Banner
Could High Quality Masks Solve China's COVID Problems? Idea For A Randomized Control Trial Of Masks In Households To Find Out

This is a suggestion for a way to resolve questions such as: How effective are the best...

Why Doesn't NASA Respond To Public Concerns On Its Samples From Mars Environmental Impact Statement? (short Version For Experts)

First for anyone who doesn't know, NASA’s perseverance rover is currently collecting small...

Why Doesn't NASA Respond To Public Concerns On Its Samples From Mars Environmental Impact Statement?

First for anyone who doesn't know, NASA’s perseverance rover is currently collecting small...

This Is Your Opportunity To Tell NASA You Want To Keep Earth Extra Safe During Their Samples From Mars Mission

For those who don’t know the background, NASA’s Perseverance rover is gathering...

User picture.
picture for Ilias Tyrovolaspicture for Helen Barrattpicture for Steve Schuler
Robert WalkerRSS Feed of this column.

I'm Robert Walker, inventor & programmer. I have had a long term special interest in astronomy, and space science since the 1970s, and most of these blog posts currently are about Mars and space... Read More »

Blogroll

NASA have put a great deal of work into the engineering for a sample return but I can't find any papers or blog posts or any sign of prepration for the legal side of the return mission. We are strongly protected by many environmental laws and laws to protect human health that we didn’t have at the time of Apollo. These laws don’t rely on the Outer Space Treaty for their legal basis. How NASA categorizes Mars makes no difference to them. See the article by Margaret Race of the SETI institute.

Right now all our missions to Mars are sterilized to protect it from any Earth life that could hitch a ride and confuse the searches. A report by the “Planetary Protection Independent Review Board” recommends that NASA treats most of Mars similarly to the Moon for planetary protection. It comes with a cover letter from NASA recommending to their planetary protection officer that they implement the proposal. This would be fine if Mars was like the Moon.

YouTube creators are panicking as YouTube classifies their videos as directed towards kids when they are not. It's a dumb algorithm. It would classify this as a comic book probably.

A human would never classify this channel as for kids under 13:

Vivziepop

Jem Bendell’s “Deep Adaptation” is scaring many people, sometimes referred to as "The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy"- yet - it is not a published paper. It is an unpublished draft that has been rejected for failing the minimum standards of an academic paper. It is written by a sociologist, not a climate scientist. As its main cite, it uses a blog post by a system analyst recording a talk he gave to a group of businessmen. When he submitted this draft to a journal, they requested major revisions because it didn’t meet the minimum standards for an academic paper.

The New York Times has done numerous mistaken climate change stories. They would never run an obituary about someone who hasn’t died. They wouldn’t make up a sports result and say one team won the superbowl when in fact the other did. They wouldn’t say that the UK has left the EU when it hasn’t.

Why do journalists feel that it is okay to invent whatever you like about climate change and claim it is the truth?

Here are my annotations for this article using Hypothes.is, the academic web annotation tool:

The Daily Express run this fake meme on many of their fake asteroid stories. It is riddled with errors and outright lies. The red top tabloid papers in the UK are well known for just making stuff up.

The most famous red top tabloid story which ran in The Sun, another similar paper here. They made up the story that Freddie Starr, a comedian ate a hamster in a sandwich. He never ate any hamster.