I can’t believe I’m about to walk down the well-worn path of critiquing science coverage in the traditional media, but here we are.

Super-Earth: Newly Discovered Planet May Have Water – TIME.

Or more accurately – it *is* water. Every exoplanet report that reaches the traditional media tends to be exaggerated to feed the desire for an exciting story, and I think the net result is that the typical dispassionate observer may have concluded several times by now that earth like planets have been found.    For example, the findings that Gliese 581d and e may or may not be in the ‘habitable zone’ of their star triggered similar earth-like stories.   Now this new discovery of a 6.5 Earth mass ball of hot ice is throwing similar keywords.

However my favorite part of the article is this:

<blockquote>a planet 2.7 times bigger than Earth, circling a dim red star called GJ 1214, just 40 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus.</blockquote>

Yes, it’s *only* 40 light-years away, we can just stroll over there.  And how to decide whether to use the mass or radius when reporting how much “bigger” it is?  Let’s use the smaller number to increase the earth-like excitement!

I came across an entry on Google Books, and realized they have a map with all locations mentioned in the book tagged on the map. This is a neat feature. Check out the map for Around the World in 80 Days. Certainly an interesting way to access data in a book.

I was recently reading how St. Jerome was partial to plagiarizing the hell out of Origen and other sources, in some cases most of entire biblical commentaries. The author makes the point that plagarizing was quite a bit easier in the ancient world, as there weren’t that many copies of the books floating around when each copy had to be written out by hand. Printing was one paradigm jump in text availability, and we’re now going through another one.

I hear often how the internet makes it a lot easier for people to cheat and plagarize, but I think the increased accessibility of our accumulated texts actually makes the opposite true. We’re just coming through a period where people aren’t yet submitting papers electronically, and these papers aren’t yet routinely run through a programmatic comparison with the database of all books to check for plagarism. (This won’t address paying someone to write your paper). Think of how accessible human knowledge is now compared to even 10 years ago. Doesn’t it seem astronomically harder to find plagarism if you have to look through a physical book for the copied text?

Taking aim at a longstanding rite of passage for 16-year-olds, an influential auto safety group is calling on states to raise the age for getting a driver’s license to 17 or even 18.

Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research group funded by the auto insurance industry, acknowledged the idea is “a tough sell,” but noted that car crashes are the leading cause of death among teenagers.

“The bottom line is that when we look at the research, raising the driving age saves lives,” Lund said.

I don’t doubt it. But why stop there?  Think of all the lives that could be saved if the driving age was raised to 50.  Do teenagers die on the road at greater rates than other age groups, or do they just have lower mortality from other causes?  Even if they do have a higher auto-death rate, what is the cause?  Inexperience on the road perhaps?  If the driving age was raised to 18, wouldn’t that then increase the number of fatalities in the now inexperienced 18-20 age group?

If you’re tired of wrangling broadcast times for television out of tv.yahoo.com or tvguide, I’ve finally found a simple, decent television calendar site. CAT allows you to display only a whitelist of the programs you’re interested, as well as simple nomenclature for episode numbers, mouse-over synopses, and correct time display for your time zone. All this in a clean, text based table.