Martian Deception? Perhaps Not

My colleague, Listener 43, may have jumped the gun in posting his commentary on the discovery of life on Mars.

1. He does note that this was based on a study of only one experiment, ignoring the data from two other contemporary experiments.
2. He seems not to realize that this analysis runs counter to many others of the same data which found no evidence of life.
3. While sampling technology has certainly advanced in the intervening years, the analysis of this data has noting to do with updated sampling, but rather only with new analyses of the same samples.

Given the relatively short distances between Earth and Mars, there is little doubt that material from each planet can be found on the other - in fact, we have found Martian rocks in the antarctic - likely due to its being "splashed" out of the planetary gravity well by comet, asteroid, or meteorite impact.
It is much easier to believe - if any of this material really does represent the presence of life - that  its source was actually Earth rather than Mars.
Of course, there is still little reason to believe that there is the evidence of life in those samples at this point.

Clearly, my skepticism on this subject should not be taken to imply that I doubt the existence of any extraterrestrial life. It simply means that we haven't really found any evidence in these experiments, any more than we have evidence of global warming in the carefully curated sub-sample of tree-ring data.
In much the same way, I know that the Earth has warmed since the depths of the Ice Age; I simply don't know that the global fleet of HUMMERs is uniquely to blame, and would never use such a paucity of evidence to claim it to be so.

Posted by Procrustes 17

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Travels in Space and Time
Occam and Lunatics
NASA Avoids Smelling Like Musk
Arctic Ozone Depletion

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Another Agency to Police the Internet?

You've probably already heard by now that the largest ad agency - Group M - is going to stop putting its ads on sites with pirated content.
That's right, these Mad Men are going to try to stop the free flow of information that's the whole raisin d'etre of the world wide web!

You're probably wondering how they plan to do this, right? I am too. After all, the single smartest company in the world - Google (also the largest force for letting everyone know everything that there is) can't tell who has the rights to what content without the legitimate owners actually telling them, so how are these chumps going to do it?

As far as anyone can tell so far, they're just making a list of sites that they think are the bad guys and they're putting them on a 'don't buy' list so they won't buy ads from those sites on the list even if they make sense for their clients' needs for reaching the audiences that visit these sites to see the content they have there that nobody really knows if it's illegal anyway.

Of course apart from making themselves the police of copyright on the internet, they're also making themselves the financial executioners of the internet by denying some potentially legitimate sites the money they are trying to earn by giving their visitors what they want in terms of content and so forth. By taking away funding from these sites, they're going to destroy the free flow of information that has been the goal and glory of the internet since Tim Berners-Lee first made it happen for all of us (sorry Al Gore - it wasn't you, baby!).

Naturally we still have to wonder how they're planning to monitor all these sites to see what's what and what's where and so forth.
We have to wonder who will decide who is a pirate.
We have to wonder who will be told about these guilty-before-even-being-charged allegations.

I don't know about you, but I think it might be wise to let this bunch of madmen know that we're not going to take this all lying down, and that we want to find our content where we find it and that trying to stop the free flow of information on the internet is not only a bad idea as well as kind of un-American, but it's also basically impossible and they'll find out that there are forces out there that will pwn them in a minute if they don't let us have our content.

Posted by Gyro Gearloose