Why Stardust is awesome

NASA has just revealed that the Stardust spacecraft has found glycine in the tail of a comet!

"But Ken", you say, "so what?"

Well, I'll tell you what! Glycine is a fundamental building block of life, which is a fancy way of saying that glycine is one of the 20 amino acids that ALL of our cells are built from. Finding glycine in space adds further weight to the panspermia theory that I was on about recently.

Breifly, panspermia is the theory that life on earth was "seeded from space". Panspermia argues that either life, or the building blocks of life, were transported to earth from somewhere else by some mechanism.

Before we could consider the panspermia theory to be plausible (which is the lowest level of theory) we'd need to know two things:

1. that stuff can be transported from planet to planet (either within or between solar systems), and
   
2. that life or the building blocks of life exist elsewhere.

Now, point one is cool, we already know that it's happened in our very own solar system: we've found Meteorites from Mars on Earth... well, we don't know it in any absolutist positivist sense, but you know what I mean, there are multiple converging lines of evidence and a Martian origin is the strongest theory explaining their origins.

Moving on, the discovery of glycene in a comet in our own solar system is strong evidence for point two. I say strong evidence because there's already some evidence of amino acids in space, although it's somwehat equivocal (i.e., not 100 % convincing, could be caused by other things).

So, Stardust discoverd glycene in a comets tail, and life might have come from the void between stars. Stardust is awesome.

Q.E.D

P.S. Ha, I get it! Stardust! D'you see why they named it that?

Of Toxic Tim Tams and Feather-laden Bread

Amongst my work colleagues I am generally referred to as “one of those... skeptics”, said with the tone that implies that I over analyse everything and ruin everyone’s fun. Which pretty much sums up the title of this blog. I am, apparently, a killjoy.

But wait.

Recently a colleague asked “Is there anything on snopes about Tim Tams containing toxins?”
Apparently said colleague’s neighbour had refused to touch those chocolate covered bits of chocolate with chocolate sandwiched between them, because they apparently contain toxins and it’s illegal to sell them in America for this very reason and that’s why you can’t buy them in America.

My response was, of course:

• What on earth do you mean by “toxins”? You’re going to have to be more specific if you’re making such claims

• What specific ingredient on the following list is the supposed “toxin”? (Milk solids, cocoa, salt, raising agent (E500), emulsifier (E322: soy) and flavoring, colours (E102, E110, E129, E133, E150). May contain traces of peanut, other nut, egg or seed).

• Why would you assume the food quality regulations in the United States are far more stringent than those in Australia?

• Why would you assume toxins are the reason Tim Tams are not available in the USA, rather than the fact that Tim Tams are an Australian branded product, just like several USA products not available here?

• If Tim Tams are so toxic, I should have died years ago.

I don’t pretend to have the answers to these questions. The toxic Tim Tam theory may be correct. But the person claiming such is going to have to provide some evidence to the fact.

In response to my ranting another colleague started in on the “The local Vietnamese bakery puts ground up chicken feathers in their bread, so you shouldn’t eat it”.

I love this one because it’s almost not quite like the McDonalds worm meat burgers or chicken feather shakes.
Which, I suspect, has the same indicators of unlikelyhood:

• Ground up chicken feathers don’t sound to me like a cost-effective filler compared to plain old flour

• Chicken feathers do not appear on the ingredient list

• Failure to declare this ingredient could get them in a world of trouble according to Australian Food labelling laws

• Surely, even finely ground chicken feathers will make the bread taste funny

My arguments which, of course, in addition to not changing this person’s opinion one bit, caused another colleague to comment on the smarties I was eating as “having all those bad artificial colours in them”.
I told her I was lucky that I wasn’t sensitive to artificial food colourings so I was fine, and anyway, Smarties now have “natural” colourings. Her argument was that even if I’m not sensitive, they still must be bad for me because they are made of chemicals.

Sure. So is water, salt, and, I don’t know, EVERYTHING.

Nope, natural things are always better for us, she insisted. Yep. I’d happily consume the following natural things:

• Arsenic

• Cyanide

• Deadly night shade

• Mercury

... need I go on? I won’t. I failed to convince her either.

So I left this group of merry people, muttering about my negative skeptical attitude. They remained convinced that they can’t eat yummy Tim Tams, or delicious Smarties, or fluffy bread.
I returned to my desk and savoured the chocolatey goodness of my Smarties. I pondered the feeling eating a really good Tim Tam can bring. I was happy.

But apparently, I’m the negative killjoy.

Kenny reviews District 9

Last night I had the privilege of seeing District 9, the movie that we get instead of Halo... but I digress before I've even started. (there are only mild spoilers in this review, and sections are clearly labled so you won't accidentally read them).

Setting the scene:
District 9 has an interesting premise: aliens turn up on our doorstep, park their ship over Johannesburg and then promptly do nothing. Turns out they're refugees, and don't have anything tangible to offer us, no weapons, no metaphysical insights into the meaning of life, not even really cool steak knives that can cut through hammers. Not surprisingly we treat them the same way we treat present-day refugees: poorly.

How it starts:
The aliens are placed in a ghetto near Johannesburg and forgotten. Not surprisingly they descend into squalor, crime increases and eventually the people of Johannesburg decide they want the aliens moved away. It's at this point that the movie starts, with the protagonist presiding over the operation to evict the aliens.

Broad overview (mild spoilers):
In overview District 9 is like one of those great stories by the Brothers Grimm. On one level it's simple gory fun told on a personal level but with a grand backdrop. On a deeper level, and continuing the reference the the Grim brothers, it shows some of the worst of human behaviour. At times the protagonist is petty minded, thoughtlessly inhuman, selfish and cowardly. In these moments it's painful to watch, not because of any failing of execution, but because the behaviour is too believably human. However, this is of course so that the protagonist canovercome their baser instinct, see the error of their ways and be more heroic for it.

Finally, and non-too subtly there's a moral to the story: that wallowing in our ignorance and not taking the time to understanding and empathise with others leads to our worst failings. I like this message. Empathy is important, it allows us to build relationships, and love. The flip side is that when we fail to-, or choose not to apply empathy we commit the worst atrocities of history (e.g., the Holocaust , the firebombing of Dresden, or the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki)

The science (some spoilers):
Hollywood often portrays several scientific impossibilities: bullets striking sparks as they ricochet (they don't); things changing size and or mass in blatant contravention of the laws of conservation of mass/energy (they can't... *cough* hulk *cough*); or blatant contraventions of Newtons third law of motion, that every action has an equal and opposite re-action (e.g., Optimus Prime wouldn't have saved Sam Witwicky from falling, he would have had a fist full of splattered Sam).

In comparison, District 9 had relatively little of that bad-science, nothing in the movie too obviously contravenes any laws of nature (i.e., physics, chemistry or biology). The weapon effects are awesome, but still realistic (well... as realistic as you can expect of super advanced technology). The conversion of a human to alien isn't impossible (radical retroviruses could plausibly), but does raise some interesting questions, like why does earthly and alien life use the same genetic language... unless they share a common origin? Maybe the screenplay writer is of the seeded from space (Panspermia) school of thought on the origin of life on earth?

The two moments most straining the suspension of disbeliefe involve tractor beams and starship engines.

The tractor beam was used to lift a small shuttle from the Earth's surface to the hovering mothership. It seems conceivable that a suitably advanced alien civilisation might manipulate local gravitational fields to achieve the same result: lifting things into the air with no visible physical lifting device.

The starship engines were on the hovering mothership, a vessle as large as a medium sized city. Throughout most of the movie the main engines had been doormant, with the mothership hovering by some other mechanism. At the end the engines fire up, and they look freaking hot (plasma hot, not awesome hot). Tens of thousands of human spectators under the mothership simply look up in awe as these engines power up... seemingly un-concerned about the consequences of being under a star-faring vessle as it prepares for the energy intensive task of exiting a gravity well... but nothing un-toward happens. Apparently the alein engines just look big and hot, but don't fry people.

The verdict:
One of the best sci-fi movies of recent, and even not-so recent years.