Blogs / Bad Astronomy

So, where was I?

Ah yes. I resigned from my job to become a full time writer, and pen the next great American Science Book: "Death from the Skies". That’ll happen in late May. But there’s a little backstory…

So a little while ago I get the contract from the publisher, and Mrs. BA says to me, she says: You know, a writer can write anywhere.

And I say, Well, yeah.

And she says, Rohnert Park is boring.

And I reply, Well, yeah.

And she says, Little Astronomer will be going into middle school next year, and we need to get her to a better school system.

And I think, She spends a lot of time researching stuff on the Internets, so she’s probably right.

So I reply, Well, yeah.

Taking this as confirmation that I’m agreeable to moving (which, in fact, it was) Mrs. BA starts the research. She looks at place after place, and where the schools might be good, the weather is terrible. Or it’s too urban. Or too rural. Or it’s on the East Coast, which we left back in 2001 (and don’t miss the weather, or the traffic).

Anyway, Mrs. BA works and works on this, and one day she walks into my home office and says to me, she says, How about Boulder?

Now, many thoughts crowded into my head at that point. Boulder? I love Boulder! It has a rich atmosphere, it’s a fun place, the mountains are spectacular. I have many friends who live there. People who live there love it, and seem amazingly happy. I spent weeks there working on a Hubble camera, and had a great time. It was the setting for Steven King’s The Stand. What’s not to love?

So I say, It’s cold there.

And she replies, The schools there are incredible. They have two of the top 300 high schools in the nation there.

And I think, we’re done negotiating.

It was that simple. OK, it was actually a lot more complicated. We needed to go to Boulder and reconnoiter, so we combined a vacation with poking around and looking at houses. We found one we loved, and we went back and forth on it, but we have settled on it. We put our house in California up for sale, and amazingly, it was sold immediately. I’ve never seen such a thing. If I were superstitious, I’d say it was fate. But in fact it was due to years of Mrs. BA’s effort into making our house really pretty nice. Also, we had the best house in our price range on the market in this area, and we priced it to sell. No luck or fate needed (since they don’t exist).

Sorry. Even when telling a story I have to let a little skepticism sneak in.

But there you have it. That’s the final part of the big news. I’m writing a book, I resigned my job, and the Bad Family is up and moving to Boulder, Colorado.

I have no idea how this tale will end, except that at some point a book will come out, and the Little Astronomer will get a great education, and that soon enough we’ll be reminded, after six years of rain and fog, what a real winter is like.

Sounds like fun. Eastward ho!

Update (April 21, 2007): Welcome people from dpreview! I see lots of folks coming in from there, and I hope you like the entry!

You know, I could almost feel sorry for Richard Hoagland. Here’s a guy who has built an entire career in pseudoscience, and it all relies on a single thing: the idea that an eroded mesa on Mars is actually a giant sculpture of a face, built by aliens, or humans from the future, or apes-who-evolved-from-men, or what have you.

I could go into great detail here, but why bother? I already dissected and destroyed this silly claim on my main site.

But still, the desire to dogpile on these goofball ideas is hard to deny. After all, Hoagland is on late night radio all the frakkin’ time promoting his goofiness, and he’s dissed me on several occasions. But how, oh how can I resist the urge to pile it on when image after image comes in from Mars declaring that the Face is just a rock?

The latest is from HiRISE, a camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which takes incredibly high-resolution images of the red planet. When HiRISE went online, I wondered if they’d target Cydonia (the region where the "Face" sits), because of the face, but also because it’s an interesting region.

They did, and the results are in:

It’s not a face! Unless you’re Doctor Zaius.

Duh. Every image taken of the face shows it to be … a rock. The latest 3D tour from the ESA last year was yet another nail in that particular coffin (see #7 in my Top Ten Astronomy images of 2006).

If you want to see a tad more detail, HiRISE took a fantastically hires version of this image — 22,000 x 21,000 pixels. Warning: and no kidding, I am warning you– this is a whoppingly huge image. It’s 300+ megabytes, and you need special software to even look at it because it’s so huge. But wowee wow wow! That’s cool.

Man, I love being right. But when it comes to stuff like this, I’m used to it. I guess the only question left is, how will Hoagland distort reality to fit his preconceived claims about the face? I may have to listen in to Coast to Coast AM to hear what he has to say. That should be amusing.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to Doug Ellison from unmannedspaceflight.com!

In the UK, some schools are dropping teaching about the Holocaust, for fear that it might offend Muslim students.

No, I am not kidding.

This is precisely why we must not waver, must not slow, and must not lower our gaze. The forces of antiscience, antithought, antirationalism… they lurk around every corner, hide in every dark spot. But now they walk around in the daylight, and have so slowly and perniciously built themselves up in our society that we hardly notice. They have successfully boiled a live frog.

But I see them. You should too.

Thanks to PZ for finding this.