First up in the Spacetime continuum…

*Look at this fucking picture of the surface of Mars.

*Once every billion years or so, heat deep with the Saturnian moon of Enceladus causes ice volcanoes to erupt like crazy. It turns out this once-in-a-billion-years event is happening right now as Cassini watches.

*Speaking of volcanos, the first “Earth like” (by which scientists mean rocky as opposed to gaseous) extrasolar planet that’s been discovered is in all liklihood a volcanic hellscape with surface temperatures reaching 4000 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s so close to its star that basically, unless its orbit draws a nearly perfect circle, tidal forces must be warping the planet’s mass all over the place and wreaking geological havoc. Deathklok is no doubt planning a music video shoot there soon.

Unfortunately, the new year has produced precious little in the way of interesting cosmological tidbits so far. I did scrounge up the link below, which is a little 2010 science preview, but in the meantime I’ll take the opportunity to recommend a BBC series that occasionally runs on Discovery’s Science Channel here in the states. The show is called Horizon, but when it runs on The Science Channel, they always change the name to whatever the episode is called. So for instance, last week they ran a Horizon episode about Stephen Hawking’s Information Paradox. The episode was called, appropriately enough, Stephen Hawking’s Information Paradox, and that’s how The Science Channel listed it in the program guide. So you can’t just search the listings for “Horizon,” which is too bad because it’s a really fantastic science documentary show. It’s basically the British Nova, only way better. According to Wikipedia, there have been over 1000 episodes of the show produced since 1964 and I have no idea how to go about intentionally watching them. You basically have to luck into seeing them on The Science Channel. I just watched one last night about gamma ray bursters called Death Star. It’s really great. Good hunting!

And New Scientist predicts that in the search for the elusive Higgs Boson, CERN is likely to turn up a neutralino or two…

No one has ever seen one, but it is predicted by the theory of supersymmetry, which fixes many problems that plague the standard model. Supersymmetry doubles the number of elementary particles, adding one heavier super-partner for each standard-model particle.

All supersymmetric particles produced in the early universe would have long since decayed into the lightest such particle, the neutralino. And the neutralino, it turns out, is a perfect candidate to account for dark matter – the mysterious stuff that far outweighs ordinary matter in the universe.

It would be easier to spot than the Higgs, and it might even make its presence felt in 2010. If it does, it would solve two problems at once: confirming supersymmetry and answering the mystery of what makes up the universe’s missing mass. The Higgs would have to take a back seat.

Cue the mad knitting.

And for that very special someone in your life, Robot Kasten is offering the best t-shirt of the holiday season.

Thanksgiving Day is tomorrow and families will be coming together for dinner all over the USA to share the big meal. Football will be watched. Pie will be consumed. And inevitably, in some homes, politics will be discussed. Family members love each other, but they don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on political issues. Political divisions among family members are often extreme and for some of these people, holiday meals are the only times in the year that they come face-to-face with folks who are so diametrically opposed to their political views.

So this year, Candleblog would like to offer a little help — some ammunition for the Thanksgiving table-talk.

One big topic of discussion will be the continuing debate on Capital Hill over health care reform. That’s what’s still taking up the bulk of the news cycles. But that debate has been raging for many months and all you good progressive blog readers should already be on your game for that discussion (if you’re not, there is some great material to get you started here).

But I think the political dark horse at this year’s Thanksgiving table will be global warming. Right wing blogs are all in a lather this week about some recently hacked emails from the University of East Anglia in Britain. These bloggers have cherry picked some quotes from individual scientists over the last decade of the email log and presented them as evidence that global warming is a sham being perpetuated by a conspiracy of alarmists. The link above literally calls the news “the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic [human-caused] Global Warming.’”

Right wing blogs and email lists (and Fox News) are apoplectic about this, so if you have family members at your turkey-day table this year who follow these information sources, it’s likely you’ll get an earful, particularly given the imminent summit on climate change in Copenhagen.

The truth, of course, is that while the hacked emails have proven embarrassing for some of these scientists who were informally (and sometimes ingraciously) communicating with each other in what they assumed was private correspondence (let this be a lesson for everyone about the security of email), the science behind human-caused climate change is totally unaffected by this development.

Below you’ll find a series of links to some good reactions to the “climategate” story in both the MSM and climate science blogs. There’s a lot of info here and it’s fascinating stuff. If your time is limited (gotta mash those potatoes!), I recommend starting with the NYTimes’ story on the hacked emails and them immediately reading the reaction to that story by Dr. Joe Romm (MIT physicist, former Clinton Dept. of Energy official and a leading climate change blogger):

• NYTimes story
• Dr. Joe Romm’s reaction

Then if you still have some time, read the reaction from the scientists at RealClimate.org (very thoughtful piece) and from the indispensable Nate Silver, who writes:

I don’t know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger. And yet that’s literally what some of these bloggers are saying!

Incidentally, 2009 is shaping up to be the 5th warmest year on record, according to the conspiracists at NASA.

And if you’re still hiding in the office and surfing the net when you should be making the gravy, there’s more good info at HuffPo and The Wonk Room at Think Progress.

But my favorite reaction is this one from the Carbon Fixated blog (quoted in the HuffPo piece above), which declares that “Newtongate” has driven “the final nail in the coffin of Renaissance and Enlightenment ‘thinking.’”

If you own any shares in companies that produce reflecting telescopes, use differential and integral calculus, or rely on the laws of motion, I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the calculus myth has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after volumes of Newton’s private correspondence were compiled and published.

Good luck! If you actually do engage your relatives on this, make sure you leave comments here about it! We like to know we’ve helped (or hurt) your argument.

H/T to Steve Benen for providing me with some of the above links.

UPDATE: In the comments, Gerry Canavan reminds us that a good first stop in dealing with climate change deniers is this post about How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic. And indeed, it’s a great clearing house for refutations of the most common canards coming from the global warming deniers. I do take issue with the use of the phrase “climate skeptic,” however. A “skeptic” is someone who doesn’t trust a given claim in the absence of strong evidence. There’s ample evidence of anthropogenic global warming to convince any actual “skeptic.” Once they’ve been presented with the evidence and scientific consensus, if they still claim it’s an open question, they’re just deniers at that point. Perhaps a new post needs to be written about How to Talk to Climate Change Ostriches (heads in the sand and all). Or maybe there’s no point in talking to them — if the actual evidence doesn’t convince them, it’s unlikely that a few more links will.

Yes, Frist is right and Maher is wrong. I know, I had to watch it twice!

Bad Astonomer, Phil Plait discusses the video here, and there’s more about Maher and his crazy beliefs here.

Emily and I just got home from Selene Colburn’s History of the Future Collection dance performance. Neither Emily nor I consider ourselves conversant in the art or appreciation of dance, but despite our philistine handicap, we enjoyed ourselves a great deal. The mix of dance, humor, science (yes, science) and video (some of which was created by me, incidentally) was just perfect for keeping the performance accessible and meaningful for a dunce like me.

Tonight’s show was sold out, but I believe there are still tickets available for tomorrow’s show and I highly recommend it.

In honor of Selene’s performance, I’m posting this 10-minute film I made in 2007 that combines elements from a couple of the pieces she presented tonight. This is about as close as I’ve ever come to making an “art film,” but I hope I get the chance to flex my art-film muscles some more in the future.

In the future, I’m an art-film director.

History of the Future Suite from Bill Simmon on Vimeo.

First up, science videos!

The indispensable TMBG has released anohter kid’s album, this time science-themed. Watch this awesome video and then click through to Pharyngula and read the comments. I heart nerds.

And now watch Eugene Hutz and Gogol Bordello sing about the Supertheory of Supereverything. Quick anecdote: a few years back I sat behind Eugene on a flight from Vermont to NYC and looking over his shoulder I noticed him reading 8.5 x 11 printouts of chapters from Brian Greene’s excellent super string primer, The Elegant Universe. Was I witness to the birth of this song?