Sonic Youth Gossip - All Things Science Here!!!

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I can't take credit, though. It was inspired by this:

Quote:

Originally Posted by terriblecanyons

<3 xkcd

oh! cool!

googled that-- awesome!

So there's all sort of rumours and speculation going on at the moment, concerning the Mars Phoenix Lander.

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The Internet is buzzing with rumors of some discovery made -- but not yet announced -- by the MECA team on Phoenix. MECA is the instrument that includes the Wet Chemistry Laboratory, the Optical Microscope, and the Atomic Force Microscope. It and TEGA form the two main chemical analysis tools on Phoenix, the instruments that allow it to study what the north polar soils tell us about present and past Mars climate and chemistry.

I don't have any more information on these rumors than is available elsewhere on the Internet. To summarize briefly: there is apparently some result from the Wet Chemistry Laboratory that is very interesting, having to do with the "past habitability" of Mars. This instrument can't discover life on Mars, so it's not that; it would have to do with the potential for life to exist, something revealing that there is some Earthlike chemistry happening now or in the past that has not before been seen on Mars. According to Craig Couvalt of Aviation week, it was interesting enough to brief the President's Science Advisor; however, the Phoenix mission's Twitter feed denies this.

I don't have my own source for news on this; all I have to go on is Craig Couvalt's article, in which he seems he's in touch with some very leaky source indeed -- and the Phoenix Twitter feed.

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001584/

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EDIT: Here's a reason for the hush-hush about this news -- according to Leonard David, they're trying to keep whatever it is quiet so that it can go through peer-review and publication in Science. That makes sense; it's also a case in point of how terribly hard it is to maintain the old-fashioned strict embargo in the era of the Internet. Science gets published on Fridays, with news releases going out on Thursdays, but sometimes breaking stories get released first online on other days of the week. I'll keep you posted as I hear more!

All very interesting

^^^ it was perchlorate salt. not so good for life, but it's good for making solid rocket fuel.

Barsoomian sunrise:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/sc...ml?ref=science

Astronomers from the University of Toronto have published a picture of what they say might be the first image of a planet orbiting another Sunlike star.

The planet, according to their observations, is 7 to 12 times as massive as Jupiter and is about 30 billion miles from a star known as 1RXS J160929.1-210524, about 500 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.

The picture was taken last spring by the 270-inch diameter Gemini North Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, using so-called adaptive optics to reduce atmospheric blurring and thus sharpen the images of both star and planet.

This is at least the third so-called exoplanet candidate that astronomers have photographed. In 2004, a group from the European Southern Observatory in Chile photographed a red speck about five times the mass of Jupiter orbiting a kind of failed star known as a brown dwarf in the constellation Hydra.

In 2005, another group photographed an object that they estimated to be twice as massive as Jupiter orbiting the star GQ Lupi, but other astronomers said the object could be as much as 36 Jupiters in mass, making it not a planet but a brown dwarf.

The Toronto astronomers say it will take several years to determine whether their planet is moving through space with the star and thus is really a planet. In the meantime, theorists can puzzle about how it could come to live 60 times farther from its star than Jupiter is from the Sun.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2...-x-did-it.html

The first privately developed space vehicle has successfully reached space from a ground launch.

September 28, 2008

ANCHORAGE — Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago -- about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct -- the teacher said.

After conducting a college band and watching Palin deliver a commencement address to a small group of home-schooled students in June 1997, Wasilla resident Philip Munger said, he asked the young mayor about her religious beliefs.

Palin told him that "dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time," Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said "she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks," recalled Munger, who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and has regularly criticized Palin in recent years on his liberal political blog, called Progressive Alaska.

The idea of a "young Earth" -- that God created the Earth about 6,000 years ago, and dinosaurs and humans coexisted early on -- is a popular strain of creationism.

more:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics...,3643718.story

This is NOT all things pseudo-science.

anyways, this xkcd strip is awesome

Quote:

Originally Posted by pbradley

This is NOT all things pseudo-science.

anyways, this xkcd strip is awesome

very choose yr own adventure sci fi picture novel type illustration(not that I would know). I love it.

Science and math, as humans conduct them, are just a large application of logic, and logic, as we all know, is completely unreliable.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Douglas Adams

It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the product of a deranged imagination.

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Originally Posted by afterthefact

Science and math, as humans conduct them, are just a large application of logic, and logic, as we all know, is completely unreliable.

yeah.....right. so you think that sometimes 2 + 2 is not 4? sounds like newspeak/doublethink to me son! go back to north korea!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

yeah.....right. so you think that sometimes 2 + 2 is not 4? sounds like newspeak/doublethink to me son! go back to north korea!

Maybe I will!

Keep in mind that while all arithmetic is math, not all math is arithmetic...

Last night I read the first 5 chapters of Relativity while stoned out of my mind, and I'm proud to announce that I now understand the universe.

String theory is on the right track, but they've got a ways to go.