Note: This weekend, the Deep Impact probe will slam into comet 9/P Tempel 1. I will have a blog up about it probably on Saturday, after I get back from doing a BBC interview about it! I’ll have more about that as well. Until then, enjoy this summer interlude.

Summer is finally here in Northern California, which means the fog and rain have (mostly) gone. The Sun is shining, plants are blooming, and bees are in a fervor of pollen-collection.

I took this shot a few minutes ago while on hold by an incompetent hotel employee. Somehow, being ignored wasn’t so bad since I got to watch these two little guys (gals, actually) clamber around the glorious sunflowers growing behind my office.

My camera has a fantastic macro mode, so I was able to get pretty good resolution:

Even that image (click on it!) is not full-res, but I could not get enough of the image to be cool and still keep it under 400kb, and my bandwidth is somewhat of an issue. Anyway, the full-res image is phenomenal, and I’m using it as my PC desktop background now. Makes me think of iced tea, reading trashy novels, and summer constellations.

Yay!

Note added July 9, 2005: This article is featured in the 12th Skeptics Circle. This time, the Circle has a decidedly western feel. Take a look.

It’s been announced that Bill Kaysing has died.

He’s the man most people credit (if that’s the word) as the original person to claim the Apollo Moon landings were faked. I’ll admit, his death leaves me with mixed feelings. I’m saddened that he has died, but I must be honest and say he was a monumental antiscientist, responsible in many ways for one of the most colossal wastes of time and effort in my memory.

A Google search on the terms “moon hoax” yields a quarter million hits; “apollo fake” a hundred thousand more. How much energy, how much brain power, how much simple time has been wasted on this ridiculous claim? Even today, four years after that atrocious Fox “documentary” loaded with fallacious claims about NASA faking the Moon landings, my Moon Hoax page still is the most popular static page on my site, getting almost a half million readers per year. I get mail almost daily about this as well. A lot of people chew on the gristle of the arguments, and without the proper evidence– evidence, I’ll be blunt, Kaysing never gave them — they may walk away convinced the landings were faked.

Kaysing virtually spawned an industry of deception. Bart Sibrel, Ralph Rene, David Percy, and literally dozens of others have made money off of deceiving the public through the withholding of evidence, using deceptive descriptions, and in some cases telling outright lies. I have dealt with all of these men in various circumstances, and have found them to be all-too willing to stoop as low as possible to convince people of their arguments.

To be fair, some may actually believe what they say. Kaysing may have. But he was still wrong, and made claims that are sickening (NASA killed the Apollo 1 astronauts to keep them quiet; NASA blew up Challenger on purpose to keep the astronauts quiet about the “fact” that space travel is impossible, and much more). And he was disingenuous: in the Fox TV show, he was quoted as saying that if NASA pointed Hubble at the Moon landings, it would show clear evidence if they were real, and further said that if he saw those pictures he would stop making his claims. First, Hubble cannot see objects that small on the Moon. Second, NASA returned literally thousands of images from the astronauts themselves! Why would he believe a few more from Hubble?

As I said, I’m saddened by his death, but I am far more saddened that thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of school children might buy into this outrageous bill of goods. I have heard many stories of kids talking to their teachers about the missions being faked, and more galling, of teachers telling their school children that Apollo wasn’t real! I worry about the erosive affect this has on young minds, teaching them to ignore evidence and to simply believe what they are told– the very antithesis of what science is.

All this, from Bill Kaysing.

Yet, I hold out some hope. First, of course, for as much garbage as exists on the web, there are some pages that fight it. My efforts are just one example among many others who have picked up this gauntlet thrown down by antiscientists (I maintain a list of webpages on both sides of this issue).

And maybe there is even a glimmer of gold amongst all this offal. Years ago, when I was researching this topic for my book, I was getting pretty upset by it. I mean really upset, angry that people could make these appalling claims. I was having trouble sleeping at night, and my stomach was upset. One day, while looking at one image Kaysing said showed evidence of stage lighting, I was struck by the lighting, the contrast, the simple fact that here I was, looking at a picture of a man standing on the surface of the Moon. He had traveled a quarter of a million miles, risking his life, and there he was, feet planted on another world, holding up a sample of lunar dust for the whole world– his home world– to see.

I was overwhelmed with a sense of awe, a sense of pride, a warmth, and a satisfaction knowing that what I was doing was the right thing. It was the last time I lost sleep over the Moon Hoax.

Without Bill Kaysing, it must be said, I never would have experienced that. And I never would have regained my fascination for the Apollo missions and for the Moon itself; two aspects of my life I enjoy with great love now. Who knows how many others have been similarly affected?

So, to Bill Kaysing: you did a lot of terrible damage to the world. But you maybe, just maybe, did a little bit of good in the process, too.

Note: I wrote this on Sunday afternoon, fully expecting the normal California weather to allow me to go outside and get some photographs of the planets in the western sky. But the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley, as they say (”they” being Robert Burns, in this case). It’s cloudy out. So pretend there is a picture here of three planets really close together. Thanks.

In affairs of the heart, it is said, distance adds perspective. “Give yourself time to distance yourself from the situation,” people will say, “and things will seem clearer.”

But in astronomy, the exact opposite is the case. Distance does not add perspective. It robs us of it.

Consider a nearby object, such as your thumb held at arm’s length, and a distant one, such as a tree across the street. If you hold one eye closed and look at the tree past your thumb, you may note (say) that your thumb appears to be on the left of the tree. Now switch eyes. Suddenly, you may see your thumb jump to the other side of the tree. That’s because the angle made from your eye to your thumb and again to the tree has changed. This effect is called parallax. If you want more details on this, I have page describing it more thoroughly here.

But when an object is too far away, this method fails us. The distance to the object is much larger than the separation of our eyes, and parallax using just our eyes is useless (and so we must employ other methods in that case). Such is the situation with astronomy. Astronomical objects are so far away that it’s impossible for us to directly perceive their distance. We literally lack perspective.

A case in point is hovering in the sky above me even as I write this. Three planets are making a relatively rare neighborly pass– Venus, Mercury, and Saturn are all in a part of the sky small enough to cover with your thumb, if you still have it hanging on the end of your outstretched arm.

If you’re reading this on Monday, then look to the west just after sunset. Venus is the brightest of the three, and the most obvious. Just next to it is Mercury, and below the pair and to the right is Saturn (if you are in the southern hemisphere, then reverse left and right). Saturn is faintest, and you may not see it until it starts to get darker outside (Sky and Telescope magazine has an animation of this event online which should help you visualize the event) .

Since we don’t know their distances just by looking, we might assume Venus is the closest, since it’s brightest (it’s about 33 times brighter than Mercury right now). Mercury and Saturn are roughly the same brightness, so maybe, you’d think, they are equally distant from us.

BZZZZT! Nope. Venus is actually about 1.5 times farther away from us than Mercury, even though (overly) simple math based on its brightness would imply that Venus is 1/6 the distance of Mercury. And Saturn is actually a whopping 10 times farther away!

The reason Venus is brighter is because it’s much bigger than Mercury, and reflects light better. Saturn, of course, is way bigger than Mercury (25 times the diameter, meaning over 600 times the surface area!), so even though it’s really far away, it rivals Mercury for brightness.

So, without knowing the distances to these objects we’d have no clue about their real properties. Appearances can be deceiving.

Distance may be just the solution for some emotional turmoil, but for a more cosmic perspective it’s absolutely crucial.

There’s a road not far from my house that cuts across a lot of farmland. I drive on it to get to my boss’s house, or when I go to visit the wine country in Sonoma or Napa valley. It’s a beautiful drive, with lots of rolling hills, vineyards, and cows.

At the crest of a hill is a crossroad that leads into a residential neighborhood. To give the folks who live there a chance to get out, the cars on the main road have to stop at the hill top. A stop sign isn’t very useful there, because the speed limit if 60 mph on the big road, and you’d never see it in time. A stop light might help, but they’re expensive, and the small amount of traffic from the neighborhood doesn’t warrant it.

So the engineers put in a flashing red light, which can be seen for hundreds of meters away. On the drive, I can always spot it from quite a distance, blinking on and off about once every second. As I mentioned, the drive is quite nice in that area, which is conducive to long, unbroken chains of thought. A few months ago I was watching the light blinking as I approached it, and I suddenly realized that if the light blinks once per second, it must flash 31 million times per year!

I was amazed. What kind of light bulb could take that kind of stress? A normal bulb would explode after a short time. Ever notice how bulbs always seem to burn out when you flip the switch to turn them on? That’s because the current flowing into them is like a flood, and it stresses the filament. A nice constant flow of electricity doesn’t put much stress on the filament, but a sudden torrent of it does.

So how does the red light at that hilltop last for so long? One day, I happened to mention this story to my officemate, and he looked at me like I was an idiot. “It’s an LED,” he said.

Aha! Light Emitting Diodes answered my question. You’ve seen LEDs—they’re behind the Hulkishly green glowing numerals used in alarm clocks, for example. LEDs are fundamentally different than incandescent bulbs. A regular bulb has a piece of wire which gets hot when you run a current through it. So in a sense it gives off light for the same reason stars do: hot things emit light.

LEDs, though, give off light for a very different reason. Indulge me in an analogy: When you jump down off the last step in a staircase, your feet hit the floor and make a noise. You have just converted gravity to sound! The energy of your descent (which comes from gravity) is used to move air in waves (which makes sound). The same thing happens to electrons, too. When they move in an electric potential (in a sense, the electromagnetic equivalent of gravity) they also convert their energy gained into waves, but in this case those waves are light.

In an LED, electrons move when a current is applied. They respond by giving off light. There are a number of advantages here: for one thing, there is no filament. Electrons are happy to move back and forth zillions of times without worry. So LEDs last a long, long time. It’s not hard to make a lot of light using LEDs, either. I have a pen with an LED in one end, and it’s so bright it’s hard to look at, yet it only uses two little batteries. The color can be controlled as well, so you can have red, green, blue LEDs.

That’s why the stop light at that hilltop uses LEDs. They’re bright, so I can see the light from a long way off. They can be made red, which is rather useful for a stop light. It can blink on and off literally millions of times a year without malfunction. And they can last for many years, so you don’t have to replace them very often.

And it gets better. You can combine red, green, and blue LEDs to make white light. The light generated this way is bright, cheap (LEDs are tremendously more efficient than not only incandescent bulbs but also compact fluorescents), and last virtually forever. I think they may soon replace light bulbs. Other people do too. This could easily save billions of dollars in energy costs, which is particularly useful these days.

I love stuff like this. It’s so cool! And it’s another reminder to people that understanding science can lead to amazing and unexpected ways of making our lives better.

Note added June 27, 2005: This entry was accepted as part of the 11th Circle of Skeptics.

When I was but a Pre-Bad Astronomer, still in high school, I decided to stay up late one night and watch Johnny Carson’s show. He had as a guest that night a tiny gnome-like man, shiny pate gleaming and white beard blindingly reflecting the stage lights. He went on stage and performed what is called “psychic surgery”, a technique that some people in the Philippines claim allows them to reach inside a person’s body and removed diseased tissue, all without even breaking the skin of the patient.

This odd little man, gruff of voice but charming in demeanor, demonstrated this technique on a volunteer from Carson’s audience, all the while discussing exactly why it was a fraud. He would pull out long strings of what was obviously chicken guts, and dump them in a bowl, while the audience moaned and groaned at the disgusting display of goo.

It was truly an awesome and hilarious thing for me to see (and you can see it too! [Real Media file courtesy of Richard Saunders]). At that time in my life, I was susceptible to all sorts of woowoo creduloid nonsense, and seeing this man debunk — and I had never even heard of that word before — antiscience garbage like that may have very well set me on the road that lead, inevitably, to the here and now.

That man was, and is, James “The Amazing” Randi.

You can read more about him here, and here, and of course here, at his own website. I’ll have more stories about Randi on this blog as time goes on. I have quite a few, and they’re pretty funny.

Anyway, I am in awe of him and his history, and it is with disbelief (har har) that I can actually call him friend. I sometimes think that if I had a time machine, I wouldn’t bother going to see Lincoln on the night of the play, or the dinosaurs the eve of the asteroid impact. I’d go back to when I was 15, watching that show, and say to the young and naive me, “See that guy? He’ll be a bud of yours in just a couple of more decades. Hang tight.”

And now Randi does me the great honor of posting one of my blog entries on his own weekly newsletter. It’s my Science Fair speech (originally found here), and he posted it on his June 1 newsletter.

Randi is a very cool guy. To get a nod like that from him warms my heart (if I knew what cockles were, I’d guess that part of my heart would be warm and fuzzy too).

Thanks, Randi. And I’m looking forward to the next Amaz!ng Meeting in January 2006. BABloggeroos, if you can, come to this meeting. The past three have been incredible, and so so so much fun. I’ll be there, with a host of, well, amazing guests. I have always come away from the meetings renewed and invigorated, and ready once again to fight the swell of ignorance and silliness that threatens our intellect.

I sometimes wonder what the role of hope is in the world of skepticism, but hope is what I have after those meetings. We can change things, we can show people that critical thinking is important, and we can show them that it’s possible, needed, and even fun. That’s what I learned that night so many years ago when I saw Randi on Carson’s show. And he’s still just as funny, sharp, and ready to take on the antiscientists of the world now as he was then. I’m proud to be a part of his team.

Note added June 13, 2005: I will be busy over the next few days, and may not be able to update the blog during that time. Given the furor this latest entry has generated, I’m inclined to keep it up a while anyway!

I have been saying for years that creationists would soon be turning their attention to sciences other than biology. Evolution may tick off creationists (because it has the unfortunate aspect of undermining their pre-conceived beliefs on how the Universe should behave, rather than how it does behave), but to them, other fields of science can be even worse.

Well, a shot across the bow has been fired. Sure, they’ve made dumb claims about astronomy before, which are easily debunked (I also debunked these claims in my book). But I consider this one more serious because it comes from a group which is more organized, and which has already started a concerted attack on science.

Specifically, it comes from the critters at The Discovery Institute, an unfortunately influential group of anti-scientists, even though the very basis of their existence is wrong. They have made it clear that biology is merely the first call of creationism, and it won’t be the last. On their blog (which rarely comes within a glancing blow of reality), they have this to say:

From http://www.evolutionnews.org/, to which I refuse to hotlink

Although much of the public controversy over intelligent design has focused on the application of design to biology, it’s important to remember that design theory itself reaches well beyond biology, and that some of the strongest evidence for design comes from such fields as physics, astronomy, and cosmology.

Evolution rankles them because it contradicts the Bible which says God made man in his own image and describes specifically how God did it. But cosmology, the study of the Universe as a whole, is even worse for them, since it clearly contradicts the very first passages of that Bible. If you take the Bible literally, then you have to reject everything we understand about science, and vice-versa. Most Christians in the US do not take the Bible literally, but those who do are a very squeaky wheel indeed. A lot of legislators (like say, in Kansas) think that wheel should be oiled. To push the analogy further, I think the air should be let out of it.

Many people like to say that science and religion are compatible. I find that to be a monumentally naive statement. Perhaps science and some religions can be reconciled, but if your religion says that Jupiter is really made of pixie dust, or that the Earth is flat, or that 1+1 =3, then your religion is wrong. It’s really just that simple. The Universe knows what it’s doing, and the reality of it is what science seeks. If your religion cannot be reconciled with that reality, then your religion is wrong (and I would certainly say the same thing about any science which incorrectly describes reality). Perhaps not all religions contradict reality, but certainly creationism does, as does Intelligent Design.

The effect of this on young-Earth creationism is obvious. I will be very clear here: If people read a book and use it to interpret reality, and it contradicts the way the Universe works, then either that book or their interpretation of it is wrong. Again, it is really just that simple.

There is no room for debate with young-earth creationists like those at the Discovery Institute (who, despite their bluster, have made it very clear that’s who they really are). Their ideas are absolute, and there is no shade of grey. If you are a Christian, and not a fundamentalist literal-Bible Christian, then you should be aware that these creationists are not on your side. To them, you are just as wrong as Muslims, Jews, and atheists. They may paint scientists as evil atheists who want to steer your children from The One True Way, but remember that this is their “True Way”, and probably not yours. They have no problems distorting the truth, egregiously and often if it so suits them.

Young Earth creationists have let slip the dogmas of war. In the ensuing battles they will use a host of weapons, including misrepresenting facts, mining of quotes, belaboring outdated theories, and dancing around to avoid answering direct questions. Mark my words: their history is clear.

They may have fired the first shot, but we have plenty of ammo on our side as well. And we also have many, many scientists willing to accept this call to arms.

I’m one of them. Over the course of time, you’ll be seeing more rebuttals — no, debunking — of creationist claims here. I’ve had enough, and this threat is real. They want to turn our classrooms in a theocratically-controlled anti-science breeding ground, and I’m not going to sit by and watch it happen.

In 2004, I had the incredible experience of spending two weeks in Australia. I was invited by the Australian Skeptics to be the keynote speaker at their annual meeting, and, not being an idiot, I accepted. After the meeting, I was treated to a chauffered ride around the eastern coast of Oz, where we saw no less than four astronomical observatories, as well as many other wonderful and strange things.

I took lots of pictures of things I found amazing, or beautiful, or odd. I also took some shots of things that were simply really damn funny. I present one of these below. On top is the original picture, and below it is an enhanced version that shows, well, just why I found the image funny.

No one in Australia understood why I didn’t want to eat at that establishment, but everyone in America gets it right away. Mmmmmmm, long pig.