From Aviation Week: Secret two-stage-to-orbit plane program ends. I'd say it's pretty likely that these rumors are legit, and if so... damn, that's a beautiful bit of design. I wish we could reuse it (well, minus the use of insanely toxic fuels) for civilian purposes.

From Seed: A great article on Elizabeth Gould's research on neurogenesis and stress.

From Philip Greenspun: An interesting article on why there aren't so many women in science, which basically raises the question of why anyone would be in science. There's stuff to think about in there...

And if you're really bored, my own post from a few days ago with more politics stuff. I should really know better than to post long essays over the weekend...

The New York Times has a very short article about changing rules for credit on scientific papers. Somehow, a creative writer managed to sneak in a sample page from the "Journal of Imaginary Genomics" after these rules are implemented; it's worth the look.

The Stardust probe returned to Earth safely after a seven-year mission to collect comet dust. The return capsule landed safe in the Utah desert with about a teaspoon of the fundamental matter of the solar system, and is en route to Johnson Space Center.

Read this. New study on the effect of the paleocene/eocene thermal maximum on ocean currents. (About 55M years ago, a 7-degree rise in temperatures basically caused the entire world's climate to flip) If you haven't been following this story carefully, you should -- people are finally starting to discuss in public the big secret of climate change, which is that it's a great deal more serious than anyone's wanted to talk about in public.

New Scientist has an interesting little article about "13 things that do not make sense" -- basically, odd experimental results from the past couple of years that nobody really feels comfortable explaining yet.

Now, the crackpots will be out in force saying "See! Science is at an end! There are things it can't explain! There therefore must be an intelligent designer intentionally confounding the attempts of humans to tinker with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know..." et cetera. I'll just leave them out in the pottery shed; these thirteen things are really interesting, and while most of them probably won't pan out, if any of them do then there's some damned interesting advances going on. These are all under fairly active research (for the theoretical ones and the more well-understood experimental ones [like cosmic rays] people are working hard on them, and for the stranger experimental ones [like tetraneutrons, or one they forgot, the magnetic monopole] people are still waiting for experimental confirmation).

Creativity determines sexual success

Atlantic warm-water currents are weakening

The latter article is actually fairly important.

I've been re-reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, and finding it very thought-provoking; it's a good book to come back to after a time, and if you haven't read it (and his more recent book, Collapse) I recommend it highly.

But here's a question that popped into my head while reading it: (This will probably make a bit more sense to those who have read the book) Why did England successfully invade and colonize India, and not the other way round? I'm curious both about the proximate causes (my lack of Indian history is showing through) and the deeper reasons, if any can be traced back. Diamond's analysis doesn't seem to carry over unmodified to this case; India certainly had no shortage of intensive agriculture, nor a late start in developing it, and at times in its history was a large empire. Had the two countries been neighbors, the outcome might have been very different; similarly if they had come into contact a thousand years earlier. Nor was the battle completely one-sided; the Sikhs twice managed to field a very impressive army and pose a real challenge to British domination. Yet despite all of this, the British managed to basically set up shop and run a country many times their size, and hold that empire for over a century; so there must have been some major fundamental asymmetry.

Thoughts?

New results: Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, apparently has an atmosphere and liquid water beneath the surface. WP article gives a summary of this and other recent discoveries from the Cassini mission.

The Independent is reporting that a new report indicates that polar ice melting may have just passed the critical point. I think this is something worth taking very seriously: I've been expecting a report that says this for a few years. Note that this may trigger a very large-scale change soon, such as a shutdown or other significant change in the Gulf Stream thanks to the change in thermal absorption due to having fresh instead of saltwater in the northern Atlantic.

Apparently, our President wants equal time for intelligent design in American schools, saying that "both sides ought to be properly taught" so "people can understand what the debate is about."

It's probably not really worth too much discussion in this forum, but it's fascinating to see how this culture of false debate has emerged. If a public figure were to go out and say that the sky is green, the press would simply report it, and then ask someone else what color they say the sky is, satisfied that by presenting "both sides" of the issue they've discharged their duty, and (seeing that there are clearly two sides who disagree) now being able to describe it as a disputed issue. What you won't hear is the press actually checking the facts themselves; such things are "not their department." This is especially true when there are a large number of people who, for one reason or another, feel strongly about backing whomever it was who made the false statement; the media are really averse to flat-out contradicting someone when that may alienate readers.

But if a political movement grows, and out of fear of contradicting them nobody ever says they're wrong, where do we end up?

The rather simple problem with the "debate" over the teaching of evolution, which nobody ever seems quite willing to say, is that the reason we don't teach "intelligent design" or other forms of ersatz creationism in school isn't because there's a secular humanist bias, or because we don't want to favor one religion over another; it's for the rather simple reason that these things are false, and known to be false. The fact that one group strenuously advocates for them doesn't make them any more true, and no matter how loud these groups are, the fact that people are out there saying something does not make it true, nor does it make the debate legitimate or worth people's time; if a thousand people claim the sky is green, even by divine revelation, the sky will still be blue, and trying to convince them will still be an elaborate waste of time.

Or to say this in a more religious context, we are given senses and a faculty of reason, and we do not derive our laws and our sense of the universe from omens and signs. As R. Jeremia said, the Torah has already been given at Sinai; that is, the set of divine interventions needed to create this world was done at the creation of the world, and so the world is complete within its own context: we can study it in its own right, without having to resort to revelations "explaining" for us things which our own senses can understand on their own. (Baba Metzia, 59a-b) (Yes, I realize that making a religious argument in this context seems odd, but I don't believe there's any fundamental contradiction between religion and reason; only when people start misunderstanding the difference between stories and the world around them, to the extent that they reject the evidence of their own senses.)

And now, our president has decided that he needs to weigh in on this issue, because without his wisdom and guidance, where would we be?