Archive for June 8th, 2007

Atlantis launch at 7:38 p.m. Eastern tonight

Update (launch + 15 minutes): It was a picture-perfect launch, and everything looks good for an orbital rendezvous with the Space Station.

The Space Shuttle Atlantis is preparing for liftoff at 7:38 p.m. Eastern time tonight. Rather than update this blog a zillion times (and avoiding sending a zillion emails to everyone who subscribes to this blog), I will be updating my Twitter page. Twitter is designed for just this sort of thing, so head on over there!

You can also watch it online at NASA TV and read their official launch blog!

June 8th, 2007 2:15 PM by Phil Plait in Cool stuff, NASA | 17 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

Creation museum begats controversy

Note: I will be covering the 7:38 p.m. (Eastern time) launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis tonight via my Twitter page. I’ll also have a new blog entry up here before the event.

Sometimes, I have to laugh at the restrictions fundamentalist religions place on human behavior. I like to think of it this way: the tighter they fasten the chastity belt, the more likely stuff will pop out they don’t wanna see.

Today’s example is Ken Ham’s atrocious "creation museum", which is more akin to a funhouse full of warped mirrors that distort reality than an actual place to learn stuff. The situation: in a film shown in the museum depicting the Biblical account of creation, it turns out the actor playing Adam has, well, bitten off more than just a chunk of apple. He used to run a "sexually suggestive" website. Ham has taken down the video pending an investigation.

Shocking! You’d think the far-right theocrats would feel a bit haggard at this point, but the hits keep on coming.

Of course, this is all pretty funny to me, since I am not above the ocassional episode of schadenfreude, especially when it comes to people like Ham, who bears false witness for a living.

And as the actor who played Adam is quoted saying:

But just because I’m Adam on the screen, that doesn’t mean I’m Adam off the screen… I’m hired to get a point across. On the flip side, if I was hired to play a murderer, that doesn’t mean I’d go out and kill somebody. It’s make-believe.

Make believe. Yes, that fits the description of the "museum" quite well, I think!

June 8th, 2007 12:39 PM by Phil Plait in Debunking, Humor, Religion, Science | 30 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

Vulcans, eh?

A guy in Canada fell asleep in such a way that he developed a serious condition in his leg: blood pooled in the tissue causing swelling and pressure, which can lead to damage to that tissue as well as in the nerves.

So doctors performed a procedure on his leg to ease the pressure, and when they cut him, what did they see?

Green blood!

The man, it turns out, was not a Vulcan, more’s the pity. He was taking a migraine drug which was placing sulfur in his hemoglobin, tinting it green.

He has recovered successfully from the procedure, and the cessation of the drug has also returned his blood to a healthy vermillion.

But I wonder: some Trek fans love to go that extra mile at cons and such. I’m not sure anyone has ever had their ears bobbed to get them pointy, but is it so crazy to speculate that some will take this pill to make their blood more verdant?

It may not seem, well, logical, but as one Vulcan famously said, "Logic is little tweeting bird chirping in meadow. Logic is wreath of pretty flowers that smell bad."

June 8th, 2007 9:38 AM by Phil Plait in Humor | 12 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >