Blogs / Bad Astronomy

NASA has selected seven proposals to do science on the Moon as part of the Lunar Exploration Program. This is pretty good news, as I know many folks who are wondering if any science was being planned for the Moon (and who still worry that the Moon program will eat up funds from other science).

They all appear to be interesting projects, but I am hoping to see a lot more from this one:

Daniel Glavin

“Volatile Analysis by Pyrolysis of Regolith on the Moon using Mass Spectrometry”

Glavin? MM-hey!

This is a reminder that the very cool conference SpaceFest 2007 is August 17-19. I just looked over the website, and the list of guests has lengthened, with more astronauts, and — this is very cool — Joe Kittinger. Who?, you may ask. Hee hee. Read all about him, and be amazed.

I’ll be there, fawning over the astronauts and giving my Moon Hoax talk. It’ll be great fun!

Here’s my original post about SpaceFest.

Also, Fraser Cain of Universe Today has put up the latest Carnival of Space. Lots of good reading there. So go read them!

Whether you think stem cell research is immoral or not, this little trope needs to be dealt with.

President Bush vetoed a bill last night to fund stem cell research. He then made a statement which is, to be blunt, a lie:

If this legislation became law, it would compel American taxpayers for the first time in our history to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos.

This is 100% absolutely untrue, and there is no way to interpret the bill to mean this. The bill would provide funding for additional research to use embryos which were going to be discarded anyway.

If the President were really trying to prevent what he thinks of as murder of humans, then he should block any attempts at in-vitro fertilization, which is what creates so many zygotes in the first place. Instead, he goes this route, which satisfies his far-right fundamentalist base without having to deal with actual, y’know, reality, in any way.

His statement is a lie. It is partisan pandering. It is putting ideology before science. It is distorting science.

With evidently no sense of irony, the President also said:

We want to encourage science.

If you can survive reading this statement without your head exploding, then you are either a better person than me, or you haven’t been paying attention. This White House Administration has been the most openly hostile toward science that I can remember. Period.

Media Matters has quite a lot more information on the disinformation on this topic going around.

And I expect the comments to this blog entry will be heated. I understand that. But let me point out that this blog is about science and skepticism, and this topic, while not astronomy, fits that theme perfectly. Science is not a snapshot, it’s a tapestry, and when one thread is attacked the whole pattern can be in danger.

1) The Shuttle was supposed to land today, but bad weather in Florida has postponed it. The next chance is Friday at 2:18 Eastern time.

2) At 11:06 Mountain time (18:06 UT) the center of the Sun’s disk was at the intersection on the sky of the celestial equator and the ecliptic. the northernmost apex of its annual path along the ecliptic. In other words, it was the summer solstice! Some people call this the first day of summer, but I don’t. Update: AAAARRRRGGGG! That’s what I get for writing quickly with no coffee in me. I originally described the equinox, not the solstice. Criminy. Happily, commenter Joe pointed this out.

3) I sat in the Colorado DMV for two hours today waiting to get my license. The people were very pleasant, but I am only now getting my morning coffee at 12:30, so I’m tired. If there are any more odds or any more ends, they’ll have to wait.

Just some odd -n- ends…

1) I’ll be interviewed live on the EZHelp radio show at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time this Sunday, June 24. We’ll be talking about the Moon Hoax, why the sky is blue, and how nuts I am to quit a paying job to be a writer.

You can listen live by going to their chat room.

2) In Darwin’s Wake

I heard that the Galapagos Cruise is half sold out, and all the deluxe cabins are gone. If you wanna be trapped on a boat with me and a bunch of skeptics, better hurry! And if you book a cabin because you read about it here, please let me know. I just wanna know.

3) Mars bars Mars Bars?

Due to my move and massive amounts of email transfer getting lost, I just found out that the way hot Inky Chicks wrote an article about how to feed astronauts on the way to Mars. If you don’t read Inky Circus every day, why not? Ya should. They’re funny.

4) Where there’s a Wil

Wil Wheaton is a good man Note: SFW article, not so SFW ads.