Bill Nye talks about the realities of reproduction, and the right wing completely loses its shit.
It is not Nye at his most eloquent, but…he’s actually right about everything important. Read this title for an example of the inanity of far right responses, titled WATCH: Bill Nye, Science Guy Makes An Idiot Of Himself On Reproduction. Nye is clearer and more correct than whoever wrote that, making it particularly amusing. It makes a lot of claims.
I’ve been burned by NASA announcements before (remember “arsenic life”?), but this one sounds like it is genuinely important. There’s evidence of liquid water on the surface of Mars right now.
Liquid water runs down canyons and crater walls over the summer months on Mars, according to researchers who say the discovery raises the chances of being home to some form of life.
The trickles leave long, dark stains on the Martian terrain that can reach hundreds of metres downhill in the warmer months, before they dry up in the autumn as surface temperatures drop.
Images taken from the Mars orbit show cliffs, and the steep walls of valleys and craters, streaked with summertime flows that in the most active spots combine to form intricate fan-like patterns.
There’s this glowering red omen rising over my house right now.
(Lousy picture, I know, it’s the best my camera could do.)
It’s true. This is what happens at a liberal arts college: worlds collide! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! And poets and scientists talking to one another!
This is precisely what the Christian fundamentalists are warning us of with the Blood Moon Prophecy, which is happening this weekend, and culminates with poetry in a coffeehouse on Tuesday. If ever you wanted to witness an apocalypse, get yourself to Morris stat.
Gaze upon the hidden realms of Pluto. Not here in this greatly reduced image, but go direct to NASA and get the high resolution image.
Then stare at it. Become one with Pluto.
While I appreciate the perspective on the relative investment in science, SciAm, this is a terrible graphic.
It’s interesting that the total American investment in science is slightly larger than what the military throws away on just the F-35 program, but otherwise, this image has very low information density.
Humans are lousy at comparing surface areas, and here the money spent on each project is represented by…the area of a circle. That’s poor data representation. I’m sorry, but the creator of this graphic is going to be lined up against the wall with the person who invented pie charts.
Each data point is shown as a circle drawn arbitrarily somewhere on the page. There is no information in relative location — I guess the circles were just splotched down in an arrangement that looked good to a graphic designer somewhere. Are there any relationships between any of these data?
Colors are also arbitrary. Nations are in blue, genomes are orange, brains are purple, and telescopes are red. Just because.
There is so little information in this wall of circles that it needs to be helped along with paragraphs of text dumped onto the page in teeny-tiny print, and most of that text doesn’t tell us anything about the relationships between the circles. They are just circles of varying size on a bland blue background.
A tidy table would have been more than adequate for expressing numbers.
Oh, and there is content. Let’s shut down the F-35, give all that money to the NSF, and double the amount of grant money.
Ah, don’t you love the sight of nonsensical claims getting vaporized by science? An engineer thought about Trump’s proposal to build a giant wall at the Mexican-American border. It turns out to be a non-trivial project.
Twelve million, six hundred thousand cubic yards. In other words, this wall would contain over three times the amount of concrete used to build the Hoover Dam — a project that, unlike Trump’s wall, has qualitative, verifiable economic benefits.
Such a wall would be greater in volume than all six pyramids of the Giza Necropolis — and it is unlikely that a concrete slab in the town of Dead Dog Valley, Texas would inspire the same timeless sense of wonder.
That quantity of concrete could pave a one-lane road from New York to Los Angeles, going the long way around the Earth, which would probably be just as useful.
Concrete, of course, requires reinforcing steel (or rebar). A reasonable estimate for the amount of rebar would be about 3 percent of the total wall size, resulting in a steel volume of 10,190,000 cubic feet, or about 5 billion pounds. We could melt down 4 of our Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and would probably be a few cruisers short of having enough steel.
But the challenge is far greater than simply collecting the necessary raw materials. All of these hundreds of miles of wall would need to be cast in concrete facilities, probably project-specific ones that have been custom built near the border. Then, the pre-cast wall pieces would need to be shipped by truck through the inhospitable, often roadless desert.
The men and women doing the work of actually installing the wall would have to be provided with food, water, shelter, lavatory facilities, safety equipment, transportation, and medical care, and would sometimes be miles away from a population center of any size. Sure, some people would be willing to to do the work, but at what price? Would Trump hire Mexicans?
This analysis also ignores the less sexy aspects of large-scale engineering projects: surveying, land acquisition, environmental review, geological studies, maintenance, excavating for foundations, and so on. Theoretical President Trump may be able to executive-order his way through the laser grid of lawsuits that normally impede this kind of work, but he can’t ignore the physical realities of construction.
But I don’t know — I’ve otherwise blocked Trump out of my mind for the last week or so. Is he still considered a viable candidate? Or have people yet realized that makes America look stupid?
The tobacco industry knew that cigarettes were both addictive and carcinogenic. They sold them anyway, and hired professional obfuscators and lobbyists to bury the truth.
Now we know that the oil industry is the same way. Exxon knew how much carbon was buried in oil reserves. They knew how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere. They were able to calculate in 1979 what burning all that oil would do to the carbon dioxide concentration.
They knew. They didn’t care what its effects were. They only cared about their bottom line.
You know, the future is going to look back on rabid capitalism as one of the damning pathologies of our history.
