As you have probably realized by now, I have a deep appreciation for the majesty of the universe and great admiration for those who can express and communicate it well.  I grew up watching Bill Nye instead of Carl Sagan, but they can both make me smile and inspire a sense of wonder.  Plus, it’s a great crime-fighting technique (XKCD):

“They laugh now, but within 10 years the city’s entire criminal class will have quit to work on space research.”

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Last month Daniel posted the wonderful video of Carl Sagan clips autotuned to make the song “A Glorious Dawn”. I wanted to share a similar video also made by John Boswell, this time including Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye:

Is there any better way to start a week?

I’m always astounded at how poor data-gathering devices we humans are.  Forget all the hallucinations and misinterpretations, we simply don’t notice or retain most of what happens around us.  Here’s a great demonstration (via Richard Wiseman’s blog)

I was pretty pathetic. How did you all do?

This is one of the reasons we developed the scientific method. Trusting our senses and powers of observation failed us too many times. We recognize our own shortcomings and try to overcome them.

Those of you who also follow my posts at FriendlyAtheist know I’m a huge fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think he’s an excellent science communicator and role model. He’s so enthusiastic about science and he makes others interested through his exuberance.

Back story (taken from the youtube info):

TIME recently went to interview Neil deGrasse Tyson and we noticed a huge crate had been delivered to his office. He was then kind enough to open it on-camera. The back story of this gift is that Neil was adamant that ABC News include the Saturn V Rocket on its list of The 7 Wonders of America. The folks at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama were so grateful, they sent Neil a replica.

I’ve watched this several times and I still find myself compelled to smile each time.  Learning things is fun, but Tyson manages to have fun while inspiring a sense of awe and wonder.

[Holding his new model of the Saturn V] This and only this is the only piece of hardware to ever take humans to another world.   The space shuttle… is cool, but it goes into Earth orbit -- you’re still attached to the earth.  This thing gets you off of Earth into space… to another world.

…

I submit to you that this is the crowning achievement of human ingenuity and the fulfillment of dreams in the history of what it is to be human.

Wonderful.

Can you tell the difference between Aliens and Demons?  If you were visited in the night by an intelligent, non-human entity, could you really distinguish between them?  (In a sidenote I’m not addressing right now, how would you know the voice in your head is God and not a tricky demon?  How do you know devils can’t impersonate voices?)

Although nobody would know it in an age with laptops and cell phones, I’m in New York City right now. I hopped on a bus to go see my sister Julia Galef give a presentation on rationality – my first post was written while on the BoltBus, actually. The talk was entitled “Aliens, Psychics and Ghosts, Oh My! Or, How Our Brains Fool Us Into Believing Strange Things.” I thoroughly enjoyed it.

John Henry Fuseli’s 1781 painting “The Nightmare” is now seen as a classic account of sleep paralysis accredited to a demon

One interesting point was that while reports of alien abductions are a relatively new phenomenon, the psychological reasons behind such hallucinations are not.  However, instead of blaming aliens, people used to blame the bad boys of the supernatural world: Demons.

In “alien abductions”, people tend to report waking up, feeling pinned down and unable to move, seeing visions of visitors, and often experiencing sexual stimulation. These are the familiar symptoms of sleep paralysis and hypnopompic hallucinations.

During sleep, the brain stops controlling the muscles – that’s why we don’t flail around in our sleep as we act out our dreams. Sometimes when woken from a deep sleep, the brain doesn’t immediately retake control, leaving the poor person both awake and unable to move (This has happened to me, and I was lucid enough to recognize what was happening.  It was a fascinating experience.)   It can be particularly difficult to breathe.   When woken up from a deep sleep, a person is also prone to vivid hallucinations. This combination explains the commonly heard reports of alien abductions.

But before aliens, people interpreted those perceptions as demons – same symptoms, different supernatural explanation.  Online Etymology says the term “Nightmare” originally meant “an evil female spirit afflicting sleepers with a feeling of suffocation”.  Sound familiar?

John Henry Fuseli’s painting “The Nightmare” shows an evil-looking imp sitting on a woman’s chest while she lies in bed. Psychologists now believe it to be an early representation of sleep paralysis.  It’s telling that the same evidence can fit seamlessly into countless supernatural  theories.

How cool is it that we can look at ancient experiences people thought were supernatural and explain them in scientific ways?  Epilepsy, schizophrenia, sleep paralysis, oxygen/sensory/nutritional deprivation… The gaps keep getting smaller and there’s less and less room for God.

Congress voted Monday to cut federal funding for the superconducting monkey collider, a controversial experiment which has cost taxpayers an estimated $7.6 billion a year since its creation in 1983.

The collider, which was to be built within a 45-mile-long circular tunnel, would accelerate monkeys to near-light speeds before smashing them together. Scientists insist the collider is an important step toward understanding the universe, because no one can yet say for certain what kind of noises monkeys would make if collided at those high speeds.

“It could be a thump, a splat, or maybe even a sound that hasn’t yet been heard by human ears,” said project head Dr. Eric Reed Friday, in an impassioned plea to Congress. “How are we supposed to understand things like the atom or the nature of gravity if we don’t even know what colliding monkeys sound like?”….

Construction of the collider’s acceleration mechanism was delayed for years, as scientists couldn’t decide how to get the monkeys up to smashing speed. Last month, it was finally decided that the collider would employ a system in which the monkeys run through the tunnels chasing holographic projections of bananas. “Monkeys love bananas,” Reed said, “and they’re willing to run extremely fast to get them.”

(via The Onion, of course)

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong for the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust.

It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins f bananas and turnips… continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We now this because a rising flood of evidence supports it.

Evolution is a fact, and this book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it. (p. 8-9)

I agree with Dawkins that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming for someone who looks at it with an open mind. Though I’m not sure about the “no reputable scientist disputes it” part. Perhaps that should be “no reputable biologist disputes it,” because that is their discipline — a biologist who denies evolution is like a computer scientist who denies operating systems.

I’m sure there are Christian scientists (the career, not the cult) who dispute evolution, but that doesn’t mean they are not reputable physicists or geologists. It just means they’re brainwashed into believing the Bible over reality.

Dawkins also says, “no unbiased reader will close the book doubting [evolution].” But how can a reader be unbiased? Does such a specimen even exist?

According to Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist at Stanford University, a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That’s the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant. But a small group of computer scientists may have hit on a new neural supercomputer that could someday emulate the human brain’s low energy requirements of just 20 watts–barely enough to run a dim light bulb….

[The new idea] trades the extreme precision of digital transistors for the brain’s chaos of many neurons firing, with misfires 30 percent to 90 percent of the time. Yet the brain works with this messy system by relying on crowds of neurons to shout over the noise of misfires and competing signals.

That willingness to give up precision for chaos could lead to a new era of creative computing that simulates the unpredictable patterns of brain activity. It could also represent a far more energy-efficient era — the Neurogrid fits in a briefcase and runs on what amounts to a few D batteries, or less than a watt. Rather than transistors, it uses capacitors that get the same voltage of neurons.

Let me be the first to welcome our new neurogrid overlords.

(For a fuller writeup on this, see this discovery article.)

On 8 October an asteroid detonated high in the atmosphere above South Sulawesi, Indonesia, releasing about as much energy as 50,000 tons of TNT, according to a NASA estimate released on Friday. That’s about three times more powerful than the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima, making it one of the largest asteroid explosions ever observed.

However, the blast caused no damage on the ground because of the high altitude, 15 to 20 kilometres above Earth’s surface, says astronomer Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario (UWO), Canada.

Brown and Elizabeth Silber, also of UWO, estimated the explosion energy from infrasound waves that rippled halfway around the world and were recorded by an international network of instruments that listens for nuclear explosions.

It’s a bit unnerving that, at any moment, our lives could be snuffed out by a large space rock.

My favorite comment: “Slippery slope, people. First they learn to use our tools, then they come in and take all of our jobs. And then they’ll want healthcare. Between the monkeys and the bloodthirsty robots, I feel disrespected as a hardworking American.”

(via)

Originally, NASA astronauts, like the Soviet cosmonauts, used pencils, according to NASA historians. In fact, NASA ordered 34 mechanical pencils from Houston’s Tycam Engineering Manufacturing, Inc., in 1965. They paid $4,382.50 or $128.89 per pencil. When these prices became public, there was an outcry and NASA scrambled to find something cheaper for the astronauts to use….

Paul C. Fisher and his company, the Fisher Pen Company, reportedly invested $1 million to create what is now commonly known as the space pen. None of this investment money came from NASA’s coffers–the agency only became involved after the pen was dreamed into existence. In 1965 Fisher patented a pen that could write upside-down, in frigid or roasting conditions (down to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit or up to 400 degrees F), and even underwater or in other liquids. If too hot, though, the ink turned green instead of its normal blue….

According to an Associated Press report from February 1968, NASA ordered 400 of Fisher’s antigravity ballpoint pens for the Apollo program. A year later, the Soviet Union ordered 100 pens and 1,000 ink cartridges to use on their Soyuz space missions, said the United Press International. The AP later noted that both NASA and the Soviet space agency received the same 40 percent discount for buying their pens in bulk. They both paid $2.39 per pen instead of $3.98.

Way to go, private enterprise!

Update: Video fixed.

Thirty-two planets have been discovered outside Earth’s solar system through the use of a high-precision instrument installed at a Chilean telescope, an international team announced Monday….

[T]he device can detect slight wobbles of stars as they respond to tugs from exoplanets’ gravity. That tactic, known as the radial velocity method, “has been the most prolific method in the search for exoplanets,” according to the European Southern Observatory statement.

The instrument detects movements as small as 3.5 km/hr (2.1 mph), a slow walking pace, the observatory said.

With the discovery, the tally of new exoplanets found by HARPS is now at 75, out of about 400 known exoplanets, the organization said, “cementing HARPS’s position as the world’s foremost exoplanet hunter.” The 75 planets are in 30 planetary systems, the European Southern Observatory said.

Today, earth. Tomorrow, some random exoplanet! Or maybe we should try to get to Mars first…

For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

We know that the warming couldn’t have been due to solar activity, but some climate skeptic scientists are wondering whether it has to do with the oceans:

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

Professor Easterbrook says: “The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling.”

But, of course, global warming advocates do not suggest that every year will be warmer than the one before. It’s a general trend, not a straight line:

The UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.

In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures – all of which are accounted for by its models.

In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling.

What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up.

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

What do you think about global warming? Is there any doubt in your mind that (1) it is happening and (2) it is being caused mostly by man?