snow and Ice Data Center have released some new data on the polar ice as we head into late autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. The ice pack is retreating at a rate of about 11.2% per decade, and Dr. Mark Serezze, the director of the NSIDC says that we are just a few decades away from a mostly ice free August in the Arctic Ocean.

This summer’s ice was the third lowest on record, but the ice is growing very slowly as we head into Winter. The lowest amount of sea ice was recorded in Sept. 2007. The sudden drop two years ago was stunning, and the data today shows we are very close to the same level of ice now as in late October of 2007.

It’s worth remembering that greenhouse gases are the long term control of the sea ice, but it varies each year with weather patterns and ocean currents. El Nino years and La Nina years also have their effects.

NASA has produced a really good video on why the dropping sea ice is so worrisome. To say that there is an intense amount of science being done on the ice pack at the top of the world, would be a gross understatement.

It’s quite likely that the diminishing ice is already changing weather patterns over North America. My friend Stu Ostro at the Weather Channel has been working hard to document this in a statistical way. He makes a powerful argument that the strange storm tracks that meteorologists have noticed over the last few years, are not just the normal variety of weather.

Check out the NASA video. It’s an excellent resource for teachers. You can click on the video and go to the HD version.

Full Sky Panorama by Axel Mellinger : Axel Mellinger, "A Color All-Sky Panorama Image of the Milky Way." PASP 121:855 (Nov. 2009).

Axel Mellinger is a professor and physicist at Central Michigan University, but at night he is an amateur astronomer.

He has compiled an incredible photo of our Milky Way Galaxy and the ENTIRE night sky using over 3000 high resolution photographs. The picture above is a VERY LOW resolution image of his big picture. The new image is the highest resolution

It took him almost two years and travel from South Texas to South Africa and back home to Michigan to get images of every part of the sky visible from the Earth. He then had to map it into a panoramic image and remove distortion, along with filtering out artificial light sources. Not something you really want to start unless you know a lot of  physics first.

Fortunately he did!

The image shows stars that are 1000 times fainter than can be seen with the human eye. He will be making a 648 mega pixel image available to planetariums to show on their domes to thousands of students from age 6 to 90! What a great contribution to science!

Thanks to Eureka alert from SCIENCE and here for the heads up.

This comes on the same day of another big announcement in the astronomical world. The most distant Gamma Ray Burst ever detected was announced in NATURE.

Gamma ray bursts are such stupendously gigantic explosions that their light can travel across the entire visible universe. They are now thought to be the death throws of giant stars, on their way to black hole oblivion.

The image on the left is of a gamma ray burst that is 13.1 Billion light years away. The Universe itself is 13.7 billion years old, so this explosion happened when the universe was a tiny baby. (Well not that tiny, but you know what I mean!).

Now think about something. If an object is 14 billion light years from Earth, can we possibly see it? NO! The universe has only been around for 13.7 billion years. The light has not had time since the universe began to reach us! (Yeah you have to think about that for awhile!)

We are looking back now to the very edge of time itself now.

You gotta know that Alex Filippenko is excited about this!

Who is Alex Filippenko you ask??

Go here and read about RAINDROPS and MISLABELLED FAUCETS

Later,

Dan

There are three documentaries that I think are gold standard and that everyone should see. They are all so good that, even if you are not interested at the outset, you will be drawn into them. I am sure others will have their favourites, and some may not agree with my choices, but here they are and the reasons why.

If you have read many of my posts, you can obviously guess the first pick. It’s actually a series of 13 episodes produced by PBS in 1980.

COSMOS by Carl Sagan. It may be a quarter century old, but t still stands as the definitive science documentary of a generation. Sagan left us way to soon, but he left us with 13 episodes soaked with the wonder of not just the cosmos, but of all science. It’s time for a new generation to be inspired.

You can watch the episodes online for free if you are a member of netflix. HULU has them for those in the U.S. I would go to your local video store and have them get you the entire collection. Trust me, it’s worth it. If you have kids from 9-17. MAKE them watch it!

David Attenborough is not as well known in the USA as he is in the UK and other English speaking countries. That’s Sir David ,to you and me. His contributions to public science education over the last 35 years have earned him a well deserved Knighthood.

The BBC has aired most of his programs about the natural world and nearly every UK watcher of the telly has seen his programs. His best may very well be the BBC production of BLUE PLANET. No better way to spend a rainy weekend afternoon or evening than watching them all back to back. You can get it from the BBC store for 20£ and that is a real bargain. Here in the U.S.  it’s around 45$ here.

We know less about the floor of the oceans than we do the surface of the Moon. The amazing variety of life on our planet is shown nowhere better than in this series. We have named our planet Earth because we humans spend our lives on it. A species arriving from space would not be so narrow minded. They would call it water!

Never forget that if something happens to those microscopic phytoplankton in the cold waters north and south, then we will run out of air to breathe, and food to eat. The oceans truly sustain us and ALL life on this planet. What we are doing to them and the life in them is the great horror story of the 21st century.

The last documentary is going to surprise you!

It’s THE ADVENTURE OF ENGLISH by Melvyn Bragg.

Those of you in the UK are familiar with his interesting In Our Time series on BBC Radio 4. This series of videos on the history of the english language sounds at first like something you had to sit through in English class in high school! It’s not.

Melvyn Bragg has more degrees than a thermometer in Death Valley, but he does not come across as a stuffy professor! He weaves a fascinating story of the history of the English tongue.

All I can say, is try it !  You will never hear words the same way again! It’s a history lesson, not an English class!

This one is likely to be harder to find. Legally at least! You can get the audio version at audible.com here. Amazon has the collection now for 45$ in the U.S. There is a companion book on amazon here. Both together are a good buy at 57 USD. Those of you in the UK might check with ITV who aired the series, or amazon.co.uk.

Here is a brief clip from the series courtesy of Amazon.

So there you have it. Yes, there are other fabulous documentaries. March of The Penguins, and Brian Greene’s Elegant Universe on NOVA, but you may not have seen these and they are truly remarkable.

Later,
Dan