Finally!

[ellarien]

Active region 11024, currently visible on the Sun, may be the closest thing to a real active region we've seen yet in the new solar cycle; the leading spot has a penumbra and everything! It's even managed a couple of C-class (aka, feeble but noticeable) flares in the last couple of days, the first we've seen in months.

This claim that an upcoming surge in solar activity has been predicted by crop circle, however, had my colleagues and me boggling and rolling our eyes. It's a very nice crop circle, but who comes up with these things?

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I wanna know who these crop circle "researchers" are - and what their qualifications are. Are they like a certain person of my acquaintance, but is on the fund raising committee for a particular piece of research, and who tells people (on the Internets as well as RL) that he is "researching" this.

[ellarien]

There seems to be a whole shadowy community out there, of unofficial and unorthodox "researchers" into all sorts of things. Some of them are perfectly respectable, retired academics dabbling in things a bit outside their professional field; some of them are ... rather more eccentric than that. We get a steady trickle of letters and emails from propounders of way-out theories, like the one who wrote to my old boss to suggest that the missing solar neutrinos were being captured in the Arecibo dish.

There are reasons for the peer-review system. In some ways it may be unfortunate that the system is so heavily stacked against those without some kind of institutional affiliation, and the lines between good, innovative science, bad science, and pure crankery aren't always as clear as we'd like. I'm pretty sure I know where I'd put crop circles on that continuum, though.