M Thomas Apple Author Page

Science fiction, actual science, history, and personal ranting about life, the universe, and everything

No, it’s not actually an iPhone. Yes, please stop the sloppy reporting, thanks

January 9, 2020
MThomas

AncientIPhone

This is already a few months old, but I thought I’d finally get around to blogging about it: The “ancient iPhone” of “Russia’s Atlantis.”

Spoiler alert: it’s not one, and there was no such place. But that didn’t stop the “news” from spreading. Continue Reading

“We already found life on Mars!” Um. Sorry, no, you didn’t.

October 15, 2019
MThomas

“What is the evidence against the possibility of life on Mars?” Levin wrote. “The astonishing fact is that there is none.”

Uh, no, sorry. That’s an illogical fallacy called “begging the question.”

Often phrased like this: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Or, as a friend once joked, “Just because you haven’t found any aliens doesn’t mean there aren’t any!”

Well, yeah, but that doesn’t prove anything except that we just don’t know.

See, science doesn’t work like that. It demands skepticism, careful theorizing based on positive evidence.

And replication.

If findings can’t be independently confirmed and reproduced by an outside observer, then the evidence isn’t strong enough.

Sorry. No smoking gun. Yet.

(Believe me, if scientists knew that Mars had life, we’d hear about it ad infinitum. Carl Sagan put it best: Scientists are terrible at keeping secrets.)

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/10/15/us/nasa-life-on-mars-intl-hnk-scli/index.html?__twitter_impression=true

A brief rant about Netflix: No, that’s NOT what “original” means

August 6, 2019
MThomas

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This is not a complaint about Netflix in general (well, not necessarily, but anyway). Without Netflix, I might have gone, shall we say, a little…

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…this past winter. I’ve been working temporarily in Montréal, several thousands miles of miles apart from my family, and being able to watch movies and older TV shows has been a great escape from the depressing monotony of single life.

But I feel the need to tell Netflix that I do not appreciate their use of the word “original.” Continue Reading

No, the “golden asteroid” will NOT make you rich

June 27, 2019
MThomas

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I wrote about this a couple of days ago (based on an article from two weeks prior), but it’s interesting to see random websites suddenly jumping on the “we’ll all get rich!” asteroid mining band wagon. Hey, everybody, let’s copy-paste stuff and not use our brains!

A new article by rt.com even includes two click-bait links to “how gold was formed” that have nothing whatsoever to do with NASA’s probe to (16) Psyche. Of course, we shouldn’t expect any less from an obvious Russian “news” distributor. But in the interests of calling out the bad reporting in this and similar “news” articles spread online recently, let’s give this a hearty smack-down.

Continue Reading

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