What is wrong here?

A london bus has this advert on its side. Can any one spot why it won't work.

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Google is in on the Conspiracy

Google seems to be in on the Apollo conspiracy as you can see in this video from youtube

It is funny, alas if only there weren't people out there who took it seriously.

Thanks to the Bad Astronomer for pointing this out

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92nd Skeptics' Circle is up

Wow and it is a good one, go over to Lay Science and enjoy the Ideology Olympics edition of the Skeptics circle.

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Facts and opinions

When reality is being gotten down here is a very pithy comeback:

You’re entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts.

This was uttered by US Sen. Joe Biden to fellow Sen. Lindsey Graham on the Meet The Press show, and thanks to Atheist Revolution for pointing it out.

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Teach the Controversy

Hmmm maybe we should be teaching the controversy, well you know if there was one.

'Big Science' is always suppressing The Truth with their blatant pro-evolution anti-wacko agenda: from the fact that UFOs built the pyramids to the reality of creationism and fact the universe is "Turtles All The Way Down". It is time to fight back and urge schools to Teach The Controversy with these intelligently designed t-shirts.

I want the Turtles one!


Thanks to Vicki Hyde of the NZ Skeptics for the link

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new skeptics circle

The latest edition of the skeptics circle is out and about at sorting out science, it all looks like some good reading, so I hope to see you there

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Global Warming and the Sun

Well there was an opinion piece in my local daily (well ok to be fair I don't know if it made the press version but it was front and centre on the webpage this morning) and it was about global warming, and while it was not outright denying it (nobody who is anybody does that any more not even George W. Bush) it takes a look at the solar influences and presents them as the dominant factor.

Before I say more about the article I would like to mention that one of my supervisors does research on Solar Flares and how they effect the atmosphere (in particular the ionosphere), and as solar flares are caused by sunspots, this leads to me have a pretty good idea of the solar cycle.

So when Professor Geoff Kearsley (of the Department of Media, Film and Communication, though to be fair according the article a geographer by training) claims that anthropocentric claims about climate change are "distorted by dogma" and the real driving forces such as the sun are being ignored. I want to scream and tear my hair out, both about those that claim the mantle of Climate skeptics (not so much driven by the article - but it is related) and about the relationship between temperature and solar activity (as defined in the usual way by sunspot number).

I will address the skeptics point first - anyone who claims to be a skeptic of something just because they disagree with it is should really be named as what they are contrarian. I suppose a lot of the general public get the wrong idea when all the media does with respect to skeptics is give them a brief quote anti to any of the journalists favourite quackery - such as psychics.

But a skeptic is one who looks at the evidence for any phenomena (and the quality of evidence which is very important) before making up his mind. So if there was concrete evidence for psychics, or for homeopathy, or what ever then the skeptics would be behind such things rather than against them.

As such I will proudly call my self a climate skeptic despite the fact that I am completely swayed by the facts that it is a man-made phenomenon. That is right I just said that we are causing climate change.

And my response to the good professor is has he seen the image at the top of this post. Ok it is old data now (from an article in 2004 - which should be available here but you will need a subscription - if you are desperate to see a copy just ask), but the point it makes (and I apologise if it may be a bit hard to make out some of it this was pinched out of one of my supervisors presentations and I will try and extract it anew from the original) is the the global temperature in recent times (the green and blue lines and the plot is over the last 300 years) follows reasonably (although with a little lag) the red line which is the smoothed trend for sunspot cycle length (orange line) up until approximately the 1950s at which point the temperature leaves the cycle of sunspots behind and increases.

This would tend to indicate that even if more recent data might show a slight dip in the trend in the past couple of years, that there has been a shift in the global temperature response to the solar cycle. More recent data may show (and I haven't seen any) a change in the trend but that does not deny the massive change in temperature compared to solar cycle activity that has occurred in the last 50 years, the point of this being if this abnormally long solar cycle (which has officially ended now) is visible in the temperature trend it is unlikely to have had a big effect as it would have without the effect of the industrialization of our planet.

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Sugar in the Morning

I've never really been a big fan of the whole artificial sweetner thing. And now it seems as if replacing the sugar in your diet can be a bad thing.

A study by Purdue University researchers that came out in February links artificial sweetners to weight gain.

Why would a sugar substitute backfire? Swithers and Davidson wrote that sweet foods provide a “salient orosensory stimulus” that strongly predicts someone is about to take in a lot of calories. Ingestive and digestive reflexes gear up for that intake but when false sweetness isn’t followed by lots of calories, the system gets confused. Thus, people may eat more or expend less energy than they otherwise would.

Now to be fair this research was done on rats, and not humans but as Cliff Mintz of BioJobBlog notes

Although this study was conducted in rats, its findings are consistent with the observations that increased use of artificial sweeteners can contribute to human weight gain.

As always more study is going to be needed on this and in particular human studies, so time will tell.

Thanks to Science to Life for the hot tip

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Its about time

It appears that Obama has finally beaten Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Why on Earth did this process take so bloody long, why can't all those little states get their acts together and vote over a time period that isn't 6 months.

Seriously they could do it all on one day (as we will see in November) but if they want to take a bit of time, why not 1 - 2 weeks, surely with all the campaigning that happened before the the first of the primaries would that not be enough time to shake some hands and kiss some babies? Or if you are a republican shake some babies and kiss some hands.

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Dirty Limericks and Skeptics

Well I'll be that sounds like just the best combination ever and it can be found in the 87th skeptics circle of at Action Skeptics, go and enjoy if you dare.

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