Friday, April 22, 2005
1. EVOLUTION: DISCOVERY INSTITUTE FINDS A SCIENTIST TO DEBATE.
The National Press Club in Washington, DC is a good place to hold a press conference. If a group can make its message look like an important story, it can get national coverage. The message of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute is simple: "Intelligent Design is science." That's bull feathers of course, but that's why they have PR people. Science is what scientists do, so they gotta look like scientists. Nothing can make you look more like a scientist than to debate one. Scam artists all use the "debate ploy": perpetual-motion-machine inventors, magnet therapists, UFO conspiracy theorists, all of them. They win just by being on the same platform. So, the Discovery Institute paid for prominent biologist Will Provine, the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences at Cornell, to travel to Washington to debate one of the Discovery Institute's "kept" PhDs, Stephen Meyer, at the National Press Club on Wednesday. It was sparsely attended. Most were earnest, well-scrubbed, clean-cut young believers, who smiled, nodded in agreement and applauded at all the right times. The debate was not widely advertized. I'm not sure they really wanted a lot of hot-shot reporters asking hard questions. The only reporter was from UPI, which is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, a spiritual partner of the Discovery Institute. The next day I searched on Google for any coverage of the debate. The only story I could find was in the Washington Times, a newspaper owned by - the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
2. METHYL TERTIARY BUTYL ETHER: THE SMELL IS COMING FROM TEXAS.
Does your water smell like kerosene? Don't worry, it's just a gasoline additive, MTBE, meant to reduce emissions. It finds its way into groundwater. The energy bill that just passed the House would immunize the producers from law suits. The House tried the same thing in 2003 (WN 02 Jan 04). It wound up killing the bill in the Senate. You better hope it does again, because the rest of the bill smells worse than MTBE. The president admits the bill will do nothing to reduce the price of gasoline, nor will it reduce dependence on foreign oil.
3. RHIC: NEW RESULTS INDICATE SOMETHING INTERESTING IS HAPPENING.
If it's time for a new energy bill, it must be time for some amazing new results to come out of energy laboratories, and behold, the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, RHIC, may have created a quark-gluon plasma in the collision of gold ions. Or maybe it didn't, because a clear signature for such a state is not really known. But it did make some really dense stuff that seems to behave more liquid-like than gas-like, with very low viscosity. And all of this might be related to string theory.
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