Presto Agitato

Fixing the Headline

Drudge had the headline: Velvety underground spider in Israel named for Lou Reed...

That's Loureedia annulipes to you.

What a Maroon

The education (and reasoning) standards for some reverend members of the North Carolina clergy could use some, um, improvement:

A North Carolina pastor has come under fire after calling for gays and lesbians to be killed off by keeping them locked up behind an electrified fence.

During his sermon at the Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, Pastor Charles Worley said he figured out a way to ‘get rid of all the lesbians and queers’.

‘Build a great big, large fence – 100 miles long – put all the lesbians in there, fly over and drop some food’, Worley said during his May 13 sermon.  ‘Do the same thing with the queers and homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out … and in a few years they will die out.’

Uh, come again?  Leaving aside the matter of decency (!), I must point out to Pastor Worley that homosexual couples aren't reproducing (ref: Biology 101 … um, never mind!), at least not without a lot of help.  But yet new ‘lesbians, queers, and homosexuals’ are coming from somewhere and always have.  Clearly the man's plan has a few holes in it.

But maybe we could institute a DNA screening program.  I'd start by screening for the propensity to be a jackass.

Get a Life

Fermilab may be on to something:

Scientists in charge of the two detectors on Fermilab’s Tevatron particle collider, CDF and DZero, announced that they have seen a small excess of events between 115 and 135 GeV that could correspond to the mysterious Higgs [boson] on March 7, during a particle physics conference in Moriond, Italy.

But some scientists dislike the particle's nickname:

‘I hate that “God particle” term’, one member of the CERN team in Europe said last December.  ‘The Higgs is not endowed with any religious meaning.  It is ridiculous to call it that.’

Sir, it's called the ‘God Particle’ because it's everywhere, it's behind everything, and you can't see it.  It's a joke, man.  You know what those are, right?

I find your lack of mirth disturbing.

Oops

Scientists at CERN reported last year that they had (maybe) detected faster-than-light neutrinos.  Several hypotheses were proposed to explain what went wrong with the experiment (and it is almost certainly wrong!), but here is the best explanation so far:

Scientists who last year found particles that appeared to break the Universe's speed limit are looking at two technical issues that could have skewed the controversial finding, CERN said on Thursday.

The European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) confirmed a report by the US journal Science on Wednesday that the team were verifying a cable connection. …

‘After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fibre, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed’, it added.

‘Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos.  New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.’

‘Explains’ as in ‘debunks’.  The surprising too-fast-for-Einstein result appears to have been a measurement error.

But this is how science works: Science is a process, not any particular experiment or experimental result, because experiments are frequently flawed and interpretations of experimental results are frequently wrong.  If experiments survive review, replication, and refinement, more confidence is merited.  Until then, the results are merely ‘interesting’.

X-Ray?

I just caught a show on the Science Channel in which the host rode in an old British military jet to 60,000' in order to see the ‘thin blue line’ of Earth's atmosphere.  The host intoned his concern: From up there, he said, you can see the thinness and fragility of the atmosphere, Earth's only protection from being another damned space rock.

Wait a minute: He could see the fragility of the atmosphere?  How's that again? 

Man, his eyesight is much better than mine!

Smooth Groove

Why didn't I think of this?

We just heard about the Smooth Groove, an invention out of Britain that looks like a snazzy, black-and-white athletic cup.  Smooth Groove's website claims, without attribution, ‘A staggering 55 percent of women, irrespective of age size or weight experience camel-toe at some point.’  Um, really?  Who is conducting those surveys?!

Ah, this problem just begs for some proper research!  Field teams are forming now! 

This is for science, ma'am.

What the Frack?

This week in ‘environmental science’, from The Fiscal Times:

Environmental Protection Agency Strikes Gas!  That should have been the headline last week that instead ran as ‘EPA says fracking may be polluting groundwater’.  Here’s the story: the EPA says tests it conducted in Pavillion, Wyoming ‘indicate that ground water in the aquifer contains compounds likely associated with gas production practices, including hydraulic fracturing.’  However, it turns out that the EPA drilled two monitoring wells to some 900 feet — much deeper than water wells which are usually at about 300 feet — and indeed found hydrocarbons.  In short, they drilled into the natural gas reservoir that has long attracted industry producers.  It may the single most productive moment in EPA history.

Sigh.

First, Assume They're All Morons

More on the OPERA experiment at CERN which seemed, at first, to have detected faster-than-light neutrinos:

So, look, the OPERA result is almost certainly going to turn out to be an error of some sort.  It might even be some subtle relativistic correction that was left out.  But please, try to start your search for an explanation with the assumption that the experimenters aren't complete idiots.  Whatever's wrong is probably going to be kind of subtle — especially since MINOS saw a similar anomaly, though with worse statistics, back in 2007 — and not something that will seem blindingly obvious once it's discovered.

It's a fair point, but ... no, full stop there.  It's a fair point, and one that should be taken to heart.  These guys know their shit.  That said and grokked in fullness, my experience is that even the best experts make silly mistakes, ones that they find painfully embarrassing when they finally figure them out.  In my (different) line of work, I frequently consult with the guy in the next office over to put a ‘fresh set of eyes’ on what is an obvious mistake on the part of one or the other of us.  Surely enough, the error is discovered and we have a good laugh, sometimes after a sigh and a head hung in shame.  It's not every day, but often enough that we can't take it personally or we'd never get any work done.

Massive Injustice

Dark matter is mad as hell and it's not going to take it any more!

(h/t: Principles)

BPA Bullshit

From the Associated Press:

Exposure to the chemical bisphenol-A before birth could affect girls' behavior at age 3, according to the latest study on potential health effects of the compound used in the manufacturing of some plastic drink bottles and food can linings.

Preschool-aged girls whose mothers had relatively high urine levels of BPA during pregnancy scored worse but still within a normal range on behavior measures including anxiety and hyperactivity than other young girls.

The results are not conclusive and experts not involved in the study said factors other than BPA might explain the results.  The researchers acknowledge that ‘considerable debate’ remains about whether BPA is harmful, but say their findings should prompt additional research.

(Translation: We got bupkis but please believe we weren't just wasting money!)

The ‘considerable debate’ about BPA is between responsible scientists and anti-BPA cranks.  The BPA scare began with one tenured crank at, I think, the University of Missouri (Columbia) and two sloppy (but award-winning!) reporters at the Milwaukee Urinal Journal-Sentinal.  All of the imagined positive results have been marginal (to put it generously) or have followed from bad assumptions and poor methodology — or, as in this case, both.  Public health officials around the world, even those who subscribe to the Precautionary Principle, have rejected the scare as baseless in reality.  All that remains is hype, unreasoning fear, and political pressure.  (Sad to say, in Canada, the responsible public-health officials rejected the unscientific baloney from Missouri but they were overruled by politicians and their appointed jackasses.  Sigh.)