The Bad Astronomer
2003-Sep-24, 07:29 PM
I know I shouldn't be surprised, but man oh man. These guys are irritating.
Sherwood Ensey, who goes by the name "Tuatha", has a Yahoo group and website where he makes the usual ridiculous claims. He is a PX acolyte, and has been promoting the idea that Jupiter might ignite fusion due to Galileo (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/jupiter_galileo.html). He is also the guy who promotes SOHO anomalies, and I mention his garbage by name on my PX pages about SOHO (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planetx/soho.html).
Now he claims that there is evidence that something might have happened at Jupiter when Galileo went in. He points to that bastion of critical thinking, CyberspaceOrbit (http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/). :roll: They have a plot that shows an increase in cosmic ray activity here on Earth right after the impact.
Now, I know this must be garbage at worst, and coincidence at best. So I dug more. A little tiny bit more, and that iota of extra effort is something the cranks clearly didn't do, or didn't show.
The second link on the CyberSpace page goes to a Russian CR monitor, and there is the plot (http://helios.izmiran.rssi.ru/cosray/main.htm), showing the odd increase on September 21st. Sure, there is an overall trend of increase before then, but there does look like there is a knee in the plot around the time Galileo plunged into Jupiter.
But if you look a little farther down the page, you see a link to the past two years of data (http://helios.izmiran.rssi.ru/cosray/days.htm).
Take a look. You will see what I saw immediately: right now we are seeing below-average or perhaps just average levels of CRs, and last March the level was far higher. By only showing the past few weeks, Cyberspace is making it look like things are suspicious, when in fact they are not. This is exactly the same thing we see when PX proponents show sunspot or earthquake data; they don't give you enough history to understand the trends in the data. When you look at the trends, you see the obvious: there are not more earthquakes (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planetx/nutshell.html#earthquakes) than usual, we should expect high sunspot activity (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planetx/nutshell.html#sun) even this late in the solar cycle, and we are not seeing anything unusual in the cosmic ray counts.
In fact, when I look at the two year plot, I see that last year, there was a rise starting in July, just as we see this year. It looks to me like we are seeing some sort of annual trend, completely unrelated to Jupiter and Galileo. Of course.
Shame on you, CyberSpaceOrbit and Tuatha. Alarmist garbage like the stuff you post is scaring people needlessly. Shame on you.
Sherwood Ensey, who goes by the name "Tuatha", has a Yahoo group and website where he makes the usual ridiculous claims. He is a PX acolyte, and has been promoting the idea that Jupiter might ignite fusion due to Galileo (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/jupiter_galileo.html). He is also the guy who promotes SOHO anomalies, and I mention his garbage by name on my PX pages about SOHO (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planetx/soho.html).
Now he claims that there is evidence that something might have happened at Jupiter when Galileo went in. He points to that bastion of critical thinking, CyberspaceOrbit (http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/). :roll: They have a plot that shows an increase in cosmic ray activity here on Earth right after the impact.
Now, I know this must be garbage at worst, and coincidence at best. So I dug more. A little tiny bit more, and that iota of extra effort is something the cranks clearly didn't do, or didn't show.
The second link on the CyberSpace page goes to a Russian CR monitor, and there is the plot (http://helios.izmiran.rssi.ru/cosray/main.htm), showing the odd increase on September 21st. Sure, there is an overall trend of increase before then, but there does look like there is a knee in the plot around the time Galileo plunged into Jupiter.
But if you look a little farther down the page, you see a link to the past two years of data (http://helios.izmiran.rssi.ru/cosray/days.htm).
Take a look. You will see what I saw immediately: right now we are seeing below-average or perhaps just average levels of CRs, and last March the level was far higher. By only showing the past few weeks, Cyberspace is making it look like things are suspicious, when in fact they are not. This is exactly the same thing we see when PX proponents show sunspot or earthquake data; they don't give you enough history to understand the trends in the data. When you look at the trends, you see the obvious: there are not more earthquakes (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planetx/nutshell.html#earthquakes) than usual, we should expect high sunspot activity (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planetx/nutshell.html#sun) even this late in the solar cycle, and we are not seeing anything unusual in the cosmic ray counts.
In fact, when I look at the two year plot, I see that last year, there was a rise starting in July, just as we see this year. It looks to me like we are seeing some sort of annual trend, completely unrelated to Jupiter and Galileo. Of course.
Shame on you, CyberSpaceOrbit and Tuatha. Alarmist garbage like the stuff you post is scaring people needlessly. Shame on you.