Udo's Techblog

Most high-profile wind turbine failure ever

Sometimes days come with their own themes. Today's theme is mass stupidity and media, at least for me. Now, I'll be the first to greet our new galactic overlords and all, but they definitely have to show up for real first. By that I mean hard evidence and if at all feasable a nice fireside chat with a bug-eyed little gray guy. It's all the more disappointing then - considering the implications of Fermi's formula - that ET isn't showing up, except in badly manipulated photos on the cover of shady tabloids (is there any other kind). Oh, and invariably, red neck-type citizens with a healthy lack of education or intelligence are the only witnesses available. But the audience just eats this crap up.

And because the degree of research and truthfulness required for the average news article is even lower than the IQ of the audience, it doesn't matter any more that we now have CNN reporting on strange UFO lights and what looks like a typical fanblade fracture is now officially attributed to a collision with a clumsy extraterrestrial flight in Conisholme, Lincolnshire.

Removing defective genes does not give you super powers

My mother calls, because she saw on TV how "they made a fetus immune to breast cancer", with the bonus of explicitly stating that aborted fetuses were used in the process. Give me a fucking break, what an epic failure on so many levels. So there is this family where everyone gets breast cancer, because they carry a dominant gene defect causing cancer to happen at a fairly young age. This is common. Genes mutate (that's what they're supposed to do), while many mutations are next-to neutral in consequence, some are really bad and produce offspring that are severely impaired. And the breast cancer predisposition defects are quite well researched nowadays.

Anyway, this family decides that they just have to have their own kids. You know, because there is just no other option known to humankind. And because they're a rich family living in an industrial nation that is ever more becoming like the society portrayed in Idiocracy, they can now indeed churn out "healthy" little spawns with a little help from the local biotech company. This is thanks to a technique where the defective gene is actually removed from the ovum, which is then replanted to develop naturally. Contrary to what has been suggested in the media, no fetuses or abortions are required anywhere in this horribly expensive and obscenely unjustified enterprise.

Next comes the claim that removing the defective gene causes immunity from breast cancer, also possibly x-ray vision and the ability to read minds (stay tuned to The Sun, Bild, and Pravda for more updates). This is total nonsense, of course. While the defect may be removed, the myriad other things that can go wrong inside a cell in order to become cancerous can still happen. This procedure does not produce super humans, it produces individuals with a more normal cancer risk. Contrary to what Heroes might have led you to believe, there are no mystical switches in the human genome that just lie there to be activated when the time comes for us to have magical abilities.

Blurry nomenclature causes sensational physics news

Exhibit C. Space.com runs an article that illustrates the failures and atrocities of modern science journalism quite neatly, it's about a crew of scientists who flew a balloon into the upper atmosphere once and measured strong radio emissions from an unknown source. As you can see, this alone doesn't merit a cool and sensational atronomy blurb, so it gets enriched with bullshit in equal measures by the original science team, 3rd party experts and the overpaid journalists who have to turn out this shit in ever-higher numbers so they can pay off the mortgage for the over-priced condo they acquired from some ripoff artist during the housing bubble, I guess.

Come on, let your imagination run wild, what can we do to make this horrible one-liner into a front page astro story? Right, let's make it into something the Average Joe can relate to. Let's drop this "radio emission" jargon stuff and replace it with "sound". Yeah, there's a loud, unexplained, mysterious sound in the universe. Or better still, make that a "mystery roar" (I kid you not, read TFA). With a poorly explained sound analogy we can fill at least 4 paragraphs with useless, pseudo-witty banter that makes sure a lot of people thoroughly misunderstand the nature of the thing.

Nice, OK, now we have a "mystery roar", let's make it a more current event. Like, breaking news style. Yeah, this is it:

There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," said Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Now we have implied that the universe has indeed just started sending mystery signals our way! Great, what was an unsubstantiated one-time measurement of radiation from the dawn of time has now been turned into a pressing new development.

What else can we do to completely butcher this thing, ensure our advertising dollars and give the researchers concerned a healthy boost when their budget is up for renewal? I'm out of ideas, and so were the editors of space.com - but we'll be back for more, I'm sure. But if you're looking for more stupidity, you can have a lot of fun reading the comments of that article. Incidentally, I liked the part where one poster suggested the sheer intensity of the radiation might imply a hitherto unknown interaction from outside of the universe (hey, why not, according to M theory it's at least possible), which is then followed by some physicist joker replying that it can't be so because radio waves move at the speed of light. See what happened? Physicist jargon is so utterly broken and misleading, they can't even communicate. Obviously the first guy was referring to things that are actually outside of our universe, but the second poster just assumed the concept of the "known universe" (the observable universe from our vantage point) had to be the same thing.


So, there you go. Three fine examples. I'm done for today.