Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I don’t mean to make this blog all LHC all the time, but Brian Cox gave a moving and wonderful speech at the TED conference this year.

He’s a great speaker, and I’m glad he’s on our side.

Tip o’ the Higgs boson to Gia.

Oh man. After an intensely Doctor Whoish week in the UK (I’ll squee about that in a later post) what do I find out? I can get a Dalek helmet that changes your voice!

Even better, this same company has a USB-powered TARDIS can cooler! WANTWANTWANT.

You’d think it would hold a bigger can, though.

Tip[ o’ the sonic screwdriver to Kevin Jung.

While I was in England, the good folks at nature.com let me glom on to their pub party, which turned into a Nature/Randi/BA/Brian Cox fan/meetup thingy. It was quite the good time.

In return, all I had to do was write up a soapbox speech and record it for their podcast! What a scam. Suckers.

As it is, they interviewed Randi on it, as well as Alan Marscher, another astronomer who talks about active galaxies! So it’s a skeptical and astronomical smorgasbord.

You can download the podcast directly, read the transcript, or check out their archives for tons more cool podcasts.

If you’re curious, the woman who does the voiceover ad at the very beginning is none other than Gia.

BABloggee Patrick Pricken alerted me to a new movie coming out soon… where pareidolia is real.

It’s called "Henry Poole is Here", and it stars Luke Wilson as a sad sap whose life turns around when the face of Jesus appears on the side of his house. It looks like another in a long line of don’t-trust-reality-instead-put-your-faith-in-something kind of movies. I can already predict with some certainty that in the end there will be an ambiguous scene where you don’t really know if it’s Jesus, or if people use the stain as a catalyst to open up their own inner power.

Either way, feh.

I’d rather see a movie where some kid isn’t doing well in science class because his parents think the Universe is 6000 years old. Then he sees an online interview with Brian Cox about the Large Hadron Collider and is inspired to make it his life’s work to understand why gravity works. In the end, he does, and finds out that the Universe is filled to overflowing with the wonder and beauty of nature.

I’ll be waiting a long time for that movie.

Strange Maps does it again! This time, it’s a map of the western hemisphere of the Earth… in jelly.

That’s not bad (click it for the embiggened version). The description at Strange Maps gives you the details.

It’s no Lenin, but it’s impressive.

Tip o’ the jam jar lid to our very own ToSeek!

… Hemant has this:

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. [PZ] Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed.

Yes, Ben Stein went there. He equates PZ with Nazis who gassed Jews by the hundreds of thousands.

Great guy, huh?

There is nothing too onerous for that foul little man to say. Nothing. And then he turns around and talks about "God’s love". What an evil hypocrite.

This news came as a surprise: my old friend Bob Naeye will be the new Editor-in-Chief of Sky and Telescope magazine!

Criminy, where to start? OK (and I hope I have all this in correct chronological order), Bob was an editor at Astronomy magazine, and when I was a fledgling writer just spreading my wings (barf gag) he edited contributions I made to Ask Astro, their Q&A section. His edits were always right on the money, always improving what I wrote. Not only that, but he was easy-going and fun to work with.

Then he moved on to Mercury magazine, the publication of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. I sent them one or two articles, and again his editing was great.

Sometime around this era (2002) he won the David Schramm award for best writing in high-energy astronomy, for his article about the Chandra X-ray Observatory titled "Superman’s Telescope". I voted for him, by the way. I worried a bit about favoritism, but although there were good entries that year, his was clearly the best.

Then he became an editor at Sky and Telescope, and was once again one of their best writers and editors. Eventually, he wanted to move on, and went to Goddard Space Flight Center to work on their public outreach there. I enthusiastically endorsed this move by NASA; and it was cool to see his byline on press releases from there (which were always, of course, top-notch).

Last I heard he was still there, so this news of his going back up to Cambridge to be the E-C of Sky and Tel is a surprise, but a great one! Sky and Tel is an honorable and venerable magazine, supporting amateur astronomy for many decades. I’ve written for them many times (and I’m still around, guys, hello?) and getting Bob back will only make them even better. Rick Fienberg, the outgoing EiC, is also an old friend and I’m glad to see he is staying on with the mag as a contributing editor.

So again, congratulations, Bob! It’s always nice to see good things happening to good people.