Blue Collar Scientist

I honestly can’t tell if this story on Universe Today is a parody, or credulous. Anything that seems to take the story seriously would sound like a parody to someone who knows anything about the orbital dynamics of asteroids and impact physics. But then again, taking the story seriously is also a sign of drinking the special Kool-Aid.

No Sumerian tablet records the impact of an Aten asteroid in Austria which led to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, as has already been explained.

…because the judge says so.

Superior Court Judge Beverly Cutler said the verdict should provide a lesson. “We should get young people to stay home after midnight,” she said. She later amended that to say adults should be home by midnight as well.

Sorry, Miss Astronomer, you aren’t allowed to go to work anymore. Sorry, cardiac patient, but there are no doctors or nurses at the hospital after midnight, you will just have to wait….

I can only assume that this kind of civilization-disrupting advice springs from the naive understanding that no crimes are, or would be, committed during the daytime.

And when does “after midnight” end, anyway? I know people that go to work at six AM - that’s only six hours after midnight. Are they OK? Or do you have to wait until the number of hours after midnight is less than the number before? That would mean we all get to sleep in until noon….

The UPI reports, and I learn of it by way of PhysOrg, that the Johnson County Board of Supervisors - who ought to know better - granted “preliminary approval” to the Carroll Area Paranormal Team to conduct a “ghost hunt” at the Johnson County Poor Farm and Asylum after Brandon Cochran, of the Johnson County Historical Society - who also should have known better - proposed it.

Here’s a picture of the Johnson County Supervisors - shall we have a contest? Can we guess which of these people are in favor of allowing a “ghost hunt” on a significant historical site under their jurisdiction? It has to be at least three of these fine-looking people.

I guess it just goes to show you can’t tell someone credulous of antiscientific mumbo-jumbo by their looks.

The Carroll Area Paranormal Team website says their principles are:

To give a complete professional investigation to the client

HAHAHAHAHAhahahahahahahahah!

Seriously, that’s about all you can say. If you really want a professional paranormal investigation, you have to call these folks.

To provide this service free of charge….

Ok, I’ll grant: that’s a nice change of pace. At least they aren’t trying to fleece their credulous clients of their hard-earned money like many paranormal investigators do. But they are still looking for money:

Please make a Donation to help support our efforts in helping people cope with paranormal activity.

As I write, they’ve made $0 of their goal of $500. Which is probably just as well.

Their definitions page is a credulous laundry list of concepts and fictional entities that are better looked up here. They have several case files up, in which they confuse common imaging artifacts with ghosts, and also wax surprised over apparent accidental exposures. They’ve engaged in talking to the empty air and have used dreams the investigators have had to resolve cases. A lot of their photos wouldn’t look so strange if they weren’t using crappy, on-camera flash and knew how to white-balance the images. At least one report finds heavy significance in an investigator’s probably accidental loss of jewelry and continuing use of crappy on-camera flash.

C’mon, Johnson County Supervisors - you can do better for yourselves and your constituents.

The University of Bristol has a press release out yesterday reporting that a Sumerian clay tablet provides an account of an impact event at Köfels, Austria.

I call bullshit. Here’s why, starting with some background information.

Köfels does not have a crater; it has what looks like a giant landslide, about half a kilometer thick and five kilometers in diameter. In the mid 20th-century, the impact hypothesis was raised to explain the formation. Apparently there is a lot of glass in the formation, which some geologists think could have been formed when rock melted in the landslide, and others think is more plausibly from an impact. There’s no doubt that other impact events have created quite a bit of glass. The age of the Köfels glass has been measured using radiometric methods, so we know the glass was formed between 8,000 years to 16,000 years ago.

Perhaps the strongest evidence for an impact origin of the Köfels structure is the reported presence of planar deformation features in quartz taken from the site. (But see the update at the end of the post!) PDFs, as they are called, are microscopic features of silicate (e.g., quartz, feldspar) grains, and they are basically very thin planes of glass arranged in parallel sets that have particular orientations with respect to the containing crystal’s structure. They are utterly diagnostic of impact events - no other geologic event can form them, not even highly energetic volcanic eruptions¹. They look like this (NASA image):

The presence of shocked quartz - quartz with PDFs - means that this quartz, at some time, was in the neighborhood of an impact event. If the big landslide-looking formation at Köfels was formed by impact, then the shocked quartz could have been formed then. Or it could be from an older impact, and was transported by later geologic events, such as huge landslides. The shocked quartz will survive a lot longer than an impact crater, given the way the Earth covers such structures up relatively quickly, so this may well have happened. However the shocked quartz got where it is found today, we know that it was formed when a meteoritic body impacted the ground. Shocked quartz does not form from a meteoritic airburst - a meteorite that explodes before impact - it requires a ground impact.

Science marches on, and the impact hypothesis to explain the origin of the Köfels formation fell out of favor as we discovered more and more about impacts. The main problem was the lack of parallels between the Köfels features and other known astroblemes - namely, there is no crater at Köfels, and there darn well ought to be if there is 8-16 kiloyear-old glass and shocked quartz from an impact event at the site. Here’s a picture of a smaller impact that is five times that age:

Notice how fresh and recognizable that crater is?

Currently, the consensus of scientific opinion is that Köfels is not from an impact. It is not listed in the Earth Impact Database, not even as a possible impact site. Googling “Köfels impact” turns up a zillion outlets parroting the Bristol press release, but there’s almost nothing else about it on the net.

So, where does this Sumerian tablet come in?

The researchers say the tablet dates from 700 BCE, or about 3,000 years ago. They hypothesize it is a copy of an earlier work:

With modern computer programmes that can simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago the researchers have established what the Planisphere tablet refers to. It is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC (Julian calendar).

I happen to have some software that can do that. Starry Night, Skymap Pro, or Stellarium, among numerable others, can do the job. So this isn’t rocket science. Anyone know where I can get a high-quality photograph of the tablet that I can use to test their hypothesis from my own reseources?

But a better question might be:

Assuming that the original source is a “night notebook” of a Sumerian astronomer, why is it being copied by a scribe 2,423 years later? No reason is given for this remarkable act in the press release, at least. Already it sounds a little fishy to me.

The press release continues:

Half the tablet records planet positions and cloud cover, the same as any other night….

Wait a second. Do we really know that half the tablet records conditions “the same as any other night?” Because if we do, that means we have a bunch of other examples of this genre of tablet to compare this tablet to. And if so, that’s fine, but then why does the press release say this:

A cuneiform clay tablet that has puzzled scholars for over 150 years has been translated for the first time.

They can either have their cake, or eat it: Either the tablet was mysterious and untranslated; or we can’t really know that this tablet is a typical nightly astronomical report of sky conditions, just like any other.

The problems continue:

…but the other half of the tablet records an object large enough for its shape to be noted even though it is still in space. The astronomers made an accurate note of its trajectory relative to the stars, which to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels.

Okay, I guess - something 500 kilometers away and 1 kilometer in diameter will be a tenth of a degree across, which is just about big enough to determine shape; and it could have been closer and still been in outside the atmosphere. And it is possible to record a trajectory to better than a degree using naked-eye methods.

It is also possible to integrate a bunch of orbits that intersect with Köfels, and it is plausible to believe that some of those orbits might be consistent with the observation of a celestial object that is hypothesized to be recorded in this copy of a hypothesized tablet that existed 5,000 years ago, and it is plausible to believe that some of these orbits would have the object out of Earth’s atmosphere when it was observable over Sumeria.

But really, this is beginning to look a bit like a house of cards, yes? Let’s read on.

The observation suggests the asteroid is over a kilometre in diameter and the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth, that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit.

The bit about the Aten asteroids being resonant is just wrong. Many are resonant, some more strongly than others; but Aten asteroids are defined as those with a semi-major axis of less than one astronomical unit. An AU is, in lay terms, the average distance between the sun and the Earth. A semi-major axis is simply the distance of the long axis of an ellipse, divided by two. Almost all Atens have orbits that cross Earth’s orbit - in other words, most Atens get both closer to the sun than Earth, and farther away from it, depending on what part of its orbit it is in. That’s all - you don’t need the asteroid to be in a resonant orbit to be an Aten.

And a resonant orbit certainly doesn’t lead to a craterless impact, as I initially read the following as claiming:

This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels. The in coming angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometres from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point. As it travelled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometres in diameter (the size of the landslide). When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures that pulverised the rock and caused the landslide but because it was no longer a solid object it did not create a classic impact crater.

What??

This is just preposterous.

First, you’re going to find plenty of evidence of the impact at Gamskogel if this were true. Any impact significant enough to badly disrupt an asteroid-type impactor, which is what the researchers hypothesize, is going to take out a big chunk of the mountain, cause all sorts of fracturing, landslides, and other highly noticeable effects. The physics of impact are such that, if the impact were truly strong enough to liquify or vaporize a >1 km asteroid, the mountain would have been converted into a crater - much like we see countless times on the moon.

Test of hypothesis number one: Is there a huge crater on the mountain, or has the mountain been obliterated by a huge crater?

The impact of an asteroid with a mountain will result in the classical shock wave in the impact medium and create an ejecta blanket. If the impact hypothesis is true, we should see planar deformation features on the mountain and ejecta more or less symmetrically around it.

Test of hypothesis number two: Is there shocked quartz on the mountain?

Test of hypothesis number three: Is there an ejecta blanket around the mountain?

Next, why would an impactor become a fireball? We all know that meteors in the process of burning up are hot, but they are not, literally, fireballs². The researchers claim that that an asteroidal-type meteorite, after clipping the mountain, was “not a solid object” - but why? And how? How do you get an asteroidal impactor hitting so solidly that it vaporized it, but so softly that it doesn’t shock quartz or create a crater?

Sorry, but you just can’t.

You don’t solve any problems by breaking up an impactor into a million pieces - it still impacts. So you end up with a bunch of smaller craters - the total energy is the same. Here’s an example of either a binary impactor, or disrupted impactor, on the Earth:

and an example on the Moon:

Supposing you can disrupt a 1-km asteroid impactor into pieces no larger than molecular size. What happens then? You still get craters:

That’s a microcrater in glass, too small to be seen by eye.

Maybe the press release is saying that the low angle of impact, supposedly of only six degrees, would not result in the formation of a crater. But that’s wrong too. Highly oblique impacts - thought to be considerably shallower than 6° - produce elongated craters:

So, there’s gonna be a crater, or two, or a billion, no matter what you do to the impactor³. Just because the asteroid “clips” a mountaintop on its way to its final resting place doesn’t mean there will be no crater. There will be one, or many, period.

Test of hypothesis number four: Go find the crater(s).

Test of hypothesis number five: Go find fragments of the impactor. There will be some, even if the main impactor vaporizes.

Let’s read on:

Mark Hempsell, discussing the Köfels event, said: “Another conclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt.

“The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite any flammable material – including human hair and clothes. It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast.“

Ok, so there’s no crater because the impactor “wasn’t solid,” but there was enough ejecta - which only comes from craters - to kill people, and cover an area thousands of miles around, including northern Egypt and the Levant, where we should be able to go today and find - ummm, ejecta.

Test of hypothesis number six: Let’s go find ejecta, or evidence of widespread burns, in strata that we can date, using, e.g., pottery shards, to around 3100 BC in multiple archaeological digs in both Egypt and in the Levant. The strata should be iridium-enriched compared to terrestrial facies, ought to include shock products if the impact were powerful enough to spread material over that wide an area, and ought contain impact glass.

Ok, we’re done. Just to sum up, here’s why we can be pretty sure this press release promotes a wrong conclusion.

The researchers hypothesize:

• That Sumerians made regular celestial observations (probably true);
• One of them observed a large body very close to Earth before it had entered the atmosphere (very improbable - whereas seeing a very bright meteor is not only probable, but certain, if you keep looking)
• They recorded the trajectory to an accuracy of +/- one degree or less (plausible)
• The tablet they recorded this on was reproduced by a scribe 2,423 years later (possible, but why?)
• Even though apparently no other nights’ observations were similarly copied (why not? There would have been TONS of interesting stuff, and just as correlated with significant happenings on Earth - not by causation, but by coincidence)
• And this tablet has never been translated before (I’ll stipulate that this is true even though I don’t really know)
• Two researchers - one a space infrastructure engineer, the other a rocket engine engineer, and neither linguists - translated it (huh? how?)
• And the tablet records an impactor (maybe)
• even though the impact glass found at the site is 8,000 to 16,000 years old (not 5,000 years old as the hypothesis says)
• And the impactor was a >1 km Aten asteroid (seriously, people, it requires several hours or days of precise, modern astronomical observations to determine if an asteroid is an Aten - you need either triangulated observations over a short time, or observations over a longer period of time, to extract that kind of data from the observations they say the Sumerians recorded)
• And that impactor landed at Köfels (maybe, but you need triangulated observations of incoming impactors to really determine where and if a possible impactor landed, because you can’t tell celestial distances or radial velocities - motion toward or away from you - by just looking)
• But not before “clipping” a mountain (oh, come ON! can we say “ad hoc hypothesis?”)
• Which turned it into something other than a solid (I’ve heard of shock melting, but turning an entire 1 km impacting asteroid into a liquid with a glancing blow with a mountain is beyond the pale, and turning it all into gas would be even more ludicrous)
• Which then created no craters when it landed (it still should have)
• But which did distribute ejecta all over the eastern Mediterranean (you don’t get ejecta without a crater)
• Which ejecta has not been found anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean (ouch)

I’ll add one more thing: This “research” hasn’t cleared peer review - the authors are trying to sell a direct-to-paperback book for $25 (USD). The press release says it is being published by Alcin Academics, but I can’t find them on the web and I can’t find any other book they’ve published. A quick look at the Amazon page for the book shows that the real publisher is WritersPrintshop - a self-publishing company. I’m thinking if this were a plausible hypothesis supported in a well-written book, they’d have gotten a real publisher to release it.

I’m not buying it - the book or the zany hypothesis. If anyone wants to change my mind, send me a copy of the book, and I’ll read it and reconsider.

Oh - and one more thing: Shame, shame on you, PhysOrg for credulously running this ridiculous story but ignoring the asteroid names announced last week.

Sources for Köfels background information:

• Graham, Bevan and Hutchison, “Catalogue of Meteorites”, 4th Edition, (1985)
• Kurat, Richter; Meteoritics, vol.4, p.192, 1969
• Störzer et al.; Meteoritics, vol.6, p.319, 1971

Update: I’ve been pointed to some additional references regarding the Köfels formation, which somewhat changes what I’ve written above. First, shocked quartz, with PDFs, have not been found at Köfels as some have claimed; quartz with lamellar deformation features typical of tectonic processes were found instead. Also, the Köfels formation was not a single landslide, but a result of several landslides at different times. These are both further blows to the already discredited impact hypothesis for the origins of the Köfels formation, and casts even more doubt onto the conclusions that Sumerians observed a greater than 1 km wide Aten asteroid that impacted at Köfels.

New references:

• Deutsch, Koeberl, Blum, French, Glass, Grieve, Horn, Jessberger, Kurat, Reimold, Smit, Stoffler, Taylor; The impact-flood connection: Does it exist? Terra Nova. vol. 6, 1994, pp. 644-650.
• Hermanns, Blikra, Naumann, Nilsen, Panthi, Stromeyer, Longva; Examples of multiple rock-slope collapses from Köfels (Ötz valley, Austria) and western Norway. Engineering Geology. vol. 83, no. 1-3, 2006, pp. 94-108.

The “French” in the first one is, I’m pretty sure, the same Bevan M. French who has done so much geological work on the moon and terrestrial planets.

There is additional discussion of the geologic findings here, where these two works are also cited among others, and I think the person who brought them to my attention is a member of that forum.

Update #2: Some very specific claims were raised by Mark Hempsell in the comments below; I’ve responded to them here.

1. The can be, and are, formed by nuclear explosions, however. [↩]
2. Amateur astronomers’ slang is to call bright meteors “fireballs,” but this refers to visual appearance, not physical constituency. [↩]
3. It is ridiculous to assert a 100% efficient vaporization of the impactor. The Barringer impactor was vaporized, but fragments of the impacting body remain. [↩]

Update: I have some moose in the freezer - meat which came from hunting the animal, just in case anyone is under the impression there are moose ranches in Alaska - and I’ve made arrangements to have some of the cuts medically imaged in search of lead fragments sometime in the next week! Stay tuned for results! Post follows:

But what else is new, eh?

This time, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (whose website is down as I write, returning 0-length html documents), an industry group representing firearms manufacturers and ammunition makers, has issued a press release that savages scientific results as being cruel and unscientific. The release, with a little additional reporting from AP writer James McPherson, is getting wide play today.

The story starts last year, when Dr. William Cornatzer of Bismark, North Dakota took 100 one-pound packages of venison that had been donated to food pantries, and imaged them in a CAT scanner. The CAT scan showed that more than 60 of the samples had been contaminated with high levels of lead from the bullets used to kill the animals. Every package had some level of contamination.

Cornatzer is a dermatologist and professor at the University of North Dakota medical school in Grand Forks.

The North Dakota Health Department followed up with its own tests, which confirmed Dr. Cornatzer’s results. Minnesota and Iowa evaluated the results, with some media reporting they also conducted their own tests. As a result, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa have alerted food pantries in the state to the contamination and suggested they not distribute the meat.

Lead poisoning results in reduced cognitive abilities, nausea, abdominal pain, irritability, insomnia, headache, seizure, coma, and death. It can also result in constipation, vomiting, weight loss, anemia, kidney damage, learning disability in children, and reproductive damage and infertility.

Dr. William Cornatzer explains how the contamination occurs:

“When [a bullet] hits the deer, it sends little bits of schrapnel-type lead that are almost liquid at that point because of the speed the bullet is going,” explains Cornatzer.

The impact is enough to scatter the deadly toxin throughout the entire animal. Luckily, not all bullets are the same. Dr. Cornatzer says you should avoid bullets that have lead in them that fragment when they hit deer. Instead, you should choose something that`s lead free that mushrooms.

Cornatzer’s tests were spurred by previous scientific results showing that California condors were getting lead poisoned by eating animals killed and abandoned by hunters:

Cornatzer said he became concerned after hearing about possible lead fragments through his membership in the Peregrine Fund of Boise, Idaho, a group that promotes the conservation of birds of prey, including peregrine falcons and California condors.

The organization says lead from bullets in the carcasses of animals is primarily responsible for lead poisoning that has endangered the condors.

A lead bullet shot from a high-powered rifle “fragments into hundreds of tiny pieces,” said Rick Watson, vice president and director of international programs for the Peregrine Fund. “Usually a hunter cuts away damaged meat, but the lead sprays through a large part of the animal,” he said.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation has apparently coordinated multiple statements from the same talking points attacking the discovery that lead from bullets results in widespread contamination of venison:

“It’s alarmist and not supported by any science,” said Lawrence Keane, a vice president and lawyer for the Newton, Conn.-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association for the firearms and ammunition industry. “High quality protein is now taken out of the mouths of needy, hungry people.”

Not supported by any science? So a doctor using a CAT scanner and a health department using materials assays are doing something unscientific? Only in his dreams.

Says Doug Burdin, a lawyer for the Tucson, Ariz. group Safari Club International:

“This is disheartening, and we certainly don’t think this program should come to an end on the unscientific assessment that has occurred here.”

Does Doug think that dowsing rods were used to find the lead?

And what is with the lawyers passing judgement on scientific results? I’ll grant that not all lawyers are scientifically ignorant. But these two seem to be.

Jason Foss, president of Pheasants for the Future (and of unknown lawyer status), says:

“Sportsmen have been shooting deer for hundreds of years with lead bullets with no problems.”

Poor Jason apparently has no idea that it has only been a few decades that hunters have been using high-powered ammunition with fragmenting lead bullets. As muzzle-loaders know, balls do not fragment on impact; neither do a number of bullet types designed to mushroom rather than fragment.

This is just another sad example of ignorant people lining up to attack science without seeing the opportunities that scientific results present. Hunters and their families will enjoy improved health if they respect the dangers of lead poisoning. Guidelines about the amounts and frequency of consumption of hunted meat could protect non-hunters. And manufacturers of premium, non-fragmenting ammunition have certainly not been well-served by their industry organization, which has essentially just taken a crap all over their business. NSSF had a tremendous opportunity to look like the good guys, if only they had chosen to respond opportunistically to the news; but instead they seem to take a stand against medicine, CAT scanners, and good public health. And in favor of lead in food.

Yet another in a series of scientific studies has shown that bear spray is significantly more likely to stop bear aggression than a firearm - and it was conducted using encounter data exclusively from Alaska. The study, called Efficacy of Bear Deterrent Spray in Alaska, overturns the conventional wisdom that a gun is necessary in bear country, and is published in the April issue of Journal of Wildlife Management.

The study reports that bear spray stopped aggression 92% of the time with brown bears, 90% on black bears, and 100% on polar bears (warning: for polar bears, n=2, so you wouldn’t want to bank on that result). Of the total sample of 175 people involved in the bear spray incidents, only three were injured, in each case minor injuries that did not require hospitalization. Self-inflicted injuries from bear spray affected 12 people; ten of them with minor irritation and two of them with temporary near-incapacitation.

ScienceDaily reports on some data from a previous study: that firearm use stops bear aggression in only 67% of cases. There’s no data on self-inflicted firearms injuries or their severity, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess they were less frequent but more severe than with spray. Most if not all of the self-inflicted gunshot wounds I have heard about from the nearby Chugach have been people carrying firearms for bear protection.

The study also debunks two myths: that spray doesn’t work in the wind, and that the can might malfunction. The wind issue is at least a legitimate concern, but the study found that in actual encounters, in windy conditions, the spray still deterred bears.

As for the spray can malfunctioning - they found zero malfunctions in their sample of data. And I consider the argument a bit silly to begin with. I enjoy shooting a good deal, and I’ve had a few dud rounds and gun jams since I started shooting as a teenager. I even fired a .45 squib round about 15 years ago. But I can’t recall ever having a spray can malfunction just when I needed it, even though I’ve been using them a lot longer, and a lot more frequently.

One other statistic jumped out from the data. The number of times per year that a bear gets close enough to a human to be sprayed in Alaska is only 3. I’m thinking my odds of getting killed by being run over by an ATV are considerably higher than encountering a bear in close quarters. I’m going to continue to not worry unduly about bears.

Michael Stackpole came to my attention in the late 1980’s when I read of some of his research that debunked claims that role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons led to involvement in Satanic cults and killings. The research was eventually compiled into The Pulling Report in 1990.

For some years now, Mike has been the Executive Director of the Arizona Skeptics. Every year he and his fellows in that group compile a list of predictions, some of them serious and some of them humorous, that are of the style of the annual predictions that so-called psychics make. Year in and year out, the organization comes up with more accurate predictions than the psychics, by wildly huge margins.

Although I follow the predictions every year, it was from his appearance on Skepticality some time ago that I learned more about some other things Mike does - namely, he goes toe-to-toe with the crazies on radio shows, representing skepticism and rational thinking in the mass media, where the cards are stacked most strongly against you. After doing a bit of research last November, I put Mike on my list of people who needed to have an asteroid named after him.

So there I was at TAM 5.5 last January, eating dinner with a bunch of complete strangers, when Mike walks in and sits down next to me. Nobody else at the table seemed to have “made” him, so I brought up the Pulling Report and said something that probably sounded sycophantic. Mike and I later waxed nostalgic in the hotel bar - which contained an original Star Wars poster - and I ended up having lunch with him and a bunch of other great people on the last day of the conference. The whole time I’m sitting there thinking how much I’d love to spill the beans that I’d just written a proposal to name an asteroid after him - but couldn’t, because the process is supposed to be secret.

The citation I submitted for Mike reads:

Michael Stackpole (b. 1957) is a prolific and popular science fiction author, and is a popular advocate for science and rational thinking through media appearances, public speaking, and writing.

Last Thursday, I attended the Anchorage Science/Skeptics meetup as planned, and it was a ripping success! So much so that we’ve decided to do it again and again, and have set up a Google group for event announcements and member discussions.

Image courtesy the unknown barista who agreed to take the shot with Zach’s camera.

We had 14 people there at the peak, and at least three different conversations going on at any given time. Several people in attendance had heard about it from the announcement on Pharyngula, and a couple each from the announcement on Skepchick and Bad Astronomy.

Zach has already written up a review, so here are my highlights from the event:

• Zach and Scott Elyard told the story of the T. Rex skull cast that they worked on at the Alaska Museum of Natural History. And what an epic it was.