Blue Collar Scientist

Yesterday the press was full of discussion of the (UK) National Archives releasing a bunch of previously-classified government information on UFOs. One thing that characterizes most of the press accounts, which are numerous, is a total unwillingness to provide a link to these newly-released resources.

Well, I’m not that way. Here you go!

I recommend that you get what you want promptly - some sources are saying the material will only be available for free download for the first month. I’m slurping the stuff down now, and let me tell you, the site is running slow.

First glance through the materials that I’ve gotten already, and some of the stuff the reporters have found buried in the archives, is pretty interesting.

One person reports long-term psychic contact with green space aliens since they were a child. One of these aliens was apparently assassinated by a rival group of aliens just before he was going to contact the UK government in 1981.

There’s the guy who thought that a UFO which used decoys to escape detection (”Look! It’s a duck, ummm, on fire, with a, ummm, kazoo, and - just look over there, dammit!”). The UFO did not carry humans or aliens, but fallen angels.

In other words, much of the material isn’t merely phenomenological - that is, reports of sightings of things that are flying which the observer can’t identify. Instead, many of the reports are bound up with other false beliefs, such as angels and psychic powers; and with conspiracy theories like rival alien political factions willing to use violence to get their way.

The first impressions that I get are - why was this stuff ever classified in the first place? Maybe that’s justified for some of the material in the archives - I’ve not gone through it all - but the stuff I have seen is clearly just new-age religious nonsense combined with an unhealthy dose of the dramatic, cribbed from the cheapest clichés that science fiction has to offer. A good portion of the material is no different from anything you’ll find at your local woo-promoting bookstore.

Check it out:

Phil Plait says it best:

We’re also working behind the scenes, putting together ideas and getting ready to pitch the show. But we still need your help! If you support this idea (and if you read this blog, then you do) then please let it be known! The more signatures we get, the more likely a studio executive will listen to us.

We need more critical thinking on TV, not another credulous ghost hunting show. Let’s see if we can get this one on, and maybe raise the bar a bit.

I’ve previously posted about the TV show Skeptologists, and how you ought to go send them an e-mail of support so that they can get their pilot aired and hopefully get picked up by a television network.

Now Skeptologists has a website, where you can go to learn about the show, who is involved, and so on.

Trivia question: Two of the cast are friends of mine. Can you guess which ones?

I just did a quick google search on reviews of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and have come up with the following gems for your entertainment. And I have to say, my respect for movie reviews has gone up a lot in this process - not that I disrespected them before, but I did not have a lot of (ahem) faith that movie reviewers would be able to engage with the scientific issues as well as they have. In my searchings, I didn’t find any positive reviews that weren’t associated with religious or right-wing political publications - and then only two of those.

The Star Tribune gives it one-half out of four stars:

According to “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” the source of all evil in the modern world is Darwinism, a philosophy that, the film posits, is responsible for everything from atheism to abortion, euthanasia to the Holocaust.

The New York Times leads with:

One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.

Mixing physical apples and metaphysical oranges at every turn “Expelled” is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike. In its fudging, eliding and refusal to define terms, the movie proves that the only expulsion here is of reason itself.

From Time:

It’s in the film’s final third that it runs entirely off the rails as Stein argues that there is a clear line from Darwinism to euthanasia, abortion, eugenics and–wait for it–Nazism. Theories of natural selection, it’s claimed, were a necessary if not sufficient condition for Hitler’s killing machine to get started. The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human. We’ve always been a lustily fratricidal species, one that needed no Charles Darwin to goad us into millenniums of self-slaughter.

From the LA City Beat:

One might accuse Michael Moore of similarly facile, manipulative techniques – and I have – but Moore has never gone to lengths nearly as outrageous as the makers of Expelled. (For what it’s worth, he’s also funnier.)

In the third act, Stein and company move beyond mere visual associations, when they build a case linking Darwinism to Nazism – which is not merely insultingly lame, but also ranks as one of the cheapest, most offensive exploitations of the horrors of the Holocaust I’ve ever witnessed (and I’ve witnessed plenty).

Expelled is another expression of the right wing’s victim complex. It’s classic paranoid thinking: Since we’re pure and correct, any setbacks we suffer must be the result of an Evil Conspiracy. Communists are fluoridating our water. Purity of Essence. We couldn’t be doing substandard academic work. Our poor advancement must have to do with a blacklist! (Stein himself used this idea to bully Norman Lear into giving him a writing job.)

From the New York Post:

After all of his efforts to unhook the ID caboose from the creationism train, Stein makes it clear that his beef with Darwinism is that it weakens religion.

In a long, greasy detour, Stein shows that the Nazis were Darwinists. So what? They also liked skiing. Having Nazi fans doesn’t make Darwin wrong.

From Slant Magazine:

For a film about American freedom of expression and the necessity for open dialogue, it’s hard to imagine Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed being more one-sided, narrow-minded, and intellectually dishonest.

To their film’s catastrophic detriment, Stein and director Nathan Frankowski fail to provide concrete examples of the flaws in Darwin’s theory, content instead to simply have speakers (many with impressive credentials) state that it’s problematic and then treat such unsupported statements as verifiable truth. Nor, ultimately, do they examine the obvious and crucial religious underpinnings of the “intelligent design movement,” whose onscreen adherents deliberately refuse to speculate on the source of this creative “intelligence” because their opinion on the identity of this fundamental biological architect—God—would conclusively reveal Expelled as propaganda for a Christian-right movement whose own champion, Ronald Reagan, Stein ultimately depicts as his spiritual counterpart.

From E! Reviews:

A flunkout of a documentary, this features Ben Stein—still best known for his monotone “Anyone…anyone?”—advocating creationism, er, intelligent design, in science classrooms. Stein’s credibility is blown on this poorly constructed diatribe, and you’d be smart to save your bucks.

Plus, he’s tedious and unfunny.

With a heavy, heavy hand, the pic punctuates every scene with over-the-top archival footage—the Berlin wall, Stalin and other Cold War imagery.

Despite insisting “intelligent design” isn’t pro-God propaganda, Stein argues we’re waging a religious war (cut to cannon fire) with Darwinists smiting the faithful with—gasp!—atheistic ideas. Most outrageously, he plays the overused Nazi card—he tours an old concentration camp and notes Hitler himself was influenced by Darwin. Yes, kids, studying evolution leads to this (cut to dead prisoners).

Expelled pretends it wants to encourage debate but shuts down and edits around every Darwinian scientist who attempts to explain complex issues, as Stein makes snide remarks in voice-over.

From the Colorado Springs Independent:

Nazis? It’s all about Nazis?

In a parallel universe even crazier than our own, Ben Stein, former Nixon speechwriter turned ironic symbol of the anti-hip, may be making a documentary about how the Nazis used the “controversial” theory of gravity to make bombs fall to earth — so, of course, the theory of gravity must be wrong. But we are here, and in this universe Ben Stein is actually telling us that because the Nazis thought it would be a good idea to breed people like animals, the theory of evolution must be wrong.

It’s nuttiness right from the opening moments of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Images of Nazi atrocities and the terrors of life behind the Berlin Wall are smugly deployed in an attempt to editorialize away basic scientific fact.

Expelled isn’t about “intelligent design,” about an alternative scientific theory, or even about academic freedom. It’s about Stein believing he has proven that acceptance of evolution leads to atheism (and also, we’re told, to such horrors as birth control). Hence, evolution cannot be allowed to be true. Even if it is.

From Newsday:

Ben Stein, the actor, lawyer, columnist and onetime speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford, is probably smarter than you. He’s definitely smarter than I am. What’s galling about his new documentary, “Expelled,” is that he seems to think we’re both slobbering idiots.

In an increasingly hysterical tone, Stein lambastes Darwinians as misguided, ignorant fascists, cutting repeatedly to old footage of the Berlin Wall - a metaphor for squelched thought.

Finally, he unleashes his biggest attention-getter, holding Darwinism responsible for Nazi atrocities and genocide. I’m no lawyer, but that’s a pretty lousy argument.

Did Stein really think audiences wouldn’t balk at being suckered into a propaganda rally? Or was he preaching to the converted from the start? Stein claims to denounce the tyranny of dogma, then browbeats us with his own.

From Variety, whose reviewer is predisposed to like the movie:

Even more offensive is the film’s attempt to link Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” ideas and Hitler’s master-race ambitions (when in doubt, invoke the Holocaust), complete with solemnly scored footage of the experimentation labs at Dachau. Evocations of the Berlin Wall, treated as a symbol of a bullheaded scientific establishment on the verge of collapse, are equally fatuous.

The Village Voice:

[Stein's] thesis: Teaching Darwinian evolution but ignoring intelligent design in America’s public schools and universities is the biggest threat to American freedom today—bigger, presumably, than Al Qaeda, Iraq, and the recession combined. A series of interviews with ID true believers has him playing Michael Moore–dumb—no hard questions for the folks at the Discovery Center

ID’ers protest that they’re simply interested in secular alternatives to Darwinian evolution; their scientific opponents, meanwhile, are potential Communists and Nazis. Bizarre and hysterical.

The Orlando Sentinel, whose review was also run by the Chicago Tribune:

….Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, [is] a cynical attempt to sucker Christian conservatives into thinking they’re losing the “intelligent design” debate because of academic “prejudice.”

It’s a rabble-rouser of a doc that uses all manner of loaded images, loaded rhetoric, few if any facts, dubious ID “experts” and mockery of hand-picked “weirdo” legit scientists to attack those who, Stein claims, are stifling the Religious Right’s efforts to inject intelligent design into science courses, science curricula and the national debate.

It just isn’t particularly funny. Or the least bit convincing.

I lost track of the number of times Stalin’s image hit the screen, and in the ways the movie equated science with Darwinism with atheism with Hitler or Stalin. Subtle, it’s not.

Stein (he co-wrote it) builds his movie on classic Big Tobacco Tactics.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie currently has a rating of less than one out of ten.

Update: As of Saturday, April 19, this post is number four in a google search of “expelled reviews,” and it is getting a lot of traffic. This post keeps switching places on the google front page with “Expelled Exposed,” so I figured that I’d better do an update to reflect more reviews that I’ve found over the last day. Here you are:

The Waco Tribune:

[The] film’s arguments are a rhetorical mishmash of straw men, red herrings, guilt by association, quote harvesting, gotcha interviews and post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) associations that may cause your head to pop. It’s a propaganda form highly polished by director/activist Michael Moore on the other end of the political spectrum.

Those coming to Expelled hoping to learn something about any research behind ID, a fair appraisal of weaknesses in evolutionary theories or — perhaps the film’s most glaring and telling omission — how Christian evolutionists reconcile faith and science will leave sorely disappointed. The latter is quickly dismissed by a chain of quotes that brand them as liberal Christians and duped by militant atheists in their efforts to get religion out of the classroom.

From TV Guide:

It’s hard to pinpoint the most insulting aspects of this obvious propaganda piece from Ben Stein, the eye-drops spokesman, conservative writer and pundit whom most people remember from a bit part in FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF.

But surely the film’s greatest offense is the utter shamelessness with which it exploits the Holocaust, veering far off topic for a side trip to Nazi killing centers at Hadamar and Dachau in an attempt to tar Darwin with the old “Evolution led directly to eugenics and the Final Solution” brush. The camera’s slow tracking shots through the death camps are followed by a similar creepy crawl through Down House, where Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. None of this has anything to do with the validity of evolutionary theory or intelligent design, and only serves to point up how any theory can be used to justify evil ends.

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

The scholars Stein and the film’s producers interview say they just want an open debate where creationism - pardon, intelligent design - and Darwinist evolution can be discussed side-by-side. What’s wrong with that? Stein asks with mock-innocence.

Alas, the movie’s makers (Stein and co-writers Kevin Miller and Walt Ruloff, and director Nathan Frankowski) don’t debate honestly. Stein mocks university officials for not “getting off [their] script,” but says nothing about the repetitive talking points from the ID crowd. The ID folks complain that the term “evolution” is too vaguely defined, and yet never adequately define what “intelligent design” is. They swear they aren’t espousing religion, then try to discredit the leading evolutionary biologists - such as Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers - because they are atheists.

Oddly enough, the tactics employed in “Expelled” undercut the movie’s argument, most notably in the interviews with Dawkins and Myers and in Stein’s trip to Darwin’s British home (now a museum). Either the filmmakers suckered these participants under false pretenses, or the evolutionists are more open to debate than Stein suggests. Perhaps the intelligent-design proponents know that in a truly open debate, their argument isn’t fit enough to survive.

From the Seattle Times, hometown newspaper to the Discovery Institute:

Pop quiz: What is the real source of evil in the modern world? Greed? Intolerance?

Well, according to “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” it’s Darwinism, described as a philosophy that posits the pointlessness of life and encourages the “de-privileging of human beings” — and as such is responsible for everything from atheism to abortion, euthanasia to the Holocaust.

But Jon Stewart is a lot funnier than Stein.

From BeliefNet:

Like the tobacco companies once they could no longer question the legitimacy of the scientific evidence connecting cigarettes and disease, Stein quickly shifts the debate from a head-to-head assessment of analysis of data to frame the issue as one of freedom of speech. The movie opens with archival footage not of science labs or the animal life on Galapagos Island, where Darwin first began to develop his theory, but of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Stein tries to draw a parallel between the wall that divided Germany and the impenetrable wall that keeps Intelligent Design out of the science establishment. But he is also associating Darwinian science with Godlessness, communism, and totalitarianism, with detours into Nazi atrocities and atheism so over-the-top that it becomes shrill and irrational.

The conservative Ayn Rand Institute:

“The premise of Expelled is that proponents of ‘intelligent design’ have been shunned, denied tenure, and even fired because of a conspiracy to quash the scientific evidence supporting their theory,” said Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. “But the truth is: there is no evidence supporting their theory. Intelligent design is completely devoid of any positive scientific content, and consists of nothing more than a religiously motivated attack on evolution. To the extent intelligent design advocates are facing obstacles in academia it is because they are not doing real science: they haven’t been ‘expelled’ they have flunked out of the scientific community, just as a faith healer would flunk out of medical school.

A Scientific American podcast reports on the movie’s dishonest quoting of Charles Darwin:

Toward the end [of the movie], Stein reads the following quote from the book Descent of Man: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

…I went to a full text of Descent of Man online and found the quoted passage. And then found the sentences that come right after where Stein stopped quoting.

So here’s Charles Darwin again, from Descent of Man: “The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.“

(Update: It is now April 28, and this post is still getting a lot of traffic, so I wanted to provide a link to an article about the film by noted conservative columnist John Derbyshire and appearing in National Review. It is probably the strongest slapdown of the movie I’ve ever seen.)

National Review says:

…creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are. What they are, as is amply documented, is a pressure group for religious teaching in public schools.

…The creationists took the morally fatal decision to campaign clandestinely. They overhauled creationism as “intelligent design,” roped in a handful of eccentric non-Christian cranks keen for a well-funded vehicle to help them push their own flat-earth theories, and set about presenting themselves to the public as “alternative science” engaged in a “controversy” with a closed-minded, reactionary “science establishment” fearful of new ideas. (Ignoring the fact that without a constant supply of new ideas, there would be nothing for scientists to do.) Nothing to do with religion at all! I think this willful act of deception has corrupted creationism irredeemably. The old Biblical creationists were, in my opinion, wrong-headed, but they were mostly honest people. The “intelligent design” crowd lean more in the other direction. Hence the dishonesty and sheer nastiness, even down to plain bad manners, that you keep encountering in ID circles.

Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility — from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media…. Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization.

There’s a story going around in the media to the effect that some German schoolkid corrected NASA’s odds of a collision with Apophis, with the resulting figures having 100 times higher impact probability.

It’s a hoax¹.

I ran across the story yesterday, and my baloney detectors got pinned; for a while there, I could barely even speak over the preposterousness of the claims. While I was engaged in paralysis, Daniel Fischer did the outstanding work in taking the story down. Great job!

1. Ok - it could possibly maybe be a legitimate error. But read about the people this kid did consult with, and see if you agree. [↩]

Mark Hempsell, the co-author of the book that posits that a copy of an approximately 5,000 year old Sumerian tablet records an observation of an Aten asteroid, prior to its atmospheric entry, which impacted at Köfels, Austria - this being a story which, in the immortal words of The Greenbelt, we “doubt it very much” - has left two comments on this blog, one of them fairly lengthy and, I thought, requiring some reply.

My original takedown is here, and even though I wrote it before I realized that the Bad Astronomer, StumbleUpon, and other internet opinion-makers would make it the most popular post ever on this blog¹, there’s very little I’d retract. It is still a crappy press release that evidences precious little understanding of impact processes or asteroid orbital dynamics, and it is still a wildly implausible hypothesis that the authors actively resist subjecting to peer review.

The comment of Mark Hempsell’s that I am addressing is here. Starting in the second paragraph, Hempsell exhibits either a puzzling unclarity or a lack of understanding of, or poor research within, the field.

It [the impactor] is definitely neither stony nor iron (what Aten is?)…

Asteroids are classified according to their spectral types, which are determined by their compositions. As I read it, Hempsell is here saying that Aten-class asteroids are not stony or iron-rich. There are relatively few known Aten asteroids - hundreds, not thousands - and few of them have been observed spectrally.

As far as I can tell, all Atens so far observed are either stony, or iron:

• (3554) Amun is an M-type - considered to be of mixed iron/stony composition.
• (33342) 1998 WT₂₄ is E-type - stony or rocky, like an achondrite meteorite, or rather like basalt on Earth.
• (99907) 1989 VA is an S-type - of silicaceous rocky composition.
• 1989 UQ is a C-type, which stands for carbonaceous, and is therefore rocky like a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite. In fact, C-type asteroids are (at least in part) where such meteorites are thought to come from.

Oh, and guess what - this list includes (2062) Aten, the first discovered and hence the “type specimen” for the Aten family of asteroids. It is type S, so again, it is made of silicaceous rocks.

A lot of data on this is available in 2008Icar..194..111P (Photometry of Aten asteroids—More than a handful of binaries)², which lists for a large number of Aten asteroids the B-V and V-R color indexes that are used to constrain asteroidal spectral types. (For my lay readers, B-V and V-R provide the asteroid’s color; it is achieved by measuring the brightness of the asteroid in two defined photometric color bands and then taking the difference - hence the minus sign.)

So to Hempsell’s question, ‘what Aten asteroid is stony or iron,’ the answer is, basically, all of them that we’ve ever checked.

…indeed the impact dynamics…

The impact dynamics? There are no impact dynamics to look at. There’s absolutely no evidence of an impact at Köfels. There is no shocked quartz with PDFs, no impact glass, no crater, no microcraters, no remains of an impactor, no local enhancement of elements and isotopes associated with meteoroids, no ejecta….

I believe the problem here is that Hempsell is looking at Köfels, correctly discerning that the geology suggests there was no impact, and is then making ad hoc adjustments to his hypothesis to compensate. It would be more proper to look at Köfels and acknowledge that no impact occurred there - and then stop. Because one adjustment that needs to be made is extremely implausible:

…suggest a density below 1000 kg/m3.

First, let’s convert to the standard units: 1000 kg/m³ is 1 g/cm³. That happens to be the density of water³. Gasoline (petrol for European readers) has a density of about 0.7 g/cm³. Stuff of this density does not exist in inner solar system small bodies for a very good reason - volatiles that have such low densities evaporate or sublimate, and are lost to the parent body. This is a process we see with comets - sublimation creates the comet’s coma and tail. What you are left with after a few centuries of solar heating and mass loss in the inner solar system are the rocky remains - and it is quite possible that many inner solar system asteroids formed in this way.

The problem here is very serious: Hempsell is hypothesizing that the asteroid was an Aten, which by definition spends all its time in the inner solar system. But it couldn’t have had such a low density if it had spent even a few thousand years in the inner solar system, because the fluffy stuff would have long since been lost. If you run integrations on well-observed Aten asteroids, we find they’ve had more-or-less stable orbits for millions of years. (Sources: see here, and here.)

Hempsell seems to hypothesize an asteroid made of something like gasoline, in terms of density, which can’t exist - or can it? Perhaps the asteroid was a rubble-pile. Maybe rubble-pile asteroids have lower densities than water. Shall we check that out?

It is easy to do. The NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft orbited asteroid (433) Eros, and then landed on it, in 2000-2001. This resulted in very good measurements of its density, which was, indeed far lower than many expected. But the density was still 2.4 g/cm³. If Hempsell is calling for an 0.8 g/cm³ asteroid, this is three times too dense - a massive discrepancy between observation and hypothesis.

The impact effect will be over estimated by Marcus, Melosh, and Collins because of the Alpine terrain.

No, it won’t. Marcus, Melosh, and Collins evaluated different terrain types (PDF). From their abstract:

The program requires six inputs: impactor diameter, impactor density, impact velocity before atmospheric entry, impact angle, the distance from the impact at which the environmental effects are to be calculated, and the target type (sedimentary rock, crystalline rock, or a water layer above rock).

So, unless we believe that Austria is made of feather pillows, it looks like they’ve got the situation covered. In fact, the geology of the area is mixed sedimentary and crystalline rock, and using either target type results in a huge crater, even from an asteroid made the density of gasoline. Go check it out for yourself.

Back to Hempsell:

The way it [ejecta] reaches the south east Mediterranean is the back plume which is deflected by the low pressure region behind the object, an effect well documented during the Shoemaker/Levy 9 impact.

Unfortunately, the SL-9 impact on Jupiter was into a dense gaseous atmosphere with no solid-surface impact, and the dynamics of that impact are thought to be very different from solid-body impacts. Hence, the mechanism that created the Jovian plumes isn’t looked for on Earth. This is for the simple reason that a low-pressure region on Earth cannot achieve as large a pressure difference as on Jupiter⁴. Earth’s atmosphere is significantly less dense to begin with. (Sources: Here, here, here….)

However, suborbital ballistic trajectories of ejecta are expected with large Earth impacts, as happened with the Chicxulub impact (at the K-T boundary - you know, the one that contributed to killing off the dinosaurs). Unfortunately, you don’t get ejecta without a crater. It is the process that forms the crater which causes the ejecta. I’m sure we’ve all noticed that craters are holes in the ground. Ever wonder what happened to all the dirt and rock that used to be where that hole is? Some of it vaporizes, but much of it turns into ejecta.

So, the lack of a Jovian-density atmosphere on Earth means you can’t have SL-9 style plumes, and lack of a crater means you can’t have ejecta. So much for the material supposedly thrown all over Egypt and the Levant, accounting for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra, and all that.

Hempsell then goes on to suggest that we - the multitudes of asteroid experts, anthropologists, textual critics, and so on, who find all this material laughably amateur, and say so in the comments to my original post - are somehow lacking in integrity and qualification because we haven’t read the book.

…if you want to publically slag it [the book? the hypothesis?] off as delusional pseudo-science please do us the courtesy of finding out what we are actually saying first.

The fact of the matter is that a press release was widely circulated by the home institution of one of the book’s co-authors. It is entirely legitimate to be called to account for false and implausible claims made on one’s behalf in a press release that has the imprimatur of the claimant’s academic institution, and I shall not back down.

In response, apparently, to my offer to read the book and post again, Hempsell says:

A final point on free copies; we have sent around 100 copies to journals and researchers in the field, (and in a strange reversal of the current argument several expressed surprise saying they had expected to buy it). I am sorry if you did not end up on that list, but I hope you can see the problem of sending copies to every anonymous web blogger.

I can indeed see the problem of sending the book to every anonymous “web blogger”⁵. However, I’m not one of them: my real name is disclosed on this blog.

Furthermore, my field of research is asteroids. Let’s not push that too far - I’m not as expert as many, many academics working in the field, and I’d not rate my knowledge equivalent to that of a PhD employed full-time in the field. However, I am not in an entirely unrelated discipline such as astronautics engineering; I’m actually employed in a capacity in which I study these bodies in a scientific way, as a part of a team at an astronomical observatory that has, at this point, thousands of peer-reviewed publications on asteroids, some with my name on them⁶.

I’m also, as commentator “Don Amache” points out, pretty well known as a magazine writer and critic, having been employed to review software and books for several years at Sky and Telescope.

And finally, I’ve also managed to give this particular hypothesis a lot of bad publicity. I’m up to about 20,000 hits on the original posting alone, and there’s still a lot of traffic coming in.

One way to respond to bad publicity, if you have the confidence in the hypothesis that Hempsell claims to have, is to send the work over for reading and further review. And it doesn’t have to be a book - I do all of my reading of scientific papers via PDF these days. The cost to e-mail a PDF is insignificant.

Nevertheless, the authors’ claims, as made in the press release, and as made here, on the blog, are in some cases false, and in all other cases wildly implausible. I predict it won’t bear professional scrutiny, or even a semi-professional fact-checking and inspection. I doubt I shall see the book, and I’m not losing sleep over it. We already have enough to know this crazy idea is all wrong.

1. That’s not necessarily hard to do with a young blog, mind. [↩]
2. Sorry - as far as I know, Icarus prohibits its investigators from participating in arXiv or other free-access solutions. [↩]
3. At 4° C. [↩]
4. Think of it this way - the lowest possible pressure on Earth is zero. Sea level pressure is almost 15psi, making the largest delta 15 psi. On Jupiter, pressures are available that are hundreds of times larger, leading to deltas of many hundreds, or thousands, of psi. Apologies for the SI units. [↩]
5. Are there bloggers who are not on the web? [↩]
6. This is absolutely no reason to believe what I say here, by the way. I raise these matters only to show that I do have some qualifications to review such a book. [↩]

Physorg reports that the head of the Roskosmos, Anatoly Perminov, supports renumbering Soyuz TMA missions to the International Space Station so that the next one is not numbered 13, but 14.

In Russia, many people have superstitious beliefs — black cats, Mondays, the number 13. That’s why I think that it is a good idea to change the number of the next space ship

Not just in Russia, buddy. Here in the US, a lot of hotels avoid having a 13th floor. This becomes a problem for me in elevators when my room is above the 13th floor. Apparently I tend to integrate the number of buttons instead of reading the button labels, and I hit the one that “should” correspond to my floor. Some hotels that lack a 13th floor lack a button for the floor. When that is the case I’m frequently one off on which button I punch. Since I believe that hotel elevators in hotels I’m spending money to stay in ought to be built for my convenience, I find this irritating.