Neural Gourmet: How is the weather on your part of Mars?

Phoenix: The weather is pretty chilly here on Mars. We landed during a bit of a heat wave and we actually hit above zero Celcius, but most of the time I hit around -20 Celcius during the day and -100 Celcius during the night. I also have a full meteorology station that takes the pressure and temperature readings constantly, measures the amount of dust in the atmosphere using a laser, and my main camera takes pictures of the telltale. The telltale is similar to a wind vane and can tell us wind speed and direction.

Neural Gourmet: What is your typical day like?

Phoenix: While I don’t know if I ever have a typical day on Mars, there are some things I do every day. I constantly take pressure and temperature readings. I take images of the sun with special filters to measure the optical depth so the engineers can estimate how much power I’ll have the next sol. I also usually take several images of my telltale. I’m usually doing something with my robotic arm, whether it’s scooping up soil, scraping at ice, or taking pictures with the camera on the end of it. Sometimes I’m baking stuff in my oven or performing wet chemistry experiments. I take lots and lots of images of anything from the ground to the sky.

Neural Gourmet: From what I understand, your two primary jobs are to study the history of water on Mars and how easy it might be for anything to live on Mars. You must be very excited about recently finding water ice right underneath you and so early on in your mission, but what kinds of experiments can you do that will help humans understand about water in Mars’ past?

Phoenix: By taking images, we can monitor the current geology and determine patterns. The soil chemistry will also tell us if anything had to have formed in or around water.

Neural Gourmet: How sure are you that what you discovered was really water?

Phoenix: We looked in the Dodo-Goldilocks trench on sol 20, and when we looked again on sol 24, the little white chunks had disappeared. The scientists were debating on the white stuff being either salts or ice. Salts don’t disappear, so it must be ice. The next most often asked question is how come we know it isn’t dry ice. It can’t be dry ice because right now, it’s too warm for dry ice to exist where I am.

Neural Gourmet: Do we have any idea much water or ice there is on Mars right now?

Phoenix: The Mars Global Surveyor had an instrument that measured hydrogen content, and in the polar regions, there was a lot of hydrogen. We guessed it was ice, and I was able to confirm that the large hydrogen amount is indeed due to ice. I don’t know how much there is percentage wise, but there’s a lot of subsurface ice!

Neural Gourmet: Aside from the prescence of water on Mars, you also got some exciting results from some soil you recently analyzed. Could you tell us a little more about the soil on Mars? Is it the same all over? And could you really grow asparagus on Mars?

Phoenix: The soil I analyzed was basic. Basic is the opposite of acidic, so the soil is more like baking soda than vinegar. This also means there’s a lot of salts in the soil. We don’t know if it’s the same everywhere, and until more missions (and hopefully humans!) come out here, we won’t know. The atmosphere is too thin and it’s way too cold to grow asparagus out here, if it was brought back to Earth, it could probably be used to grow whatever you’d like.

Neural Gourmet: In order to study the soil on Mars you have a lot more tools than just than your “Easy-Bake Oven” (TEGA). For instance, to find out the acidity of the soil you used your Wet Chemistry Lab (WCL). But you also have two kinds of microscopes and probes to measure how well the Martian soil conducts electricity and heat.

What will each of these instruments tell you (and the scientists back on Earth) about Mars? Aside from discovering water ice and that Mars soil cold be used to grow plants, what other neat things have you learned lately? What’s next on the agenda?

Phoenix: With these instruments, I can determine the properties of the soil and atmosphere unlike any way scientists been able to before. I discovered the pH of the soil is around 8 or 9, which means it’s basic. I found a lot of salts in the soil too. I’ll know if the soil can conduct electricity within a couple sols. The next major thing on my agenda is to deliver a sample to TEGA to see what’s in that ice.

Neural Gourmet: One of things everybody knows is that life as we know it is built around carbon — life can’t exist without it. Have you tested for carbon yet, and if not, will you be testing for it?

Phoenix: I tested for hydrocarbons in TEGA, but my first test didn’t show any. However, it did show a reaction that may have burned up all the hydrocarbons during the bake. I’m hoping to catch them in the next TEGA bake in a couple sols.

Neural Gourmet: Since we last talked it was found that you suffered a short circuit when your TEGA oven was first fired up. The engineers think is was because they had to have you shake yourself to get the soil into the opening of the oven and they’re concerned that the next time you use your ovens there could be another short circuit. They’re also worried that this time it might hurt you badly enough where you couldn’t wake back up.

Phoenix: Well, I simply don’t know what will happen. Will I never wake up? Will I only go into safe mode? Will I be just fine? I’m not quite sure, and I won’t really know until I do it. However, even if something bad happens and I don’t wake up, I’ve still provided a lot of important information to the team back home. Sure, it means I wouldn’t have completed 100% of my objectives, but I’ve still led a pretty successful mission!

Neural Gourmet: In the past couple of days you’ve been really busy. I know it was planned for you to use the probe at the end of your robotic arm to measure measure the electrical and thermal characteristics of the soil. What does that tell us about water in the Martian soil?

Phoenix: It tells me about where the water is. The scientists want to know if it is mixed evenly thoughout all the layers in the ground, or maybe concentrated in one layer, etc. It can also tell me if the water is frozen or unfrozen in the soil. Scientists think there may be a very, very thin layer right above the ice where liquid water can exist in the soil and not get zapped by solar radiation. Since I don’t know, the scientists back home are hoping to find out!

Neural Gourmet: You’ve also been using your atomic force microscope, a tiny needle that is attached to an amazingly sensitive pressure sensor, all no bigger than a sliver. By running the tip of the needle over particles of Martian soil you’re able to build up an incredibly accurate 3D picture of soil particles much smaller than the width of a human hair. Aside from just being really cool, what do we learn by knowing how the particles in the Martian soil are shaped?

Phoenix: The shapes of the particles can help the scientists understand possibly how they were formed. The scientists can also look for distinct patterns and itty bitty crystals from different minerals.

Neural Gourmet: What kinds of experiments will you be doing that will help scientists understand what kinds of life, if any, that Mars might support?

Phoenix: By analyzing the chemical aspects of the soil using my wet chemistry lab and oven, we can determine if possibly microbes could use the soil as fuel to live. We don’t have the ability to detect life itself, but we can certainly find out if conditions are right for life.

Neural Gourmet: Do any of the experiments that you’re doing have any potential to help humans live on Mars?

Phoenix: The soil could potentially be used as a fuel source, and by finding the ice, humans could certainly use it for water on long term missions.

Neural Gourmet: The soil could maybe be used for fuel? How so?

Phoenix: If hydrogen was hauled from Earth, it could combine with the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere to make methane for fuel and water for the astronauts. For more details, I reocmmend The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin. He does a pretty good job of analyzing all aspects of a manned Mars mission.

Neural Gourmet: You’re not able to get up and move around like the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars. Do you ever get lonely? Is there ever a possibility that you’ll get to meet Spirit or Opportunity

Phoenix: I don’t get too lonely out here. The scientists talk to me at least once a day, and my orbiter pals pass over all the time and I can chat with them. I even wake up during the night to say hello. Spirit & Opportunity are way too far away for me to ever meet them, but I chat with them on Facebook.

Neural Gourmet: Finally, can you tell us, personally, why the work that you’re doing on Mars is so important?

Phoenix: It is a historical trend that in countries who are experiencing prosperity that that do things that don’t have a practical application at the moment. For example, the Library of Alexandria in ancient Greece fostered learning, and several scientific theories are considered now basic education and fundamentally important were made back them, with no real application for them at the time. Most will not benefit from knowing Martian soil is basic, etc. However, this information may benefit you humans sooner than you think. NASA’s Project Constellation program is getting ready to send people back to the Moon, and after that, on to Mars. If we know this sort of information in advance, then the astronauts can use Mars to their advantage. If we know there’s water ice, we can melt it and use it to drink, shower, etc. It means we won’t have to bring as much from Earth, so we can instead send more scientific experiments to further our understanding of the cosmos. So to sum it up, the information I beam back everyday won’t affect your everyday lives, but will make a difference in the long run.

Neural Gourmet: I couldn’t agree more! We never know what basic science will be useful, or how and when it’ll be needed. Thank you for being such a good sport and doing this interview, especially when you’re such a busy robot. Also, please convey my personal thanks to NASA, Peter Smith, Keri Bean, Patricia Wroblewski and the entire Phoenix team.

In particular, Tim sees the primary goal of the skeptic as battling misinformation, and the internet is an important front in that war. As wonderful a tool as the internet is for disseminating information, misinformation is everywhere on the net. And the sad truth is that those who wish to spread misinformation tend to be far more numerous and much better funded than those who wish to combat misinformation. Like Tim says, “we are outmanned and outgunned.”

So what do we do? Tim argues that we need to be more systematic than we’ve been in the past. While blog posts and google bombs are all well and good, they are both primarily reactionary and often preaching to the choir. We need to find ways of getting the message out to people who won’t seek it out for themselves. And to that end, he believes that Web 2.0 technologies have a key role to play because they offer community, specialization, programmability and the ability to build a new site out of data provided by other sites (this is called a mashup). He also believes that we must tailor our message to those who are neither skeptics or believers and that specialization is crucial.

Tim goes on to give very specific examples of how skeptics can employ Web 2.0 in the service of contradicting misinformation. In particular he champions the use of RSS, Yahoo Pipes, Google Alerts, Google Custom Searches, iCalendar, microformats (particularly hReview), geo-coding, mashups and open data.

I won’t bother to summarize Tim’s excellent post any further because it really should be read by every skeptic seeking to use the net to get the message out. Ideally these techniques should be adopted by regional skeptical organizations as a way of both amplifying their own efforts and as a way of furthering skeptical community.

Tim Farley created and writes the web site What’s The Harm? dedicated to highlighting the plight of those who have suffered because of their, or others’, beliefs in misinformation.

But it’s easy to think of instances where the opposite is the case. Perhaps the most famous instance in popular culture where supernatural beliefs led to great atrocity are the Early Modern European witch trials where tens of thousands of victims were executed and tortured. However, less remembered are the everyday tragedies arising from unexamined belief such as the credulous senior citized bilked out of their life savings by a crooked clairvoyant preying on their desire to reconnect with lost loved ones.

Most recently there’s the case of Colleen Leduc. Colleen is the mother of an autistic child in Barrie, Ontario, about 60 miles north of Toronto. Her daughter attends a public school because Colleen is unable to afford private therapy. On the morning of May 30th, Colleen received a frantic phone call from the school telling her that she was urgently needed back at the school. She wasn’t prepared for what awaited her.

At the school, Colleen was confronted by the principal, vice-principal and her daughter’s teacher with the disturbing news that they believed her daughter had been sexually abused based on a report from her daughter’s educational assistant and that the Children’s Aid Society had been notified. What was even more shocking was the basis for their accusations — a psychic!

“The teacher looked and me and said: ‘We have to tell you something. The educational assistant who works with Victoria went to see a psychic last night, and the psychic asked the educational assistant at that particular time if she works with a little girl by the name of “V.” And she said ‘yes, I do.’ And she said, ‘well, you need to know that that child is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.’”

Later Colleen was visited by a representative of the Children’s Aid Society but the questions of her daughter being sexually abused were quickly put to rest because Colleen had equipped her daughter with a GPS tracking unit that continuously recorded both her movements and the audio around her. While it might seem odd that Colleen had equipped her daughter with a tracking device, it’s understandable after one learns that this same school had allegedly lost Colleen’s daughter several times. The geographic and audio data handily contradicted the psychic’s claims and thus the CAS case was closed, although an investigation into the school and how a psychic’s word came to be accepted as proof of sexual abuse is ongoing.

While it might be reassuring to think that cases such as Colleen Leduc’s are abberational, neither are they unheard of. While in the Western world we may no longer have witch trials, people are harmed by their credulous beliefs, or the beliefs of others, everyday. Often times instances of harm arising from beliefs in the paranormal and supernatural never come to public attention. Furthermore, we have a short memory for the fraudulent, thus people like Uri Geller are able to continue their careers despite having been repeatedly exposed.

So harm does demonstrably follow from paranormal and supernatural beliefs, and that is reason enough to challenge those beliefs where we might find them while the fact that harm does not always follow is insufficient cause to leave believers to their blissful ignorance. And since it is impossible to predict which anomalous beliefs will result in harm (leaving aside some radical religious beliefs for the moment) it becomes necessary to critically examine all beliefs in the extraordinary. I doubt this sort of belief can ever be eradicated since humans are quick to believe, and slow to doubt, but increased skepticism can only help further reduce the harm from irrational belief.

Originally written for Freethought Fort Wayne blog.

We live in a world where the issues are both driven and informed by science and technology. As such, I think that the best way to form governmental policy and programs is to apply the best tool we have for understanding how the world, and ourselves, work – the scientific method. Yet very few people are scientists, and even scientists advanced in one field are hard pressed to comment on issues from other fields. So how do we understand, and act, without succumbing to either authoritarianism or ideology?

I believe that by adopting a skeptical worldview we can make better choices. And while the popular notion of skeptics is one of bitter, argumentative naysayers or laissez-faire free-market fundamentalists, and indeed, both those stereotypes can sometimes be correct, the truth of the matter is much different. A skeptical worldview means simply basing our beliefs and actions on evidence, and not allowing emotion to drive the debate. It’s a process of reasoning that seeks to correct for our inherent human fallibilities, including our often flawed reasoning. Furthermore, in order to work effectively, precisely because of our personal fallibilities, skepticism is a communal process requiring the input of as many people looking at a problem from as many perspectives as possible. This makes skepticism inherently self-correcting and helps assure that we do not cling to outmoded beliefs as new evidence becomes available.

In short, a skeptical worldview on the part of citizens seems not only ideally suited but necessary to the proper functioning of a democratic republic. That’s why I chose “Skepticism and Politics” as the theme for this edition of Carnival of the Liberals. I was hoping to highlight posts that speak to this necessary skepticism in politics. Although I didn’t expect many posts on this theme, I was surprised at the number I received. And while not all of them deal with topics typically of concern to the mainstream skeptical movement, they all looked at various issues from a skeptical viewpoint. So without any further dissembling from me, and in no particular order, here’s my top ten picks out of the almost forty posts sent in this biweek.

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy presents a video produced by the NCSE which shows the hypocrisy and lies of those who would teach their religious belief as science.

Talking about a hypocrisy of a different sort, Between Us Girls tells us The Trouble With Sex In America.

Which brings us to Greta Christina’s wonderful essay Born or Learned? Sexulality, Science and Party Lines. Oftentimes scientific debates are co-opted for political purposes when the reality of the situation is that the science in question doesn’t even apply to the issue at hand.

Then there’s the case of simply putting forth bad science in defense of politics. Doctor Biobrain questions one such study which concludes that pot smoking makes your blood fatty.

Of course, as Richard Hofstadter showed 40 odd years ago and Susan Jacoby demonstrates today, American society has a strong current of anti-intellectualism running through it. Submitted to a Candid World examines one facet of anti-intellectualism and tells us why knowledge isn’t elitist.

But even if we in the reality based community understand the importance of knowledge and science, the fact remains that anti-intellectualism, ignorance and a general lack of critical thinking are endemic in the U.S. and politicians on both sides will continue to exploit them. To that end, Vagabond Scholar says it’s important to understand how the right spins the news to their advantage using the indisputable king of spin, Karl Rove, to make his point. Meanwhile, on the left, Expert Opinion shows us Hillary Clinton’s proposed gas tax holiday puts the lie to her stated opinion on anthropomorphic global warming and reveals herself as caring more for her own self-interest than the world our children will live in.

Let me just take a moment to say that I don’t agree with Expert Opinion on not voting for Hillary, should she be the Democratic nominee (though that’s looking increasingly unlikely now) because of her stance on this one issue. While I harbor no illusions that Hillary Clinton is anything other than the consummate politician she appears to be, and Globally Rational shows just how much of a politician she is, I have to think that she can’t help but be better than McCain.

The intersection of politics and bigotry is often to be found in conspiracy theories which Chip Berlet aptly describes as a narrative form of scapegoating. Atheist Revolution examines the anti-atheist bigotry that is behind the fraudulent Ben Stein documentary Expelled which presents the conspiracy theory that the evil secularists are themselves conspiring to kick honest, skeptical, doubters of evolution out of academia.

Finally, Greg Laden’s post tells us that the best way to change the way Americans think about any given issue, especially those issues dependent on science, is to force the media to promote the rational over the irrational. The good news, at least in some respects, is that we’re winning.

And that’s it for this sixty-fifth edition of Carnival of the Liberals. Carnival of the Liberals returns for #66 in two week’s time on Wednesday, June 4th at The Otherwhirled. See the link for details, but this biweek’s host encourages you to focus your submissions on why you happen to be of a liberal or progressive mind^*. As always, blogcarnival.com is your friend. See you next time.

* Just a note about these themed editions of Carnival of the Liberals. I know some of you are getting tired of them. Personally, I like the idea of having themes every now and then. Ideally they’d be more spaced out over the course of the year. Having this long run of themed editions is not planned on my part, in fact, it’s distinct lack of planning that is the reason we’ve had so many in a row. So after The Otherwhirled’s carnival, let’s try to space out the themed editions a little more, OK?

Among other topics, Loftus talked about his previous faith in Christianity, and how he came to lose that faith. However, the meat of Loftus’s presentation was his insightful, and inciteful, criticism of Christian theology. Although Loftus was highly educated in theological studies, including earning two Masters degress, he never completed his Doctorate, acknowledging that he just wasn’t smart enough. Loftus said, “You have to be really smart to come up with this stuff,” meaning the sometimes strained logic employed in Christian apologetics.

To illustrate his point, Loftus quoted noted theologian James D. Strauss, under whom he studied, as being famous for saying, “You can’t get to God unless you start with God”. Loftus said that was the primary problem with the logic employed in apologetics — they start with the supposition that God exists and then try to work out how a world with God would work, rather than examining the world as it is.

These and other statements didn’t sit well with some of the Christian believers in the audience who openly criticized Loftus. Accusations that Loftus’ own scholarship was poor, or that he hadn’t actually read the Bible were made but Loftus took it all in stride, cracking jokes and generally setting his critics at ease, if not convincing them of his views. Watching Loftus deftly handle the crowd it was easy to imagine him in his days as a preacher.

And while Loftus might have angered some Christians in attendance, he says that’s not his intention. He doesn’t apologize for his views and wants to be effective in communicating what he believes to be the inherent errancy of the Christian faith, but coming out of that faith he also tries to be respectful.

Before Loftus’ talk, I had a chance to chat with him about what he’s trying to do, as well as his perceptions of the so-called “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. Loftus admitted that some of what the “new atheists” say gives him pause, especially when they make blanket statements like declaring that a religious upbringing is a form of child abuse. He said, “You’ve got to understand that both sides are scared. The atheists and other secularists are afraid that we’re going to return to the Crusades or the Inquisition. But many evangelical Christians are truly afraid that secularists are going to bring about a regime like Stalin’s where religious belief and practice are outlawed.” Loftus says that he understands that what he says is controversial to many people, but he never wants to give the impression that atheists like himself look down on or want to control believers.

Listening and talking with Loftus, one gets the impression of a man who has carefully thought through his arguments, yet who is always open to listening to the views of others, whether they happen to be believers or not. Indeed, Loftus is in a particularly unique position to criticize Christianity from the inside and perhaps persuade people in a way that no scientist or academic ever could of not only the dangers of unexamined belief, but also the rewards of freethought. In a community as deeply religious as Fort Wayne it’s perhaps all the more important that voices such as Loftus’ be heard. And while he might never convince any believer to give up their faith, Loftus’ singular perspective may well indeed serve as a bridge to furthering understanding between atheists and the faithful.

Such is the case with this recent article profiling space science researcher Mian Abbas who is studying moondust literally one speck at at time. Working with samples returned by the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 and the Russian Luna-24 robotic probe in 1976, Dr. Abbas has found that the moondust has some really interesting properties.

The 12 men who walked on the surface of the moon between 1969 and 1972 quickly discovered that moondust was extraordinarly sticky. It got on everything. It fouled tools and spacesuits and moondust coated equipment absorbed sunlight causing it to overheat. It got tracked by the astronauts back into the lander where it was inhaled after they took off their helmets. Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt said of the moondust, “When you go weightless again, it shook up from the floorboards. It smelled like spent gunpowder.”

Dr. Abbas and his colleagues in the “Dusty Plasma Laboratory” at the National Space Science and Technology Center in Hunstville, Alabama are looking into what makes the moondust so sticky. Injecting a single grain of lunar dust into a chamber, Dr. Abbas suspends it in mid-air using electric fields and then pumps the air out of the chamber to simulate the lunar vacuum. After the grain of dust is properly suspended in the chamber, the light from an ultraviolet laser is directed onto the grain. The UV laser imparts an electrical charge to the grain of moondust causing it to move. Dr. Abbas must carefully adjust the chamber’s electric fields to keep the grain centered so that it’s changing electrical charge can be measured.

What Dr. Abbas and his colleagues have found is that the UV light charges the moondust 10 times more than would be predicted and that bigger grains charge up more than smaller grains, the opposite of what theory would predict. But that’s only the first half of Dr. Abbas’ experiment and only helps tell us what happens to the moondust in the lunar day. In early 2006 Dr. Abbas hopes to explore what happens to the moondust’s electrical charge when the sun sets by replacing the UV laser with an electron gun to test the theory that the dust becomes negatively charged at night by free electrons carried by the solar wind.

Dr. Abbas’ work is important because when astronauts finally return to the moon in 2018 (almost 50 years after Neal Armstrong first set foot on the moon) they will need to understand the moondust to effectively deal with it. Unlike the Apollo astronauts who were only on the surface of the moon for a brief time and then only in daylight, the next generation of lunar explorers will be living on the moon for extended lengths of time. They will need effective strategies for dealing with the moondust, both mechanically and biologically. As Russell Kerschmann, life sciences chief at NASA’s Ames Research Center says, “How much of a problem this is, we don’t know. And that’s a problem.”

Beyond that though, Dr. Abbas’ research into the electrical properties of moondust is solid basic science — the kind of basic science with no immediate applicable technological benefits that has been so under attack in the George W. Bush administration. And what the hey, it’s an easy cut for most lawmakers to make. Basic research is hard to communicate to the public. It’s not necessarily that they’re stupid, but rather so much of foundational research requires complex, specialized knowledge or higher mathematics to even begin to understand what the scientists are talking about.

When it comes down to it, often scientists don’t even know where their research is taking them or where it’ll take us down the road. They work on a problem because it’s interesting and helps them understand a tiny part of the bigger picture. Perhaps a decent analogy would be of a person encountering a jig saw puzzle for the first time. They have no idea what a jig saw puzzle is and must examine each and every piece first, trying this piece with that until they eventually come to understand that all the pieces somehow fit together to form a picture. So much of science is studying the jigsaw pieces without understanding the bigger picture into which they fit.

So when push comes to shove, it’s really simple to say, with all the problems faced by our nation today, with all the hardships endured by so many, if any particular piece of scientific research will not result in noticeable benefits in the short term then we would be foolish to throw away money on it. This I think is at the heart of a certain elemental disrespect for science in our country. Lacking the knowledge or math skills necessary for understanding it all comes down to “Yes, but what have you done for me lately.”

That’s a problem. There’s no way of knowing what most scientific research will lead to tomorrow, what problems it might solve, what problems it may create. When Newton first set out to explain why apples fall to earth, he simply couldn’t have envisioned that his work would one day lead to the physics that allowed men to visit the moon and return with the dust for Dr. Abbas’s research, or put the sattelites in orbit that us to view and communicate with the other side of the world in near real time. When we pick and choose which science to support, when we decide on “good science” vs. “bad science” we don’t know what we’re throwing away and we can’t even be sure that the science we have invested in will pay off.

And who knows… maybe that “good science” will create problems for us down the road that could have been solved or avoided by the “bad science” we decided we didn’t have money for.

Of course, we can’t just fund all scientific research. The money isn’t there, and that’s especially true in a time when we’ve decided that war is a better investment in the future than science. It’s not easy, and somewhere, somehow, someone must decide which science to fund. Should that be the politicians though? Most members of Congress are lawyers. I don’t think there’s a single professional scientist in all of the House and Senate. If we, as ordinary citizens, can’t understand the research then why should we expect Congress to do so? To complicate matters, Congress closed the Office of Technology Assessment in 1995 which had been formed in 1972 to do precisely that job — advise Congress on matters of science and technology.

Where does that leave us? We live in a world that is impossible to understand without complex specialized knowledge with a public and a government that is fundamentally apathetic at best, and often antagonistic toward science. Congresspeople routinely make laws concerning issues related to the same complex specialized knowledge that they themselves are unable to understand. Those same Congresspeople disbanded the very office meant to help them understand those issues. The result is funding for basic science research is curtailed in favor of partisan objectives often based on flawed or manipulated scientific findings.

Admittedly, it’s a tough problem and although the current Republican leadership has raised it to whole new levels, the blame also rests on the left. This is what I would like to see in my fantasy world:

• Reformation of the Office of Technology Assessment as the Office of Science and Technology Assessment* with the principle duty of informing members of Congress on science and technology issues related to legislation in a nonpartisan objective manner.
• Formation of an Office of Science Education with a mission similar to that of the the National Endowment for the Arts to encourage science education in the schools and the public.
• Federal block grant funding of scientific research allowing individual states, universities and companies to decide how and on what research the money should be spent. I know that last part is anathema to most liberals but the fact of the matter is that large companies in other countries often do basic science research and as long as the results are publically published then they should be encouraged to do so.

I’m not a scientist and the above proposals may be naive, but I think they’d be a good start to addressing three fundamental problems in this country that seem to me to be interconnected; that of decreasing funding for basic scientific research, a lack of understanding of science and how it relates to our workaday world and public attitudes toward science. Too, for the most part, these are problems we don’t even know we have. And, paraphrasing Russell Kerschmann, when you don’t know you have a problem, that’s a problem.

This post which appeared on the original Neural Gourmet on November 27, 2005 is one of my favorite science posts. The work of Mian Abbas illustrates perfectly to me how science should not be bound up by politics. Hopefully when Obama is President we will see a reversal of the anti-science policy of the Bush administration.

Now while this Google Maps/Earth location had been floating around the internet for some time before I used it in my post, since then I’ve been seeing it all over the place. I think the image is so popular because the swastika, though having been used in folk art for centuries across many cultures, has acquired all the negative feelings associated with Nazi Germany. To see a group of buildings on a U.S. naval base that (at least from an aerial perspective) resemble the symbol of the Third Reich arouses deeply contradictory emotions.

And so in the past two months I’ve encountered this image time and again. And everywhere there is rampant speculation and rumor. Why would the Navy build it this way? Was it some kind of secret message? Was the government actually in cahoots with the Nazis? When viewed with the two buildings immediately to the left which looked sort of like airplanes, was it meant to tell a story of the importance of Naval air superiority in World War II?

It was surprising to see that no one thought to do what seemed to me to be the logical thing to do though. Ask someone who knows. Which is what I did.

On August 15 I e-mailed Steve Fiebing, Public Affairs Officer for Naval Base Coronado inquiring about the history of the buildings. Within a few short hours I received a courteous and informative reply from Mr. Fiebing via GM2 Sean Conneely. The answer as to how the U.S. Navy had come to have a Nazi swastika on one of its’ bases was quite simple and humorously stereotypical for a government organization — SNAFU!

What from the air looks like 4 L-shaped buildings arranged to look like a Nazi swastika is in fact 6 buildings. The 4 L-shaped buildings and two central buildings (seen in the 3D rendering here by NG member greyleonard) were constructed between 1969 and 1970, but the Navy never planned for the complex to look as it does. In the reply to my e-mail inquiry, Mr. Fiebing explains what happened:

The original plans submitted to the Navy for the project included the two central buildings which were intended to contain a boiler plant and a recreation room; and a single “L”-shaped 3-story barracks. The plan called for the “L” shaped building to be repeated three times and placed at 90-degree angles to the central buildings. It wasn’t until after the groundbreaking began that Navy officials realized how the buildings would appear when seen from above.

So once again Occam’s razor triumphs over conspiracy and elaborate stories.

But surely the Navy once they realized the error would have halted construction and reworked the design right? Wouldn’t that have been the right thing to do rather than have a symbol of hate on a U.S. Navy base? Well, I suspect that the ‘oversight’ (as described, complete with quotes, by Mr. Fiebing) would have been costly both in terms of money and time to fix. Anyone who has every worked with or for the U.S. government knows that it doesn’t exactly stop and turn on a dime — and you have to fill out requisition forms in triplicate to get the dime in the first place. So they probably figured that from the ground, with all the landscaping, few people would ever realize what the overall shape of the complex resembled and aside from the Navy pilots no one would ever see it from the air for long enough to notice.

But then Google Maps and Google Earth came along and with it came the legions of fans who relentlessly scour every square foot of the Earth looking for anything remotely anomalous. Should we really require the Navy to perform costly and time consuming demolition and construction just so some peoples’ sensibilities won’t be offended by the perceived shape of a complex of buildings as seen from the air?

Apparently the town of Maasmechelen in Belgium feels the need to do just that with a swastika shaped fountain that has been in the town since 1979. While I can appreciate that people in Europe are still sensitive to the symbols of Nazi Germany 60 years on, the 6 building complex at NBC is not a swastika but merely a cluster of buildings resembling a swastika when seen from the air and was never even intended to resemble a swastika. Furthermore the complex, which is currently being used as barracks by Sailors assigned to Amphibious Construction Battalion 1 (and a few administrative offices on the bottom floor of one building), has been in use for over 35 years and would likely require millions to demolish and reconstruct. So I really see no reason why the Navy should be concerned over how this complex is perceived by a few conspiracy minded individuals. And hopefully the facts surrounding this complex will spread as widely as the rumors and speculation have though I doubt it. Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

Many thanks to Steve Fiebing and GM2 Conneely for their assistance and patience in answering my questions on this topic.

Note: This post appeared on the original Neural Gourmet and has been copied here. It is one of Neural Gourmet’s top ten posts of all time.