PZ Myers delivers a very entertaining talk at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne in 2010:

From Pharyngula.

The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), mounted to its Centaur rocket stage.

On June 18, 2009, NASA launched the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). LCROSS executed the goal of its mission on October 9, 2009, following and observing the planned impact of its spent booster rocket into the southern polar region of the Moon. The LCROSS probe itself impacted the same region four minutes later.

There was little fuel remaining in this rocket stage. Thus the event could be accurately described as an “impact,” or even a “crash,” though crash has a connotation of being uncontrolled, which is patently not the case here. “Bombs,” on the other hand, from what I am led to understand, explode, which is an activity of which this spent rocket stage was incapable.

Thus, NASA did not “bomb the Moon,” despite media reports to the contrary, typified below:

A new chapter in space exploration has been opened up after Nasa confirmed that their mission to bomb the Moon had found “significant quantities” of frozen water.

[The Daily Telegraph, November 13, 2009]

The author of the above story, Richard Alleyne, goes by the title “Science Correspondent.” Presumably he should know better.

But this journalistic “one small misstep” seems trivial when compared to the “one giant pseudoscientific leap” taken by Ellen Whitehurst (purveyor of such verifiably false notions as astrology, feng shui, and new age remedies) in her ill-informed babbling against LCROSS:

So, it looks like NASA’s mission to blast a hole in the surface of the south pole of the moon is continuing as previously planned and could occur any day now. NASA is sending a weapon [note: misleading word choice] to blow a five mile deep crater [note: WRONG] in the surface of that unassuming [note: Oh! Poor Moon! How I weep for thee!] orb in order to dislodge debris that may or may not hold traces of water, ice or vapor. This alleged [note: sinister plot?] water-seeking and lunar colonization experiment is believed to be an attempt at seeing whether there are any natural resources on the moon.

Now, there are some who believe that there might be an extraterrestrial base [note: and now she trots out unfounded conspiracy notions] sitting over on the dark side of the moon as well … citing eyewitness accounts given the NSA by astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.

[note: Wait, it gets better.]

If you want to tap into the powerful energies these autumn moons offer then wear oranges and yellows and purples. [note: WTF]

[The Huffington Post, October 7, 2009]

Rather than tapping into autumn moon energies with a colorful sweater, NASA’s LCROSS probe was on a mission of science.

The impact was intended to excavate lunar soil, or “regolith,” as well as some of the underlying rock beneath. This method was far cheaper and more rapid than sending some sort of automated backhoe to the Moon to perform the same task. The resulting plume of material, or “ejecta,” would be scanned by LCROSS as well as Earth-based telescopes in order to determine the chemical composition of the ejecta.

While the ejecta from the October 9 impact did not make for much a of visual show, analysis of the data did indeed confirm the presence of water in this region of the Moon which lies in permanent shadow. Any resource that would not have to be hauled up from Earth to a potential lunar base would make such a base easier and cheaper to maintain, so this discovery is a boon to any future human exploration of the Moon.

Update: It turns out Ray Comfort* is a demonstrable liar. (OK, this is no surprise: he’s been a demonstrable liar on many issues for years. But here’s a nice, concrete example that he’s a demonstrable liar on this particular issue.) In addition to being disingenuous and despicable, turns out he’s also an intellectually dishonest plagiarist. Apparently, What Would Jesus Do? is copy and paste the text of a Darwin biography directly into your introduction, without appropriate citation.

Actually, this situation is even worse than what I was going to blame him for: I had assumed that the various stories I’d seen about this were all referring to the same instance of plagiarism. As it turns out, don’t give a guy like Comfort the benefit of the doubt: There are two separate issues of plagiarism in the first five pages of his introduction! He lifts an entire timeline of Darwin’s life into his book with a citation at the very end, suggesting that only the last statement is being cited, rather than a two-page hunk of text copied verbatim. And he appears to have lifted the preceding biographical essay nearly entire without any citation whatsoever!

And unsurprisingly, what changes there are in the copied text tend to be insulting to Darwin: Changing “in his youth he demonstrated predilections for hunting, natural history, and scientific experimentation” to “young Charles showed less interest in studying than in hunting, natural history, and scientific experimentation”; “In 1839 he married Emma Wedgwood” to “In 1839 he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood”; etc. So, in the entire first five pages – and there’s an entire page of illustration – it looks like he might have written half a page himself.

(Just so I don’t get accused of plagiarism, thanks to PZ Myers for covering this.  )

In other evolutionary update news, check out this week’s Scientific American Podcast, with several concrete examples that one can use to smack people like Comfort upside the head, including the evolution of lactose digestion in adult humans, evolution of malaria resistance through non-ideal means, and NOVA’s new three-part series on human evolution, “Becoming Human” (part one, covering ~7-2 million years ago, was pretty good!)

*For those of you who don’t regularly follow Comfort, his partner-in-stupid is Kirk Cameron. Yes, that Kirk Cameron. No, seriously. No, for real seriously. I know – Reality has just Poe’s Law‘ed itself.

Starving, exhausted, lobotomized fish in a nearly-empty barrel.

Creationist nut-bag Ray atheists’-nightmare banana-fetishist Comfort has had the audacity (bad judgement? misfortune?) to go mano a stupido with actual scientist and non-crazy-person Dr. Eugenie Scott in a resent set of essays on the US News & World Report Blog. (Dragon*Con-ers may remember Dr. Scott from Skeptrack this year.) Comfort starts out . . . strong? Well, he starts out . . . and gets knocked down, but he gets up again (you’re never going to keep him down!) – oh wait, yes you are. And Dr. Scott does so handily.

Comfort’s arguments really are almost indescribably bad (he says, immediately before going on to attempt to describe them). Fallatious arguments abound: ad hominems, quotes out of context, straw men, special pleading, moving the goalposts, non sequiturs, appeal to consequences (hell, it takes him all of five paragraphs to smack into Godwin’s Law!). These essays, and everything Comfort has ever done, frankly, are such a mess of ignorance, mischaracterisation, and misinformation that they pretty much devolve to the level of Gish Gallop: he gives so much bad, innaccurate data so fast that’s wrong on so many levels, that a step-by-step refutation becomes impossible in the allotted space. For instance, here is his “argument” that evolution is wrong because of the problem of the evolution of sex:

[E]volution has no explanation as to why and how around 1.4 million species of animals evolved as male and female. No one even goes near explaining how and why each species managed to reproduce (during the millions of years the female was supposedly evolving to maturity) without the right reproductive machinery.

This argument is so blitheringly stupid, and is wrong on so many (basic) levels that even having it postulated in a “serious” debate makes my eyes bleed. Fortunately, it also makes him sound like a raving loon.

The sad thing is that people like Comfort, who is at best a complete idiot, and at worst an outright liar, are given such prominent stages from which to present their arguments, as if they weren’t definitively refuted long ago. Of course debate of contentious issues should be fostered in the public arena, but you don’t see them giving Time Cube Guy a chance to debate his position on ABC’s Nightline. Why? Because he is clearly nuts, and any rational person can see that his arguments are ridiculous. It’s about time to start treating Ray Comfort the same way.

For a cogent and thoroughly watchable discussion of “Why Evolution Is True” (and a pallet-cleanser to get all the Comfort out of your system), check out this recent lecture Jerry Coyle at the AAI conference in Californina:

Particularly nice was his inclusion of the excellent transitional fossil record of whales, which Comfort claims is completely missing – something that further shows that he is either completely out of his depth, or is deliberately misrepresenting the facts. Or both.

So what image of the Crab Nebula am I used to seeing? Which image is ubiquitously plastered on calendars, desktop backgrounds, and, for all I know, third-graders’ lunch boxes? Generally, something like this one:

Kinda neat, especially given its historical context, but ultimately fairly boring. “Hmm, you say a star blew itself to bits 1000 years ago in a conflagration so intense you could read by it at night from a distance of 6300 light years? That’s nice. *yawn*”

Then what do I see a few days ago on the Astronomy Picture of the Day? This:

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about a recent article, which proposes that the Higgs boson doesn’t want to be detected, and that some superior force is preventing it. Whether the culprit is Nature, causality, paradox, Galactus, or rogue Time Lords from Raxacoricofallapatorius, the authors claim that “unlucky” events seem to be conspiring to prevent detection of the Higgs. The gist is that, despite 45 years of intensive searching, the Higgs has gone undetected. And, even though several experiments have had the potential of detecting it, all have (so far) failed to do so, sometimes in seemingly suspicious ways.

Briefly, the Higgs boson is the last remaining undetected particle in the Standard Model, which unites all non-gravitational interactions in the universe. It would be the particle that explains why other particles have mass, by creating a molasses-like field that gives other particles traveling through it inertia. Now, the mathematics describing the laws of physics work equally well with time moving in either the forward of backwards direction – i.e., you can calculate a baseball’s final position after leaving the pitcher’s hand, or you can determine its starting position by observing it entering the catcher’s mitt. The paper’s authors conclude that, since we never seem to find the Higgs boson in the catcher’s mitt, any historical trajectory that would cause the detection of the Higgs boson is forbidden, and therefor we must always find ourselves in a present where something has conspired to prevent it. Furthermore, the authors suggest an experiment to determine whether the future is determined to prevent detection of the Higgs: Cut a million-card deck, where one card says “Don’t turn on the LHC,” and, if that card comes up, don’t turn on the LHC! (Why perform this experiment at all? Because, if we don’t give the future [or the Time Lords] a “pressure valve” – an easy way to prevent Higgs production – more drastic preventative measures may be required, such as catastrophic failure of the LHC, or production of planet-devouring black holes.)

A lot of the buzz has been backlash and loud outcries, as if the article were crankish; however, the article itself seems to have been submitted in all seriousness – it was produced by extremely well-respected physicists, the proposed mechanisms are well within established physics (or, at least, non-forbidden physics, which, according to Murray Gell-Mann, means that they’re compulsory), and it was published in an acceptable venue and manner (i.e., not a Pons & Fleischmann press conference).

I am not criticizing the authors of the paper or claiming that their article was fallacious. Speculative ideas – even wildly speculative ideas – have a distinguished tradition and a valuable place in the scientific process. Quantum mechanics in particular is notoriously non-intuitive – Niels Bohr once said, when asked if an idea was crazy, “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

The problem with this (admittedly fun) paper is that the data set proposed to speculate interference from the future is incredibly sparse: The cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider after an expenditure of several billion dollars, the shutdown of the LEP just before possible Higgs detection, and the malfunctioning of the LHC upon startup due to electrical shorts. And this also doesn’t take into account the extreme difficulty of detecting the Higgs, nor the extreme expense and complexity of the machines and projects constructed to do so. The LHC is probably the largest, most complex, most intricate machine ever built by mankind – I hardly think it requires such unlikely speculation to explain why it failed during its first trial run; I’m sure it will have many more technical glitches over its lifespan, some serious and some severe.

Of course, since the LHC has now once again been fully cooled to below the temperature of deep space, and particles have now been injected into the main ring in anticipation of the first collisions in a few weeks, I guess the proof will soon be in the pudding.

(I stole that title from The Rachel Maddow Show, I swear to god – send your angry letters to them.)

The one-and-only Bill Nye the Science Guy was on tonight’s The Rachel Maddow Show discussing 200km-long strings of sticky marine snot in the Mediterranean Sea. OK, it was diatomaceous mucilage with associated pathogen-harboring macrofaunal excreta – but Marine Snot would make a better name for a punk band.

Other good band name from the story? Aquaphlem. (Wasn’t that a Jethro Tull album?)

Seen in this week’s Science, a definition of hydrogen:

a colorless, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people.

Awesome. From Los Alamos physicist Steen Rasmussen.

It reminds me of Carl Sagan’s quote from Cosmos:

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

And that, of course, gives me the excuse to post this: