Science: December 2003 Archive Page

Bjorn Lomborg, the author of a controversial book attacking the environment movement, was cleared yesterday of "scientific dishonesty" by the Danish science ministry.

The ministry overturned a ruling in January by the Danish committee on scientific dishonesty (DCSD), part of the Danish Research Agency, that Mr Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist was "clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice". --Houlder and MacCarthy --Danish writer cleared of 'scientific dishonesty' (Financial Times)

I've been following this one for a while. Well-meaning reporters and students often uncritically accept the statistics given by activists who misrepresent, misunderstand, or simply mis-emphasize scientific findings.

Among the attractions at the 1958 World'sFair in Brussels, Belgium, visitors would have beheld ?Professor RAMAC,? a four-ton IBM machine capable of offering up responses to users? queries on a two thousand year historical span... [T]he Professor offered the general public its first encounter with the magnetic disk storage technology today called the hard drive.... In 1950 Edmund C. Berkeley had published a book entitled Giant Brains: or Machines That Think, the first work to introduce computers to a general audience. The shift from Berkeley'santhropomorphism to the RAMAC'sfull-fledged personification as a ?Professor? or ?genius? hints at the kinds of synthetic identities that would culminate with Arthur C. Clarke'sHAL 9000 only a decade later. --Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --An Excerpt from Mechanisms [2]: 'Professor RAMAC' (MGK)

I left a niggly comment on the author's blog. It somehow didn't feel right simply posting, "Thanks, I enjoyed that."

To quote a student of mine... heck, phooey and darn. I got distracted before I hit "submit" on that comment and now it's gone. Drat.

Scientists say measurements taken by the US space agency's Mars Odyssey craft prove that a human mission could survive on the Martian surface. | Instrument data show radiation around the Red Planet might cause some health problems but is unlikely to be fatal. --Richard Black --Humans 'could survive Mars visit' (BBC)

Also interesting in this article: Mars seems to have too much surface water to be sustained in equilibrium. It may be coming out of an ice age.

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. --Why Santa is Dead (Spy Magazine/Physics Humor)

I've seen this on the Internet and in my e-mail, but this is the first time I've seen the Spy citation. Take it for what it's worth.