Perusing America’s Newspaper of Record while taking care of some vital

business this morning, I came across this in the TV pages. It’s about

plans at Fox TV to make a new ‘Lost in Space’ series about a group of

astronauts who go missing after tracing a distress signal to the dark side

of the moon. “When they arrive on the other side of the moon – which is

cloaked in perpetual darkness and beyond radio contact with earth – they

discover a mysterious compound.”

Oy vey. Don’t you need some elementary acquaintance with the simplest facts

of nature to write for a newspaper nowadays? The moon has no “dark side.”

The moon rotates relative to the Sun, just as the Earth does. It just

doesn’t rotate **relative to the Earth**. The moon has a “day” lasting

29.530589 Earth days — the synodic month — during which the sun rises and

sets over all points on the Moon’s open surface.

I suppose it’s pointless to get mad about this stuff, but I can’t help it.

Science is going to dump some very large squalling babies on our doorstep

over the next few years. It would be nice to think that facts pretty widely

understood in ancient Mesopotamia have sunk into the consciousness of the

modern journalist. Apparently not.