BAN #359: SciManDan podcast, A million a mile

20 September 2021   Issue #359

September 20, 2021

[The planetary nebula M 2-9, winds from a dying star. Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Legacy Archive / Judy Schmidt]

Just a quick reminder that Monday issues are free, but your support in being a paid subscriber makes it a lot easier to write the Thursday issues, too. I see SO MUCH astronomical garbage on social media, and it’s hard to find trustworthy sources of info. Now, me saying I’m a trustworthy source is maybe a tad suspicious, but my bona fides aren’t too hard to find. So please subscribe! Thanks!

Debunkening

You can’t debunk something unless it’s bunk to start with

I was just interviewed on the SciManDan podcast, a show about science and debunking conspiracy theories. Dan tackles such nonsense as the Apollo Moon Hoax and flat Earth BS, so it was fun to go on the show and talk not just about those ideas specifically but also how to debunk them, and why we do it.

I don’t really dive into this sort of garbage as much as I used to for a lot of reasons, mostly because I was really tired of it; it’s whack-a-mole most of the time and progress can seem limited. I mean… <waves vaguely in literally every direction>. Still sometimes I do stick my toe (or my overshoe-clad Moon boot) back into it. It’s good to see so many others taking up the mantle of it.

You can listen to the podcast directly here, or grab it via iTunes or Spotify. And if you dig the debunking, add his show to your list!

Blog Jam

What I’ve recently written on the blog, ICYMI

[This one’s a bit complicated to explain in a caption. Just go read Wednesday’s article! Credit: NASA, ESA, Steve A. Rodney (University of South Carolina), Gabriel Brammer (Cosmic Dawn Center/Niels Bohr Institute/University of Copenhagen), Joseph DePasquale (STScI)]

Wednesday 15 September, 2021: Space warp puts a supernova on cosmic repeat

Friday 17 September, 2021: Extragalactic stars in my eyes

Random Thoughts

Stuff I think about in the shower, typically

I was out running an errand the other night, behind a big truck that seemed a little lost. The driver used their turn signal once or twice, slowed, than turned the signal off but kept going straight.

Eventually they turned down a road and I had to slow as they navigated the sharp turn. The thing is, because they were so hesitant I was paying more attention to what they were doing, so when the truck turned down this road I took a closer look. It was just marked as “Rt 3”, and since I was on a relatively big road that leads to everywhere I need to go, I’ve passed Rt. 3 probably a hundred times, but never thought about it.

It was an unmarked but paved rural road that headed away as far as I could see. I have no idea what’s down that road, but I didn’t see any houses or buildings. Just road and trees.

That made me think. I’ve heard all my life it costs about a million bucks per mile to build a road, and here was one that goes, well, somewhere. What sort of thing would induce a government to spend that kind of money to build a road right there, I wondered.

Then I thought about the huge number of rural roads in Colorado, and had a somewhat shocking flash of insight into the amount of money we spend on such things.

And that made me wonder: Is that million dollars a mile thing true? I’ve heard it since I was a kid, but kids make up a lot of crap. As someone who debunks “common wisdom” I figured that’s an assumption I should, and can, check.

So I did. And, as it turns out, that number is wrong. It’s too low. The American Road and Transportation Builders Association has a FAQ (click on “Funding, Finances, & Costs) gives the figures for various roads. A two-lane undivided road can be anywhere from $2 million to $5 million per mile depending on location! A 4- and 6-lane highway is much, much more, too.

That’s amazing. Now, I don’t know what year those numbers are for, so when I was a kid maybe a cool mill per mile is about right, so I’ll allow it. But still, oof. We spend a lot on roads.

There are other implications to that, like how much we depend on cars and how much that situation has been forced on us (an episode of Adam Ruins Everything dealt with that pretty well), and how much fossil fuel is used to make roads. I could go on and on.

Which is part of my point. There’s a lot of interesting reading out there about cars and roads and a lot of questions to ask about things I will guarantee you’ve taken for granted (I’ve written something myself about why you get those washboard ripples in dirt roads, for example), and this all came from getting stuck behind an unsure truck driver.

And that’s the other part of my point. It’s easy to just accept or dismiss things as the way they are. How often have you been frustrated behind a slow driver and let it irritate you? I do that all the dang time, but this one time I let it trigger a chain of thoughts that led to me learning something, which is always cool.

I can’t guarantee that’ll happen every time — I swearily mutter a lot when I’m out driving — but after this incident I’ll try harder. I don’t like being irritated, and I do like learning things. It’s a better way to live.

Et alia

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