Monthly Archives: December 2006

politics

Update on the NSTA Story

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It would appear that the controversy over the NSTA story rejecting the distribution of DVDs of “An Inconvenient Truth” has been heating up lately. NSTA, not surprisingly, in a Nov. 28, 2006 press release has defended their actions as part of their policy of not distributing unasked-for goods to teachers via mail. The producer of the documentary, Laurie David, did not mention that policy in her critical Washington Post editorial of a week or so back. NSTA still cannot explain why it rejected the DVDs by saying first that they didn’t want to take risks with their current sponsors (including ExxonMobil). If they had a policy, they should have made THAT their excuse, not raising the fear of angering sponsors.

There seems to be a lot of finger-pointing going on, and nobody seems to be wearing the white hats in this saga.

Someone sent me a link to a Science Magazine article about the to-do over this. Also, our old friend Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer is digging into the issue as well.

Still, things are not as cut-and-dried as they seemed when I posted about this last week. In reading over the NSTA’s press release, I wonder what the difference is between the activities they tout which were paid for by sponsor money and the action of sending out (or making available) a DVD. It’s a sponsorship, just in a different form. In both cases, a message is being sent (taught), paid for by somebody with a reason to want that message out there. It’s all information, and in a subject as sensitive and important as global warming and environmental science, more information is good.

Stay tuned.

cassini mission
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I mentioned in my last posting about the fascination with “how things work” that made me a nerd, of sorts. Over the weekend I was visiting with friends and we got to talking about our respective college days and the subjects we studied. That music history background of mine came up again. One of the classes I took was a music analysis survey. That’s where you learn about how musical compositions are put together—the “nuts and bolts” of a symphony, for example. One of the pieces we “disassembled” was Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3. We studied its harmonies (the chord structures), the rhythmic structures, the instruments needed, the themes and variations in the melodies, and so on. It was fascinating stuff, although sometimes it could be a little tedious, especially in a piece with many variations on the same theme, or many sequences that run through a set of key changes (such as in some Bach works).

Courtesy the Cassini Mission web pages
Courtesy the Cassini Mission web pages

Experiences like that class fed into how I look at the universe and the many “variations on a theme” we see throughout the cosmos. For example, take this image of Saturn, posted today by the Cassini mission folks.

At first glance it reminds me of clouds in Jupiter’s atmosphere. And also of clouds in our own planet’s atmosphere. And of atmospheric features that come and go in Neptune’s atmosphere. Although I’ve studied some atmospheric physics, I don’t completely understand all the mechanics behind their formation and evolution. Certainly some of the mechanics are the same from world to world: coriolis effects, atmospheric heating and cooling, hadley cells, adiabatic lapse rates, and so forth. But, at each world, these same processes provide beautiful variations on an atmospheric theme. Who can look at them and NOT wonder how they work?