Has Cassini found life on Titan?

Scientists are reluctant to say so, and are determined to exhaust all other explanations first, but something unusual is happening with the hydrogen, acetylene, and methane levels on Saturn's largest moon. One explanation is a microbial form of life conjectured five years ago. Read the whole story from Popular Science.

Climategate

There's a fair amount of buzz lately about the scientists in the UK that a hacker exposed fudging data, withholding information, and stifling dissenting opinion. Of course you'll only find that buzz on the Internet, as the mainstream media is staying so far away from the story they're almost on their way back toward it.

Defenders of course claim that this is an isolated incident. We're expected to believe that this hacker just happened to pick on the one bad apple in the Global Warming community. The trouble is, if the GW community were really acting like the scientists they're supposed to be, they would have exposed these frauds themselves.

It would be quite impossible for four scientists to cover themselves so thoroughly for so long if the rest of the GW community were approaching their work with anything even remotely resembling healthy scientific skepticism. But no, the fact that these "bad apples" were not exposed by other scientists is a strong indicator that they are by no means the only ones involved in the suppression of GW dissent and skepticism.

It's not just one bad apple--that much is certain. Chances are it's the whole tree.

Teen-age angst-ridden vampires and the girls who love them

It's Halloween Week at the video store where I work, and so we're showing Halloween-related videos on the screens around the store all week. Yesterday was "Twilight" day. I'll admit up front I know very little about Twilight--and I don't care to be enlightened. I find the idea of vampires not being able to go out in sunlight because they "sparkle" to be silly. What the author seems to have done is show laziness by wanting to create tragic immortal beings who were not really vampires without going through the effort of establishing something else.

Anyway, the movie's tag-line keeps bothering me: "If you live forever, what do you live for?", or something like that. It occurred to me that nowhere have I ever seen vampires try to do anything useful with their immortality. At best they create art or something, but most of the time they sit in Gothic mansions and brood, plotting and scheming against their own kind.

Why is it we never seen a vampire given to scientific pursuits? Imagine what an immortal researcher could accomplish? They have all the time they need to ground themselves in the history and theory of their field, all the time in the world to patiently test each hypothesis. They don't need to worry about achieving some great, life-defining work before they die, because they don't.

I'm not so naive as to think vampires might do this to benefit humanity. But imagine the things they could do to benefit themselves, at least. But they never do that. Vampires are wasting their immortality. So why do all these vampire fans want to believe that vampires are somehow superior to mere mortals? They waste all the positive aspects of their existence.

It's no wonder vampires are so popular with goths and certain other crowds. Many of these people do with their own mortality what vampires do with their immortality. They waste it on brooding.