I have no independent knowledge of the veracity of this report, but a local TV station in the Bay Area is reporting rumors that the SETI program running at the upgraded Arecibo radio telescope has detected an anomalous signal (or in the very high tech language of their reporting, a “mystery signal”). The report includes some quotes from Dan Wertheimer, the director of the program, so presumably the reporter talked to someone with verifiable science cred before writing the piece. The quotes from the project’s scientists are guarded enough that I’m guessing this is just a lousy job of science reporting in the local news.

The part that got my blood pressure going was the follow-up about what we should answer back. The idea that our backward, technologically impaired civilization should jump up and down and wave its arms around saying “LOOKY HERE!!!! LOOKY HERE!!!! PICK ME!!!!”, is,….what’s the word….oh….batshit crazy. History is not exactly awash in cases where the technologically less advanced civilization wound up the winner when two cultures collide. Usually, it gets rolled.

In spite of this, some crazy optimists in Russia are actually beaming signals out to nearby stars, right now. This “active SETI” program strikes me as completely foolish, and has already caused a rift within the SETI community (so apparently, I’m not alone in my abject fear of being spotted by a more advanced civilization). While this issue hopefully has less urgency than figuring out the political response to planetary climate change, we need to eventually get our collective goverments organized into a treaty about how to deal with this issue. Suppose someday we actually detect some alien space ship whizzing through our local neighborhood. Do we let the Raelians and Scientologists invite them down for a drink, even if the rest of us think it’s better to lay low?

In the meanwhile, Earth should just STFU.

(UPDATE: Link to timesonline changed to the original reporting that they swiped from a much better article by David Grinspoon at Seed.)

(AND ANOTHER UPDATE: Phil Plait did some actual reporting (you know, calling and actually asking), and yup, it’s just bad journalism, as expected.)

I know it seems obvious, but two of today’s news stories brought home the absurdity of how people are judged.

On the one hand we have a Republican (who would have guessed?) Senator who is accused of soliciting sex in an airport men’s bathroom.

On the other is this priceless story about legislating against the wearing of too baggy clothes.

What is striking is that I don’t think the first should be news except that the Senator in question consistently votes against gay rights and gay marriage. His fellow Senators seem concerned with the actual behavior, which I think is irrelevant, and unconcerned with his hypocrisy, which I think is abhorrent.

But the individuals involved in the second story seem to ignore completely the behavior of the persons wearing the dangerously low-riding jeans. Even those defending these loose-legged louts seem to miss the point:

“The focus should be on cleaning up the social conditions that the sagging pants comes out of,”

No, the focus should be on how they behave, not on what they wear.

Being a good citizen is about how you behave to others - what rights you support or try to deny them, or how you treat them - not about how you choose to meet sexual partners or about how you dress.

We’ve been hearing a lot over the last few days about the damage to the tiles on the shuttle Endeavour. Roland Piquepaille at ZDNet blogs has now posted some exclusive pictures of the affected region, provided by Neptec Design Group.

I don’t know how serious this is, but now at least I understand what they mean by a gouge in the tiles. Here’s keeping our fingers crossed for the safety of the astronauts on board.

It was with great interest that, during a typical CNN post-mortem on a, well, prominent recently departed American, I saw the face of Christopher Hitchens. I knew that this would be outrageous - a smackdown of Jerry Falwell before his body was even cold, much less the mud on the mourners’ boots dry. You can find the video of this posted over at Newsbloggers. It is definitely a Must See, with Hitchens waxing truly poetic on the Falwellian nightmare, calling him “odious”. “small”, and a “toad”. Thank you, thank you, Anderson Cooper for having Hitchens on! It was brilliant.

Putting aside for the moment Falwell’s bigotry, homophobia, and his blaming of the troops in Iraq for failure there (and the gays for 9/11), let’s not forget that lately he had been particularly alarmed that the evangelicals in this country were beginning to ally with the environmentalists on the global warming issue. His sermon from Feb. 25 typifies his anti-science stance, which we saw earlier in his statements on creationism, where he brands leading researchers in these areas as “pseudo-scientists.” Yeesh.

In the end, though, it occurred to me that we’ll miss Jerry, in a way. Now we need some other buffoon to bring out into the open the ignorance and anti-intellectualism that is the hallmark of true religious fundamentalism. Any nominations from the floor?

I keep hearing that one shouldn’t, so soon afterwards, speak of the implications of the Virginia Tech tragedy for certain political positions. But shouldn’t we be outraged by this horrific event? And if there’s an elephant in the room, why should we ignore it?

Now, I have no problem with hunting, and don’t want to ban guns entirely. But there is plenty to agree with in Elayne Boosler’s furious rant over at The Huffington Post. You don’t have to buy it all - I don’t - to feel that there is something right about this kind of outrage. Why isn’t the mainstream media, instead of repeating the same grisly facts over and over, exploring the implications of

The number of children under the age of 17 shot by guns in America every year is greater than the gun-related deaths of children in all the industrialized nations of the world COMBINED.

and

3,300 Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last four years. 120,000 Americans have been shot to death in America in the last four years. Where is the outrage? If we can elect a new congress based on its commitment to end the war overseas, we can elect a congress committed to end the war here at home. End both wars.

Boosler ties her piece up by anticipating the associated hypocrisy we might see when the President responds to today’s Supreme Court decision that refuses women a medical procedure even in the case that it may be life-saving.

“Today’s decision affirms that the Constitution does not stand in the way of the people’s representatives enacting laws reflecting the compassion and humanity of America. This affirms the progress my administration has made to defend the “sanctity of life”.

Thanks for the outrage Ms. Boosler - you’re not alone.

The blog world, and now, timidly, the “real” media (if Netscape News is the real media) are abuzz about a purported attack code named Operation Bite in six days against Iran. Many of the stories are straight cut-and-paste, all pointing back to a single newspaper article in Russia, by Andrei Uglanov in the Moscow weekly “Argumenty Nedeli.”

With tensions at the present level between the US and Iran, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the U.S. would take unilateral action like this. But is this all just a propaganda leak from the Russians? Apparently an ex-advisor to Putin, former Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, speculated that the US might even use small-scale tactical nuclear weapons against hardened underground facilities. Well, that got people’s attention.

So, anyway, April 6 at 4 am Iran time…

Here’s a question for our highly mathematically talented readership: what does the following condition describe?

[(δU/δL) / (δU/δC) | Sp=0] ≤ w - [(δU/δr) / (δU/δC) | S = 0]

If you said

“An individual will start to sell prostitution if the price for selling the first amount of prostitution, minus the costs of a worsened reputation for doing so, exceeds the shadow price of leisure evaluated at zero prostitution sold.”

you were spot on. That’s right; according to Marc Abrahams’ Improbable Research column in The Guardian, this is the equation to describe when a prostitute finds it worthwhile to sell (typically) her services.

The story is a little unclear, but the very least you’ll need to make sense of the equation is a definition of the variables:

• U is the “utility”
• L is the amount of leisure you have.
• C is the amount of goods and services you, as a consumer, consume.
• S is the amount of prostitution you, as a prostitute, sell to your customers.
• W is the going price for prostitutes.
• R is a measure of your reputation.

And here I am working on particle cosmology when there are these huge open problems in other fields!

Jonathan Dorfan, the director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), made a stunning announcement this morning - he is stepping down from the laboratory directorship this Fall. This news is certainly a surprise - at least to me! It seems that this decision is all about timing. This Fall marks Jonathan’s 8^th year as laboratory director, as his tenure began in the Fall of 1999. Factor in that Jonathan has said he believes change at the top is healthy for large organizations and when he accepted the directorship he stated his intent to serve only for 8 to 10 years. Couple this to the fact that SLAC’s contract with the Department of Energy will be sent out for bids and competed against in about two years time. And recall that when a new contract is drawn for the lab in this two years time, one condition of the contract is that the lab’s directorship must pledge service (i.e., stay in place) for an additional five years. Jonathan apparently looked at the numbers and decided that now is the right time to step down.

Stanford University President John Hennessy said, “Jonathan Dorfan’s tenure at SLAC has been characterized by exceptional scientific vision and foresight. He deserves our thanks—and those of the greater scientific community.”

During Jonathan’s tenure, he has accomplished many things, including:

The Stanford President has asked Persis Drell, deputy director of SLAC, to head the search committee for Jonathan’s replacement. The committee will be established shortly, will conduct a world-wide search and report back to the President. Jonathan will remain on the SLAC faculty and will no doubt become actively involved in actually doing science again.

Best wishes to Jonathan, and thanks for what you’ve done!

In Sunday’s New York Times, Julie Bosman has an interesting article about a mini-crusade to keep an award-winning children’s book off library shelves. The book, “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, won this year’s Newbery Medal, and is taking flak because of a single word, which appears on the very first page. That word is (and I hope any children reading will cover their eyes) scrotum.

So what is this filth that threatens to infiltrate children’s libraries? Well, the word apparently arises is the following context

The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

The Times article contains a number of quotes from librarians that I found pretty silly

“This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn’t have the children in mind,” Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote…

“I think it’s a good case of an author not realizing her audience,” said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J.

Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., said she anticipated angry calls from parents if she ordered it. “I don’t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

“At least not for children,” she added.

What exactly is going on here? Around fifty percent of the people who might read this book will have already found, after a casual inspection, that they possess a scrotum. If one wanted a natural way to talk to one’s children about what their body parts are and what they are called, surely having one crop up in a kids book would provide that. There is certainly nothing sexual about a dog being bitten on his scrotum (unless he specifically asked the rattlesnake to do it, and was found tied to his kennel with silk scarves. But I digress.). And telling a child that a scrotum is a particular body part that either they or their classmates possess does not seem to be necessarily sexual either.

Is it thought that keeping the name of the body part secret will make them less likely to realize that it can be used for Satan’s work?

The author is understandably, to my mind, confused by the kerfuffle.

Reached at her home in Los Angeles, Ms. Patron said she was stunned by the objections. The story of the rattlesnake bite, she said, was based on a true incident involving a friend’s dog.

And one of the themes of the book is that Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up, Ms. Patron said. Learning about language and body parts, then, is very important to her.

This is what really gets me about censorship. Nobody would argue that the children’s section of the library should contain hard-core pornography, but I wish people weren’t so touchy as to squash things that might trigger, and help nurture curiosity. I would have thought that any teacher worth their salt would welcome a child initiating “that vocabulary lesson”. Micromanaging a child’s environment to this level, where one tries to avoid their knowing what perfectly natural body parts are called, strikes me as, well, you know, what a scrotum contains - bollocks!.

The Times Online is reporting that

The Ancient Egyptians built their great Pyramids by pouring concrete into blocks high on the site rather than hauling up giant stones …

If true, this would be quite amazing to me, and there appears to be some science (at least the words) backing it up.

… according to Professor Gilles Hug, of the French National Aerospace Research Agency (Onera), and Professor Michel Barsoum, of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the covering of the great Pyramids at Giza consists of two types of stone: one from the quarries and one man-made.

“There’s no way around it. The chemistry is well and truly different,” Professor Hug told Science et Vie magazine. Their study is being published this month in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society.

The pair used X-rays, a plasma torch and electron microscopes to compare small fragments from pyramids with stone from the Toura and Maadi quarries.

They found “traces of a rapid chemical reaction which did not allow natural crystalisation . . . The reaction would be inexplicable if the stones were quarried, but perfectly comprehensible if one accepts that they were cast like concrete.”

If this holds up then I’m definitely going to start pushing my theory that The Lighthouse of Alexandria consisted of a huge LED.