Tag Archives: Science

New Moon == New Earth?

Posted on by Brad Heap

The news that NASA’s impact with the moon failed to create the huge dust cloud that was predicted has left me wondering if that is evidence that the moon is a lot younger than previous thought. And if this is true then could it also hold that the earth is also a lot younger than the commonly held thought.

Now first I will give a disclaimer I am no moon or space expert, I only hold a passing interest in the subject, and I am happy to be corrected or proved wrong on any scientific information I present below.

Until this morning the view was that the moon was covered in a huge amount of dust (and potentially ice) built up over many millions of years by collisions with space objects (comets and the like), so like the sand on a beach covers the real surface sometimes to metres deep, the moon dust acted like sand and covered the real surface of the moon by many metres of dust.

However the failure to kick up this dust may suggest a few things.

  • The moon is not as old as we expected and therefore there is a lot less dust on the planet.
  • The dust on the moon is a lot stronger than we expected, therefore the chemical bonds and electrostatic bonds between each piece of dust is much stronger than we expected and therefore there was less of a dust storm (a lot like how mud is a lot more sticky than dry dirt)
  • That the ice inside the dust made the dust a lot more sticky than we were expecting.
  • Although the moon collects dust over time there may have been much bigger collisions in the past that have kicked a lot of this dust back into space, so while the moon acts as a giant vacuum cleaner stopping things hitting earth, it may every so often get its own bag emptied with a huge collision.
  • The dust on the moon accumulates much slower than we expected, this could mean there have been less collisions with the moon in the past then what we see today.

My personal preference is for the first idea to hold true, that would give creationists a much stronger leg to stand on if they can show the moon is a lot younger than we thought it was, however, at the same time I am very interested in if any my other ideas hold water. NASA will hopefully reveal some more info on what happened and while the dust cloud didn’t arrive as expected in the next few days, I am hoping it is exciting rather than just another typically NASA we stuffed up moment like has happened plenty of times before.

NASA Fail

Posted on by Brad Heap

So if you didn’t know already late last night NASA deliberately crashed two probes into the moon to try and kick up a dust cloud hopefully containing water. It turns out it was an epic failure with nothing happening.

The spacecraft ploughed into a 60-mile-wide crater called Cabeus, which is permanently in shade at the lunar south pole. Scientists believe the crater may contain frozen water and expected it to be kicked up by the impact. One theory is that the impact site was unexpectedly hard and that rock and soil gouged out by the impact failed to rise high enough to be lit up by sunlight.

“If it turns out to be as dull as it looked, I’d imagine the soil just didn’t respond as was hoped to being hit,” said Vincent Eke, an astronomer at the University of Durham who helped Nasa choose the impact site. “It might mean we don’t get sufficient data, which would be a shame,” he added.

So all those people who called Nasa’s headquarters in Washington DC with a flood of calls from people objecting to the agency “bombing” the moon, fearing disruption to tides on Earth and even their menstrual cycles have nothing to worry about.

But NASA have some explaining to why their predicted impact that would throw up a six-mile-high cloud of lunar dust and rock which could be scanned for evidence of frozen water didn’t happen.

It just goes to show we do not know as much about the world as what we think we do and we should never taken anything in science as fact, it is all theory until a new theory replaces it.

Climate Change in NZ

Posted on by Brad Heap

I read the snow.co.nz forums quite a bit, and was interested to see a discussion today regarding skiing in the kaimai’s and other areas of the North Island in the past. As part of this discussion one of the forum users posted this image from NIWA showing temperature in NZ over the last 150 years.

Now I am not one to take a chart at face value so I went hunting around the NIWA website to find the source of the data etc and came across this page: http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/information-and-resources/clivar/pastclimate

Now the interesting thing about this chart is it is not based on predictions of the past. It is based on actual records as noted here:

Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2007 inclusive, based on between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the 1971 – 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted line is the linear trend over 1908 to 2007 (0.92°C/100 years).

Further interesting notes are the more recent history.

Points of interest since 1990 include the cool period in 1992-93 associated with the injection of small particles high into the atmosphere by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, and the high temperature in 1998 (the warmest year for New Zealand since measurements began). The 1998 warming was apparent in the Tasman Sea to considerable depth (Sutton et al., 2005; Bowen et al., 2006) and happened to coincide with the end of an El Niño event when New Zealand temperatures are usually below normal.

This whole data set is interesting for a number of reasons. The first is that is shows the increase in air temp in NZ over the last one hundred and fifty years as measured – this is important because almost all other charts that you see are based on predicted temp. The second is that it shows quite interesting the end of the little ice age in 1850 and the subsequent heating of the earth.

Now how this relates to global warming is even more interesting. And this is where this chart comes in:

Wiki Climate Change

This is the average temperature of the world over the last 150 years again based on actual data (thanks wiki: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Temp-sunspot-co2.svg)

If there was ever a time to sign on to lower C02 levels then now must be it. Visit http://www.signon.org.nz and sign on. Do it.

World’s Biggest Brick

Posted on by Brad Heap

The LHC has been delayed yet again with yet another failure.

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/article?issue=30/2009&name=CERNBulletin&category=News%20Articles&number=3&ln=en

During the past week vacuum leaks have been found in two “cold” sectors of the LHC. The leaks were found in Sectors 8-1 and 2-3 while they were being prepared for the electrical tests on the copper stabilizers at around 80 K. In both cases the leak is at one end of the sector, where the electrical feedbox, DFBA, joins Q7, the final magnet in the sector.

Unfortunately, the repair necessitates a partial warm-up of both sectors. This involves the end sub-sector being warmed to room temperature, while the adjacent sub-sector “floats” in temperature and the remainder of the sector is kept at 80 K. As the leak is from the helium circuit to the insulating vacuum, the repair work will have no impact on the vacuum in the beam pipe. However the intervention will have an impact on the schedule for the restart. It is now foreseen that the LHC will be closed and ready for beam injection by mid-November.

As the saying goes: if it scratchs and crawls its biology, if it pops and fizzys it is chemistry and if it doesn’t work it must be physics.

Target in the shitter.

Posted on by Brad Heap

The Herald reports on the false Target test that is looking like ruining a very good cafe in Ponsonby.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10581183

The owners of a Ponsonby cafe falsely accused by TV3′s Target show of serving contaminated food say the blunder has left them on the brink of bankruptcy.

The June 16 edition of the consumer show featured a hidden camera segment assessing the hygiene standards of eight Auckland cafes, and claimed chicken from Cafe Cezanne contained high levels of faecal coliforms.

This week TV3 released a statement on behalf of production company Top Shelf Productions admitting food samples from the cafes were incorrectly coded and they were unable to confirm which one had produced the contaminated food.

The statement said the employee in charge of labelling the samples had been sacked.

Releasing a statement, and sacking someone is simply not good enough. TV3 need to give the mistake at least twice the amount of airtime they gave to making the false accusation, and furthermore sacking someone is not the solution to the problem, it is the process that is at fault here.

Cafe Cezanne owners Rod Williams and Jackie Wilkinson said the “unbelievable” mistake had ruined their once-thriving business and they had taken legal advice on their next step.

“If it carries on this way we are going to go bankrupt,” Williams said.

“Our meals are quite reasonably priced and we go for volume in our cafe, but things have been so much quieter.

“We are pretty disappointed and our staff are very upset by everything.”

The cafe received an A grade rating during a food and safety inspection by the Auckland City Council last month.

I have been to Cezanne many times over the years, and it is one of the best cafes in Ponsonby. It is well known for its good priced food, and friendly atmosphere, and the fact that it got an A only a month ago suggests that Target stuffed up big time.

Both owners said the mistake was unforgivable and wanted to know more about how it had happened.

Wilkinson said they contacted Target before the show aired to say there was a mistake with the food sample.

“We knew there were a few errors in their facts but they went ahead anyway and we have noticed a serious downturn in clientele since then,” she said. “Then they come out with an apology but it’s too late. It’s shocking.

“We’re usually busy through the week, on weekends and in the evenings but now it’s really quiet.

“Sometimes we hear people walking past and saying ‘That was the dirty place on Target‘. It’s horrible.”

Okay this is where the shit really sticks to Target. Cezanne told them that it must be wrong, and coming back after the fact with a statement is no apology. It appears that Target is out to rack mud onto people deliberately, the show is no longer about consumer affairs but more about ruining people for the sake of entertainment.

Target executive producer Laurie Clarke said the mistake was “embarrassing” but was satisfied it was down to a single employee.

“We had followed basic procedure but fell down when it came to labelling the samples,” he said. “Of course it is embarrassing for us. We are a programme that critiques the performances of other industries so we have to maintain a high standard ourselves.”

Restaurant Association chief executive Alistair Rowe said the mistake was “irresponsible” and had destroyed the owners’ livelihood.

“It should have been obvious it was falsely contaminated food because it came back with a very high number for contamination – it was almost pure poo,” he said.

Anyone who has done any studies in Science will know that you test, test again, and test again until you get consistent and reasonable results. Surely if a result was almost pure poo it would raise alarm bells. How do we know Target has not been planting samples for the sake of good (or bad) tv?

“In my opinion Target deserves to get sued, and I will personally stand there in court and clap if they do.

“To get something like this wrong is just plain irresponsible.”

This issue is so many times worse than the issue with the Warehouse PJs from a few years ago, at least that test had some basis to it they just got the figures massively out of proportion. This is just outright defamation, and false accusations. Target owe Cezanne a lot more than an applogy, when the media can make or break companies the media must act with all due care to ensure that what it reports is the absolute truth. I hope the Cezanne win any legal battle, that Target do the right thing and broadcast a long and sustained apology and change their ways, and I hope the Broadcasting Standards Authority also takes steps to prevent this unnecessary destruction of a buisness happening again.

Update: here is the BSA report from last time: http://www.bsa.govt.nz/decisions/2007/2007-114.htm

And the media from last time: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10458951 and http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/11155

Brainy children ‘likely to vote Green’

Posted on by Brad Heap

From: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5068743.ece

Cleverer children are more likely to vote for the Green Party or the Liberal Democrats in a general election than other parties when they become adults, research suggests. The study, by the University of Edinburgh and the UK Medical Research Council and published in the journal Intelligence, indicates that childhood IQ is as important as social class in determining political allegiance. The IQs of more than 6,000 subjects were recorded at the age of 10, before any secondary schooling. Twenty-four years later they were asked about their voting habits.

Science Millionaire

Posted on by Brad Heap

While I was bored an browsing the Internet I came across a science version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

http://education.jlab.org/million/index.html

The first time I played I got to $32,000 and dropped out on the $64,000 question by not thinking out the question right. Perimeter is the sums of the sides not just the length of one side! doh!

My second time around was even worse dropping out on the second question after I couldn’t remember how many continents there are. I got six because I was confused if North and South America was one or two continents.

My third time around I cracked the 1 Million. Got through reasonably easily until the final question where I made sure I used all my lifelines to be absolutely correct. All in all a lot of fun. Give it a try.

God and Science

Posted on by Brad Heap

People often try and use science to prove the existence of God. By using creation science or intelligent design theory these scientists try to prove God by using overwhelming statistical data. By doing this creation scientists believe that they can disprove other theories on the origin of humanity, specifically evolution.

Using science to prove God will not fully show who God is. Actually it will show very little of him. This is because if God created science then, despite what some people believe, God is not bound by science. To explain this in the context of everyday life take the example of a man building a shed. The man builds the shed, but the man is not bound inside the shed that he built.

So using this reasoning, in the beginning… God creates science and man creates a shed. Science shows God’s creation and the shed shows man’s creation. Science is an example of God’s creativity and the shed is an example of man’s creativity. However, the shed does not completely describe man’s creativity, let alone everything about the man. In the same way science does not completely describe God’s creativity, let alone everything about God.

You see in the same way the man and the shed are different, one being the direct result of the other, God and science are different. Science cannot completely describe God because God is more than just science. When we realise that God is not bound by human constraints we will begin to understand that God is the only logical explanation of how we can exist.