Odds & Sods For Tuesday, March 25th

Item The First: On the second episode of the new “Cosmos” series, Neil deGrasse Tyson opened the lesson on evolution by talking about how humans had artificially bred dogs from wolves. In talking about this, he pointed out that we have bred for cuteness in addition to breeding for utility. When The Long-Suffering Dog sits in “The Desk Cave” (she loves it under there when I’m working), I’m wondering if we can breed for dogs that fart less? And can we please do it quickly?

Item The Second: Again we’ve gotten so blase about manned spaceflight. I tuned in on NASA-TV tonight at 19:25 expecting a show to start at 19:30 with live coverage of the Expedition 39/40 crew docking with the International Space Station. Instead I saw that they were already live and a lot of folks were huddled in groups around Mission Control. This is never good.

As we now thing we know, there was just a problem with the third delta-V burn needed to match orbits with ISS, so the burn was cancelled and that meant an abort of the “express” six-hour rendezvous flight plan. The failure scenario o the six-hour flight plan is the old, tired-and-true two-day flight plan. Everyone’s fine, the launch was flawless, there’s no indication that it’s anything other than some sort of software error.

But it was startling how quickly my brain went into “Apollo 1,” “Apollo 13,” “Challenger,” “Columbia” mode.

Item The Third: My Twitter feed is full of comments tonight from planetary scientists and the like (@elakdawalla, @PlanetDr, @Alex_Parker, @RonBaalke) about a news article that’s been released early. I guess there’s a major announcement coming out tomorrow from ESO. I’m assuming they’re talking about the European Southern Observatory instead of the Elder Scrolls Online, but I might be wrong.

Anyway, a couple of media places have released the embargoed story early. A part of the response, a new Twitter hashtag has been born, and it’s pretty funny. Check out #ESOrumors to see what I’m talking about. For example, @mcnees said “Hey no biggie, and totally just out of curiosity, but exactly how many nuclear missiles do we have?” @danielg1905 suggested, “Stronomers: ‘We’re not saying it was aliens . . . but it was aliens.”

Item The Fourth: Speaking of “Cosmos,” it has upset a number of fundamentalist groups that claim that Fox owes them “equal time” to talk about “intelligent design” if “Cosmos” is going to give a “one-sided” view of the arguments on evolution. A few thoughts:

• This isn’t a political campaign, you have no right to “equal time.”
• Hypothetically and parenthetically, if you were to win “equal time,” would you in turn be forced to give “equal time” to scientists and rational thinkers as part of every television program put on by some megachurch evangelist (i.e., blackmailing for dollars)?
• Get over the “evolution is just a theory” argument! All it does is prove that you have no idea what the definition of “theory” means in a scientific discussion. Evolution is a “theory” the same way that gravity is and radioactive decay is. If you still don’t believe or understand, go jump off of a tall cooling tower into the core of a nuclear power plant. Enlightenment will await.
• Not only are you not entitled to “equal time,” neither are the Flat Earth Society, the Ptolemaic fundamentalists who still believe in epicycles, the Mayan fundamentalists who believe that human sacrifice appeases the sun gods, or the Hindu fundamentalists who think that the Earth is carried around the sun on the back of a giant turtle. It doesn’t matter how big of a turtle they find. (Although, to be fair, if they could find a turtle the size of Saturn or Jupiter, I would be happy to accept at least the possibility that their theory was relevant. But can you imagine how much lettuce that turtle would eat?)

Item The Fifth: It’s so neat that our space program has taught all of us space cadets how to spell “r-e-n-d-e-z-v-o-u-s”. Is that a great spinoff, or what?

Item The Sixth: Someone the other day wanted to draw me into a political argument, and it was an argument, not a discussion. I wasn’t taking the bait, but after being pressed a bit I put it this way: “I hate all politicians these days. I don’t trust a single one of them, either party, local, county, state, or federal. On a scale of one to ten, I hate the Democrats about a twelve. You just think I’m a ‘liberal’ because I hate the Republicans about a thirteen.”