Daily Archives: 2/4/2006

HOWTO propagate an urban legend

Boing Boing presented a link to this: HOWTO cook an egg with two mobile phones

The only problem?  It doesn’t work.  It can’t work.   Dan and his readers figured it out relatively simply: if you take the battery’s capacity, express that in calories, and then take the mass of the egg and figure out how much energy it takes to raise the egg 40 degrees Centigrade, then you realize that even with 100% conversion, it just ain’t gonna happen.

Shame on you Boing Boing.

Bush administration aggressively prosecutes war… on science.

It seems that a collection of public relations officers appointed by the Bush administration are giving NASA a black eye by trying to “recast” (if one is charitable) or “rewrite” (if one is accurate) the scientific research that the technical staff at NASA produce.  In particular, Bush appointee George Deutsch pressured NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen to refrain from talking about global warming, threatening him with “dire consequences” if he continued.   He also worked to change the NASA website so that every mention of the Big Bang was changed to the Big Bang theory, since it was a just “a matter of opinion”.

Deutsch appears to be one of those people who think that the role of federal employees is to serve the commander in chief, when in reality they are supposed to serve the people of this nation and uphold the Constitution.

Phil Plait is even angrier than I, so go read his blog for more info.

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