A rightwinger wrote me about how science, like religion, also has a history of being wrong, and specifically mentioned Eugenics (controlled breeding of humans), and Phrenology (divining individual and group human character by studying and cataloging physical traits).

Well, scientists are people, too, and are subject to all sorts of religious or political beliefs that get in the way of the scientific search for truth. Such scientists often twist or otherwise misinterpret new data, theories, etc, to fit their own agendas or preconceived notions.

Popular 19th-century distortions of Darwin’s evolution resulted in Eugenics, social Darwinism (survival-of-the-fittest capitalism) and phrenology were all ’sciences’  accorded a high degree of credibility in their day.

The scientific method, however, insists on repeated verification of data and extensive peer review. Eventually those theories were proved unviable, and only the most ignorant of crackers gives them any credence today.

In the realm of religion, however, the more evidence against a thing, the harder the religion exhorts the devotee to cling to it. In turn, the believer works harder to believe it, and is promised a greater reward for staying ‘faithful’.

Religion actually fights hard to hang onto the scientifically unprovable, because in a toe-to-toe battle with science, religion loses every time. Religion must cast itself as outside science, even outside objective reality, because it cannot survive when faced with either.

I spent the past two nights outside, viewing the galaxy and beyond with 20×80 astro-binoculars and Scott’s 6″ refractor. I so don’t want to think about politics right now; here in the real world, political ideas are smaller than molecules.

Check out this beautiful astro-photography from Austria. I saw each of these objects tonight. Except in my glass, they were mostly tiny, fuzzy blobs. The thrill is in hunting them, finding them, getting the best view of them, and then remembering how to find them later.

Sometimes thinking about outer space helps me decompress. This animation of the 12-year development of the International Space Station helped me relax tonight. Puts everything into perspective, and forces us to readjust visual scale several times.

Then there’s stuff like this giant supernova remnant, about 30,000 years old and (if I did my math right) more than 16,500 of our solar system diameters across. The light we see in this picture left the nebula 3,000 years ago, about the time the Mayans were discovering environmental regulation and forest management. 

Did you know? You can regularly view the nighttime passage of the ISS and the space shuttle with the naked eye? Get schedules or downloadable charting applications here.

If you board a jetliner and begin flying away from the earth at 550 mph, you’ll reach the moon in about 18 days. Stay in that jetliner until your newborn daughter leaves for her third year of college, and you’ll have reached the sun.

Or maybe head in the opposite direction on the day you’re born;  at 550 mph you’ll gain Jupiter orbit as an 82 year old woman.

If your family stays on the plane for 750 years, your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson will party on Pluto. 

And in 5,000,000 years, when that jetliner finally comes in for a landing on a small planet around Alpha Centauri, the the star nearest to Earth, your family line will have completely disappeared, and what is left of humanity will be floating in zip-lock bags scattered throught the galaxy.

Factoids like these 1997 blasts from the past  serve as a reminder that As much as George W and his bankster, energy pirate and war profiteer buddies gave this country a new drubbing, the fix was already in long before he got here. I found these two little factoids from 1997:

Myth: The space program provides valuable data for Earth’s inhabitants and probes the heavens to expand future horizons for humankind.

Fact: First and foremost, NASA furthers military programs shrouded in secrecy. Space hype serves to distract public attention from collosal expenditures on questionable and dangerous Pentagon projects.

Myth: Free market economists believe in allowing market forces to take their natural course without interference —especially by government.

Fact: When one of the biggest hedge funds (which bet on currency or market trends) got defoliated by the world economic crisis this September, the Federal Reserve pressured top bankers to come up with $3.65 billion to keep the fund afloat.

Boy, those were the good old days, when a taxpayer bank bailout was still in the billions…

It’s official. There were Martians, once upon a time.

Mars is the next planet out, and the last of the small rocky planets which include Earth. All the planets past Mars are gassy giants.

Gas giant Jupiter, often described (not quite accurately) as a failed star, has 49 official, named moons– with another 14  candidates still under consideration.

Jupiter acts like a giant vacuum cleaner in our solar system, and is one reason why the earth isn’t pelted with devastatingly large meteorites.

on·o·mat·o·poe·ia   (ŏn’ə-māt’ə-pē’ə, -mä’tə-)

  
n.  The formation or use of words such as buzz or murmur that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.

Essentially, a word that sounds like what it refers to.  Buzz. Murmer. Cuckoo. Boom! Whoosh. Sigh. Hiss.

‘Onomatopoeia may also refer to the use of words whose sound suggests the sense. This occurs frequently in poetry, where a line of verse can express a characteristic of the thing being portrayed. In the following lines from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”, the rhythm of the words suggests the movement of a locomotive: “An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.”‘

[Late Latin, from Greek onomatopoiiā, from onomatopoios, coiner of names : onoma, onomat-, name; see n-men- in Indo-European roots + poiein, to make; see k^wei-² in Indo-European roots.]

I don’t care who’s telling the truth, I just want to know the truth. I need to know the truth. How can I respond accurately and effectively in the world if I don’t have a clear picture of it?

The scientific method is, in a nutshell, the desire to know the truth and the drive to determine it.

The unscientific thinker sees as instability any willingness to chuck the idea that doesn’t work and replace it with a new one. The T-Bigot believes that the static consistency of a lie is more real than any dynamic probabilities inherent in drilling ever deeper into reality.

Hundreds of years ago, Brits who colonized malarial areas of Africa and SouthEast Asia drank gin and tonic water in combo. Gin is made from Juniper berries; it was believed that mosqitos found chemicals in the berry unpleasant, and would be less likely to feast on someone who smelled like it.

Tonic water contained the crystalline alkaloid quinine, which killed the malaria parasite but was extremely bitter. Gin served the secondary purpose of masking quinine’s bitter taste.

Since then, unfortunately, the malaria parasite has evolved immunity to quinine, and in Cambodia, an even stronger super-malaria parasite is spreading–a species immune to all current quinaline-replacement drugs.