Dark energy is a mysterious form of energy pervading the Universe that is causing its expansion to accelerate. Of all things in astronomy, we probably know the least about it, but this is in part due to it only being discovered in 1998! So there hasn’t been time to figure it all out.

But that doesn’t mean we know nothing about it, and the folks at Hubble have put out a really good documentary about dark energy on their site. I watched the whole thing through, and it does a good job describing how it was discovered, what we know about it, what we don’t know about it, and where this investigation will lead. It features interviews with astronomers Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess, who were instrumental in discovering this weird energy, and as an added bonus some fun quotations from astronomers who didn’t believe the results when they were first released.

I can see this documentary being useful to the public as well as in classrooms. If you’re a teacher than you should really take a look at it.

Greg Laden brings us the happy and welcome news that for the first time, girls swept the prestigious Siemens science competition, winning both the individual and team grand prizes.

That’s awesome. It may be hard for some people to see that girls still lag behind boys in science and math, but it happens, and there is no inherent reason they should. The system is at fault here… but we’re making progress.

Any society that relegates half its populace to the dust bin in any endeavor deserves to fail. I am really heartened to see progress being made in America.

I recently wrote about Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer denied tenure at Iowa State University, allegedly in part because he is a proponent of Intelligent Design. The Discovery Institute put together a self-serving press conference in Iowa recently to make some hay out of this.

Evil Monkey over at Neurotopia has a dynamite entry about all this. He really nails it. Josh from Thoughts From Kansas also has an excellent summary.

I still stick by my own conclusion too, that by trying to say that Gonzalez’s religious freedom has been curtailed, they are admitting ID is religion and not science, which they vehemently denied with the Dover case. I think if this comes to court, that’ll be a fun issue to grill them about.

You may have heard of the book The Reason Driven Life, a rational response to the wildly popular religious book The Purpose-Driven Life. The author of Reason is Robert Price, a professor of theology and a critical thinker. The book examines a lot of religious claims and shows how it’s better to take a rational view of how to live your life.

Inspired by this book, Danny Schade and Mikyle Lockwood created The Reason-Driven Podcast, where they interview various critical thinkers, and each ‘cast centers on one chapter of the book.

They interviewed me about Chapter 7, "The Mystery of Everything" (some NSFW language in the intro), and we discuss the most basic of ontological questions: why is there something rather than nothing? I am not a philosopher by trade, but like any rational person I’ve spent some time thinking about it.

The interview is about 45 minutes long, and we cover a wide range of topics from fine-tuning the Universe for life (bzzzzzt!) to the idea that there are multiple Universes, and how we can look for evidence of them. I also talk a bit about faith versus trust — my own take on how you should make decisions based on evidence or the lack thereof. This is a really important topic to me when it comes to being a skeptic, obviously, since our society stresses having faith so strongly (specifically during this time of the year). I’m not a big fan of it myself, though I understand that a lot of people feel that they need it. Still, I prefer evidence myself, especially when it comes to discussing evidence for or against a particular religious belief. We spend some time on that in the interview as well.

Danny and Mikyle sent me that one chapter from Reason, and I point out in the interview that I don’t agree with everything I read in it (I wish I had remembered to discuss his characterization of why people believe, which I think is pretty far off the mark). But what I did read has piqued my curiosity, so I’ll probably be picking up a copy of the book soon. It should make for interesting reading over the holidays.

Man, I’m funny.

But seriously, folks, Caroyln Porco, the leader of the imaging team for the CiCLOPS camera on board the Cassini Saturn probe is asking people to vote for their favorite images and animations. I have little doubt the blazing ring image will win, but there are other categories, so head over to the CiCLOPS site and vote. They’ll be announcing the winners on the last day of the year.