P.S. on the problem with science
I should have, of course, provided the two papers in question so you can decide for yourself. I can't quite do that. I can give you the link to my paper, here:http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/papers/ps/vimsclouds_final.pdfAnd I can even provide you with a link to their paper:http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7247/full/nature08014.htmlBut it's possible that you can't read theirs. Why not? Because, even after $1B of taxpayer money going to send Cassini to Titan and get these resu

The problem with science
Science is a great system. You examine reality, come up with ideas how it might work, test those ideas, keep the good ones, discard the bad ones, and move on. It’s got one big flaw, though, and that is that science is done by scientists, and scientists are people. I have a whole slew of scientists mad at me this week – and I will admit that I am pretty irritated back – because none of us cool rational analytical scientists can truly separate our emotions and our egos from the reality-based science that we do. In this current dispute, I get to claim the scientific high ground, at least. My scientific paper that just came out this week unarguably demonstrates that the

Millard Canyon Memories
The Station Fire started near JPL on Thursday and went crazy yesterday, expanding to 20,000 then 35,000 and now who-know-how-many acres. Remarkably few structures have been lost.There is a good chance, though, that the little cabin that I lived in when I first arrived at Caltech is now ash. I might be wrong; in the major fires 15 years ago Millard Canyon was saved when fire skipped over the top of it. But from everything I can see things don't look good. The firefighters started protecting structures in the real city, not crazy cabins up in the woods. The cabin was at least 100 years old and had survived floods and fires that had slowly gotten rid of the cabins throughout the rest of the

Fog! Titan! Titan Fog! (and a peer review experiment)
Look! Titan has fog at the south pole! All of those bright sparkly reddish white patches are fog banks hanging out at the surface in Titan's late southern summer. I first realized this a year ago, but it took me until now to finally have the time to be able to put all of the pieces together into a

Planetary Placemats
[word of warning; this one really really requires the pictures. So if you aren’t seeing pictures, you might want to directly go to www.mikebrownsplanets.com] This morning Lilah started asking about Christmas. With her fourth birthday now more than a month behind her it seems to the natural thing to start contemplating. As a warm up, she started trying to remember presents from last Christmas. “Daddy! Daddy! You gave me those baby scissors!” she exclaimed, running over to her little table sitting in the middle of the kitchen and pulling out a pair of 4-inch miniature yet quite sharp scissors. She uses these most every day, tho