We have a podcast scheduled for Saturday at 4pm Central. We’re bloggers, so maybe you’re not familiar with what we look like, so here’s a portrait.
You’ll never guess which one is me.
The topic: in preparation for Halloween, we’ll be discussing what it is about scary stuff that we like. We’re partly inspired by this Ologies podcast on “What’s Creepy”, which is better than anything we can do, but we’ll try.
Avi Loeb is playing games with his peculiar interpretation of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. He keeps suggesting that this interesting, carbon-rich, and very old rock is an artificial construct built by a distant civilization, that it is a probe sent to examine our solar system, and that it could be a “Trojan horse” that will do something, who knows what, when it arrives.
Reading some his justifications for that claim, I am forced to conclude that he is an idiot putting on a display to get attention.
Worse, he’s a bad scientist whoring irrational claims and calculations that he has to know are invalid. I am not an astronomer, but I do understand logic a little bit, and seeing him derive extravagant conclusions from mundane observations hurts, especially since he’s using them to obscure the really interesting (and entirely natural) interpretations of the data.
For instance, he’s on the record for inferring the probability that 3I/ATLAS is an alien space probe on the basis of “anomalies” that turn out to not be anomalous at all, just unique properties of an interstellar comet.
As of now, I assign a 30–40% likelihood that 3I/ATLAS does not have a fully natural origin, based on its seven anomalies that I listed here. This low-probability scenario includes the possibility of a black swan event akin to a Trojan Horse, where a technological object masquerades as a natural comet.
Show your work, Avi. How did you calculate that 30-40% likelihood? I think he got it by fumbling about in his rectum and pulling out a squishy number that he likes because it fits his presuppositions. There is nothing in his list of seven “anomalies” to warrant that degree of estimation. They aren’t even anomalies, he’s just looking at the brute facts of its existence and declaring that the details are improbable. Of course they are! It’s a unique object in space!
I tried looking at his list. I am unimpressed.
Anomalies that could be alleviated or explained away with upcoming data:
1. Size: The diameter of 3I/ATLAS is larger than 5 kilometers, making its minimum mass of 33 billion tons, larger by a factor of a thousand to a million than the mass of the second and first interstellar objects (as derived here).
OK, it has a size. That is not anomalous. Call me when you observe an object that is massless–that would be anomalous. I don’t see how finding that it has a mass of 33 billion tons makes it more likely to be artificial than if it had a mass of 3 billion tons or 333 billion tons.
I also don’t see how more data would explain away the mass.
It’s also a fuzzy blob far away and hard to resolve. The size is subject to revision, so how do you conclude anything from a measurement with so much variability?
Initial estimates suggested 3I/ATLAS might be up 20 kilometers (12 miles) across—very big for a comet—but most astronomers now think it is much smaller. “It’s probably somewhere in the range of one or two kilometers,” says John Noonan at Auburn University in Alabama. That would be somewhat comparable in size to our first two interstellar visitors: 1I/ʻOumuamua, which was discovered in 2017 and was up to about 400 meters (0.25 mile) long, and 2I/Borisov, which was found in 2019 and was about one kilometer (0.6 mile) wide.
It doesn’t matter — any number you attach to it will be used by Loeb to claim it is probably artificial.
2. Jet: The Hubble image of 3I/ATLAS showed a forward jet of scattered sunlight — 10 times longer than it is wide, pointing towards the Sun (as discussed here). A weak tail showed up only at the end of August (as reported here).
Yes? It’s apparently a carbon-rich object, and gasses are sublimating off of it and spewing in the direction of the heat source, the Sun, that is thawing them, making an anti-tail. How does that make it more likely that it is artificial? It has a chemical composition is what that tells me.
3. Unusual chemical composition: the plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS showed much more nickel than iron (as discussed here and here), as in industrial nickel alloys. Unlike solar system comets, the plume contained mostly carbon dioxide and not water (as reported here and here).
Note the dishonest trick he’s pulling here, comparing it to “industrial nickel alloys.” These are estimates of the composition of the comet made from the spectroscopy of the diffuse cloud of gas surrounding it, not a determination that it’s made of metal alloys.
It actually is an interesting difference — its composition differs from more familiar comets found in our solar system. That composition also seems to be changing over time, which is somewhat odd, but explainable.
To make sense of this mystery, scientists turned to chemistry — specifically, to organometallic compounds, which are molecules containing both metal atoms and carbon-based groups.
In particular, they looked at compounds called carbonyls: nickel tetracarbonyl (Ni(CO)₄) and iron pentacarbonyl (Fe(CO)₅). Both can form under cold, low-pressure conditions, like those found in the outer reaches of a protoplanetary disk — the birthplace of comets and planets alike.
These carbonyls are highly volatile, meaning they can sublimate (turn from solid to gas) at relatively low temperatures. Nickel tetracarbonyl is more volatile than its iron counterpart, meaning it will vaporize first as the comet warms up.
This neatly explained what the VLT was seeing. When 3I/ATLAS was still far from the sun, only nickel tetracarbonyl had begun to sublimate, filling the coma with nickel. As the comet drew closer, the temperature crossed the sublimation threshold for iron pentacarbonyl — and suddenly, iron began to appear. The Ni/Fe ratio plummeted, not because the amount of nickel was decreasing, but because iron was finally joining the show.
Now, though, somebody needs to explain to me how being composed of volatile organometallic compounds is a signature of artificial manufacture.
4. Polarization: the light from 3I/ATLAS showed extreme negative polarization (as reported here).
I read the paper, and I must admit, the topic is beyond me. It does say that 3I/ATLAS has distinct, unique polarization properties and that “Its polarimetric characteristics provide novel insights into the dust properties of interstellar objects, suggesting that ISOs may encompass a broader diversity than previously recognised,” but does not even come close to implying that this is a marker of artificiality.
Anomalies that will remain puzzling forever:
5. The trajectory of 3I/ATLAS is aligned with the ecliptic plane of planets around the Sun to within 5 degrees (0.2% likelihood), as discussed here.
It has a trajectory. That is not anomalous. Every object moving through space has one. Yes, this trajectory is roughly similar to the ecliptic plane, but so what? 3I/ATLAS is very old, between 3 and 14 billion years old, is Loeb suggesting that aliens aimed their space probe at a condensing protosystem before the planets existed in order to tour potential planets?
6. The arrival time of 3I/ATLAS was optimized to pass near Mars, Venus and Jupiter (0.005% likelihood), as discussed here.
“optimized”…such misleading language, implying intent behind its trajectory. Here’s what that trajectory looks like:
Ooooh. Does that look like a pre-planned course to you? It does to Avi Loeb.
7. The arrival direction of 3I/ATLAS is aligned to within 9 degrees with the “Wow! Signal” from August 15, 1977 (0.6% likelihood), as discussed here.
The “wow” signal was a brief, unexplained, unrepeated pulse of radio signal noise. It got SETI researchers very excited for a while, but there’s no reason to think it is a message from space aliens, and Loeb is making an exceptionally tenuous connection between it and 3I/ATLAS. A 9 degree difference is an immense difference in location at the astronomical distances we’re talking about.
You know, as an atheist I read far too much nonsense from religious apologists claiming to have proof of their god’s existence — bizarre non sequiturs about physical constants and numerological coincidences, collections of anecdotes that are supposed to add up to evidence, and a tiny set of permutations on the same old arguments that even in their best interpretations don’t make up a justification for their beliefs. Reading Avi Loeb’s work gave me a strong sense of deja vu. It’s the same thing! A good analysis of a phenomenon should lead one to a minimal conclusion, but everything Loeb does ends up supporting the remarkable interpretation that God Aliens exist, and they want to talk to you, and this tiny fragment of data is how they shout at you, Occam’s Razor be damned.
I’m going to say it: Loeb has gone batty, and all this noise he makes is nothing but a dedicated (and successful!) effort to get his name in the tabloids. He’s the Percival Lowell of our generation, a scientist who did good work but whose reputation was poisoned by his irrational pursuit of astronomical phantasms, the Martian canals in one case and this alien obsession in Loeb’s.
…one should spend some time with one’s spiders. I know it is numerically the 10th month, but it should be the 8th month by name, if not for some silly Romans who tried to squeeze a couple more emperors into the calendar. It was feeding day anyway, so I spent a little time giving them treats in celebration.
Here’s Blue, who gobbled down her mealworm instantly, and is now dabbling her toes in her water dish.
It’s getting more difficult to photograph Blue, because she’s covering everything with silk — when you look in from the side, it’s a haze of strands everywhere, and I have to remove the lid to the terrarium to lean in and see what she’s up to.
I fed the Steatoda borealis, the Parasteatoda tepidariorum, and the Latrodectus mactans juveniles as well. I’ve isolated about 80 black widow juveniles in individual vials, and am running out of room in the incubator, so there’s about 80-100 more left in a container together, like a giant colony of black widows. It’s a Darwinian world in there — I figure I’ll let the numbers decline and then extract the biggest survivors.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the isolated individuals, in spite of getting a bounty of fruit flies twice a week, are growing more slowly than some of the black widows in the communal container. Most are small, but there’s a few that stand out as growing distinctly larger than their siblings.
(Photos were taken immediately after I dumped a lot of fruit flies into the container, so they’ve all got their faces snout deep in dinner.)
I have to speculate that maybe, just maybe, some of the spiders are eating their siblings.
I suspect most of my readers are not manly, masculine “he-men,” according to this declaration by Edward K. Strong.
Men Are Becoming Less Manly, Scientist Thinks
Men today are not as roughly masculine as they used to be, according to Dr. Edward K. Strong, of Palo Alto, California, noted psychology professor at Stanford University. He set forth this conclusion in an article in the current issue of the Journal of Social Psychology.
The only he-men are engineers and farmers, he stated in an account of a survey of divisions of interest among the sexes. But if you are a minister, a lawyer, a doctor, a writer or a newspaperman, you have feminine interests, which have become stronger with each generation.
Although…how can you trust Dr Strong? He was neither an engineer or farmer, but was a psychologist, a mere academic who wrote books like The Psychology of Selling and Advertisement and The Psychology of Selling Life Insurance. He reeks of “feminine interests.”
Also, he’s dead. The article is from 1936.
Elle Cordova does a rendition of a Halloween classic.
Trump is a gangster. Now he’s committing extortion against American universities.
President Donald Trump’s war on academia continued this week with letters pressuring the leaders of top universities across the United States to sign his “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” for priority access to federal funding and other “positive benefits.”
The New York Times reported that “letters were sent on Wednesday to the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia.”
The letters “urging campus leaders to pledge support for President Trump’s political agenda to help ensure access to federal research funds” were signed by Education Secretary Linda McMahon and two key White House officials, according to the Times.
The “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” is basically a demand to dictate who is allowed to be employed by and attend our universities — it’s an anti-DEI set of demands that claims to enhance diversity while effectively abolishing it. It demands that the university “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” so it’s trying to artificially pump up bogus conservatism, at a time when conservatism has dived off the cliff into outright lunacy.
My university hasn’t been victimized by the extortionist, yet. I would hope that they would refuse to accept the compact, if they were sent this wicked letter. Most universities are fighting back and refusing to sign on.
Leaders of the Texas system were “honored” that the Austin campus was chosen to be a part of the compact and its “potential funding advantages,” according to a statement from Kevin Eltife, chair of the Board of Regents. “Today we welcome the new opportunity presented to us and we look forward to working with the Trump Administration on it,” Eltife said.
What a cowardly, chicken-shit place Texas must be.
Arachnologists poking around in Thailand discovered a new species of mygalomorph, Damarchus inazuma. One individual was particularly unusual: it’s a gynandromorph!
Damarchus inazuma sp. nov. gynandromorph (ARA–2021–273). A dorsal habitus (live); B dorsal habitus (preserved); C ventral habitus (preserved). Scale bars: 1 cm (A, B, C).
Female side is on the left, male on the right.
Kunsete, C., Thanoosing, C., Sivayyapram, V., Traiyasut, P. & Warrit, N. (2025) New insights into Damarchus: a new species and gynandromorph description from Thailand (Araneae: Bemmeridae). Zootaxa, 5696 (3), 409–424. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5696.3.6
The Oregon GOP posted this image on Twitter.
Oh my goodness. I had no idea the anarchy was so bad.
On all three platforms, the statement was illustrated with an image that seemed designed to support Trump’s false claim that protests against immigration sweeps in Portland are so out of control that the city is “burning to the ground”. On one side of the image, a line of police officers held riot shields; on the other, a crowd of young men held up flares that lit up a night sky filled with red smoke.
Except…the police on the left side of the image are Ecuadorian, and the photo was from 2008.
And the fiery protest is a photo from Brazil in 2017.
Do you realize what this means? South America has invaded the United States! The spearhead has been driving up the West coast for the last 17 years, and we’re only finding out now! MAGA was right all along about the Hispanic invasion.
Or, I suppose, it’s possible that Republicans are terrible liars.
Chopping it all down
I had a nightmarish realization last night — that American education was worse than I thought, and it was all going in the wrong direction, which will have dire consequences for the next generation. I’ve been listening to the right-wing’s plans for our schools, and they are ugly. For one thing, they hate education and want to simply shut it down; they’ve put Linda McMahon in charge of the Department of Education, which is scheduled for elimination, and she is a horrible, hateful dimwit. Science is mostly gone. They think math is what you do to fill out your tax forms. History is being put in the hands of PragerU, a fake ‘college’ run by a bigot who has no background in education or history. Museums are being policed to make sure they say nothing unpleasant about America. Their vision of good schools stops at putting Bibles and the ten commandments in every classroom.
This is how they will maintain power, by making sure every child is fitted with blinkers from birth onwards.
It made me think about how I would support good educational policy.
Math. No, math is not about filling out a form, or learning about spreadsheets. Math is the great enabler of ideas. Students should learn that math is beautiful and fun, and is also a foundation for sound reasoning and logic — I know that in my case, learning basic principles of algebra and geometry, and quantitative reasoning in the sciences, opened up my brain and led to a flowering of interest in all kinds of scientific subjects.
Every grade school curriculum should culminate in an introductory understanding of calculus. Maybe that shouldn’t be a requirement for graduation — I’m well aware that a lot of students are terrified of mathematics — but we should at least aspire to improve on that. We do have, in our better schools, the idea of college-tracks, a series of classes that students should plan on take if they want to go to university. Unfortunately, my experience in recent years has been that even if they fail algebra, students think they are prepared for science at the college level. They’re not.
History and Civics. History is not about smooth upward trajectories to the perfection that is America today. History is about stuttering forwards and backwards through errors and tragedies to overcome terrible human failures. One of my high school history classes started with how the “founding fathers” done fucked up, compromising on basic human rights to get a short term victory, that led to the catastrophe of the Civil War. More of that please. Maybe one of the lessons of history is the ability to look back and see where we went wrong, so that maybe we realize that even “Great Men” are fallible and biased.
You won’t get that with the PragerU approach to history — they even whitewashed Christopher Columbus, one of the greatest monsters of our history.
Literature. Do right-wingers even read? I don’t think so.
I think our education has been hobbled by the Western Canon, which contains what modern minds would consider real klunkers. I know, they’re well-regarded for reasons, and if we studied them harder, maybe students would warm to them, but we have limited time and we need to get them enthused about learning. For instance, Darwin’s Origin is a gorgeous piece of Victorian literature…but I wouldn’t inflict it on students. Contemporary literature removes that roadblock of historical conventions, and is going to be more engaging on subjects of modern interest. There are few 19th century texts that have anything relevant to say about the current gay or black experience.
Turn the teachers loose to discuss books they are passionate about. If a teacher has a passion for Silas Marner, go for it. The key, though, is engagement, and there are ways to do that that don’t involved dogma.
Language. This would enrage the MAGAts, but we should be teaching Spanish from kindergarten on. I had grade school Spanish myself, and it didn’t take — we memorized a few rote phrases, but learned nothing about the structure of the language, how to assemble a sentence, how to engage in a conversation beyond learning how to ask where the library is. We learned the parts of speech in our English class, but nothing of the kind in Spanish. The goal should be that every kid be able to have a simple conversation on the playground in Spanish by the time they get to middle school.
We should be beyond our self-centered focus on just one language, English. We live in a hemisphere where most people speak Spanish (OK, also Portuguese), and where growing communities in the US are Hispanic, we should be obligated to be at least bilingual. I think I was short-changed by a system that treated an entire language spoken by our neighbors as negligible.
Science. I’m going to go against my own background on this one, but a little less focus on science in grade school is OK. I generally feel like I have to start at the beginning for my college biology classes, because their understanding is mostly superficial; what they did learn seems to have leaked in through their eyes and ears and then dribbled out their noses. That sounds harsh on the students, but what I do see that is encouraging is that they come in eager and ready to learn.
This is partly my bias, because the science classes I took in high school were mostly boring, empty noise that didn’t teach anything particularly fundamental. The one exception was my high school chemistry class, where the teacher ignored the expected curriculum and taught remedial math: estimation, quantitative measurement, logarithms, all that juicy stuff which actually proved useful throughout my career. Thanks, Mr Thompson!
The right-wing perspective on education is all about compelling kids to memorize a set of facts, a simplistic pattern, that doesn’t involve thinking at all. If we let them get away with it, we’re crippling the next generation. Don’t let them.
A week or so ago, I was at the local coffeeshop and overheard a conversation. A very earnest, serious conservative was talking to a young woman about parents’ rights — how the law must not interfere with parents’ ability to instruct their children about religion and politics, that parents have a right and a duty to pass on their values to their children, and it shouldn’t matter how weird and wrong they might be.
It was infuriating to listen to, but I didn’t speak up, I didn’t bother the pair, I just got more and more aggravated to the point where I just left the coffee shop rather than make a scene. All that was running through my head was a simple question:
What about the children’s rights?
Shouldn’t every child have the right to good information, a good educational framework, an opportunity to learn about other perspectives? Every thing I see about conservative education is a denial of ideas outside a narrow ideological focus, leading to a situation now where un-American ideas (where the conservative starts with a very limited version of what is American) are on the verge of being criminalized. And one of the ways they accomplish that is by treating children as property who can be rightfully indoctrinated with whatever stupidity their parents hold sacred.
And then I realize…they probably are pretty damned comfortable with their role as thugs who hurt people.
