I suspect tomorrow will be a big news day what with the Hubble announcement and all, so I’ll take the time now to let y’all know that Tuesday (Halloween) night at 8:00 p.m. local time, PBS will air a NOVA program called "Monster of the Milky Way". It’s about the search for supermassive black holes in other galaxies and at the center of our own.

I have not seen the show, but I’ve seen clips — the show was sponsored in part by the Gamma ray Large Area Space Telescope mission, and my group at Sonoma State University works on the education and public outreach arm of the mission. I wasn’t terribly involved with the NOVA show, but I did edit the script a wee bit, and it looks like it’ll be very cool, with amazing graphics, and good stuff from scientists involved with searching for black holes (including an old friend I went to grad school– hi Brian!). It’s a sort-of companion piece to the planetarium show we (the GLAST mission) helped develop as well, though both shows of course stand alone.

Too bad it’s on right when I’ll be expecting trick-or-treaters! Hopefully by 8:00 things will — haha — die down a bit, and I can watch the show. It’s broadcast in high-definition, which will be awesome, and will eventually be available for free download (in much lower res, of course) from the PBS website.

NASA has issued a press release saying that a decision on whether or not they will service Hubble Space Telescope will be announced Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time.

I read the release with some laughter, because right after that statement, they said this:

If the decision is made to go ahead with a servicing mission, NASA will hold several other media events on Tuesday, Oct. 31 (all times
Eastern):

2:30 p.m. News conference with the astronauts who would carry out the mission from Johnson; broadcast live on NASA TV. Questions from reporters will be taken from Goddard, Kennedy and NASA Headquarters.

3:30 to 5 p.m. Media interview opportunities on NASA TV. Hubble Space Telescope experts will be available for satellite interviews. The specific experts are TBD.

5 to 7 p.m. Astronaut media interview opportunities on NASA TV. Certain servicing crew members will be available for satellite interviews. The specific astronauts are TBD.

Media interested in the astronaut satellite interviews must contact the Johnson Newsroom at XXX-XXX-XXXX [number deleted] by 6 p.m. EST Oct. 30. The astronaut satellite interviews will be carried live on the NASA TV analog satellite AMC-6, at 72 degrees west longitude; transponder 5C, 3800 MHz, vertical polarization, with audio at 6.8 MHz.

To schedule a satellite interview with a Hubble Space Telescope expert, media must contact Ed Campion at Goddard at XXX-XXX-XXXX by 5 p.m. EST Oct. 30.

Now, if I were NASA — and if I were, a lot of the past, oh, 30 years of space travel would look a whole lot different right now — and I were saying "We may or may not go back up to fix Hubble", I wouldn’t immediately follow up that statement with 10 times as many words on how the press can find out more about the astronauts, scientists, and engineers and how to schedule interviews with them.

But that’s just me.

Wait, no it’s not. Emily noticed it too.

I have no qualms at all saying that I’m sure this is already a done deal. I said that on Coast to Coast AM last week, and I’m sayin’ it again now. NASA will go ahead with the mission. They’ve made some bad decisions in the past, and they’ll make more in the future, but this is one I think they won’t screw up.

Steve Maran is an astronomer and an author– he wrote Astronomy for Dummies and a host of other books. It is not an exaggeration at all to say I owe my career to Steve; I gave a brief synopsis of the story in my book’s acknowledgements page, and someday I’ll write the whole story down. He’s the press officer for the American Astronomical Society, so he knows just about every astronomer in the country, as well as every science journalist. A better connected astronomer would be hard to find!

Steve is also great writer, and when you put this together with his knowing everyone, you get a wonderful article about the story behind the latest Nobel prize for physics. I love stories that talk about the people behind the science, and Steve has some very good stuff in that article. There’s even a Seinfeld connection! He is truly master of his domain.

Reading Bob’s Junk Mail (yes, you should subscribe right away; I like Bob), I came across a comment that a German guy was burned when his cottage caught fire… due to a meteorite.

My Spidey-sense always tingles when I read stuff like this. It never ever pans out. Meteorites, from everything I have so far read, just aren’t hot when they hit the ground unless they are big. Little ones slow down way up in the atmosphere, and then just fall at terminal velocity. That may be a hundred or more kilometers an hour, which is fast, but not that fast.

In this article about the German guy, it says they think the meteorite that started the fire was 10 mm in size. That’s less than half an inch! Way too small to still be hot when it hit.

Witnesses say they saw an arc of fire before the cottage burned, and the article does say it happened during an annual meteor shower… but there is nearly always a meteor shower. On October 10, the night of the incident, there are actually seven different showers. Those are all minor showers (the Orionids, a bigger shower, didn’t start fro another few days).

So what was this? I doubt seriously it was a meteorite. Sounds to me that someone was playing with fireworks or something like that. It’s happened before.

If anyone hears anything more on this, please let me know.

Every week, my buddy and world-renowned cranky guy James Randi writes a newsletter about the latest nonsense being spread by fraudulent or self-deluded psychics, antiscientists, and newagers. This week he wrote about a site which tells you how to pray for the "right" results in the upcoming national U.S. election.

Yes, you read that correctly.

My thoughts on prayer are on record. I talked about it extensively in a "Brains on Vacation" segment I did on the "Are We Alone" radio show (available in MP3 and WMV). Intercessory prayer is useless. These results are quite firm. Praying for something doesn’t work; getting off your butt and doing something about it does.

As I have told people before, one pair of hands grasping a shovel will do far more good than a thousand hands closed in prayer.

However, given how antiscience the current administration is, and how the far-right religious groups are egging them on, it would be better for science, our country, and our world if those people Randi talks about really do stay home and pray rather than vote.

I’ve been receiving a lot of email about this natural formation in Canada:

There have been lots of articles in the press about it recently, though this one in Australia appears most complete. It’s natural, and just looks like a face (the iPod wire is actually an access road). The reason so many people have been emailing me is because in the past I have debunked claims of artificiality of such formations, having been attacked in the shower by an apparition once.

What’s funny to me about this is that I heard about this months ago. The Skeptic Friends Network was talking about it back in January, and the original find was in October 2005! I wonder why it took this long to get popular? I should have written about it then. Oh well.

And for your Friday amusement, here are some more natural faces, too.

How frakking cool is this?

Pretty frakking cool, I say.