Random Roundup
Where I make snide – I mean informative – comments about stuff that caught my attention, instead of the usual long-winded ranting. I’ve been thinking about this for a while because often I see something, think of a paragraph or two, then get bored and wander away. But maybe sometimes a paragraph or two is enough! First up:
New Test For Detecting Fake Organic Milk
I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this one. You mean there’s a problem with knock-offs of organic milk? Of course there is! Damn that supply and demand! People are willing to pay extra for a product they can’t identify, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when there are distortions in the market. That’s what art fraud is all about, after all. Tell a collector you’ve discovered a brand new Vermeer, then sit back and watch the bucks roll in because even the experts can’t tell the difference! (It happened during World War 2. See The Forger’s Spell)
Here’s a thought: If you can’t tell the difference, then maybe it’s not worth the extra money. (The milk, anyway. The fake Vermeer’s in the book I referenced were terrible. The experts were idiots, which is a lesson we’ll go into at great length some other time)
Martian Volcano Could Harbor Primitive Life
So could my septic tank. How does this kind of empty speculation get to be news? That’s one of my big complaints about science reporting and even a lot of so-called scientific studies. This is nothing! Anyone can have just as profound a thought as this after a couple beers! So what?
Patrick McGovern, one of the scientists whose study of Olympus Mons (that’s the volcano referred to in the headline) is discussed in the article, should be given credit for saying that the implication that life is possible there is the kind of thing that goes at the end of the paper, meaning it’s not the actual point of what he was studying. The point was to figure out the history of that monster volcano, in order to understand Mars better.
So why did the possibility of life get into the headline? Apparently because whatever editor wrote it didn’t think extra-terrestrial volcanoes were cool enough by themselves. That’s weird.
Google’s Eric Schmidt looks down his nose at Twitter
My first reaction was: so? He doesn’t have to use it if he doesn’t want to.
Then I thought, what are the odds this means that Google is going to roll out their own version of Twitter in about 2 weeks?
Were gravitational waves first detected in 1987?
Wow. For those who don’t know, the detection of gravity waves is a BIG DEAL. Because until gravity waves are detected, we don’t really know if gravity is a wave (like we know sound and light are) or not. It makes sense, in the current state of physics knowledge for it to be so but that’s the thing about science: If you don’t have actual evidence, there’s still the chance you could be wrong. Even assuming it’s not wrong and gravity is a wave, detecting that wave would make it much easier to measure and develop better models of how it works.
Anyway, the story says that a physicist named Joe Weber claimed in 1987 to have detected gravity waves but no one believed him. The most likely source of the waves was a supernova that was detected around that time but other scientists calculated that gravity produced by that supernova would have been much too weak for Weber to detect.
Now a Pakistani physicist (they have nukes. You knew that meant they would also have physicists, right?) named Asghar Qadir says there were factors that no one was considering back then that modify the math. He says the whole world may owe Weber an apology (not that he’ll hear it – he died in 2000).
Here’s the thing though: Before anyone can prove Weber was right or wrong, they have to detect gravity waves again. The math can only be validated by actual measurement. There are efforts underway to do the measurement but they haven’t had any luck so far. For my book, the more time goes by without detecting gravity waves, the harder it is to believe that Weber did it in the first place.
The best part is that this article had a headline that made sense, rather than making me laugh or cringe.
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