Like there’s any other kind!

But after that last bit of nastiness involving astrology, I thought a palate cleanser might be in order. So, I offer to you the utter delightful nonsense that is The Astrology Site, a watering hole on the web so full of fertilizer they should bag it up and sell it to be-droughted nations. Specifically, for reasons beyond understanding, though I suspect related to trying to mock reality, they decided to post a link to my book Bad Astronomy. That book, my first, has a whole chapter slamming astrology to the ground. The astrology site doesn’t have any actual content on the page; it just has a link, a picture, and the text of the blurbs from the book cover.

The comments that were left, though, are highly amusing. The very first one is from an astrology apologist who also think the Moon landings were faked! Ah, these blog posts sometimes write themselves. It reminds me of something I wrote in this post:

I’ve said here before that the path of reality is razor-thin: there’s only one way to be right, but an infinite number of ways to be wrong.

The thing is, that narrow path is like a single, unbroken strand, but each path of unreality leads to every other. If you can chuck reality into the dustbin, then all manners of silliness seem equally plausible. You might think that believing in Santa Claus is a lot sillier than believing in homeopathy, but really they’re the same: they’re both fantasy.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

How do you punch a hole in a cloud? Fly through it.

Meteorologists had long figured that aircraft were part of the explanation for crazy-looking “hole-punch clouds” like this one. When propeller planes fly through a cloud, they thought, it can exert air pressure that cools water extremely quickly to produce ice. If water vapor condenses on that ice, snow falls from the sky and leaves a conspicuous cloud hole.

Now, thanks to a happy accident, researchers confirmed that planes can cause these cloud holes, and that even jets, not just prop planes, can do it.

Andrew Heymsfield, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, was aboard a research plane near the Denver airport in 2007 when he unwittingly flew through a flurry of snow produced by a hole-punch cloud.

The plane was loaded with instruments for studying how ice forms in clouds. Radar from the ground picked up a strange echo in their wake, indicating oddly-shaped snowflakes. “We didn’t know it, but we went right through this precipitation feature that was spotted from the ground,” Heymsfield said [Wired.com].

Their readings, when matched up with the path of planes in the area, helped unravel the mystery:

The researchers then linked satellite images of hole-punch clouds to flight schedules to show that jet aircraft, not just propeller planes, can also punch holes and produce snow. The supercooled droplets freeze after passing over the jet planes’ wings, Heymsfield said [Wired.com].

Their work will soon be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

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Image: Alan Sealls, chief meteorologist, WKRG-TV

There’s a movement afoot to frame science/religion discussions in such a way that those of who believe that the two are incompatible are labeled as extremists who can be safely excluded from grownup discussions about the issue. It’s somewhat insulting — to be told that people like you are incapable of conducting thoughtful, productive conversations with others — and certainly blatantly false as an empirical matter — I’ve both participated in and witnessed numerous such conversations that were extremely substantive and well-received. It’s also a bit worrisome, since whether a certain view is “true” or “false” seems to take a back seat to whether it is “moderate” or “extreme.” But people are welcome to engage or not with whatever views they choose.

What troubles me is how much our cultural conversation is being impoverished by a reluctance to face up to reality. In many ways the situation is parallel to the discussion about global climate change. In the real world, our climate is being affected in dramatic ways by things that human beings are doing. We really need to be talking about serious approaches to this problem; there are many factors to be taken into consideration, and the right course of action is far from obvious. Instead, it’s impossible to broach the subject in a public forum without being forced to deal with people who simply refuse to accept the data, and cling desperately to the idea that the Earth’s atmosphere isn’t getting any warmer, or it’s just sunspots, or warmth is a good thing, or whatever. Of course, the real questions are being addressed by some people; but in the public domain the discussion is blatantly distorted by the necessity of dealing with the deniers. As a result, the interested but non-expert public receives a wildly inaccurate impression of what the real issues are.

Over the last four hundred or so years, human beings have achieved something truly amazing: we understand the basic rules governing the operation of the world around us. Everything we see in our everyday lives is simply a combination of three particles — protons, neutrons, and electrons — interacting through three forces — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. That is it; there are no other forms of matter needed to describe what we see, and no other forces that affect how they interact in any noticeable way. And we know what those interactions are, and how they work. Of course there are plenty of things we don’t know — there are additional elementary particles, dark matter and dark energy, mysteries of quantum gravity, and so on. But none of those is relevant to our everyday lives (unless you happen to be a professional physicist). As far as our immediate world is concerned, we know what the rules are. A staggeringly impressive accomplishment, that somehow remains uncommunicated to the overwhelming majority of educated human beings.

That doesn’t mean that all the interesting questions have been answered; quite the opposite. Knowing the particles and forces that make up our world is completely useless when it comes to curing cancer, buying a new car, or writing a sonnet. (Unless your sonnet is about the laws of physics.) But there’s no question that this knowledge has crucial implications for how we think about our lives. Astrology does not work; there is no such thing as telekinesis; quantum mechanics does not tell you that you can change reality just by thinking about it. There is no life after death; there’s no spiritual essence that can preserve a human consciousness outside its physical body. Life is a chemical reaction; there is no moment at conception or otherwise when a soul is implanted in a body. We evolved as a result of natural processes over the history of the Earth; there is no supernatural intelligence that created us and maintains an interest in our behavior. There is no Natural Law that specifies how human beings should live, including who they should marry. There is no strong conception of free will, in the sense that we are laws unto ourselves over and above the laws of nature. The world follows rules, and we are part of the world.

How great would it be if we could actually have serious, productive public conversations about the implications of these discoveries? For all that we have learned, there’s a tremendous amount yet to be figured out. We know the rules by which the world works, but there’s a lot we have yet to know about how to live within it; it’s the difference between knowing the rules of chess and playing like a grandmaster. What is “life,” anyway? What is consciousness? How should we define who is a human being, and who isn’t? How should we live together in a just and well-ordered society? What are appropriate limits of medicine and biological manipulation? How can we create meaning and purpose in a world where they aren’t handed to us from on high? How should we think about love and friendship, right and wrong, life and death?

These are real questions, hard questions, and we have the tools in front of us to have meaningful discussions about them. And, as with climate change, some people are having such discussions; but the public discourse is so badly distorted that it has little relationship to the real issues. Instead of taking the natural world seriously, we have discussions about “Faith.” We pretend that questions of meaning and purpose and value must be the domain of religion. We are saddled with bizarre, antiquated attitudes toward sex and love, which have terrible consequences for real human beings.

I understand the reluctance to let go of religion as the lens through which we view questions of meaning and morality. For thousands of years it was the best we could do; it provided social structures and a framework for thinking about our place in the world. But that framework turns out not to be right, and it’s time to move on.

Rather than opening our eyes and having the courage and clarity to accept the world as it is, and to tackle some of the real challenges it presents, as a society we insist on clinging to ideas that were once perfectly reasonable, but have long since outlived their usefulness. Nature obeys laws, we are part of nature, and our job is to understand our lives in the context of reality as it really is. Once that attitude goes from being “extremist” to being mainstream, we might start seeing some real progress.

A month ago, something big burned up in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The impact was seen by two amateur astronomers, and very quickly the big guns were turned to the giant planet.

And what they saw was… nothing. Nada. Bupkis. Not even the powerful eye of Hubble saw anything. See for yourself:

This picture of Jupiter was taken on June 7, just a few days after the impact. The image on the right is a closeup, and the circle represents where the impact took place, and there’s nothing there we can see. In previous impacts — most notably the one last year in July, and the Shoemaker-Levy 9 series of impacts in 1994 — nasty black bruises appeared on the planet’s cloud tops. Those were impact scars, plumes of material blasted up from deeper in Jupiter’s cloud, dredged up by the multi-megaton explosions. You can see this by comparing an image of Jupiter taken last year after the July impact with what they got this year:

The 2009 impact scar can be seen in the left hand image near the bottom of Jupiter. There is no such scar seen for the newer impact. That means that whatever hit Jupiter didn’t explode deep in the atmosphere. The observations imply strongly that whatever hit burned up high in the atmosphere, more like a giant fireball than an impact and explosion. Given how bright it was, I’m personally of the opinion that this may not have been a giant solid asteroid, like a piece of rock or metal. If it was that fragile, it may have been what’s called a rubble pile; a loose conglomeration of rocks held together by their own gravity.

At the moment, because we didn’t see anything it’s hard to say anything positive. We can eliminate a few possibilities, but it’s hard to know exactly what happens. These observations definitely help, but are also in their way a little maddening. What the heck happened on Jupiter?

As an added bonus, these observations also show (OK, don’t show) the missing southern equatorial belt; a planet-wide storm wrapped around Jupiter. In the older shot you can see it, but a few months ago it disappeared, and is missing in the newer shot. This has happened before, but it’s unclear why. In the new images you can see that the storms north and south of the missing belt look different now too, perhaps a clue as to what’s going on. There is a series of brownish circular storms all lined up, more or less, and other odd features as well.

All in all, I think we can sum all this up by saying Jupiter is a weird place. Mind you, it’s 140,000 kilometers across (86,000 miles), which is a heckuva lot of real estate to try to understand. I expect the questions and answers will change, but I bet that in a hundred years, astronomers studying Jupiter will still have plenty of mysteries on their hands.

Credit: NASA, ESA, M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley), H.B. Hammel (Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.), A.A. Simon-Miller (Goddard Space Flight Center), and the Jupiter Impact Science Team

Snapping iPhone pics may soon be an order for cops in Brockton, Massachusetts. But don’t expect these shots to end up on the Facebook page for COPS. Using a special app, officers plan to turn the iPhone into a crime-fighting gadget that will use facial and iris recognition to identify criminals on the streets.

As first reported by the Patriot Ledger, the iris recognition software looks for unique coloration in the area surrounding the subject’s pupils. The face recognition software measures the spacing between the suspect’s major facial features–comparing the outside distance between the person’s eyes and the distance between his nose and chin, for example.

These measurements will then go to a central database so that the officer can identify the suspect before bringing him into the station. The current system, called MORIS (Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System), costs about $3,000 for each phone and currently only uses facial recognition, reports Popular Science. Future versions will incorporate the iris technology and may even have a fingerprinting app.

The phone will eventually be used by 28 police departments and 14 sheriff departments in the state, though the Patriot Ledger reports that other states also soon hope to employ the system.

Officers will only take shots when they have probable cause, Brockton Chief William Conlon says in the video above: “Were not going to just randomly stop people on the street and say, ‘Hey, come here, we want to take your picture and look in your eyes.’”

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Last night, President Obama made his first Oval Office speech. In it, he described the BP oil spill as an assault on “our shores and our citizens” and outlined his “battle plan.” He discussed the immediate cleanup of the spill, the repayment he’ll insist on from BP for harm done, and the future of U.S. energy.

Katie Couric compared Obama’s speech to others issued from the Oval Office.

“The disaster in the Gulf may or may not be President Obama’s Katrina, but, tonight, it will be his Challenger explosion, his Cuban missile crisis, his Sept. 11. Unlike those events, this is a long simmering disaster, getting darker by the day.” [CBS]

Here are some of the major points covered in the speech:

Immediate Clean-up

Obama started by discussing BP’s current efforts to stop the leak and assuring the public that the company’s work will soon pay off. Obama wasn’t specific on how the company will finally stop the oil flow, but only said that the company will use “additional equipment and technology.”

“In the coming weeks and days, these efforts should capture up to 90 percent of the oil leaking out of the well. This is until the company finishes drilling a relief well later in the summer that’s expected to stop the leak completely.”

How BP Will Repay Victims

Though he didn’t specify an amount, the president also wants to put aside BP funds (The New York Times reports that Senate Democrats have called for $20 billion) in an account managed by a “third party” to fairly distribute to victims. BP has confirmed a meeting with the president at the White House today, in which this escrow account will be discussed. Said Obama:

“I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness. And this fund will not be controlled by BP. In order to ensure that all legitimate claims are paid out in a fair and timely manner, the account must and will be administered by an independent third party.”

Relationship Between Companies and Watchdogs

He spoke of earlier efforts to clean up corrupt relationships between big companies, like BP, and the agency meant to monitor them–the Minerals Management Service (MMS) within the Department of the Interior. Obama said his administration began cleaning out the MMS when he took office:

“But it’s now clear that the problem there ran much deeper, and the pace of reform was just too slow. And so Secretary [Ken] Salazar and I are bringing in new leadership at the agency — Michael Bromwich, who was a tough federal prosecutor and Inspector General. And his charge over the next few months is to build an organization that acts as the oil industry’s watchdog — not its partner.”

A Green Energy Future?

He also spoke of a need to adopt greener energy sources and described our slow transition to these energy sources compared to China, for example.

“We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny.”

Some have criticized Obama for not being more specific; others hope that his speech will incite change after the clean-up.

Still, some polls suggest a national willingness to make economic sacrifices for the sake of kicking the oil addiction. And the first step need not be too expensive. A new study from the Environmental Protection Agency shows that one proposed energy bill, which includes a carbon emission trading scheme, would cost the average American household only about $100 a year. [Reuters]

DISCOVER wants to know what you think. Please comment below.

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