Wheat-dogg’s world
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In the interests of free expression and free press, I am jumping on the bandwagon to publicize the quashing of a fellow blogger’s criticism of a homeopathic “doctor,” Joseph Chikelue Obi.

Le Canard Noir, a skeptic who runs the Quackometer blog, wrote a couple of articles about Obi, a self-styled expert in all things medical, in which the Black Duck implies that Obi is full of shit. Obi then promptly threatened the blogger with a libel suit, and the blogger’s web host forced Le Canard Noir to pull the offending posts. Libel laws there favor the complainant, not the defendant, so a libel suit would have expensive and perhaps damaging to the blogger and the web host.

Fellow bloggers are coming to Le Canard’s assistance and reprinting his articles on their sites, partly to stick it to Obi but mostly to print the truth. So-called medical practitioners like Obi are frauds trying to hide their medical quackery (and thriving businesses) behind the screen of libel laws. So, these posts may seem like they are out of context here, but I am trying to serve the higher good by reprinting them verbatim.

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Right Royal College of Pompous Quackery - Dublin, Thursday, September 28, 2006

I had to share this with you. Following on from my recent Quack Word ‘Doctor’ blog, I came across the Royal College of Alternative Medicine (RCAM) , a Dublin based - well, I’m not sure quite what it is…

Caption: Áurea (Fernanda Torres) talks to Luiz (Enrique Diaz) in Casa de areia.

On our day off Monday, I ended up watching TV in the afternoon and stumbled upon a Brazilian movie on Starz, Casa de areia (House of Sand), that to my surprise had references to Einstein’s relativity theory in it.

The plot is minimal. The movie’s effect comes from the acting and the ironic turns in its main characters’ lives.

Áurea is a young, city-bred woman whose husband has the crackbrained idea of moving to a godforsaken plot of land on Brazil’s arid northeast (O Nordeste). Her mother, Dona Maria, accompanies them. The husband dies before the birth of Áurea’s only child, Maria, leaving the women essentially stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Áurea wants to leave in the worst way, while Dona Maria would prefer to stay. There are no men to tell her what to do, Dona Maria says. After nearly a decade stuck in O Nordeste, Áurea arranges to leave with a wandering peddler who sells salt and other sundries to the few people living in the region.

But the peddler dies en route to the women’s house. Áurea and their neighbor, a reserved man named Massu, go in search of the peddler. Along the way, Áurea tells Massu she will finish the trip on her own, following tracks in the sand. After two days, she comes across the campsite of a group of scientists photographing the solar eclipse of 1919.

MESSENGER took about 1,200 images during its flyby of Mercury earlier this week. Here’s another nifty one. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)

It may be a barren surface, but I find it fascinating to see pictures of another world. They make Mercury seem like a place, instead of some abstract location. By the way, the large crater at the lower right is named “Sholem Aleichem,” the Yiddish author who created the Fiddler on the Roof. The large craters on Mercury are named after authors, artists, and musicians.

Normally, I avoid remarking about politics here, since there are so many political blogs out there, but this news story I figure deserves an exception to my self-imposed rule.

Republican candidate Mike Huckabee’s says we should amend the Constitution to be more in line with Biblical principles. That’s right, Rev. Huck believes we need to change the bulwark of our nation’s existence as a free republic to reflect religious principles. Theocracy, anyone?

What’s more alarming is the effort it took to find any mention of this seditious remark in the mainstream media on-line. Only MSNBC excerpted Huckabee’s suggestion from a campaign speech he made in Warren, Michigan, yesterday. All the other commentary has come from bloggers.

That Huckabee would even suggest amending the Constitution — a deliberately secular document — to bring it in line with Biblical laws seemed so fantastical to me that I could not believe the blogosphere had it right. After all, the Internet is infamous for spreading all kinds of false information.

But said it, he did. From MSNBC:

“[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards,” Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

The MESSENGER probe captured this image of Mercury yesterday from 27,000 km away, giving us our first view of this previously unseen side of the planet. At the time, the probe was receding from its first flyby approach. [Click on the image to see a larger version.]

As MESSENGER passed by, it snapped this image of the “near side” of Mercury, showing the crater Vivaldi on the right. Mariner 10 had imaged this part of Mercury on its pass in 1974.

NASA will be releasing more images as MESSENGER sends them for processing.

After several months hiatus, I resumed digitizing my albums over Christmas break. This one was a logical subject, since I had fond memories of it as a kid. Now, I wonder why I liked it so much.

Still in researching this album I found a few interesting tidbits about it — very few.

First of all, I have no idea who “Cactus Jim & the Wranglers” are. Nowhere on the Web is there any other mention of this group other than in relation to this album. One site suggested the group was the same as “Tex Johnson & the Six Shooters,” which recorded a similar album of tunes about the same time. The two albums were produced by the same company (Synthetic Plastics Co.), so it’s likely the two groups were the same set of studio musicians pressed into service for this project.

I found out more about the record company than the group. It seems the Synthetic Plastics Co., had produced a variety of injected plastic objects beginning in the 1920s. Brothers Donald and Louis Kasen realized they could use the same manufacturing process to press record albums, so beginning in the 1940s they produced a series of children’s albums under the Peter Pan label.

The boomer generation created a huge demand for the cheaply produced records, so SPC/Peter Pan quickly became the nation’s largest manufacturer of children’s records.The Kasens introduced several new labels, including Diplomat. (Diplomat Records more recently is the label created by rapper Cam’ron and has no relation to SPC.)

The MESSENGER probe zipped past Mercury yesterday in the first of three flybys needed before it settles into a regular orbit. NASA scientists say the probe survived the encounter, which brought it to within 200 km (124 miles) of the planet’s surface.

MESSENGER is the first probe to visit Mercury in 30 years, so planetary scientists are excited to see what new data the new probe returns. MESSENGER (short for “MErcury Surface Space ENvironment GEochemistry and Ranging” — NASA must have a special office to devise names like this one) will investigate Mercury in ways that were not possible when Mariner 10 paid it two flyby visits in 1974. Mariner 10 was able to image only one side of Mercury.

Here’s an image of Mercury taken by MESSENGER on its approach Sunday, from 760,000 kilometers away (about twice the distance from the Earth to the Moon). (Click on the image to see a larger version.)

After two more flybys this year and next, MESSENGER will settle into a regular orbit in 2011 when it will begin a longterm study of the innermost planet, the first in its history. The peculiar trajectory is a fuel-saving measure, to enable the probe to “catch up” to Mercury in its fast orbit around the Sun. [Earth travels at an average of 30 km/s; Mercury at 48 km/s. A more direct route would require burning a lot of fuel to speed the probe up and change its orbit.]

You don’t need to cancel any Martian vacation plans. The chances of asteroid MD5 colliding with the Red Planet are now 1 in 10,000, according to Near Earth Object Program experts. The image below shows the envelope through which the asteroid will likely pass on Jan. 30, when it intersects Mars’ orbit.

Earlier estimates had the envelope overlapping Mars itself, and experts as late as yesterday had given MD5 a 1 in 40 chance of hitting the planet. Better telescopic observations of MD5’s path have narrowed the size of the envelope, reducing the odds of a collision.

Our celestial neighbors, Mercury and Mars, will both have interesting fly-bys this month.

The NASA-JPL probe, MESSENGER, is due to skim Mercury’s surface on its first fly-by on the 14th. MESSENGER will eventually settle into a stable orbit around the innermost planet in March 2011 for a long-term recon mission. The MESSENGER team is scheduled to release some early images of Mercury from the probe today.

Meanwhile, the Near Earth Object Program experts figure the asteroid 2007 MD5 has a 1 in 40 chance of hitting Mars on the 30th. They estimate MD5 will probably pass within 30,000 km of the Red Planet, or in other words, not much will happen. As the projected fly-by date approaches, we’ll probably have a better idea of the likelihood of impact.

If MD5 does hit Mars, nothing really exciting will happen. It will make a crater and rattle the planet a bit, but there won’t be any big catastophe. MD5 is not a planet killer.

Down in the Sunshine State, state education authorities are attempting to hold local school systems to consistent standards of science education, that is, to teach evolution and not creation science or Intelligent Design. Not surprisingly, some local school boards are none too happy about the new standards.

So far, 12 local boards (including Polk, Taylor and Holmes Counties) have passed resolutions that state education authorities revise the standards to include evolution as only one explanation of how life began and developed on Earth. Taylor County’s board actually resolved, “the district is opposed to teaching evolution as a fact.”

All of these challenges are doomed to fail, given the clear results from the Kitzmiller v. Dover court case, which basically sank the Intelligent Design ship in the Dover, Penn., schools. After weeks of expert testimony, the judge hearing the case definitively found that ID was a religion and not science, and thus it had no place in the Dover schools’ science classes.

Clearly, none of the Florida school board members voting for these anti-evolution standards have any clue about the significance of Kitzmiller v. Dover, much less what the words “scientific theory” mean. Science standards by definition cannot include creationism or ID instruction, since neither is scientific by any stretch of the imagination. Who knows what the school boards there expect to happen — the entire state challenging legal precedent and common sense?