Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Note: THIS HAS BEEN POSTPONED AN HOUR.

I’ll be doing another live video chat starting at 3:00 p.m. Mountain Time (21:00 UT) on Sunday May 11. If you look below and see/hear me jawing about astronomy or Doctor Who, then you’re good. I urge you to go to the UStream page, though, so you can participate in the chat room (or find/use an IRC client you like; the channel is chat1.ustream.tv and the room is #bad-astronomy). If you want to change your nickname there, type "/nick David Tennant" (or whatever) in the text field.

The Disco ‘tute, the ironically described think tank for intelligent design, loves to crow about how there are basic controversies in evolutionary science and that makes it all wrong. However, in the real world, we know that the mouthpieces at DI are overly fond of lying, as has been shown so many times that it should set the whole world’s collective pants on fire.

But there are real controversies in evolution, as there are in any science. An article in ars technica by biologist John Timmer talks briefly about some real issues in evolution, enough to give you a taste of what’s real, as opposed to what the jabbering heads at DI froth over.

Don’t let the antiscientists fool you. As we real scientists who fight them like to say, just because we don’t know everything doesn’t mean we don’t know anything. And we know a heckuva lot more than they do.

Tip o’ the flagellum to BABloggee and cool cartoon artist Matt Andrews.

I got an email from writer Paul McNamara about my recent comments complaining about shoddy journalism when it comes to UFO reports. Turns out he wrote a list of 10 reasons not to believe in UFOs, and while it’s a tad snarky it really hits the high notes.

To his list, I’ll add my #1 reason of all time: why don’t amateur astronomers report them in record numbers? After all, who spends more time looking at the sky? The fact that few if any amateurs report them is a pretty clear case that the vast majority, at least, of all UFO reports are misunderstood mundane objects like airplanes, satellites, reflections, meteors, and Venus. Sometimes even the Moon, amazingly.

When a flying saucer lands on the White House lawn, someone call me.

A lot of you may have already seen this, but a 1200 meter volcano called Chaiten in Chile erupted the other day, blowing smoke and ash kilometers into the sky. It also sparked massive lightning, and the images are incredible:

There are quite a few amazing pictures of the event on Flickr. There is also this astonishing video on YouTube:

Other videos abound as well.

This is the first eruption of Chaiten in almost 9400 years. Small towns nearby have been evacuated, and I haven’t heard reports of anyone getting hurt.

I rather hope we get some images of the eruption taken from the space station. They tend to be rather dramatic.

There’s a preview of the next Futurama direct-to-DVD movie out on YouTube!

Squeee!

OMG OMG OMG.

The first movie had some great moments, though a lot of it was lackluster. This preview looks a lot funnier, the equal to some of the best of the episodes. It has Morbo (kittens give him gas), and Nixon, and Kif, and and and…

It has a giant ant. Really. Oh man. I love giant ants. "Them!" is one of my favorite movies of all time.

I miss Futurama. More is coming! Yay!

Slurm’s up to io9.