97 Cavalier Stalls While Driving in the Rain

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I had a new fuel pump, fuel filter put on my daughters 97 cavalier with 98000 miles. The car would stall sporadically, sometimes start again and pump made a loud whistling type noise. Now the car runs fine when the roads are dry, fuel pump still makes the loud noise, but when it rains and roads are

Andrew Wakefield, martyr | Bad Astronomy

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[Note: I expect antivaxxers to flood the comments below with their typical spin and distortions. I urge everyone to read my comments policy. I also note that the article here is extensively linked to other sources backing up my claims about Wakefield and the antivax movement. The debunking of the vast majority of antivax claims can be found in those links.]

Andrew_WakefieldAndrew Wakefield, the man who more than anyone started the modern antivaccination movement that has led to the rise of measles, pertussis, and other preventable diseases, has been struck off the UK General Medical Council’s register. The GMC registers doctors in the UK, and oversees their conduct. To be struck off is essentially the same as being disbarred.

This is indeed good news, but forgive me if I don’t dance in the streets. It hardly makes any difference, and is years too late.

In 1998, Wakefield published a paper which led to people thinking vaccines caused autism. His research was shoddy, poorly done, unethical, and, frankly, wrong. Eventually the original paper was withdrawn by the medical journal in which it was published.

Syringe, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/8499561@N02/2756332192/That’s all great, in that eventually truth won out. But has it, really? Sure, he’s disbarred, and reality-based people understand he’s totally wrong. But the antivax movement still rolls on. Wakefield moved to Texas where he still spreads his antivax propaganda; he was on NBC’s TODAY show just this morning — what a coincidence! — still proclaiming his innocence, and still spreading falsehoods about vaccines.

And falsehoods they are. From the NBC page:

When [host Matt] Lauer asked Wakefield whether it’s dangerous to continue promoting an MMR-autism link when it causes many families to shy away from vaccinating their children, Wakefield answered, "Matt, you’re missing the point.

"The point is that despite denying it, in the public relations campaign they’ve used against me and against the parents, they are conceding these in vaccine court."

Actually, that’s completely wrong, and he should know better. For one thing, courts have ruled over and again that there is no evidence to link vaccines and autism. What Wakefield is most likely referring to is the Hannah Poling case, which can be twisted and spun into making it sound like it connects vaccines and autism, but it doesn’t. Read Steve Novella’s entry on that case to see how once again the truth eludes Wakefield.

For another, Lauer was not missing the point at all. Wakefield was dodging the point. Lauer was precisely correct; it is dangerous to promote a link that doesn’t exist between autism and vaccines, for exactly the reason Lauer stated.

It would’ve been interesting indeed to see Matt Lauer following up that question with asking Wakefield about his huge financial conflict of interest in all this, since Wakefield was developing an alternative to vaccines when he wrote that paper. Or if he had anything to say about investigative journalist Brian Deer — a man who has been at the forefront of exposing Wakefield all along — and the evidence he found that alleges Wakefield was paid by lawyers to start a vaccine scare?

Anyway, for years Wakefield has been claiming he’s the victim here. This news won’t change that, and will in fact make him a martyr to his reality-impaired followers.

He’s not the victim here. The real victims are people who get measles, people who get rubella, people who get pertussis. Most of the time these folks recover and are fine, though miserable. But sometimes it’s not such a happy ending. Dana McCaffery, a four week old girl in Australia, died last year because the herd immunity was too low where she lived. Because people chose not to vaccinate — and the antivax movement was strong there — that little girl died.

We’re seeing outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases all over the world, and in many of those regions the voices of Wakefield and the antivaxxers are strong. I’m glad the GMC finally took action and did the right thing, but this does not mean we must rest in our fight against those zealots who believe — without any evidence, and plenty of evidence against them — that vaccines cause autism.

They don’t. But how many kids will get sick before everyone finally realizes that?

Syringe picture from ZaldyImg’s Flickr photostream, used under the Creative Commons license.


Actuator control

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What is the advantage of using a 24V DC derived internally for local control voltage in an Electric actuator in for a motor operated valve (MOV) instead of 110V AC.. ? what is this voltage used for actually in local controls? thanks in advance

iPhone CR4 App

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Is anyone out there writing a CR4 discussion app. I love my iPod Touch and use it for most things, and I thought it would cool to to have an app that would let me look at the discussion's. I know I could do it through Safari and I have but an app design just for CR4 discussions would be a lot more p

Aluminum Shapes

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Dear All:

I am working in a project to fabricate structural & platform in 6061 T6 Aluminum for a Mexican steelmill but I need to buy those profiles for example CHANNEL 8. "I" beams etc.

Any kind of help would be appreciated.

Israel Barron

ibarron@sfmex.com

Freeze the Flow

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All right one more comment on the BP disaster.

Would it be possible to take canisters, containers or whatever of liquid nitrogen, surround the area where the oil is being released and explode the canisters. This would freeze the water into a large chunk of ice which would stop the flow of crude o

Amateur Sky-Watchers Track the Air Force’s Super-Secret Space Plane | 80beats

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X37BYou can’t slip much past dedicated amateur astronomers. A month after the United States Air Force launched its space plane, the X-37B, under a veil of secrecy, backyard sky-watchers say they’ve found it, along with clues to its mission.

Though the military still won’t open up about what the classified X-37B actually is, officers have been insistent about what it isn’t: a space weapon. Indeed, defense experts have guessed recently that the craft is testing next-generation spy satellite tech, and the observations back that up.

The amateur sky watchers have succeeded in tracking the stealthy object for the first time and uncovering clues that could back up the surveillance theory. Ted Molczan, a team member in Toronto, said the military spacecraft was passing over the same region on the ground once every four days, a pattern he called “a common feature of U.S. imaging reconnaissance satellites.” In six sightings, the team has found that the craft orbits as far north as 40 degrees latitude, just below New York City. In theory, on a clear night, an observer in the suburbs might see the X-37B as a bright star moving across the southern sky [The New York Times].

In addition, the plane’s path would carry it over places the U.S. is interested in watching, like Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea, according to Greg Roberts, one of the astronomers to track the X-37B. More than uncovering its secret mission, he was interested in finding the plane because it was difficult. Said Roberts:

“If the data were freely available, we would probably not have bothered with it. I see little sense in tracking objects for which data is freely available. It’s like reinventing the wheel. So as long as there are missions with little or no information, I personally will be interested in the challenge of finding them” [MSNBC].

For more about the Air Force in space, check out DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait’s post at Bad Astronomy.

Related Content:
Bad Astronomy: What Is the Air Force Doing with Space?
80beats: Air Force to Launch Secret Space Plane Tomorrow—But Don’t Ask What It’s For
80beats: DARPA Loses Contact with Mach-20 “Hypersonic Glider” During Test Flight

Image: U.S. Air Force


Batching Plant full Load

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To install baching plant (concrete mixer) as Electrical Engineer I need the total full load (KW or KVA) of the plant and control room. the brand is (LIEBHERR BETOMIX 2.25 A-R/RIM-M, GA 929225).

No catalouge available for me.

Copernicus Gets a New Grave, Belated Respect From the Catholic Church | Discoblog

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Over four hundred years after his death, the man known for moving the sun to the center of the solar system made a move himself. On Saturday, at a medieval cathedral at Frombork on Poland’s Baltic coast, the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus—whose ideas were once declared heresy by the Vatican—was reburied with full religious honors. After a stint in city of Olsztyn, Copernicus's remains returned to his original resting location (under the cathedral’s floor), but his grave got an upgrade. After his death in 1543 he lay for centuries in an unmarked grave, but his new plot has a black tombstone with six planets orbiting a golden sun. The ceremony concluded a several week tour of a wooden casket with the astronomer’s remains. The ceremony included shows of respect from the Catholic Church, which eventually had to admit that Copernicus was right about the whole planets-moving-around-the-sun thing. According to The Times, a local archbishop praised Copernicus for his hard work and scientific genius, while Archbishop Jozef Kowalczyk, the Primate of Poland, said that he regretted the “excesses of zeal” that led the Church to brand Copernicus a heretic. But Copernicus didn’t dig himself into his former grave with his treatise De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On ...


Lunar boulder hits a hole in one! | Bad Astronomy

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Y’know, I see a gazillion pictures of astronomical objects all the time, and I never get tired of them. But every now and again a picture comes along that’s so wonderful I just have to share it.

This is one such piece of wonderfulness: a lunar hole in one!

lro_holeinone

And you thought the windmill at the end of putt putt golf was hard.

This picture — click to enlunanate — is from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and shows a region of the Moon inside the crater Henry Frères. Taken on March 7, 2010, the image shows an area just 500 meters (550 yards) across — if it were Earth, you could easily walk across it in less than ten minutes — and shows objects down to less than a meter in size.

lro_holeinone_zoomAnd it’s just so cool! Look at the dashed trail going from left to right. See how it ends at the little crater, and even — if you look closely — can be seen to turn downwards? It suspiciously points right to the 10-meter (30+ foot) boulder sitting just inside the crater wall.

Suspicious indeed. In fact, what you’re seeing is the trail left by that boulder as it rolled and bounced downhill and stopped inside the crater! Look at the big picture. From the debris (small rocks) running up and down, you can tell that the terrain on the left side of the picture slopes down to the middle (in other words, if you started on the left side and walked to the center of the picture you’d be going downhill). The middle of the picture is relatively level ground.

In my mind’s eye, what happened here is clear. The boulder starts off at the left, and something — perhaps a minor moonquake, or a nearby impact — shakes the ground. The house-sized rock gets dislodged, and in the gentle gravity begins to roll downhill. It hits something and bounces, coming back down, skidding and rolling, only to be launched into the sky again and again. It slows a bit each time — the ruts it digs get shorter as it moves left-to-right — and by the time it gets to the end of the track it’s barely moving, just enough to feel the change of slope due to the crater wall. It even rolled past the crater a bit (you can see the last groove is actually along the path a little beyond the crater), and almost slows to a stop… but then slowwwwwwly teeters backwards, back along the path it came. Just as it’s about to come to a rest, it goes over the lip of the crater, slides into it, and lumbers to a halt halfway down the 60-meter (200 foot) crater’s wall.

I would give a lot to be able to see video of something like this happening on the Moon in real time. Wow!

And that boulder’s flight is just one of many scenes depicted here, which you can see if you let yourself explore. Just above the bouncing boulder’s path is a trail of what looks like a dustslide, a bit more brightly colored than the moonscape around it. It slid downhill to the right as well, and partially buried some of the bigger debris. Obviously, this happened after the bigger rocks already slid down, since it buried some of them. And above that in the picture you can see fainter trails from other rocks sliding down. Those trails are harder to see, meaning they’re older (millions of years of micrometeorite impacts and thermal flexing from the Moon’s day/night cycle gradually erase features like that), which again is consistent with the picture I’m painting here.

sloped_plumeTake a look at the crater at the bottom left. It’s surrounded by a light-colored apron of ejected material. See how there’s more of that ejecta to the right than to the left? That’s what you’d expect if the slope goes downhill to the right; the material spreads out more as it falls downslope (the diagram here will help). And hmmm, there’s a small crater about 10 meters across just to the right and below the big crater with the boulder in it. That crater is fresher; it still has a light apron as well. But what’s that dark spot in the center? Beats me. Cool though, ain’t it?

There’s so much to see and investigate, and this image is only about the size of a city block! It’s a slice of a much longer 2.5 x 15 km strip, which you can interactively browse, too. WARNING: be prepared to lose a lot of your day if you click that link, but it’s worth it, just like exploring the thousands of other pictures LRO has sent back is worth it as well.

The LRO mission cost roughly $600 million. There are 300 million people living in the US right now… so play with those images for a few minutes, and then let me know if you got your two bucks’ worth out of this mission.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University