Researchers insist they can tell someone’s politlcal affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Messy? You’re a lefty. A neatnik? Welcome to the Right.

According to a controversial new study, set to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, the bedrooms and offices of liberals, who are generally thought of as open, tend to be colorful and awash in books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia.

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials in their personal spaces, according to the study. Their bedrooms and offices are well-lighted and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flags—especially American ones.

[...]

“It’s pleasurable for liberals to think more. They gravitate toward art, to things that are not as concrete,” says Carney. “Conservatives have a need for order, for there not to be ambiguity. There you see that expressed by being more orderly, having more cleaning supplies, needing to have everything lined up and organized so that one feels one’s environment is predictable and therefore safe.”

So how do they explain this?

I think what they mean is that you can jump six times as high on the Moon.

In case you were wondering, that’s because the surface gravity of the Moon is 1/6 that of the Earth’s. It’s not because the moon has 1/6 the mass or the diameter of the Earth, as you might suspect. In fact, as you can see here, the mass of the Moon is 1.23% of the Earth’s, and its radius is 27.25%.

Surface gravity can be expressed like so:

( Surface gravity of the Moon/Surface gravity of the Earth ) = ( Mass of Moon/Mass of the Earth ) / ( Radius of Moon / Radius of Earth ) 2

Plug in the numbers, and you get the following:

( Surface gravity of the Moon/Surface gravity of the Earth ) = ( 0.07349 x 1024 kg/5.9736 x 1024 kg ) / ( 1738.1 km / 6378.1 km ) 2

Which ends up as Surface gravity of the Moon/Surface gravity of the Earth = 0.1656 ~ 1/6

Stellarium is a free, open-source computer application that runs on every common kind of operating system. Even on my Ubuntu Linux computer it pans smoothly across the sky, and lets you zoom in on particular astronomical bodies (600,000 stars by default, according to the website).

I can’t wait to take this on a laptop into the wilderness, where it can help us learn the constellations and identify stars. Because you can dial up any particular time, serious star-gazers can plan a future night’s viewings or see astronomical events from the past.

The first picture is what you would have seen from our apartment window last night, if Boston weren’t in the way. The second shows Jupiter an hour ago, as it drags its moons across the sky.

By the way, I instantly recognized the narrator as former MIT professor Philip Morrison, who hosted a delightful PBS series in the 1980s called The Ring of Truth.

After you watch the original “Powers of Ten,” be sure to see the Simpsons’ version.

Currently, encryption is based largely on complex numerical codes that even the most sophisticated computers would, theoretically, fail to break.

But Lo says these numeric codes could be broken in the future with new mathematical theorems.

As a fundamental law of nature, however, quantum uncertainty will never be changed, and will never become obsolete.

Among the rafters on this year’s trip were Susan Epperson, 64, a former high school biology teacher who was the plaintiff in the 1967 Supreme Court case that found Arkansas’ law banning the teaching of evolution unconstitutional, and Ken Saladin, 56, a professor at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville who has been protesting any mix of church and state for 30 years.

So it should be pretty obvious who are the dogmatists and who are the open-minded enquirers, right? Scientist Eugenie Scott, of the evolution raft, explains how she engages the controversy:

“I won’t defend evolution,” Dr. Scott said in exasperation one evening. “We don’t defend the spherical Earth. We need to stop defending, as they put it, Darwinism, and just make them show they have a scientific view.”

And thankfully she managed to keep her charges in line:

“I’ve always believed in evolution,” Irene Rosenthal, 71, a semiretired psychologist, said over soup one night.

“Accepted evolution,” interjected George H. Griffin, 58, a retired law enforcement officer in Colorado. “That’s what Genie wants us to say,” he said, referring to Dr. Scott. “Genie said anyone who said ‘believed’ would have to walk home.”

Dr. Scott and others cringe at creationists’ charge that Darwin’s theories have become dogmatic faith, that creationism and evolution are just two parallel belief systems, equally plausible and unprovable. “We have faith in science, but it’s not a religion,” said Herb Masters, a retired firefighter. “It’s a faith in a body of knowledge.”

Then there are the members of the creationist raft:

Diana Panes began questioning evolution, which she had studied in school like most everyone else, seven years ago when Andrew came home from school asking whether Genesis was fable or history, and about dinosaurs dating back millions of years.

“I was gobsmacked,” Mrs. Panes recalled.

So she started reading, attending lectures, watching creationist videos. “I don’t want to believe in fairy tales. I’m interested in truth,” Mrs. Panes said.

Convinced that Jesus himself believed the global flood and genealogy of Genesis were true historical accounts, “the whole thing becomes his reputation at stake,” Mrs. Panes, 54, said of why she felt compelled to come to the canyon to see for herself. “For years there were huge areas I couldn’t answer. My faith was devotional.”

. . .

But Brenda Melvin, 46, a nurse practitioner, was not so sure. “My Christian heart wanted to believe, but my scientific mind had questions,” Ms. Melvin said. “I believe totally that God created heaven and Earth – I don’t know how he did it, I don’t know exactly when he did it. I don’t know that we’re ever going to learn the answers here.”

Her pastor, Paul Phillips, also did not accept Mr. Vail’s explanations of rock layers and fossil remnants without question. “Whatever he says, I’m just trying to think: There’s a really smart person, there’s tons of really smart people, that think the other side,” he said.

Ah, thinking. That can only get you in trouble.

ITHACA, N.Y. – Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.

They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.

After about 45 minutes, “I told them I needed to take a break,” she recalled. “My mouth was dry.”

That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.

. . .

Dr. Allmon, who directs the Paleontological Research Institution, an affiliate of Cornell University, began the training session here in September with statistics from Gallup Polls: 54 percent of Americans do not believe that human beings evolved from earlier species, and although almost half believe that Darwin has been proved right, slightly more disagree.

“Just telling them they are wrong is not going to be effective,” he said.

Instead, he told the volunteers that when they encounter religious fundamentalists they should emphasize that science museums live by the rules of science. They seek answers in nature to questions about nature, they look for explanations that can be tested by experiment and observation in the material world, and they understand that all scientific knowledge is provisional – capable of being overturned when better answers are discovered.

Let me see if I understand. Someone questions some of the “settled precepts of science” by referring to “techniques for dating fossils” and “the second law of thermodynamics,” and how does the guide reply?

She pulls out her handbook for dealing with “religious fundamentalists” and gives pat answers about how “science museums live by the rules of science,” saying that “they understand that all scientific knowledge is provisional.”

It’s possible the “provisional” line is just meant to placate the religious nuts, but maybe some museum workers actually think something can be both a “settled precept” and “provisional.” If that’s the case, then I suspect the cracks in the hegemony are widening.

Victorian authorities believe a man built up at least 30,000 volts of static electricity in his jacket simply by walking around the western Victorian city of Warrnambool yesterday.

The man left a trail of scorch marks and molten plastic behind him.

It was yesterday afternoon when Frank Clewer walked into a Warrnambool business and got his first shock.

“It sounded almost like a firecracker or something like that,” he said.

“It was at the reception area. Within say, around five minutes, the carpet started to erupt,” he said.

Burns the size of 10-cent pieces were left on the carpet where Mr Clewer had been standing.

The Country Fire Authority evacuated the building and those around it, fearing the power could cause larger electrical problems.

But Mr Clewer’s worries continued when he got back in his car.

“I actually scorched a piece of plastic I had on the floor of the car,” he said.

Scientist Karl Kruszelnicki says it is likely the electrical build-up was caused by a number of factors, such as the synthetic clothes the man was wearing.

“This poor guy has built up static electricity thanks to an unfortunate combination of insulating clothes that he’s wearing, static, synthetic clothes, just walking along and he’s just building up this static charge everywhere,” Dr Kruszelnicki said.

“I’ve read of it but I’ve never heard of it here in Australia.”

The CFA has Mr Clewer’s jacket and says it is continuing to give off voltage.

Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river, visible because former watercourses absorb different amounts of moisture from the air than their surroundings do.

His eye was caught by unusual ‘rectangular shadows’ nearby. Curious, he analysed the image further, and concluded that the lines must represent a buried structure of human origin. Eventually, he traced out what looked like the inner courtyards of a villa.

Mori, who describes the finding on his blog, Quellí Della Bassa, contacted archaeologists, including experts at the National Archaeological Museum of Parma. They confirmed the find. At first it was thought to be a Bronze Age village, but an inspection of the site turned up ceramic pieces that indicated it was a Roman villa.

HT: digg.com