Friday, February 1, 2008
It will start next week. Issues of support need to be resolved. Except
for the week the tree fell, it will be the first break WN has taken in 25
years. We'll be back when we can. I appreciate all 1274 opportunities
I've had to share my concerns with you - there is much to be concerned
about.
I was invited this week to join a panel of "experts" on "It's Your Call
with Lynn Doyle," an Emmy Award-winning, viewer-interactive news talk show
on the Comcast Cable Television Network. The subject was "Are we alone?"
The object was to increase advertising revenue by pandering to a public
that lives in a mythical world. I was the token scientist; Ted Schick, a
philosophy professor from Muhlenberg, was the other rationalist. Then
there was a delusional M.D. who saw lights she couldn't explain over
Phoenix, and the delusional head of the Paradigm Research Group, devoted
to exposing the imaginary UFO cover-up. But the "experts" hardly
mattered; the stars were the callers, with tales of strange lights and
space aliens who can walk through walls. Is that really possible? "Of
course it is," a caller explained, "quantum physics has proven it." The
aliens, another cautioned, may be in another dimension - "there are eleven
you know." What have we done?
An extensive study relating the information that could be obtained from
the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) to that from the National
Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) has
just found its way into the sunshine. This hugely-important study not
only confirms the Earth-observation potential of the Lagrange-1 vantage
point, it's the first crack in the wall of secrecy that has kept the
DSCOVR scandal hidden from the public. Eight years of critical data on
global warming has already been lost while DSCOVR languishes in a
Greenbelt, Md dungeon. Its sin was a thing with Al Gore. Another
unreleased study finds the cost to launch DSCOVR, already built and paid
for, would be a small fraction of NASA estimates.
Launched in December, more than 12,000 people and 57 organizations signed
on to urge that science be the subject of a presidential debate
(WN 14 Dec 07) . On Monday, the
Council on Competitiveness joined the AAAS in becoming an official
cosponsor of Science Debate 2008.
The morning ABC News had an a commercial for the Oprah Winfrey Show about
a guest on her show today, an NFL player who had a serious injury and was
told he would never walk again. He now walks fine. She said it was
a "miracle." She uses the word a lot, but there are no miracles in
science. The correct word is "misdiagnosis."
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