Herd of Fuzzy Green 'Glacier Mice' Baffles Scientists
npr.org
npr.org
Start: "Every week, I see headlines in the mainstream media (as well as the “social” and online media outlets) that say something like “NASA Scientists Baffled at….” or “Scientists Bewildered by…”. It’s annoying and tells me that the writer and/or the headline writer is a) lazy and b) doesn’t have a clue about science or scientists. "
> "We still don't know," he says. "I'm still kind of baffled."'
Scientists are baffled. It's what gets us out of bed. If we knew everything, we'd be called oracles or something. If we stuck to the comforts of the known, applicable facts, we'd be called engineers.
Humans are curious beings. We enjoy the trivia at the forefront of science, even if we won't read the boring details of the precise scientific answer. Mulling the questions that scientists are investigating is a delight. And yeah, sometimes it's a lazy editor who exploits that curiosity, editorializing without verification, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
seriously? you are showing off your knowledge of science by displaying an ignorance of engineering... engineers don't live in emotional comfort, and the best experimental scientists are engineers or they'd never create novel equipment to test ideas.
In this specific case, it is an example of baffling.
What's really happening is that the headline writer knows what wording gets clicks.
They're not fools. Their job is just different from what you think it is.
There's a new PBS science show hosted by a "journalist" (rather than a scientist) called "H2O: the molecule that made us".
When talking about the atmosphere of the early Earth, she referred to it as "mostly CO2". That's so egregious an error, I rewound and rechecked it five times. The highest CO2 content we know of was 0.04%. "Mostly"?! This means that nobody with fairly basic science knowledge (I don't even have a degree in hard sciences, and this hit me like fingernails on a chalkboard) reviewed the script, or caught it in production, or caught it in previews.
After all, scientists like to be baffled ... if you're not, you're probably not looking hard enough. (Ask any cosmologist ;-)
So scientists employed a device to prevent the slosh dynamics caused by fuzzy green mice from affecting glaciers! Now THAT is an article I'd like to read!
Being baffled is pretty much a scientist’s job.
No images, no scripts, no cookies, no styling. Just the text. What a great thing!
Tracking more generally is not something that can be prevented by a browser which executes code written by the tracker, and must give that code access to the internet. Even if the SOP was completely enforced, trackers can still store the information on the origin server. Even if the browser doesn't expose any tracking information, the tracker can still measure all sorts of information which may be unique to your system, especially in concert with your IP address.
Text, images, and no scripts
• the "Agree and Continue" button does nothing;
• the "Decline and Visit Plain Text Site" button directs me to the article index at https://text.npr.org/ (instead of https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=858800112)
Perhaps NoScript special-cases this site?
Perhaps I had opened the page without noscript in the past, and it still had the relevant cookies
Nice aptronym!
Looks freaky though. :)
> "We still don't know," he says. "I'm still kind of baffled."
Science doesn't yet know which motive mechanism these use (they might even use something novel), and that's really cool.
>The researchers considered several possible explanations. The first, and most obvious one, is that they just rolled downhill. But measurements showed that the moss balls weren't going down a slope.
"We next thought maybe the wind is sort of blowing them in consistent directions," says Bartholomaus, "and so we measured the dominant direction of the wind."
That didn't explain it either, nor did the pattern of the sunlight.
"We still don't know," he says. "I'm still kind of baffled."
"It's always kind of exciting, though, when things don't comply with your hypothesis, with the way you think things work," says Gilbert.
The work has charmed other glacier scientists who dote on the adorable moss balls.
"I think that probably the explanation is somewhere in the physics of the energy and the heat around the surface of the glacier, but we haven't quite got there yet," says Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute.
Besides growth, their center of mass may also shift when one side becomes damper or dryer faster than the rest, due to sunlight, wind, or the wet ground.
I always found this aspect of English, uniquely naming sets of animals, to be simultaneously adorable and thoroughly useless and anachronistic.
Is there a defence of this flock of birds, mischief of mice, whateverthefuck of whosits system? (Does it have a name?) Do all linguistic systems do it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animal_names
Some of the terms vary depending on wieght of numbers (say, more than 12) or behaviour at the time, such as migration.
A parliament of owls, a murder of crows etc. I can imagine it was a way of excluding people without education.
My speculation anyway. Whole things just seems silly to me.
As a native English speaker, and armchair linguist, I feel that that sentence describes a rather substantial percentage of English usage, grammar, and (especially!) spelling.
That seems unbelievable to me but they just go around happily saying that easily.