I hate to take away from a rant about an important topic, but when astronomers speak colloquially, “size” almost always refers to radius. That’s the most common way, after all, to descibe the scale of an object. You usually don’t say that the Moon is 2.05 x 10[sup]10[/sup] cubic kilometers in size, do you? Ask me the size of a particle in Saturn’s rings, and I’ll tell you 2 cm. Ask me the size of a black hole, and I’ll give its Schwartzschild radius. Ask me the size of an asteroid, and I’ll probably give you its long axis. Ask me how the size of Pluto compares to the size of Charon, and my first reaction would be to ratio the radii.
If you don’t like that, you can feel free to pit the astronomers. “Size” is a sloppy term to use, and you won’t find it used in technical writing without explicitly stating whether you’re talking about radius, or mass, or what. Maybe we should be equally careful about that in casual speech or writing. But I wouldn’t fault the reporter for repeating it, or using a similar convention.
Now, if you want to see some bad science writing, I got a link to this dreck from one of my students:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051029/ap_on_sc/early_americans
I can’t make heads or tails of what the archaeologist is claiming because the reporter has scrambled it beyond all recognition. It begins: “A supernova could be the ‘quick and dirty’ explanation for what may have happened to an early North American culture, a nuclear scientist here said Thursday.”
Very interesting, I thought!
But supernovae are not mentioned again.
Ever.
In the whole article.
“Richard Firestone said … that he thinks ‘impact regions’ on mammoth tusks found in Gainey, Mich., were caused by magnetic particles rich in elements like titanium and uranium.” Um. Fantastic. What the heck is an “impact region” in this context? Putting it in quotes doesn’t relieve you of the duty to define the unfamiliar term. Does he mean that the tusk itself actually got hit by an impactor? Really? A big one? A little one? Or is “impact region” some kind of a term used in palentology?
“He estimates that comets struck the solar system during the Clovis period, which was roughly 13,000 years ago. These comets would have hit the Earth at 1,000 kilometers an hour, he said, obliterating many life forms and causing mutations in others.”
1000 km/hr. Ooooooh. Very impressive. Except that’s only 0.2 km/s, and anything falling into Earth’s gravity well will end up going around 10 km/s, and comets usually hit the Earth going much faster because of their elliptical orbits. But, hey, what’s a factor of 10 or 100 between friends? And . . . mutations? Ummmm . . .
Firestone is further quoted as saying: “I’m not going to tell you that there’s Clovis people on the moon, or that they had a space program. But these particles look very much like the material that comes from the moon, which is the only place we’ve found with this same high titanium concentration.”
What the hell are we talking about here? Comets hitting the Earth that for some reason have composition similar to lunar samples? Comets hitting the Moon and causing lunar meteorites to hit the Earth? Connect the dots for me, will ya?
Then the reporter goes on to some reaction quotes from an Episcopal minister and amateur archaeologist, who has nothing substantive to say about the actual story, just some general rhapsodizing about digging on Clovis sites. This is the best source you could get? You couldn’t talk to another knowledgable archaeologist? Or an astronomer even?
Or DID you call up an astronomer, and spout some blather about supernovae and comets and moon rocks until they hung up on you?
I thought the whole thing was particularly bad, even for an AP story. I cannot find any other science stories with that reporter’s byline, and most of her other work appears to be on South Carolina court cases and politics, so maybe she got tasked to work this archaeology conference and isn’t actually a science writer. Still, a pretty piss-poor effort, I’d say.
