[LINK] The Milky Way

[Greg Taylor]

On 31/12/2009 11:40 PM, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
> If the information on these two websites is factual (and previous reading
> suggests most of it is, even though sometimes un-sourced here) then these
> two websites might well be the two most important sites you'll ever read.
>
>    

I have a genuine Sagan Baloney Detector (TM) (Mark 1, USB interface) 
that I was going to list on eBay, but the alarm went to Alert Level 3 
when it scanned this message, so maybe it's worth keeping.

Confusion between the solar orbital plane and the Milky Way galactic 
plane is not a common thread in the global warming conspiracy theory 
blogosphere, and it's rather surprising to see it raise it's ugly head 
in the once highly-respected Link journal. Perhaps the critical thinking 
gene is disappearing from the genome even faster than we feared.

The Chicken Little theory of global (nay galactic) warming has been 
doing the rounds in the darker regions of the Internet for a few years 
now. Phil Plait did a good job of debunking it back in 2007. Hurrah for 
the Internet:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/06/27/is-the-sun-from-another-galaxy/

A Happy and Skeptical New Year to all.

Greg

References:

Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit
http://users.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/baloney.html
Tip 1:  Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the 
facts.

The Crackpot Index
A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to 
physics.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html