January 05, 2009

Oh, so THAT'S what Science is

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein says:

Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it's 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it's denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight.

moan... And now you know why the AP is going broke. (Or one of the reasons.)

(I wonder if he also has said "velocity, which is like speed".)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 08:45 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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1 J School or Media. For student who can't pass college algebra. And that was in the early '80s.

Posted by: toadold at January 05, 2009 09:40 PM (zcbXo)

2 Here's hoping none of those dudes get in a position where they can mess around like in the Mars Climate Orbiter project.

Posted by: Jaked at January 05, 2009 10:03 PM (9/9Mk)

3

Wouldn't you think that to be a science writer you'd have to know something about science? The difference between "weight" and "mass" is pretty fundamental.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 05, 2009 10:04 PM (+rSRq)

4 Mass is like weight.  Just like a peanut-butter sandwich is like a supernova in the M51 Galaxy.

Posted by: Wonderduck at January 05, 2009 11:01 PM (sh9fy)

5 I actually take this more as an indictment of the readership.  The guy is assuming people don't know what "mass" is.

Posted by: metaphysician at January 05, 2009 11:05 PM (h4nEy)

6 I imagine that after a few years of writing to AP standards, you just give up when an editor sends your piece back with a question like "what does MASS mean?".

-j

Posted by: J Greely at January 06, 2009 08:38 AM (2XtN5)

7 Wow, just reading that was painful on two counts, both in that he felt the need to explain mass, and that it was so obviously wrong.    

Posted by: Arson55 at January 06, 2009 09:06 AM (Wpad5)

8 Does this mean we no longer need "dark matter" to explain how the galaxy can hold itself together?

Posted by: atomic_fungus at January 06, 2009 10:41 AM (d3juo)

9 If you're assuming your readers have never heard of mass outside of a Catholic context, okay, maybe it could work.

But the intersection of the sets "people who haven't ever heard of mass in a scientific context" and "people who are interested in how much the galaxy masses in the first place" is vanishingly small!

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 06, 2009 11:29 AM (7TgBH)

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