‘Major bummer. Darren McGavin died on Saturday.

Most people probably know him as the dad in "Christmas Story", the movie where the kid wants the BB gun (and eventually shoots his eye out). But to me, he will always be Karl Kolchak, the gritty, goofy, news reporter who investigated weird deaths in Chicago, only to find there was some supernatural cause behind them (vampires, succubi, ghosts, Greek gods, aliens, a robot, you name it).

I loved that show when I was a kid. There are many scenes that still stick with me (like the monster that appears as someone you trust, and Kolchak says he doesn’t trust anyone, but then in a dark alley the old lady he works with comes up to him, and he shoots her in the belly with the blessed crossbow… wow). Chris Carter says "Night Stalker" inspired him to create "The X-Files", and McGavin later had a guest role on the show.

Yes, I know, I’m a skeptic and a critical thinker and someone who fights the idea of the existence of vampires, ghosts, succubi and what-have-you. But I still have an imagination, and still love to hear stories (the difference is I know when they’re true or not). And when I was a kid I sucked down all that stuff: monster movies, scary TV shows ("The Outer Limits" creeped the hell out of me when I was little) ,and all that. "Night Stalker" was the epitome of those shows, and Kolchak’s character — the surly but lovable anti-hero — was my favorite.

Don Knotts died yesterday as well, and I suppose in popular culture, his name is much bigger (I did love "The Incredible Mr. Limpett" when I was a kid, and he was really funny in "Pleasantville"), but it’s Darren McGavin who had a bigger influence on me. I’m sorry to see him gone, but I’m glad he was around as long as he was.

Update: Geez, Saturday was a bad day. We lost Octavia Butler, science fiction author, too. Also , Henry Morris, the person who is probably most responsible for the modern creationist movement, also died. Like I said when Moon Hoax originator Bill Kaysing died, I’m never happy when someone dies, but everyone has to go sometime, and some people do more bad than good in the world. Morris may have believed in what he was doing, but what he did has caused a vast amount of strife and set parts of the U.S. back a hundred years in science learning.‘

‘Stylus magazine — I’d never heard of them either — has a Top Ten list put together by their staff. Today’s list? Top Ten Most Welcome Movie Deaths. Their number one choice?

Bruce Willis in Armageddon.

DUH.

Note added a few minutes later: In related news, Abe Vigoda is 85 years old today (scroll to the bottom of the page)!

Tip o’ the space helmet for the link to The Huffington Post.’

‘

I blogged a little while back about a new supernova in the spiral galaxy M100. It’s probably hitting its peak brightness right now, and will soon begin to fade away into obscurity. In the meantime, the folks south of the border– way south, in Chile– have weighed in, observing the exploded star with the mammoth 8-meter Very Large Telescope (yes, that’s its real name).

The picture above (click it for a big 800 kb version) shows an M100 "before and after" shot. The image on the left was taken in 2002, and the one on the right was taken just a few days ago. I marked the supernova to make it easier to see. On the left image, you can see the bright star above the supernova; it may look brighter on the left than on the right because the exposure times were different, and the images were processed differently.

There’s an interesting thing to see right away in the image: the supernova is not in a spiral arm, it’s in the gap between two arms. The spiral arms are big, obvious features in the galaxy because clouds of gas and dust get compressed in them. This triggers star formation, which means you get lots of dinky, dim stars, but also a handful of bright ones. These bright ones are really bright, which in turn light up the gas clouds, which in turn make the arms obvious features.

Now, bright, massive stars don’t live long (a million or so years) and then they explode as supernovae, so you expect to see them in the spiral arms, because they don’t live long enough to make their way out. But this one, SN2006X, is not in a spiral arm. What gives?

What gives is that there are two types of supernovae. When a low-mass star like the Sun ends its life, its core gets compressed into a dense ball called a white dwarf. I explain how these can explode in yet another previous entry. Anyway, stars like the Sun can live for billions of years, so they live long enough to move out of their parent spiral arm. So you don’t necessarily expect to see this kind of supernova (called a Type I) in an arm. It might be, if coincidentally the star happened to be drifting through an arm when it blew up, but it doesn’t have to be, like the other kind of supernova does.

So just by looking at this picture, you can guess the star that blew up was an old, low-mass Type I. And you’d be right!

Usually it takes a lot of work to interpret astronomical images, but sometimes you can tell a lot just at a glance.’

We interrupt this NASA-bashing (and I suspect there will be more; I have some more items I’m tracking down right now in fact) for this announcement:

On Friday, February 24 at 13:00, NASA will be holding a press briefing about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a pretty beefy mission due to enter orbit around the Red Planet on March 10. I think that link will have a public webcast of the briefing, but there is nothing there at the moment. NASA TV will carry it, but on their "Public, Education, and Media channel". Go to their website for info on how to watch.

I’ll add that Mars exploration is something NASA is doing very, very well. The rovers are still operating more than two years after arriving on Mars, and their nominal mission lifetime was 90 days. Not too bad, exceeding the planned lifetime by a factor of 7… and the Mars Global Surveyor is still returning so many images the scientists can’t keep up with them. People will be studying those images for decades.

This science is the kind of thing NASA needs to give more funding to, devote more time to, and promote a whole lot more.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, NASA’s fiscal year 2007 budget contains devastating cuts to science. The new Exploration Initiative (to go to the Moon and Mars) is going to cost a lot.

That money has to come from somewhere, and even though this vision was stoked by the President, he has not relegated any extra money for it. That money has to come from somewhere, and it certainly won’t come from the Shuttle or the International Space Station (despite huge cost overruns, lengthy delays, and a lack of any clearly defined goal for either one). This means that the money will come from the science side of NASA, which will pay a dear price, a dear price indeed. Whole missions are being cancelled, and others are being delayed indefinitely or suffering crippling cuts.

Astronomers around the country have sent letters to Griffin, expressing their alarm in various degrees of emotional level. There are some templates for letters floating around, but I found they were not adequate for what I wanted to say. So I wrote my own, and faxed it to Dr. Griffin a few hours ago. As I understand it, letters sent by tonight will be gathered together and delivered to Congress, which will then have a couple of weeks to discuss the situation. I don’t expect the House Science Committee members will actually read them (though a group of staffers might, and give synopses to the Congresscritters). It’s likely they’ll simply count them up to know how many astronomers are good and truly ticked off. Hint: I am one of them.

Below is my letter. After that, I have included links to what other astronomers are saying and doing.

February 21, 2006

Dr. Michael Griffin
Administrator
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
300 E ST, SW
Washington, DC 20546

Dear Dr. Griffin:

When the NASA FY2007 budget was released, I was shocked to see the extraordinary damage being done to the science program.

NASA’s major impact on the public consciousness is with both exploration and science, especially when they are combined. The Cassini mission, the Mars rovers, Hubble, Spitzer, New Horizons — these have captured the imagination of people all over the country, and the world, and have inspired generations of students to look up and wonder.

Manned exploration is a part of this as well. The Apollo missions unified this country as no other space effort ever has. And in the space science community, you will not find a more vocal or enthusiastic promoter of our returning to the Moon than me. But this must not come at the cost of space science. I was deeply disturbed to see such devastating cuts, delays, and outright cancellations of space science missions in the FY2007 budget. The list of threatened missions is astonishing:

The WISE MIDEX mission is insufficiently funded, SOFIA is on hold, Dawn (postponed indefinitely) is sitting in a warehouse ready to fly, TPF is delayed, the Astrobiology Institute suffered an almost total slashing of their funds over the next two years, tremendous cuts were made to two Mars Scout missions, the Europa probe has been indefinitely delayed, and the SMEX NuSTAR was cancelled mere weeks from having the proposal completed; excised in word and deed from the budget.

Dr. Griffin, you were quoted as saying that delaying the Exploration program would be more devastating than delaying science. I strongly disagree: the delays in science will not be simple delays; scientists will have to find other programs on which to work in the meantime, and the missions will lose expertise quickly. This will lead almost certainly to further delays, cost overruns, and eventual cancellations.

The Explorer program was designed to provide rapid and frequent access to space, yet it has been four years since the last Announcement of Opportunity (which included the winning proposal for NuSTAR, now canceled), and while another AO is scheduled for next year, honestly even that looks doubtful. Given that so many excellent mission have been Explorers (including the fabulously successful Swift gamma-ray burst and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe missions), and that the NRC Decadal Surveys have consistently and strongly emphasized the critical importance of the Explorer program to space science, these actions are short-sighted at best.

We all know the budget pressure NASA is under. You have to make very difficult budget decisions, but cutting science in such a devastating way cannot be the best of all possible worlds. A simple solution to all this is for NASA to ask for more money to support the Exploration Initiative; given that this push was mandated by the present Presidential Administration, that seems the most fitting way to proceed. Of course, it would be naive to assume that would be fruitful. Barring that, then, it would be rational to look at the Shuttle and ISS phase-out, and see if money could come from there. The funding needed for science is relatively small compared to what is needed for those.

The scientific community is reeling from what is being proposed by NASA. There simply must be another way to fund the Exploration initiative — which I will remind you, I strongly support — other than robbing Peter to pay Paul.

I urge you to support science: find a way to restore delayed or canceled missions, and enable a new generation of scientists to find their way to the stars.

Sincerely,

Dr. Philip Plait
BadAstronomy.com and Sonoma State University

Cc:
NASA Associate Administrator, Science Mission Directorate, Dr. Mary Cleave
United States Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science
House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Science, State, Justice, Commerce
United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation
House of Representatives Committee on Science

Here is what other astronomers have said:

• The Planetary Society’s letter to Congress
• Letter from Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg and SETI Institute CEO Thomas Pierson regarding proposed astrobiology cuts
• The American Astronomical Society has not officially spoken out on this issue yet, but they do have an information notice about it which outlines some of the damage.
• The NASA budget is available online. You want the "FY 2007 Budget Request" (it’s a 5 Mb PDF).

I think that if anyone else wants to write letters, it may be too late to get them to the HSC, but letters to NASA may still help. Just in case, use your own words, note mine! Also, you need to fax them. Address the letters as I did, to Mike Griffin, and fax one copy each to:

1. NASA Administrator Mike Griffin: 202-358-2810
2. Lewis-Burke Associates LLC: 202-289-7454
3. NASA Associate Administrator, Science Mission Directorate, Mary Cleave: 202-358-4118

Like I said, it may be too late to get the letters to Congress, but I hope it’s not too late for NASA, and it’s once-great commitment to science.

This entry is long. I hope you understand why after you finish reading it. I try not to post long entries very often, but when I do, it’s because I have something I really need to say.

I’ve been discussing the AAAS meeting in the past few entries, but I haven’t said just why I came to the meeting. I was invited to participate on a panel discussing the current attacks on science, both by fundamentalist religions and by ideological politics. On the panel would be experts on biology, education, creationists, and, well, me. I decided to tackle the astronomical nonsense coming from young Earth creationists. They approved of my topic, so I prepared a talk; basically, very similar to what I was going to say at James Randi’s The Amaz!ng Meeting.

A day or two before the talk, however, I had a change of heart. I decided to totally change my talk, even the topic.

Mind you, I never ever do this. Ever. When I say I’m giving a certain talk, that’s what I give.

But things had changed a bit since I sent in my topic idea. The big thing was the George Deutsch business. Speaking up about him on this blog was not like anything I had done before. Obviously, though, I couldn’t leave this topic alone any more. I’ve been watching science suffer terribly these past few years, and I could no longer keep quiet.

After watching things go by for so long, speaking up felt very right to me. So I decided to change my panel topic. I want to get other people to talk about this. The more scientists we get speaking publicly, the more likely it is people will take action. But the first step is to just get people aware of what’s going on.

So I started taking a lot of notes the night before my talk, and worked all morning researching and scrawling down ideas. I was feeling a bit weird about it, and I was getting nervous. That, plus I’d be speaking in front of scientists, as well as several people I respect immensely, added to my jitters.

The time finally came, and the other speakers talked one by one. First up was Genie Scott, a tireless crusader (har har) against creationism in all its guises. She is the leading fighter against Intelligent Design, and was involved in the Kitzmiller case in Dover, Pennsylvania. She talked eloquently about the recent attacks on science by these groups.

The other speakers included researcher Jon Miller, who gave an excellent talk about the percentages of Americans who think evolution is or is not real. It was fascinating; most Americans (90%!) feel that their lives are better because of science, yet 50% of Americans think that we depend too much on science and not enough on faith. A full 40% reject evolution! We rank 33rd out of 34 countries (just above Turkey) in accepting evolution. How weird is that? I wonder if those 40% get vaccinations for viruses, or take antibiotics?

Other speakers gave equally provocative talks, but finally it was my turn. I had a lot of stuff to say, I really did. I got to about ¼ of it before time ran out. Figures.

I talked about Deutsch, giving an overview of that affair. I talked about not just creationism, but ideological attacks on astronomy, and other sciences. I talked about how this Administration talks the talk about science, but doesn’t walk the walk. How Bush wants to go the Moon, but hasn’t funded it, and that’s why NASA had to cut huge amounts of science from their plans to pay for it (a diatribe for another, not too distant day).

I then gave advice, such as it’s worth, to those in the room. This part was something I wrote down before the speech, so I can post it here for you to see. I can’t conclude this blog better than with what I wrote, so I’ll leave you with these thoughts.

What can we do about this situation, this attack on science and scientists? In this audience are scientists, educators, and journalists. As someone who can lay claim to all three professions, let me tell you what I think.

To the scientists, find the best among you who can communicate. Not just professionally, though that helps. We need people who can talk to people, explain not just the science, but the joy, the wonder, the sense of awe we as scientific explorers get. You want people to want to understand science? Let them see the twinkle in your eye when you describe why we do what we do.

To the media, please, don’t simply take what people say and repeat it. Don’t feel the need to get "balance" in your reporting by talking to "both sides". Sometimes there aren’t two sides! If someone builds a Holocaust museum, would you interview a white supremacist who says the Holocaust never happened to achieve "balance"? When a new vaccine comes out for a virus, would you interview a homeopath so that "both sides are heard"? This administration has put a jack-booted heel to the throat of science for years, and it’s the media’s responsibility to shine a light on it. I’ll admit to not pulling my weight in this issue, but, obviously, that stops today.

And finally to the educators: don’t just teach rote science. Science isn’t memorization, it isn’t a dry compendium of facts, dates, numbers. It’s like a living, breathing thing, it grows, it repairs itself. Science brings us knowledge, wonder, enlightenment. That’s what you should teach your students. The content will come after their minds are primed. Teach them the joy of discovery, and maybe these attacks on science will wither on their own.

I was able to check email and such Saturday night using the hotel lobby wireless, but Sunday was too hectic. Well, that was my fault: I woke up late, and then went to a reception sponsored by a bunch of NASA satellite observatories (the food was terrific; that’s what a few billion tax dollars pays for). Anyway, after that I helped out at a symposium about a super-magnetic neutron star that blew its lid back in 2004– that was avery cool series of talks, and I’ll blog about that eventually. I wrote something on the plane, but it’s 1100 words. Yikes.

Anyway, after that I ran to the airport and flew home, so I haven’t been able to update my blog until just now. I have a nice, meaty entry for tonight about my talk on Saturday, so for now I’ll just say that Joel Achenbach, a humor writer for the Washington Post with whom I hung out the other day, mentioned me by name in his blog. Cool! I actually met Joel years ago at an American Astronomical Society meeting, and it was fun hanging out with him again. Did you know that St. Louis was originally French, then sold to Spain, and then sold back to France as part of a secret treaty with Napoleon, which was only announced three weeks before the French sold it to America as part of the Louisiana Purchase? This is the kind of stuff we were talking about in the bar (and I had wireless so we could look all this up). Meetings are fun.