… and it’s a BIG step. Bill Foster just won the seat for the House of Representatives!

W00t!

Foster is a scientist, a physicist who worked at Fermilab, and I mentioned him briefly in an earlier post. I just heard from Darksyde and Sean Carroll that Foster won the special election in IL-14 despite steep odds, and a concerted effort by the NRCC to stop him.

This is fantastic news. The only thing that would be better would be if this were for a full term, but unfortunately it’s only to replace Dennis Hastert in a special election (who resigned amidst a lot of controversy in his involvement with the Abramoff scandal and Tom Delay’s shenanigans), so we’ll have to do it again in November. Feh.

In the meantime, though, I hope that Representative Foster can inject a much-needed dose of science advocacy into Congress.

Congratulations, Representative!

Daylight savings time, blah blah blah.

Spring forward, fall back, blah blah blah.

OK, fine. Tonight at 2:00 a.m. you’re supposed to set your clocks forward an hour and pretend like 2:00:00 to 02:59:59 never existed. Or you can do like me, forget all about it, stumble around in the morning without looking at the clocks, turn on the TV and realize you missed something you wanted to see, then stomp around the house resetting the clocks, then swear like a sailor when you accidentally set one three minutes ahead of the correct time and then have to hold down the "time" and the "fast" button for another 30 seconds while they cycle through an entire day, then realize ten minutes later you set yours but not your wife’s, and then swear again.

I’ve always disliked and distrusted Daylight Saving Time. At least now, according to Astroprof, I have a legitimate reason.

Congress. Setting back clocks for decades now.

I wrote about the discovery of possible rings around Saturn’s moon Rhea last week… and now Emily has the actual data. I’ll say, to my eye — and I’ve examined a lot of plots like that — that’s pretty convincing evidence that something is going on. I’d like to see corroborating data, but this is certainly enough to be interesting.

In the plot on Emily’s page, the dips in the number of electons counted shows where the rings may be. They also have a diagram where the rings are shown as circles, and the fit isn’t great. I wonder if anyone tried fitting similar ellipses? I’ll have to poke around and find out.

I’m lazy, and don’t feel like doing anything original right now. Plus I’m planning for The Little Astronomer’s slumber party tonight, and about to have nine 12-year-old girls descend on Chez BA. So, here are some things I found around the web to entertain you.

1) I hate to link to Dilbert, because Scott Adams is an antiscience twinkie, but when you read this strip you’ll see why I linked to it.

2) An Ontario all-sky camera caught a pretty cool bolide streaking across the sky.

3) An attosecond is 10^-18 seconds, which is an incredibly short period of time. Engineers have created a laser which can send out a pulse of light just 170 attoseconds long. Turns out that is about the same amount of time it takes an electron to move around the nucleus of an atom, so they have used this laser as a strobe to freeze the action of a moving electron. The video (avi or mov) is… odd. But cool.

4) Are plastic bags the scourge so many people say they are? This article says the claim that they kill millions of animals is totally false. Such things have happened before, so my bull detector isn’t going off. But it doesn’t say anything about how they are made and how they are disposed of, which also play into this.

That’s it for now. I’m off to the party store to get festive plates and earplugs. TTFN.

I happened to notice I was getting some traffic sent my way from Voxday, an ultraconservative blogger who has a history of saying ridiculous things — sometimes so ridiculous it’s indistinguishable from satire. Unfortunately, of course, willful ignorance has quite an audience these days, and just in case it’s not satire, I decided to reply.

He was writing about my blog post where I discussed the WMAP results showing the age of the universe, and that normal matter and energy are only 5% of what we can directly see:

The Bad Astronomer doesn’t realize that science is undermining the basis for materialism:

The energy budget of the Universe is the total amount of energy and matter in the whole cosmos added up. Together with some other observations, WMAP has been able to determine just how much of that budget is occupied by dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. What they got was: the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe.

In other words, even by its own lights, science and rational materialist philosophy is only relevant to five percent of what we currently consider to be all known Creation. Combined with its complete inapplicability to abstract concepts such as justice, equality and freedom, this shows that even attempting to build a social order on a secular basis is not only doomed to failure, but is quite arguably insane.

Insane? Only if your grip on reality is tenuous in the first place.

I wrote a comment back to him on his blog entry. Here is what I said:

Your conclusions are way off the mark, for two reasons: you misinterpreted/misunderstood what scientists did, and then you misapplied it.

First, 5% of the Universe is normal matter and energy. About 23% or so is dark matter. While we don’t know precisely what it’s made of, its existence has been conclusively proven, and it was using scientific methods that proved it (its existence was speculated due to odd motions of galaxies, its impact on observations predicted and then confirmed).

Same with dark energy. We don’t know what it is, but scientific observations and prediction show us it exists. We have independent lines of evidence for it now as well.

It’s not just to balance the equations. We have actual observations showing these things exist, just like we have observations that electrons and neutrinos exist.

So actually, “science and rational materialist philosophy” applies to the whole Universe.

Second, evolutionary biology does in fact explain our concepts of justice, equality, and freedom. Just because you say it doesn’t doesn’t mean it doesn’t. We evolved these concepts as prehistoric humans and the species we evolved from developed into tribal cultures. Those concepts helped ensure our survival, so we adapted to include them in our daily lives.

Third, about building a secular society… The US, despite claims by the far right, actually was and is built on a secular basis, and that is not only written in the Constitution, but in the very first right it lays out. Secular in this case doesn’t mean non-religious, it means not favoring any particular religion.

That’s the way it should be.

It’s clear to me that you don’t really understand anything at all about science, the scientific method, and how successful it is in understanding the world and universe around us. There are many books and websites devoted to just these topics; before drawing wildly inaccurate conclusions based on scant reading, you should research these topics.

Some of his commenters on that post basically parrot his own words, and grossly misunderstand what the WMAP results mean, so it’ll be be interesting to see what they reply.