Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Oh, how I wish I were going to Dragon*Con this year! But I can’t; I’m cruising to Alaska with James Randi instead. Tough world (seriously, it was a very tough choice). But to make it worse, Derek Colanduno from Skepticality has posted a list of skeptical activities at D*C, and it’s a killer schedule. If you’re a skeptic in the Atlanta area you should get your critical brain to Derek and Swoopy’s panels! Michael Shermer will be there, Benjamin Radford, Jeff Wagg from Randi’s org (he’s flying out to go on the cruise the next day!), Mike Stackpole, the fantabulous George Hrab, Pamela Gay, an old friend and half of the Astronomy Cast team — it’s a great list of folks.

And of course, you see stuff like this:

But only stuff like that, since I won’t be there. Sigh.

It’s been a while since I did the “Brains on Vacation” segment on Are We Alone, the SETI podcast, but one came out a week ago. You can download it on their shiny new website, or you can simply grab the MP3. My segment is the first one, starting about 2 minutes in, and in this episode Seth and I chat about the Bermuda Triangle. My verdict about the Triangle is: well, duh. Guess.

You can listen to the rest of the podcast if you want to, but I’m not in it, so it’s not as interesting.

I get spam. Lots of it. But I got one the other day which was pretty funny:

We would like to invite you to join a magnificant [sic] and very special worldwide September event: The Days of Good.

The Days of Good is VERY IMPORTANT world-wide event which can help to change the whole World for BETTER and can improve the LIFE through joining all people over the World…

This majestic worldwide event takes place from 9th September (Sunday) to 18th September (Tuesday) 2007 and all those people of the whole world will join it (regardless of nationality, religion or spiritual traditions, cultures, philosophy, education, profession, age, or race…) who are not indifferent to their own life or life of their relatives and friends, life in their surroundings, village, town or city, their region, country and life on Earth in general!

In general, I think that everyone should do as much good as they can, all the time. And since this particular spam does encourage people to actually do something, instead of sitting around doing useless things like praying or wishing good thoughts, it is actually a cut above the usual New Age (rhymes with sewage) nonsense.

But I have to wonder: if they want me to think positive thoughts, why did they send me &^%#($(&*^&%@&* spam???

The server issues we were having should be finished now. There was some difficult-to-trace bug floating around, but evidently it’s been exterminated.

Just to rehash about the blog, I am still tracking down bad ads as people complain. If you see something that goes against the mission of BA, or is a really irritating ad, let me know in the comments. Please tell me where you saw it (at the top of the site, or the sidebar) and what it was advertising. I have already eliminated most of the bad ones.

I think I have eliminated the spam filter error some people were getting. The only way to know is to see if anyone gets it again! So if you see it, post in the comments please!

Every upgrade has growing pains, and this one was rough. I think it’s mostly behind us now though.