Science

I'll tell you, I didn't have much Love for the Pluto haters. But I've come to accept the truth of it. Pluto crosses the orbit of Neptune, it's tilted out of the ecliptic, there's other crap all around it, and it's small---almost as small as its moon, which doesn't even orbit a point inside Pluto. It's a rock. Just like all the other outer-system dwarf planets: Haumea, Makemake, … [Read more...] about Pluto and the Final Stage of Grief

In another post, I mentioned that I was worried that I might write something that was so bad it wasn't even wrong. I borrowed that phrase from Steven Pinker (who borrowed it from someone else), and since saying that, I've been concerned that people might not understand what I mean. I'm talking about a level of level of misunderstanding so profound that it's difficult to … [Read more...] about Stupidity and Darwin and Liberals and Molotov Mitchell

I think I've read about a dozen science fiction stories that start this way. It's usually not a good sign. In a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, astronomers working on the Supernova Cosmology Project report finding a new kind of something that they cannot make any sense of. ... On February 21, 2006, in the direction of a far-away cluster in Bootes...Hubble began … [Read more...] about Mystery In Space

There's been some excitement among criminal defense bloggers such as Mr. Greenfield, Mr. Katz, and the Dude over a fascinating Los Angeles Times article about some strange search results in some of the major DNA databases. State crime lab analyst Kathryn Troyer was running tests on Arizona's DNA database when she stumbled across two felons with remarkably similar genetic … [Read more...] about Something Fishy About DNA Fingerprinting ?

In an article about the legal defenses for a drug possession charge, Jon Katz mentions a case in which a suspect was caught with ten pills, all allegedly methadone. The state had a chemist test one of the pills to determine it was methadone, then the chemist testified that the other pills looked similar. This was enough to convict, and the decision quoted favorably an earlier … [Read more...] about A Sampling of Evidence