Blogs / Bad Astronomy

The BBC is certainly ramping up the excitement for my favorite show ever. This trailer just appeared, and once again I’m sure it’ll get taken down and reloaded and and and. This one’s more melodramatic than the others.

I’ll be in LA filming Skeptologists when the new season of Doctor Who premiers, so I want no spoilers, but lots of comments.

There is no word for this other than brilliant, unless that word is genius.

PZ linked to this his own self, and his commenters worked out the lyrics. I wasn’t sure at first who this was parodying, but reading the lyrics makes it clear. And as another commenter pointed out, this is way too hip, clever, and just plain funny to be from a creationist.

I mean, honestly. Michelle Malkin finally stopped going on Bill O’Reilly’s show when even the sycophantic Geraldo Rivera said she was creepy, and Ann Coulter somehow no longer haunts (and I mean that literally) the bobblehead news shows.

So why do they go to people like Pat Buchanan, who has shown himself repeatedly to be a throwback to 900 years ago?

This time, it’s a nutsoid racist rant that is worthy of any of the pre-Laurel Maryland George Wallace speeches:

Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

The mind boggles. He says things as ignorant as this (and lots, lots more) and still gets to go on national television programs, which tacitly give his words weight. Didn’t we get rid of this kind of narrow-minded bigoted garbage forty years ago?

No, I suppose not, which is why Obama’s speech was so important. I’m not sold on Obama yet — his science policies need to be straightened out for me at least, and I have other issues I’m working through — but that speech was pretty cool. Imagine, talking to Americans like they’re intelligent, capable of understanding layers of subtlety and nuance of phrasing. I bet he can pronounce "nuclear", too.

But then, we still have far too many people like Buchanan to deal with. As long as he and his ilk get a podium, Obama’s speech will still be needed.

Hat tip to Crooks and Liars, which had an excellent response to Buchanan as well as links to others.

So I’ve told you most of the good news about things I’m working on right now, including Skeptologists and the CWA. But there’s a third thing that I’m also really excited about.

Regular readers know about Brian Cox, a British physicist/rock star who does lots of TV interviews and the like. He and I met a few years back when he was filming a documentary about NASA’s Deep Impact probe which smacked into a comet, and he interviewed me about the tie-in with the movie of the same name. Brian works for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research^*. In France and Switzerland, CERN operates particle accelerators that have been used for decades to push our knowledge of subatomic physics forward (and more than one Nobel Prize has been given due to work done at CERN).

Currently, they are building the extremely amazing Large Hadron Collider, the beefiest and biggest particle accelerator ever built. The hope is that it will open up new doors into the quantum world, and help scientists understand just what the heck is going on in the Universe on the smallest scales we can understand. Even after decades of research, there are lots of questions still hanging around, like why is there gravity, why is it so weak compared to other forces, and why do particles have mass? LHC may very well answer these questions, or at least get us heading in the right direction… and for the record, it won’t destroy the planet, either.

Is that Brian himself immortalized in an XKCD comic? I think maybe. Edited to add: I freely admit I stole this joke from Dave Pearson.

Anyway, due to budget issues, CERN is going to decommission some of the older accelerators, and they will be shutting them down soon. As a final gesture, Brian and his wife Gia (who absolutely rocks and is also a science geek, TV host, blogger, and just all-around cool chick) want to make a video about the facility, and have invited me to come to England and film with them!

Yeehaw!

I’ve never been to England, and even if I ever had this would still be incredibly exciting. I’ve never seen an actual accelerator before; a few years ago I visited Fermilab in Illinois, but didn’t see the actual hardware. I’ve also never been to France of Switzerland either, so this trip will be amazing.

I’ll be heading over to Jolly Old England on April 16th, and it looks like I’ll have most of the 17th to fool around and look for David Tennant. But we’re thinking that on the evening of the 17th we’ll have a meetup of some kind, a skeptics-in-the-pub type party somewhere, maybe Soho. I’ll let Gia figure that out, since all I know about England is where London and Cardiff are (yes, I know, that’s Wales, but it’s also where The Rift is, which is why I know about it). I might even be able to round up a few other skeptics, too; more on that as it develops.

The next day we’ll fly over to CERN, film for a day or two, and then head back to the UK. I’ll stay one more day and then come home, so there might be another chance for a meetup of some sort.

I cannot say enough how chuffed I am about this. I can’t wait!

Funny coincidence– a few days after a COPV (fuel tank) dropped from space onto Brazil, a story has surfaced that looks like exactly the same kind of object was found in Australia last year (there is a picture with the article, too).

The article claims (without cites) that it is from a US rocket launched in 1998. I’m not sure how they know that precisely, but I suppose the ground tracks of known re-entries narrowed it down. The tank was discovered in November, and the farmer who found it just started looking into the mystery, which is why the story popped up now.

From Rebecca comes word that Genie Scott, a personal hero of mine, and her flunkies at the National Center for Science Education — a top-notch outfit that fights creationism — have created a new site called Expelled Exposed, debunking the garbage of the "Expelled" move.

Yay! This was a good move. All reality-based folks should make sure we link to this site, and steer people to it if this movie is able to bubble out of the murk and filth and into the public consciousness.

So earlier today I wrote about Skeptologists, which I’m doing next week.

Step 2 in The Plot To Grind Phil Into Dust is the Conference on World Affairs. This annual conference is held in Boulder, this year from April 7 - 11, and is really something extraordinary. Committees covering various topics — science, politics, music, and so on — choose people from all over the world to come to Boulder and spend a week sitting on panels talking over issues of the day. That may sound a little dull, but it’s anything but. The speakers are at the top of their game, chosen for expertise, breadth of knowledge, and really their wow-factor. An expert who is dull as a bowling ball won’t get invited, typically.

What you end up with are about 100 vivacious, interesting, smart people, all in one place. It’s incredible.

I am on the science committee, so I was able to invite some folks I know, including James Randi, Alex Filippenko, and Brian Cox (though Brian may not be able to come due to issues I’ll be posting about later; we’re working on that). But the list of others coming includes other luminaries like my buddies Andy Ihnatko and Seth Shostak, and (squee! squee!) Rachel Maddow. The complete list of panelists is on the CWA site.

It’s a solid week of hanging out with smart people, which is one of my all-time favorite things to do. If you live anywhere near Boulder, then this is an event you don’t want to miss.

Next, Step 3: Texas and the UK. Posts about those coming soon.