OK, not really (and here’s the reference). But he’s trying to set up a lottery, and the winner gets a ticket to ride… to space. Details are sketchy, but my guess is this won’t be active for a few more years yet. But there’s no doubt he’ll still get quite a few takers. Better get in line now!

I wonder if Bart Sibrel will buy a ticket?

NASA pioneering astronaut Wally Schirra has died at the age of 84. One of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, he was also a veteran of the Gemini program and was commander of the first Apollo spaceflight (Apollo 7).

More information can be found at SpaceflightNow.

PSA: Hey, don’t forget to register to win the Sam Neill DVDs!

New Horizons is one of the fastest probes ever launched by humans. Even so, it’ll take another eight years to get to Pluto, its primary target. But it would take longer if it didn’t steal energy from Jupiter in a process called a gravity assist (it catches up to Jupiter from behind, if you will, and absorbs some of Jupiter’s orbital momentum, accelerating the probe a lot and slowing Jupiter an eensy weensy bit).

But the folks who run the NH program aren’t ones to let an opportunity pass — or to pass an opportunity. They aimed NH’s very sophisticated cameras at the monster planet and took a set of incredible images (there are 4 gigabytes of images in all, and 70% have been sent back so far).

There were many purposes for getting the images. There are still lots of things we don’t understand about Jupiter, of course, so more data always help. Things change there all the time, so getting images at any time is good. Also, it helps to calibrate the cameras on New Horizons. I spent many years calibrating instruments on board Hubble, and so I know that if you don’t understand how your equipment works, you can’t get any good information out of them.

But they also took pictures because they’re pretty. Check this out:

That’s the moon Europa rising over Jupiter’s limb. The planners took that picture not because they could get good science, but because they knew it would be stunning. Stanley Kubrick couldn’t have done better!

But like I said, things change. Io is a volcanic moon, constantly erupting as its insides are churned up by tides from the other moons. When NH passed, the volcano Tvashtar was spewing sulphur into the sky:

Wow.

And finally, how can I ignore my own namesake, Oval BA, Red Spot Junior? This is highest resolution color image ever taken of it:

For a sense of scale, the Earth would fit easily inside the frame of this picture. Jupiter does things BIG.

There are tons more images on the New Horizons site, and they are all incredible, and all worth looking at. Man, just 8 more years. I can’t wait!

I’ve just heard that a train carrying cargo only described as a "NASA load" crashed when a bridge it was on collapsed. This story was on a news site in Alabama, and I have not seen any other sources yet. I’ll post more when I find more, and if this continues I’ll post on my Twitter page as well.

Update: From Central Florida Channel 13: The train was carrying solid rocket boosters segments. Five people were injured.

In case you haven’t seen this on other reality-based blogs, the Institute of Creation Research is starting a peer-reviewed journal, and is putting out an initial call for contributions. See how many misused words you can find in this one paragraph:

Addressing the need to disseminate the vast field of research conducted by experts in geology, genetics, astronomy, and other disciplines of science, IJCR provides scientists and students hard data based on cutting-edge research that demonstrates the young earth model, the global Flood, the non-evolutionary origin of the species, and other evidences that correlate to the biblical accounts.

Well, there’s the word "experts" in there, for one. And "scientists"! Hmmm, "data based", "research"… but my favorite is "young earth model". A model is a scientifically created idea that is testable, and represents a preliminary view of reality. As you test it, parts of it pass or fail the tests, and you modify (or dump) it as needed. Will creationists ever dump the young earth model?

Heh.

Their intent gets more clear when you read the PDFs they have online about instructions to authors and editors. There’s a section in one about what to do about conflicts of interest! Wow. I think anyone trying to fit facts to match their presuppositions would certainly count for that, so "scientific" creationism itself is one giant conflict of interest.

But my very very favorite is this bit in what the Editor in Chief will do to consider the paper for inclusion in the journal:

2. Review the Paper for possible inclusion into the IJCR review process.
The following criteria are to be used in judging the papers:
(a) Is the Paper’s topic important to the development of the creation model?
(b) Does the Paper’s topic provide an original contribution to the creation model?
(c) Is this Paper formulated within a young-earth, young-universe framework?
(d) If (c) above is not satisfied, does this Paper offer a very constructively-positive criticism and provide a possible young-earth, young-universe alternative?
(e) If the Paper is polemical in nature, does it deal with a topic rarely discussed within the origins debate?
(f) Does this Paper provide evidence of faithfulness to the grammatico-historical/normative interpretation of Scripture?

Lessee, what did they leave off? Oh yeah: is the paper scientific? How about, is the paper accurate?

Silly me. I forgot: it’s a creationist paper. It can’t be scientific, or accurate.

It would be fun to pull a Sokal on these guys. Of course, just mentioning it here means I can’t, but it would be a fascinating test of the ability of the ICR to separate reality from fantasy…

Oh wait. Never mind.

I was on the very popular NPR radio show "Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!" on Friday. Kinda.

Here’s how it went. At TAM5, I met Peter Sagal, the host of "Wait Wait". He gave a great talk, and although we only talked briefly we hit it off. He was very funny and personable, which I guess you have to be if you’re a successful NPR radio game show host.

So weeks pass, and I’m on my way home. My cell phone rings. It’s Peter! They have a segment on the show where they tell a contestant three stories about a topic, but only one is true. If the contestant guesses the right one, they win a prize — the announcer will record their phone message for them, which I think is really funny.

So Peter tells me they have NASA as their topic for tonight’s live taping, but they found out that their "true" story is actually an urban legend! Uh oh. Do I know any far-out NASA stories that sound like they may to be true, but in fact are?

I actually came up empty, but Peter asked if I had ever heard of the John Young corned-beef sandwich story? I said yeah, I had, but I didn’t know the details. So when I got home, I called my old buddy James Oberg, and he gave the me the whole scoop on the story. I called Peter back, and they recorded me talking about it.

I won’t go into the story here– because you can just listen to that segment of the radio show online your own self. I actually only have two lines they used for the show, so I’m not exactly an NPR star, but it was still fun, and I’m getting some email about it too.

Maybe I’ll send Peter an email sometime and try to be on the show. They have another segment where they get an "expert" in some field get asked questions about a totally different field, and it’s pretty funny hearing smart people stumble around. The problem, of course, is that I am such a polymath and genius in every subject in the Universe that they’ll have a hard time stumping me. But they can consider that their own challenge.