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"What else is being reported to us on
numerous other subjects that is also full of factual holes?" Well, probably just about everything,
especially if it might have political ramifications. It seems like it's
about 30% fact and 70% spin these days, and the facts are frequently either
erroneous or carefully chosen from among a larger collection of facts that,
taken together, would paint a different picture. Science news is an
exception in that it usually doesn't get reported at all unless it helps
somebody grind their favorite axe or seems like too big a deal to ignore--and
even then they usually don't get it straight.
Maybe media
corporations should be fined for misrepresentations, not just "obscenity."
Personally, I'd rather be cursed at than lied to.
Sean
Amazing not only at how many errors there were in this article, but the
facts that they
were not checked by anyone at the Washington Post, no less, plus it seems
not to be a
major journalistic crisis to them - it's just them space nerds and some
alien moon billions
and billions of miles away after all, plus it doesn't seem to have
anything to do with
Paris Hilton, so who cares?
What should concern everyone, even beyond the sad lack of basic science
knowledge in
this country, is that if they let such easy-to-find-and-correct errors
slip by, what else
is being reported to us on numerous other subjects that is also full of
factual holes?
Larry
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2005 7:02
AM
Subject: Amusing letters to the editor
about Huygens/Cassini
Science reporting is really too exacting to be left to
mere ... science
reporters.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27812-2005Jan21.html
This
cleared up a point that I didn't realized I was confused about, until
now
- why the relay of data took so long after Huygens started
transmitting.
Cassini's antenna was pointed at Huygens, and therefore
couldn't be pointed
at Earth at the same time. That makes design
sense - it left more power
available to Huygens, since Huygens could
count on talking to a high gain
antenna. But that antenna could
only point in one direction at a time.
Cassini pointed at Huygens,
received and buffered the data, then turned and
sent it to us.
Duh. I get it now. (Huge antenna, by the way, if you look
at
the pictures. For much of the period of transit to Saturn, they had
it
pointed at the sun, for added radiation protection.)
I'm still
waiting for some smart reporter to bring up the fascinating
economic
backstory of Cassini design. David Porter of JPL, a colleague
of
Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith, designed the Cassini Resource Exchange,
a
system that allowed the different instrument engineering teams to
barter in
such dimensions as power consumption and mass to juggle the
design
trade-offs for this very complex probe. At some point, the
relative price
of mass crashed, because they had a surplus in their mass
budget. Cassini
also suffered no significant cost overruns, and
came out pretty much on
schedule. I really wonder if Cassini would
have been anywhere near as
successful without resource exchange, which
substantially substituted for
bureaucracy. Resource exchange
systems have been used for Shuttle manifest
management, and have been
talked about for ISS but not, to my knowledge,
implemented. I think
they tend to get used where nothing else works very
well, instead of
getting used everywhere they could offer benefits.
-michael
turner
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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