Yahoo News Reaches New Low in Journalism: move over National Enquirer
In a modern world, we get our news from a wide variety of sources. I admit it: I am both lazy and cheap. I don’t pay for any high quality news sources, or even any moderate quality news sources. I mostly read the news items on Yahoo Canada News. and sure, it is full of celebrity crap, and other topics of which I don’t care, but hey, I just skip over them. The point is that I believe what I read, and trust the editors of Yahoo News to be telling the truth to the best of their abilities.
But this morning I was surprised to see the headline:
Edward Snowden: Aliens Are Trying To Contact Planet Earth
In case you don’t recognise the name, Edward Snowden is the man who copied thousands of secret NSA documents and revealed some of those documents showing that the US government has been illegally spying on innocent civilians on a massive scale. Snowden has been interviewed before. I found him to be intelligent and quite reasonable. but there are always rumours about what secret files he has kept. The internet is swarming with conspiracy theories, and some strange people out there have been posting stories about how the CIA has known about aliens, and Snowden has seen their secret files. But there has never been a shred of evidence offered in support of these claims. And there was never any evidence that Snowden himself has made such claims. So when i saw the above headline in Yahoo News, I thought that maybe he has been saying something about aliens. So I read the article. The quote in the article, taken from the podcast is as follows:
“So when we think about everything that we’re hearing through our satellites or everything that they’re hearing from our civilisation (if there are indeed aliens out there), all of their communications are encrypted by default.
So what we are hearing, that’s actually an alien television show or you know a phone call… is indistinguishable to us from cosmic microwave background radiation.”
Note that Snowden himself expresses the caveat : “(if there are indeed aliens out there)”. The quote from the Yahoo article wasn’t very convincing in support of the headline. So I looked up the podcast and listened to it. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who conducted the interview, is a justly famous astro-physicist, and explains to his audience that he is not a journalist, and so would like to have a discussion with Snowden, geek-to-geek. He keeps it light, and, in the discussion of the theories of encrypted communication, it is Tyson himself who brings up the hypothetical question of alien communications. Snowden plays along, which leads to the quote cited above. At no time does Snowden make any claim that aliens are actually trying to communicate with us. Instead, he talks about the internal communications of a hypothetically advanced civilisation, and postulates that such communications, if intercepted by earth-bound listening devices, would be indistinguishable from background radio noise.
The Yahoo News headline is a bald-faced lie, in the tradition of the worst of tabloid journalism. Shame on you Yahoo News. And shame on the idiot who put this article together. From now on I’ll be more careful of what I read: you have lost my trust.
Desert Rains
The still night air is hot and humid. Heavy cloud obscures the stars but it is not dark. The sky is illuminated by a nearly continuous pulsing of lightning flashes, like the cameras at some red carpet event. Lightning is coming from all points of the compass, and yet none is near enough to allow me to hear the thunder.
I await the heavy deluge that never comes. This is the frustration of desert rains.
At mid-latitudes, rain follows frontal systems. It is fairly easy to predict. But here, in the Horse Latitudes, rain comes, mostly during the Summer Monsoon, in the form of random squalls and larger storms, called chubascos.
Because the monsoon is associated with heavy rain, these are often called monsoon rains. But the monsoon is not the rain. The word monsoon is of Arabic origin, meaning season. It refers to the seasonal pattern of winds found in certain regions of the world. At latitudes,between 30 and 60 degrees, the prevailing winds are from the west and are, not surprisingly, called the Westerlies. In the tropics, the prevailing winds are from the East and are called the Trade Winds. In between those two bands, lie the Horse Latitudes an area of nearly continuous high pressure, with dry, descending air. This is where the Sonoran Desert lies, and it is why you can paddle in to shore in the Gulf of California and tie your boat to a cactus.
During the summer, the air over the vast deserts of southwest North America is heated by the high sun. This hot air rises and draws air in to replace it. The Trade Winds are deflected by this pressure difference and bring warm, moisture-laden air from the tropical Pacific, along the West coast of Mexico. As this air passes overland, it is heated over bare desert and rises, becoming unstable. This unstable air creates the heavy showers and fantastic electrical storms that we call the monsoon rains.
Storms tend to follow specific paths. The chubascos of the summer monsoon tend to run up the middle of the Gulf of California, or on a parallel track a few km inland. San Carlos is located at the western edge of an east-west section of the coast, which means the storms usually pass just to the east or west of us. When a storm passes, we feel the wind, and hear the thunder but rarely get any of the precious rainfall. Our summer rain is more often associated with the tropical cyclones: hurricanes and tropical storms. A tropical cyclone hundreds of kms away will throw a wall of clouds that bring heavy rains. It also sends huge swells up the gulf to bash our shores.
This summer is a busy one for tropical cyclones. As yet they have all head out to sea, heading NW, but soon the approaching autumn will push the westerlies zone farther south, and cyclones caught in this westerly flow will be pushed ashore, bringing unwanted destruction and badly needed rain. Meanwhile we listen to the passing chubascos, and wait for the big rains that will replenish the desert, and make it bloom again.
jackwildeadventures 
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