“Their views on each issue were added together to produce one bumper score on the extent to which they thought science could be informative on all of these questions, and the results were truly frightening. People whose pre-existing stereotypes about homosexuality had been challenged by the scientific evidence presented to them were more inclined to believe that science had nothing to offer, on any question, not just on homosexuality, when compared with people whose views on homosexuality had been reinforced.

When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate bid to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather conclude that science in general is broken. This is an interesting finding. But I’m not sure it makes me very happy.”

The point of this post is not to debate the results of the study – while they are very interesting, the best part by far is the conservative response. I’ll simply quote Survivingtheworld.net who says it best in Lesson 669:

I don’t make these studies up – I just make sure you’ve heard about them.

Of course, science is always open for debate – if you’ve ever been at a scientific presentation, people will routinely ask questions about methods and analysis, and what the conclusions actually mean. In other words, debating science in comparison to other science. So what does the opposing side have to say about this study? Well, let me quote the president of Concerned Women of America:

"You have to be a little suspicious of any study that says children being raised by same-sex couples do better or have superior outcomes to children raised with a mother and father. It just defies common sense and reality."

Ah, yes, common sense. Because nothing has driven society and science forward more than common sense.

Launched on 17th September 2009 from Kazakhstan on a Russian Soyuz rocket, Sumbandila is a small 81kg low orbit (500 km) solar-powered satellite with a Butane propulsion system successfully fired in January. It carries a 6 spectral band imager (6,25 m × 6,25 m resolution) for ground photography and video (agriculture, mapping of infrastructure and land use, population measurement and the monitoring of dam levels etc), as well as an amateur radio transponder (SA-AMSAT) among other experiments.

See the Sumbandila mission blog for details, as well as the Wikipedia article – there is also a Facebook group.

A video taken of Earth from orbit (13th October 2009, moving over Namibia).

The latest Carnival of Africans – the Phoenix Edition – is well worth a read.

• 01 and the universe
• Acinonyx Scepticus
• Amanuensis
• Ambient Normality
• ASSAf Blog
• Botswana Skeptic
• Bomoko and other nonsense words
• Communicating Science, the African Way **new**
• Defollyant’s AntiBlog
• Effortless Incitement
• Ewan’s Corner
• Geekery
• Grumpy Old Man
• Hello Universe, This is Nessie
• Ionian Enchantment
• Limbic Nutrition
• Lenny Says
• McBrolloks **new**
  
• Nathan Bond’s TART Remarks
  
• Orion Spur
  
• Other Things Amanzi
• Pickled Bushman
• Psychohistorian
  
• Reason Check
• Retroid Raving
• Scorched
• Shadows Hide
  
• Stop Danie Krügel
• Subtle Shift in Emphasis
• Synapses
• Tauriq Moosa
  
• The Science Of Sport
• The Skeptic Black Sheep
• The Skeptic Detective
• Turn 2 Reason
• Word of the Blog

Matthias Rath drops his million pound legal case against me and the Guardian.

Personally, I am all for SETI continuing – the concept fascinates me (on both a scientific and religious level), the money spent on SETI is a drop in the ocean, and I really do believe it is our responsibility to search and look outwards. Success would change the world – there is no arguing that – and I believe overall for the good (it could give us the focus we need as a species, and put a few things into proper perspective – local xenophobia may vanish for example. We can hope).

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence seems a lot like a religious belief to me – both require faith from supporters, neither can be proved to be pointless by science, and the payoff for “success” in either case is huge no matter how you look at it :-)

I don’t follow the shallow “religion will collapse if we find intelligent life elsewhere” idea that so many people seem to subscribe to – as a Christian myself I can’t believe God created this wonderful universe just for us (in the same way God didn’t give us a huge curiosity and fascination with “out there” and the desire to explore, learn and understand).

As a fan of science fiction (“Contact” is one of my all-time favourite novels and films) I have thought and dreamt about all kinds of first contact scenarios, from beneficial through benign and on to disastrous – and plenty of reasons contact / proof hasn’t happened yet. Personally I sway towards beneficial. I definitely don’t believe we should “hide” from nasty aliens – I don’t believe anything we could do would help us hide from anything that could directly affect us anyway.

Slashdot coverage of the article includes all sorts of different viewpoints as always, including:

“How interesting it would be if we finally make contact with an alien race and the first thing they ask us is whether or not The Creator has sent a “Messiah” to us yet.”

SETI’s success may very well be an Outside Context Problem for our species (and an OCP could obviously still happen even without SETI), so it deserves to be discussed and explored. I love this quote from Excession, a scifi novel by the brilliant Iain M Banks:

“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.” —-Iain M Banks, Excession.

Links:

• Space.com SETI FAQ
• Review: Contact with Alien Civilizations
• Meet the neighbours: Is the search for aliens such a good idea? (which includes a literary and Hollywood guide to “First Contact”)
• The other side of the Fermi paradox

Spanish authorities say the appearance of higher than normal levels of radiation in snails and other creatures shows there may be dangerous levels of plutonium and uranium below ground, and a further clean up could be necessary.

“We have to study the dirt, we have to look underground,” said Juan Antonio Rubio, director general of Spain’s energy research agency CIEMAT, which is carrying out an investigation with the U.S. Department of Energy.

“We don’t know what’s down there.”

That lead me to the story of Palomares (a fishing village in Spain near where the hydrogen bombs fell in 1966) and the story of humble but greedy fisherman Simó Orts.

After the bomb had been located, Simó Orts turned up at the First District Federal Court building in New York City with his lawyer, Herbert Brownell, formerly Attorney General of the United States under President Dwight Eisenhower, claiming salvage rights on the recovered hydrogen bomb. According to Craven:

“It is customary maritime law that the person who identifies the location of a ship to be salvaged has the right to a salvage award if that identification leads to a successful recovery. The amount is nominal, usually 1 or 2 percent, sometimes a bit more, of the intrinsic value to the owner of the thing salvaged. But the thing salvaged off Palomares was a hydrogen bomb, the same bomb valued by no less an authority than the Secretary of Defense at $2 billion — each percent of which is, of course, $20 million.”

The Air Force settled out of court.

Welcome to planet Earth. Escarglow, anyone?

[via Slashdot - Radioactive Snails Crawl Up From Beneath]

Researchers have found that lab-grown neuron cultures tend to fire in bizarrely synchronized, dishwide waves, eerily echoing the neural patterns seen during Alzheimer’s disease.
“It’s possible that this is a state of arrested development,” Potter said, “or that the networks are asleep because they’re missing the parts (humans) use to wake up. It’s (also) possible that the networks are in some sort of epileptic state.”

Related: The Neurally Controlled Animat: Biological Brains Acting with Simulated Bodies (PDF),
MEART, Wikipedia (sparse) Animat topic.

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection – is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

I definitely believe that evolution is a valid scientific theory, with plenty of proof behind it, and also plenty of gaps in what we know and understand about it. I also believe that there is no way we, and most other forms of life on this planet, could have evolved entirely by random chance. God’s amazing handiwork is everywhere if you only open your eyes and look around with an open mind and heart.
On an unrelated note, if all goes well the Shuttle launches today at 05:50:53 p.m. South African time. Oh, for a proper NASA TV feed…