BMU # 345 Land of fire & ash con - Davies

Seasons greetings one and all.    Plenty of fun stuff this weekend.   Didn't get all done that I wanted, but I think it was a fun episode.

First I start with a fine piece of music that is the closing music for the anime series  called Btoom! which I review later in the program.  The song is Aozora and is performed by May'n.  

After the music I do indeed explore and review the 12 episode anime series called Btoom!

The story of the day is the conclusion to Colin P. Davies Land of Fire & Ashes.  A thoroughly entertaining and exciting tale.

Next are a few articles from Earth Sky, this week, spider webs, giant bugs and the Milky-way is truly HUGE!

Then some Trek Trivia with questions about  James T. Kirk.  Much better!

From the blog  The Grail Sats crashed, but not before they did excellent science.

Kall, describes his plans for world domination after the apocalypse   Then I take a moment to pass on some observations about copyrights.  

Another review takes the form of the abysmal "Class of 1999"  It shows that some good actors can not save a steamer....nope....

Oh you know the song Gundam Style...well I play the music here for a parody called NASA Huston Style, but you have to see the compete video for comic effect!

Brighton may want to check out their lights...someone was a bit upset.  Check out the vid on the beam me up blog.

Will we ever return to the moon.  Well  if we plan on going to the moon or the asteroids, the moon is close and copies many of the features of where we plan to go.

This week's program direct url

Bad Science Reporting 101: No they didn't plan on blowing up the Moon

I would have imagined that anyone with even a 5th grade education would know enough science to skeptical of the rather looney (pun intended) idea the United States planned to blow up the Moon to impress the Russians.  Alas, I had forgotten that a lack of scientific knowledge, along with a lack of skeptical inquiry into any absurd claim against the "Military-Industrial Complex" was a requirement for success in the humanities, including journalism.

You have likely read or seen news reports that "Project A119", also known as "A Study of Lunar Research Flights" was a newly discovered secret plan to "blow up" the Moon. Some of these come from allegedly credible sources, such a Brian Williams on MSNBC.  Other outlets include Forbes, a CBS affiliate, Yahoo News, and countless others.

The only problem is it's not quite true.  This story originated with the Daily Mail, an entertaining British tabloid better known for celebrity scandals than for accurate science stories.  And even there story came closer to the truth than some of the derivative articles. They note that "a missile carrying a small nuclear device was to be launched from an undisclosed location and travel 238,000 miles to the moon, where it would be detonated upon impact." and that the "planners decided it would have to be an atom bomb because a hydrogen bomb would have been too heavy for the missile." 

Good skeptical reporters would have stopped there and asked themselves if a single atom bomb could do any significant damage to the Moon, much less blow it up.  The answer is obviously no.  They would have then asked themselves who was involved with the project and would they have known that this would not destroy the Moon. The answer to this is many scientists, including a young Carl Sagan and physicist Leonard Reiffel (As noted in the Daily Mail article).  By 1959 the US had exploded countless atom bombs, including the more powerful hydrogen bombs.  They knew full well that this "a small nuclear device" would not do any real damage, that was not it's intention.  A decent reporter might even have done a simple Google search to see if the Daily Mail article contained anything new except the wildly inaccurate headline. It doesn't. This accurate Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article is from May of 2000.

So what happened?  Obviously the sensationalist Daily Mail took some very old, but semi-interesting, news that the US had contemplated exploding an atomic bomb on the Moon and letting the flash, not any destruction, scare the Soviets, and sexied it up by making it seem that it was an insane plot to destroy the Moon.  Utterly incompetent reporters, such as Brian Williams, too the story and ran with it, without even the slightest skepticism. It took me less than 30 seconds to find the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, yet either the entire combined staff of MSNBC has weaker "google fu" than I do, or else they deliberately ran a false story that will live forever on the internet, fueling anti-American paranoia.I don't know which possibility is worse.

I suspect it is the latter.  A typical headline is Yahoo News "U.S. 'planned to blow up Moon' with nuke during Cold War era to show Soviets might" yet the last sentence states "The scientists also registered concerns about contaminating the moon with radioactive material, Reiffel said." They wouldn't be worried about irradiating the Moon if they were trying to destroy it.

Pseudoscientific Myths that People Believe Are True Science

How many times have you heard something come out of a person's mouth that they feel is honest true scientific fact with some being so bizarre that you wonder how something this patently ridiculous you have to believe that there is this person sitting somewhere, cackling, saying...OMG lets see if they believe this!  If you are like me, you have bit your tongue and kept your own council many times.  

I think it would be a hoot to collect the strangest and funniest.   First off, here are a few from the IO9.  Let's see if we can add to the list here.

Sound in a Vacuum (Thanks George...pretty much ruined real scientific curiosity single handed)

Or 

Or maneuvering jets  do not need an opposite jet fired to stop the maneuver. (granted it might be a bit advanced, but how hard is it to understand opposite and equal forces...)

oh and we have all heard of the girl in gold finger who died of suffication because her skin was fully painted and covered...(ummm lungs people.....)

But here is a STRANGE one....Sumo are trained to retract their testicles into their body...(really?  people believe that?  really?!!!)

And how many times have you seen the exploding car when it crashes... (one person recounts that at an accident, people insisted the driver be moved before the car exploded, even though the driver was not hauling anything explosive and was not on fire.....truth!)

I am sure there are millions more  ideas?!!!!

BMU #332 Now On Line

****UPDATE***
For some reason, mainly not paying attention, the newest episode 332 was labeled 331 even though all the links went to 332 it could have led to some confusion so I have updated the file title.  Sorry for the confusion.

Here is episode 332 of Beam Me Up, for your enjoyment!

 yaaaeeeeee are we excited yet? Wow, tough crowd.... Well, anyway, I warm up with an oldie, Thomas Dolby's She blinded me with science.

Next is the first story of the afternoon, Mark Webb's The Gloriously Cunning plan which demonstrates that even the best laid plans can often be unraveled when one does not take in crucial facts.

Up next is Star Trek Trivia with two new trivia questions!

Ok, now on to the BMU blog!

Have you heard about planet Nibiru? If no, then listen to with Earth Sky article I found!

I rented both of the animated Ultimate Avengers animated straight to disk movies. The first movie in particular really followed the Marvel Avenger history line.

Check out my reviews of both movies on disk. And on the ISS, NASA, with shades of Apollo 13, two EVA astronauts assure the continuation of some of the critical systems with some unusual parts!

Is FTL possible? NASA steps back and rethinks it's position as some high level mathematics which, on paper, seem to show that it might just be possible with far lower energy requirements than was previously calculated!

And finally, part 5 of Edward McKeown's The Dive. Enjoy!

JUST IN: There is no such thing as Time Reversal!

Nobel Prize winner Anthony James Leggett has thrown a monkey wrench into one of Science Fiction's favorite hobby horse - manipulation of the time line.

In a recent lecture "Why Can't Time Run Backwards?," Leggett stated:

• Reversing the time or speeding it up is not possible... The universe is hot and compact, so it is slowly in the process of cooling down. Time, therefore, is unidirectional.

because entropy only occurs in one direction - time can be thought of as moving one way and not another, but only in that direction.

In truth Leggett's comments really do not rule out classical time travel, where someone goes forward and back in time but they do negate time itself running backwards (kinda ruins the whole idea of "The Time Traveler's Wife" huh?)

There is more to be said in the IO9 article....check it out here

Why Mile Wide Motherships Don't Make Sense!

Finally! Someone agrees with me! I never thought these mega-ship from E-T to Independence Day made any sense what so ever!

so I was reading on the Dvice blog and here was an article giving out some excellent static on these uber mother ships.

First ummm we could see them coming! In V they just appear! Granted sometimes we get a little bit of a warning, but as inefficient as NASA's NEO project is, if it's a kilometer across and inside of Mar's orbit, pretty good chance NASA can see your ass.

Something this big entering the Earth's atmosphere would raise havoc with the weather! According to the article, ships this huge

• would be enough to cause "mesoscale" weather effects
• storm systems ... a hundred kilometers across, encompass anything from thunderstorms to tropical cyclones, and have "an equivalent energy of multiple nuclear bombs

And what about the energy needed to keep something that huge in the air. Orbit is one thing, these behemoths are WELL into the gravity well! The author computes that in real world energy output, to keep a 3 kilometer craft in the air would take about 368 quadrillion joules of energy. That's one and a half times the power of the most powerful atom bomb ever built! And that's not total....that's EVERY SECOND!

Oh and remember in some of these movies we manage to shoot some of these things down? umm what would a 3 kilometer asteroid do if it hit the Earth? Exactly...DUH!


Check out the complete article...pretty damn interesting!