One word:

AWESOME.

More words: see my Bad Astronomy review.

Overall, I was really impressed with this flick. I won’t spoil anything here, but I will say that I wish I hadn’t eaten a big ol’ beef burrito before going to see it; my stomach was in knots by halfway through. Not from gore or anything, just from pure tension.

In my opinion, this was a truly terrifying movie in the original sense of the word. I was scared. Not sickened, or jumpy, just good and truly scared.

Very cool. Go see it.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the movie "Expelled", an attempt by the liars at the Discovery Institute to once again spread their abysmal crap about intelligent design. The star of this movie is Ben Stein, a guy I have tried to like over the years despite his having been a Nixon speechwriter, but who might as well smother kittens at this point, such are his chances at redemption.

PZ and others have been all over this movie and how everyone involved has been lying non-stop to get interviews and promote it. As usual, I have to ask: why is the Ninth Commandment considered to be optional by religious fundamentalists?

Anyway, Bay of Fundie has a great take-down of Stein and the movie on his blog (some NSFW language). He even has links to destroy the usual ID/creationism memes, though it’s like trying to dig a hole in water.

I can make a few absolutely certain predictions about this movie. I will bet that:

1) It will not do terribly well in theaters.

2) The Disco ‘tute will claim it did.

3) When they finally have to admit it is tanking, they will claim it’s the evul evilutionists who suppressed it.

Any takers? Bueller? Bueller?

Well, what was I thinking, leaving astronomy to write full time? I could have been making a lot more money sticking with astronomy.

The link goes to an article which says that on a list of top-paying professions, astronomy is #24 with an average salary of about $96k/year.

I must say, that statistic leaves me very baffled. I wonder who they included to get those numbers! I’m guessing no grad students were in there (I made $9k/year back then), and no post-docs ($40k nowadays? I’m not sure). I know a full time tenured professor can make $90k, once they’ve been in the biz for a while.

I also know some astronomers make a fortune giving invited talks. I might too someday, but I don’t give as many as I’d like to (if you are a wealthy benefactor, CEO of a company, museum exec, or have money to burn in some other manner, contact me).

But still, $96k a year? The original source of the article says they got their numbers from the Department of Labor. I may have to look into this. I’m getting gypped.

… but this does explain that picture of Edwin Hubble I always see.

Tip o’ the gold-plated dew shield to BABloggee Bill Rehm.

I figured that if the Trek teaser was being shown before Cloverfield, it would hit the web pretty quickly. It’s on YouTube now.

I don’t condone using your cell phone to steal a trailer, but, on the other hand,

1) It’s Trek,

2) It’ll be on apple.com and all those other sites in a matter of nanoseconds, and finally,

3) It’s Trek.

Hawesome.

BTW I saw it here as well earlier, but they don’t have video embedding, so I was waiting for YouTube.

BABloggee Matthew Kozachek sent me word of this video, which nails it.

Oh, those wacky intertoobs.

Hot on the heels of Mercury changing its name back from Canada, I find out that Europe has signed an agreement to send a probe to the little planet.

Called BepiColombo, it’s a pretty ambitious mission. It will launch in 2013 and arrive at Mercury 6 years later, using a combination of — get this — planetary slingshots, chemical rockets, and an ion engine.

Cool.

There are two orbiters in this mission. One, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter, will do the usual incredible imaging of the planet, including using wavelengths of light that allow a mineralogical study, and the other is the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter which will investigate Mercury’s magnetic field. The European Space Agency will build the imager, and Japan will handle the manetospheric observer.

You probably won’t hear too much about this mission for a while since it won’t even launch for several years, but when the time comes, it will probably improve our understanding of Mercury quite a bit, even over what MESSENGER will tell us. That’s always a good thing.

At the AAS meeting last week I was writing up a blog post about my friend Travis Rector’s image gallery. I clicked on the URL to cut-n-paste it into the blog, but I must have screwed it up: the URL I pasted in was to Orbiting Frog, a blog I had been perusing a few minutes before, liked, and added to my feed reader.

So a few hundred (no doubt baffled after clicking) BABlogees went to Orbiting Frog, expecting to see some of Travis’ pretty pictures. I saw the error fairly quickly and corrected it, but the "damage" had been done: Rob at Orbiting Frog got a bunch of hits.

He noticed the traffic spike, wrote it up, and said he had been Bad Astronomered.

Verbing: I has it.

Anyway, I was going to write up a nice post about OF and tell everyone to go there, but it looks like my work here is done…

… almost. You should read Chris Lintott’s blog too. He runs GalaxyZoo, is co-host of the beloved UK telly programme "Sky at Night", and is a cool guy and good writer. Show Chris and Rob the lurv.