Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Emily Lakdawalla, the blogger for The Planetary Society, has learned from the master. She will be hosting a live video chat Wednesday May 14 (tomorrow) at 3:00 p.m. Pacific time (22:00 UT) on her UStream channel. You can get more info on her blog.

I’ll be there in the chat room, and I urge everyone else to take a look too. Emily is very knowledgeable and very funny, so I’m sure this’ll be a good way to spend an afternoon.

What the heck is a skeptic ring tone?

I don’t know, but someone advertising on MySpace does. I went to check my page, and saw this:

What would this sound like? Randi harumphing? The Skeptologists theme song?

Ironically, I’m skeptical of the ad. But still… it would be useful for spam phone calls.

Two Whoish things:

1) Catherine Tate was robbed! Of an award, that is. She won the popular vote for the People’s Choice at the British Comedy Awards, but a bit of back-stage shenanigans gave her award to someone who didn’t deserve it. She isn’t always my cup of tea, but she has done some fabulously funny stuff, and is really shining on Doctor Who as Donna, as I predicted.

2) Steven Moffat, the brilliant mind behind "The Empty Child", "The Doctor Dances", and the incredibly funny TV show Coupling, won a BAFTA award for writing "Blink", perhaps the single best hour of television in any genre ever (and I will even put it up against even Firefly’s "Out of Gas", which was extraordinary).

Congrats to both!

In case you’re curious, the title of this post is a joke on a great line from Blink.

While poking around the intertoobs a few days ago, I found a remarkable blog by a young woman. She volunteers at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature, an excellent place where you can learn all about reality (and where "my" black hole show was created).

Sadly, this young woman also sees creationists giving tours and lying about said reality. Her blog post on this subject is truly worth reading. It would be considered well-written and thoughtful by anyone.

So imagine my surprise when I found out, coincidentally just now, that she’s only 14 15.

Fourteen! Fifteen! Amazing. I foresee a very bright future ahead of this young lady.

Just some stuff I get in email and from other sources… read these all the way through. You’ll love #6.

1) 85% of Americans wants a Presidential debate on science. I do too, if only for the hilarity factor. I’d love to see Clinton questioned repeatedly on how little she trusts experts.

2) The SciFi blog io9 (I read it every day, and you should too if you like SF) has an article asking if Obama will destroy the space program. Not quite as nuanced as my own blog post on the subject, but then we both stole this from Popular Mechanics.

3) Also in PopMech, it looks like NASA has been rethinking dissing private space companies. The space agency has been giving prizes and awards to some companies; they just indicated they’re interested in using SpaceX for launches in the future. I’m glad to see this. I think private industry may be a lot more flexible when it comes to launched than NASA. I’ve been saying for years that NASA should spend taxpayer money to do things companies cannot do (pay for the design, building, and use of deep space missions; go to the Moon, develop new technologies and methods, etc.) and let private industry take over launches. NASA has proven quite effectively that they are not so great at getting cheap access to space. It’s not all their fault; being beholden to the White House and Congress would be enough to make any person insane.

4) I was asked on my live video chat last Sunday if any video of Pangea Day, and specifically Carolyn Porco’s talk, would be made available. The answer is, yes! It’s on YouTube now, at least the first 20 minutes of it. But it includes Carolyn… introduced by Queen Noor of Jordan! Wow. That starts about six minutes in, and it’s nine minutes of your life that will be very well spent.

5) My sister sent me a link to some incredible hi-res Shuttle images. Very cool.

6) Finally, Colbert interviews astronaut Garrett Reisman. It’s funny — huge duh — but you can tell Colbert is totally squeed by this.

7) Not space or science per se, but my bud Adam Savage was on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me last week. Very funny!

… and you want proof he’s my bud? O foolish mortal.

You know, it’s just not a party until someone shows up with a lamp shade on her head.

No, really, we were having a hard time hearing her bark, so we set her up with a surgically-attached megaphone.

No, really, she’s going to a costume party as Queen Elizabeth.

OK, fine. On Sunday, not long after I got back from Michigan, she tore her foot open a little bit near her upper pad on her left leg. The dog next door started barking, Canis Minor^* chased after her (there’s a fence between the yards and the dogs love mixing it up with the fence between them), and turned a minor injury into a pretty big and gruesome gash, 10 cm long and quite deep. A trip to the animal hospital later (of course this had to happen on the one day our regular vet was closed, so we get charged extra for the emergency) and she had the dressing and the collar on. She also came home stoned out of her mind from the procedure, which was actually pretty funny. She came down after a few hours and is now more like her normal self.

That’s why the live video chat was late, and I appreciate the well-wishes from all the listeners. CM is feeling a lot better, but the dressing stays on for several more days. She’ll be hopping around quite a bit for a while, but she doesn’t seem to mind the collar. She’s a weird dog.

Evidently — and I do mean evidently — there is no "too much". And for this, we have a threefer:

1) The Bush White House has politicized the EPA so much that it is making it very difficult for the agency to protect citizens from toxic polluters.

2) What does this Administration do when they find someone in the government who supports the people over industry? Oh, we know the answer to this all too well: they fire them. After all, it’s better to have a company dumping toxic chemicals into rivers and lakes for a half century than it is to protect humans.

3) This one may be the most incredible: The Bush Administration doesn’t want meat packers to voluntarily test cattle for Mad Cow disease. They’re afraid of "false positives" upsetting consumers. Hey, here’s a thought: regulate the testing so it’s done correctly. Of course, given the mutilation of science done by this White House, I wouldn’t trust them to regulate anything fairly, but wouldn’t that make at least a bit more sense than trying to gag the packers? The trumping of corporations over consumers is so blatantly obvious by the Bush Administration that this is positively Orwellian.

I assume that our chocolate rations will be increased from 30 to 20 grammes any time now.

The past seven years have been one of seemingly unending downward spirals into recession, far-right control of the government, loss of liberty, and nothing but non-stop lies from the Bush Administration. I can only hope the damage they can do to America over the next 7 months is minimal, but even if Bush sat that time out in the Oval Office playing tiddlywinks, the damage is done, and will continue to grow (at $20 million per hour).

January 20, 2009 cannot come fast enough.

Hat tip to Crooks and Liars for the purging article and the Mad Cow article.