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20-July-2006, 09:59 PM
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Incredibly Bad Astronomy in German Newspaper
The biggest German tabloid newspaper has reached levels of silliness unheard of before:
They suggest the summer is so hot because Mars is now too far away to cool the Earth... I translated some parts of the article (german): "+++ today hottest day of the year +++ red planet doesn't cool us anymore +++ Scienists puzzled +++ Does Mars make it so hot? Desert-like heat in Germany! The air temperature approaches 38°C. Researchers wonder: is that because Mars is farther away from the Earth than ever before? Its cooling influence (-140°C) might be missing for us now." A nice example of quote-mining is the one of the guy from the German Space Agency (DLR), whose quote states Mars' surface temperature, immediately followed by the sentence "It is as if Earth's air-conditioning system had been removed". On this page (german), the three researchers quoted state that they explicitly told the "journalist" that his article is absolute nonsense... And then there's this piece of text that reeks of geocentrism to me, somehow: "Why is Mars receding? Its orbit is an ellipse. Sometimes it comes near (56 Mio. kms), but this year it moves to a distance of 370 Mio. km." [ok, "bahn" translated as "orbit" here doesn't necessarily suggest that it's an Earth orbit, but still...] (Originally I wanted to email that to the BA himself, but his contact page put me off somewhat  Anyway, good reason to join Bautforum after having occassionally read it for a while.) 
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20-July-2006, 10:55 PM
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Hello Mandrake, welcome to the board.
Aren't you glad those people aren't teaching school children?
__________________
"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah
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22-July-2006, 07:13 PM
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Well, trouble is that BILD has a much wider audience than the Weekly World News as far as I know...
Most people probably have understood now that they don't do good journalism, really, but it still is the paper that most of the blue-collar workers here read in their lunchbreak. Grrrr.
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