How hard do I rock tonight on Halloween?

How hard? Oh, yes, very hard indeed. Here is the pumpkin I carved:

GIVE ME YOUR CANDY OR I WILL EXTERMINATE YOU!

Mrs. BA and The Little Astronomer did pretty well too, I think:

and

Man, I love this holiday!

I want to like Dennis Kucinich, I really do. He is one of the very few people taking a firm, logical stance on issues like the Iraq war, the crimes of this Presidency, and the erosion — heck, the wholesale destruction — of our Constitutional rights.

But then he goes and sees a UFO. Sigh.

I heard about this on the radio the other day. Shirley MacLaine outed him, apparently; he was with her when he saw whatever it was he saw. Now, I am a big of Ms. MacLaine’s movies from the 60s, but of course over the past couple of decades, she has, um, well, she’s become a bit of a flake. So her version of the story about Kucinich has him seeing this as a soul-changing event full of all sorts of New Age stuff:

Kucinich, she writes on page143-144 of the book, “had a close sighting over my home in Graham, Washington, when I lived there. Dennis found his encounter extremely moving. The smell of roses drew him out to my balcony where, when he looked up, he saw a gigantic triangular craft, silent, and observing him. It hovered, soundless, for ten minutes or so, and sped away with a speed he couldn’t comprehend. He said he felt a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind.”

That’s her version, of course, not his. I haven’t heard his own side with any details, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. But I still have some concerns over a Presidential candidate who says that he’s seen a UFO, and then says it’s OK because Jimmy Carter did too — when it’s been shown that Carter’s UFO was actually… wait for it… the planet Venus.

Sigh.

I know a lot of folks who like Kucinich, folks I respect. I think the man has some great ideas, so I think he would be better in an advisory position to the President as opposed to being in the Office itself — as long as his advice sticks to politics, and not Roswell.

I still haven’t made up my mind about the candidates. I’m not thrilled with any of them, but there’s still time. I’m very curious where they stand on issues of science suppression (besides Hillary Clinton) — that may be a small issue in the scheme of things, but I think it’s a bellwether on a lot of other issues.

Sorta like UFOs.

More Halloween stuff… (and yes, I know Ray Stantz got the date wrong)…

In general, I love librarians. They help people learn! But not always…

According to the Charlotte Observer:

There are strange things happening in the stacks of the Morehead City library.

Large books inexplicably leave the shelves and wind up on the floor. A light bulb fell from a fixture and landed upright, unbroken.

“It’s really interesting,” says Sandy Bell, director of the Webb Library and Civic Center. “None of the staff has felt threatened.”

Hmmmm. I would certainly feel threatened.

Bell has no explanation for the incidents, but she says the building “does have an aura.”

Oh, it’s radioactive? Phosphorescent? On fire? The lights are on? Yeah, maybe, but nobody’s home:

She said unusual things seem to happen whenever the staff makes changes. For example, she said, she decided to move the children’s section from its longtime home upstairs to a new room downstairs. Soon after, she said, the staff left the library in perfect order and returned the next day to find large art books on the floor with the pages balled up.

When I am in a situation like this, I always remember what the great scientist Peter Venkman said when also confronted by ghosts in a library: "No human would stack books this way".

Seriously. Some vandals are getting away with doing a lot of damage, because librarians — librarians! — would rather think it was ghosts than the far far more obvious, simple, and rational explanation.

This is why I fight, folks. It’s not just politics, religion, and science. It’s teh stupid. It must be stopped.

Tip o’ the unlicensed nuclear accelerator to BABloggee uknesvuinng.

So it’s Halloween, my favoritest holiday of them all. Candy! Costumes! Scariness! Ticking off fundamentalists!

What could be better?

I already wrote about my plans to haul out the ’scope, so I’ll spare you that (though it’ll probably be cloudy tonight, grrrr). Instead, I’ll note that today is also the last day of October, a special month in skepticism: it’s the month that features Rebecca on the Skepchick calendar!

It’s also the month that, um, well… that I’m on the calendar too. I’ve not posted the whole picture here for fear of terrifying the masses (but I used a small piece of it as an avatar on MySpace). But hey! It’s Halloween! Plus, since it’s the last day of October, I think the surprise and shock for everyone who owns the calendar has finally worn off.

So here, without further ado, is the picture. Well, a small cropped thumbnail of it, since it’s marginally (or wholly) NSFW. Click it to see the whole thing.

The quotation is from Carl Sagan:

It’s sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But it does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

I was fooling around on You Tube doing a vanity search, and I was surprised to see that someone had uploaded the "debate" I had with Moon hoax goofball Bart Sibrel which aired on MSNBC back in 2002. This was the first time I had ever gone head-to-head with a conspiracy theorist, and I don’t think my performance was 100% up to snuff. The format was awful; Dan Abrams’ show gave way too much time to setup and also way too much time to Sibrel. But I blew it on a few fronts here; the worst being that I didn’t lead the discussion, I took my cues from the host. I should have taken control right away and steered the conversation more toward Sibrel’s claims, which were ludicrous. Also, I looked like I was clenching my teeth the whole time. I need to smile more on camera.

This is one reason I don’t debate antiscientists very much; the format on radio and TV makes it very difficult. I held my own against Joe Rogan, for example, but that hold was tenuous during quite a bit of the second segment.

Here’s the MSNBC video.

One good thing came out of this: Sibrel claims I am a NASA employee and "that’s where [I] get my paychecks." That is not true, of course: I’ve never been a NASA employee, and that is something Sibrel should have known before he said that. Either he didn’t know and was making that up, or he did know and said it anyway. Either way, it’s a lie, and so I can honestly, and with evidence, call Bart Sibrel a liar!

There was a lively discussion of this on the bulletin board when the show originally aired, too.

Note: the thread was converted to the new board software a while back, and some of the content didn’t convert correctly, so you’ll see some weird stuff there (links to images and such).

So tomorrow is Halloween, and that means the usual tradition at the BA household:

• Panicky buying whatever candy is left at the local store, usually inedible waxy chocolate coins and Mary Janes;
• Panicky carving of pumpkins, panicky dumping of elaborate plans this year of really carving the Face of Boe and instead hoping to just get triangular eyes and a mouth where the teeth don’t break off;
• Panicky last-minute selection of a costume for The Little Astronomer as well as for me when I give out candy, which means a panicky rummaging-through of the closet and coming up empty;
• Decidedly non-panicky decision to haul out the ol’ ’scope and show the kids the sky.

That last one is my favorite Halloween tradition. I still give out candy, but I do it from my driveway, where I have the telescope set up. Some years are better than others; when Jupiter or Saturn is up you’re gold. But this year, we have, of course, Comet Holmes, which showed up right on time to make this the splashiest Halloween treat we’ve had in a long, long time.

If you have a telescope — or even binoculars you can mount on a tripod — then why not give the kids coming around something they’ll remember for years to come? Show them an erupting comet!

More cool astronomy news: astronomers have found the most massive stellar black hole so far, weighing in at about 24 - 33 times the mass of the Sun.

Drawing of IC 10 X-1 by artist (and my friend and ex-coworker!) Aurore Simonnet. Courtesy of NASA.

Stellar mass black holes are called that because they are in the same mass range as stars (supermassive black holes are millions or billions of times the Sun’s mass and reside in galactic cores; intermediate mass BHs have hundreds of solar masses and are generally seen in star clusters, where "food" for the black hole is plentiful and they can grow easily). Stellar mass black holes form when a massive star explodes. The outer layers blow off, but the core collapses inward. If the mass of the core is high enough, it forms a black hole.

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