P.S. on the problem with science

I should have, of course, provided the two papers in question so you can decide for yourself. I can't quite do that. I can give you the link to my paper, here:

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/papers/ps/vimsclouds_final.pdf

And I can even provide you with a link to their paper:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7247/full/nature08014.html

But it's possible that you can't read theirs. (but wait: read the comments below; people found all of the parts of this article posted online in various locations, so you're in luck!) Why not? Because, even after $1B of taxpayer money going to send Cassini to Titan and get these results, the copyright to the paper is now owned by Nature. And they say you're not allowed to read it unless you subscribe or pay. If you are logged in from an academic institution, you probably will get access from their subscription. But if you're elsewhere you are simply out of luck. Seems a bit crazy, huh?

If you do get the two papers, be sure to check out the supplementary information in the Nature paper: that is where all of the important details (like where there are and are not clouds) lie. At first glance the two papers look more or less like they say there are clouds in the same spots. It helps that the figures are all really really small so details are hard to discern. But when you blow them up and look carefully things just don't match up nearly as well as two papers using exactly the same data should.

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