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http://enemiesofreason.blogspot.com/2009/12/cough-syrup-confusion.html Sometimes you don't need to be a brilliant scientist to detect a whiff of bullshit when it appears in newspapers under the guise of health advice. Take this article in the Mail:  The intro appears to be saying: people have looked at the evidence around some of these remedies, and tested them, and found they're not as good as you might think. So why not try these untested and unproven remedies instead! For a start, is this even news? Well:  That report from USA Today, you'll have noticed, is dated 2006. But the Mail appears to be regarding this as a current story, and has decided the best way of informing its readers about what's really effective in fighting a cough is to decide that they'd like to hear about herbal and homeopathic remedies instead, with unproven claims parroted unquestioningly by the writer. Is that really what readers want? Well, who knows, but: Here are five options to soothe nasty coughs would seem to imply that these aren't just pretty liquids in bottles with herbs in them, or water-memory stuff, or whatever, but things that will/might/could soothe nasty coughs. Despite that, the packaging on the remedies is a lot more coy, only saying "based on traditional use only" in the case of the Kaloba Oral Drops, "apparently used by Zulus for thousands of years as a remedy for upper respiratory tract infections". Well if that's not nailed-down proof that that'll soothe a nasty cough, I don't know what is. Hey, and it's only a bargain £14.99 a bottle, so why not get five? You can see the level of probing journalism that's been applied to these remedies by the objective and sceptical reporting of their effects:  That honey one doesn't even mention anything about coughs. Still, it's only a bargain £7.82 for a bottle, so it's worth stocking up with a dozen to see you through Christmas and the New Year. Finally there's Seagate Olive Leaf Throat Spray, at a cheap-as-chips £5.71 for 30ml: a combination of three natural antibacterials: olive-leaf extract homeopathic remedy Baptista tinctoria and Xylitol So artificial sweetener, water, and a bit of leaf extract. I suppose you pays your money, you takes your choice: but the Mail have unhelpfully not pointed you in the direction of any choice, preferring to state unchallenged the claims made by these remedies without wondering whether they do any good (or harm) or not. Who wants to ask those awkward questions about things? Certainly not journalists. I know there's a school of thought that says that journalists, not being scientists and having probably done inferior humanities degrees at former Polytechnics for god's sake, are confused by things like this and are a bit bewildered by it, so you can't blame them too much for getting it so wrong. I disagree with that kind of pomposity for a start, but I have another problem with it. You don't even have to be particularly bright or inquisitive to see that something's up with this, with the unquestioning presentation of unproven claims, with the legitimisation of stuff that perhaps doesn't always deserve to be legitimised, with the offering of stuff that's unproven as an alternative to stuff that has been tested. That runs contrary to any sensible journalistic instinct. And besides, we all know the best thing for a cough is a large glass of whisky. (It might not make the cough any better, but with a bit of lucky you'll be too pissed to care.)
A couple of interesting screenshots of recently encountered FAIL. The first is from the BBC News Scotland website, where you would think they had some understanding of the geography of our fine nation.  It looks as if they just took a photo from the window. The second is something that came up in my Amazon recommendations. The reasoning they give for recommending it is bizarre. I think what it means is that they can recommend it because they know I have the tools with which to kill myself after attempting to use the recommended product:  Yes, that must be it. Update: Should those of you with Cheezburger accounts wish to vote on the top one, here you are.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BadAstronomyBlog/~3/Q2mA8UkRANY/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/?p=8718  Five years ago today — on December 27, 2004 — the Earth was attacked by a cosmic blast.
The scale of this onslaught is nearly impossible to exaggerate. The flood of gamma and X-rays that washed over the Earth was detected by several satellites designed to observe the high-energy skies. RHESSI, which observes the Sun, saw this blast. INTEGRAL, used to look for gamma rays from monster black holes, saw this blast. The newly-launched Swift satellite, built to detect gamma-ray bursts from across the Universe, not only saw this blast, but its detectors were completely saturated by the assault of energy… even though Swift wasn’t pointed anywhere near the direction of the burst! In other words, this flood of photons saturated Swift even though they had to pass through the walls of the satellite itself first!
It gets worse. This enormous wave of fierce energy was so powerful it actually partially ionized the Earth’s upper atmosphere, and it made the Earth’s magnetic field ring like a bell. Several satellites were actually blinded by the event.
So what was this thing? What could do this kind of damage?
Astronomers discovered quickly just what this was, though when they figured it out they could scarcely believe it. On that day, half a decade ago, the wrath of the magnetar SGR 1806-20 was visited upon the Earth.
Magnetars are neutron stars, the incredibly dense remnants of a supernovae explosions. They can have masses up to twice that of the Sun, but are so compact they may be less than 20 kilometers (12 miles) across. A single cubic centimeter of neutron star material would have a mass of 1014 grams: 100 million tons. That’s very roughly the combined mass of every single car on the United States, squeezed down into the size of a sugar cube. The surface gravity of a neutron star is therefore unimaginably strong, tens or even hundreds of billion times that of the Earth.
 What makes a neutron star a magnetar is its magnetic field: it may be a quadrillion (1015) times stronger than that of the Earth! That makes the magnetic field of a magnetar as big a player as the gravity. In a magnetar, the magnetic field and the crust of the star are coupled together so strongly that a change in one affects the other drastically. What happened that fateful day on SGR 1806-20 was most likely a star quake, a crack in the crust. This shook the magnetic field of the star violently, and caused an eruption of energy.
The sheer amount energy generated is difficult to comprehend. Although the crust probably shifted by only a centimeter, the incredible density and gravity made that a violent event well beyond anything we mere humans have experienced. The quake itself would have registered as 32 on the Richter scale — mind you, the largest earthquake ever recorded was about 9 on that scale, and it’s a logarithmic scale. The blast of energy surged away from the magnetar, out into the galaxy. In just 200 milliseconds — a fifth of a second — the eruption gave off as much energy as the Sun does in a quarter of a million years.
 A fireball of matter erupted out of the star at nearly a third the speed of light, and the energy from the explosion moved — of course — at the speed of light itself. This hellish wave of energy expanded, eventually sweeping over the Earth and causing all the events described above.
Oh, and did I mention this magnetar is 50,000 light years away? No? That’s 500 quadrillion kilometers (300 quadrillion miles) away, about halfway across the freaking Milky Way galaxy itself!
And yet, even at that mind-crushing distance, it fried satellites and physically affected the Earth. It was so bright some satellites actually saw it reflected off the surface of the Moon! I’ll note that a supernova, the explosion of an entire star, has a hard time producing any physical effect on the Earth if it’s farther away than, say, 100 light years. Even a gamma-ray burst — an event so horrific it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up just thinking about it — can only do any damage if it’s closer than 8000 light years or so. GRBs may not even be possible in our galaxy (they were common when the Universe was young, but not so much any more), which means that, for my money, magnetars may be the most dangerous beasties in the galaxy (though still unlikely to really put the hurt on us; see below).
Here’s what Swift detected at the moment of the burst:
As Swift scientist David Palmer describes:
This is the light curve that [Swift's Burst Alert Telescope] saw, showing how many gamma rays it counted in each sixteenth of a second during six minutes of observation. I didn’t draw the main spike because it was 10,000 times as bright as the tail emission, and you would need a monitor a thousand feet tall to look at it.
The blast was so strong Swift saturated, counting 2.5 million photons per second slamming into it, well off the top of that graph (and the actual blast was far brighter yet, as other satellites were able to determine).
See the pulsations in the plot? After the initial burst, which lasted only a fraction of a second, pulses of energy were seen from the magnetar for minutes afterward. The pulses occurred every 7.56 seconds, and that’s understood to be the rotation period of the neutron star. The crack in the crust got infernally hot, and we saw a pulse of light from it every time it spun into view. This same pulsing was seen by other satellites as well.
The damage from the explosion was actually rather minimal here on Earth. But that’s because SGR 1806-20 is 50,000 light years away. Had it been one-tenth that distance, the effects would have been 100 times stronger. We’d have lost satellites at least, and it would have caused billions of dollars in damage in NASA hardware alone. Of the dozen or so known magnetars, none is that close (though a couple are about 7000 light years away). Magnetars aren’t easy to hide, but it’s possible there are some within 5000 light years. It’s unlikely, though, and I’m not personally all that concerned.
I do have one thing to add: when this event occurred, I got an email from someone convinced that the magnetar was responsible for the earthquake in Indonesia that created the devastating tsunami that killed more than 250,000 people. However, there is one small problem with that idea. Well, two problems, really, the first being there’s no physical way it could have triggered an earthquake! But a worse problem is that the earthquake occurred on December 26th at 00:58 UT, and the burst from the magnetar was at December 27 at 21:30:26 UT, about 1.5 days later. Oops.
But why let facts get in the way of a good pseudoscientific theory?
The tantrum from SGR 1806-20 is one of the best studied events of its kind, and is certainly the most powerful ever detected in the modern era. Astronomers will be studying the magnetar, and others like it, very carefully to see what can be learned from them. If you want to read more, then I suggest the NASA page about the event, as well as the Sky and Telescope magazine page on it, too.
And if another blast like that one comes from SGR 1806, or any other magnetar, don’t worry: I’ll report it right here. Unless it fries my computer. Or just my brain, reading about it.
Image credits: NASA
This year, following a random link from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) neadods, I have followed the Organised Christmas: Houseworks Holiday Plan. Well, I say, followed but I rapidly concluded that the people the website was aimed at had considerably more free time, and less need of a plan for organisation than I did. My favourite bit of entirely ignored advice was the suggestion that you make a decoration plan for each room of the house, not just for Christmas, but for your Autumn Theme house decoration and your Halloween Theme house decoration and so forth. Anyway the tips that were definitely worth following, for my future reference and in case anyone is interested, were: ( Notes for next year )NB. We had a lovely Christmas, and though I'm complaining about our families' joint ability to mess up our plans it was, in fact great to have a house full of people just generally having a good time... and I did manage to persuade them to delay the pancake making until Boxing Day so the kitchen was marginally less chaotic at 8am on Christmas morning than it threatened to be.
I have absolutely NO INTEREST in Dr. Who. Or perhaps slightly more than in Farmville, but that's pushing it. Right, I have an episode of Spooks to get back to. In season 6, they develop this shadowy SMERSH or THRUSH-style international conspiracy of Illuminati types. Sigh.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BadAstronomyBlog/~3/N0jBwI2Kswo/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/?p=9542 If you want to lose weight, then you should avoid this Ebay auction, where someone has a Higgs boson up for bids.
The Higgs boson, for those not up on their Standard Model of Particle Physics, is the subatomic particle that is theoretically responsible for giving all the other little particles their mass, and its detection is one of the main goals of the Large Hadron Collider. Come to think of it, the folks at CERN could’ve saved a lot of cash had they simply bid here instead of building a bazillion dollar machine to look for the Higgs. But then how would Brian Cox find work?
And I love that graphic. 10∞? That’s a big number. You’d think magnifying the Higgs by that amount would make it look bigger.
Anyway, read the whole thing, because it’s pretty funny. Of course, this is a joke, and Ebay will no doubt take it down soon, so look before it’s gone and you’re doomed to travel the Universe forever with your mass kicked.
Tip o’ the spin 1/2 lepton to BABloggee Martin Kielty.
But his bomb doesn't go off, and the other passengers beat the shit out of him. Looks like 9-11 galvanised people to take immedate action ha ha. His dad is a Nigerian banker. (He has a large sum he needs to move, if you send him your bank details he will deposit 15% of it in your account). If this is Al Qaeda, they aren't very competent these days. I guess it's just as well they aren't taking lessons from people in Belfast... Everyone remember the idiot who tried to bomb Glasgow airport with a car on fire, and the baggage handler wallopped the living crap out of him while he was still on fire? You can become a fan of the Dutch guy who stopped the guy, Jasper Schuringa, on facebook, btw. I suggest you do so.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BadAstronomyBlog/~3/lWtTzVMoQ7s/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/?p=9499 [It was either that title or "E-ring in the New Year".]
Here’s an unusual shot from the Cassini spacecraft: Saturn’s faint, diffuse E ring, seen almost edge-on:
I like this picture! First, we’re used to seeing Saturn’s rings looking sharp and well-defined, but this ring is fuzzy. It’s huge; it doesn’t even start until well outside the main rings, about 130,000 km (78,000 miles) above Saturn’s cloud tops, and is 300,000 km (180,000 miles) across! It’s thought that the ice particles in the ring are supplied by geysers from the moon Enceladus.
Second, we’re also used to seeing pictures of Saturn sitting in inky darkness. Saturn, its rings, and most of its moons are very bright, far brighter than the background stars. Exposing the images correctly for Saturn means the stars don’t show up, so the background is black (though not always, as this nice shot of the Pleaides from Cassini attests). But the E-ring is so faint that a longer exposure was needed, and then the fainter stars show up in multitudes.
This image was taken when Cassini was 2.5 million km (1.5 million miles) from Saturn, which was far enough to fit in a good amount of the edge of the ring. I really love all the images Cassini takes, but it’s the more unusual ones I really enjoy. Here’s hoping we see lots more in 2010!
Related Post: Cassini Dances with Enceladus Once Again.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Christmas day was laid back, languid and lazy, and other words that begin with L. We had our multi-course dinner with elaborately set table and candlelight and very tasty it was too. We were rather full by the end, but not too full to enjoy my mother's home-made Christmas pudding. We also watched the entirety of season 5 of Spooks, which is even more preposterous than previous seasons, but, like 24, was still highly watchable. Season 5 was where the cast was joined by Hermione Norris, the ice queen from Cold Feet, iirc, who goes on to be an excellent ice queen in Spooks. (US readers, this series is called 'MI5' in the US). DH got me some really thoughtful gifts. He got me the Knitty Gritty book that I asked for, but also the Stitch 'n'Bitch guide, The Daily Mash annual, a collection of Charlie Brooker's articles and the Simon's Cat boo,k, these without prompting. He also gave me a 1500 piece jigsaw puzzle of a kitten :). My mum gave me a lovely fluffy cardi from Monsoon and a mini ogham stone to hang on the wall. She gave DH a bottle of single malt which he has been sampling and is very pleased with :). DH is highly amused with one of his gifts, Terry Turtle, a turtle that randomly yells out rude things like "Dickwad!" and "Fuckface!" while moving its feet when switched on. It has a switch that can be set at PG or 18+. We currently have it at 18+. I don't know about you but we both find this toy to be very very very funny. Today we stayed in bed til 1pm, and plan on eating yesterday's leftovers and watching another season of Spooks. We have no desire to go outside until the snow melts really. Ginger kitty spent a large part of yesterday sitting on my lap. She has decided that jumping up on my lap leads to cuddles and so does so at every opportunity. It's cute. There was, apparently, a Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special on last night, so am going to watch that now. No, I am not going to make DH watch it. That would be mean.
http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2526.html 
It's always a pain using different fonts in this comic, because the default font I chose is very legible at the quite small default type size,
and almost without exception any fancier font I want to use needs to be made larger just so you can read it. Which eats up a lot of the dialogue space.
If you weren't aware, by the way, technically a font refers to a particular size and style
of typeface, a typeface being
the entire collection of sizes and styles. So "Arial, 10 point, Roman" or "Arial, 12 point, italic" are fonts, whereas "Arial" is a typeface.
Not that anyone cares much about the distinction any more except for typographical enthusiasts. |
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