A few things to amuse you over coffee today:
1) PZ has run into an old friend of Bad Astronomy: one Charles Schults III, who sees fossils littering the surface of Mars. His followers have been posting to the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today board for years. Needless to say, their arguments are impervious to such trivialities as logic, reason, and evidence.
2) A NASA intern hopes to go on a spacewalk before his term ends in June… at least, according to the Onion. It’s pretty funny, but in fact that sense of entitlement smacks a bit much of things I hear from antiscientists. They sent me a seven-screen email IN ALL CAPS, after all; how dare I not take several hours to go through their math to find they divided by zero in the third equation?
3) Skeptics in 1939 were pretty sharp. Too bad scammers and frauds still abound.
4) Celestis, the company that launches peoples’ ashes into space (and which launched, lost, and subsequently found the remains of Jimmy Doohan, Scotty from Star Trek), will be sending a new payload of ashes on the next SpaceX launch, scheduled for June. I hadn’t heard that SpaceX was trying to launch again so soon, and this is a weird and somewhat macabre way to find out. Incidentally, they want to launch human remains to the Moon by 2010.
Tips o’ the tin foil beanies to BABLoggees Shaven Yak (It’s Yaksmas!), Austin Burns, and Seonaid Barrett.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Maybe the woman on Mars scooped up all the fossils
April 25th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Re old sceptics: somewhere we have letters from some family members who emigrated to Illinois in the 19th century (my father’s father’s father’s mother’s cousin, I think – I really should look that up …). Anyway, I was very pleased to read a letter from 1900 talking about the upcoming new century. So happy to see that people could count back then – unlike now.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:47 am
I think sending someone’s ashes to the moon is a great use for fossil fuels…….did someone say peek oil?
April 25th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
HEADS UP!
I just removed an unauthorized paper poster from our bulletin board.
It promotes “scientific exploration” dot “org” and an event called “Emerging Paradigms at the Frontiers of Consciousness & UFO Research”
It’s scheduled for late June in Boulder, Colorado, which is why I mentioned it here.
The poster uses phrases like “time to turn the page,” “new understanding,” and laughably, “a new reality.”
The sponsoring organization calls itself “The Society for Scientific Exploration”
“Science … as exciting as it was meant to be.”
Do you know about these guys?
April 25th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Ya know, if they keep sending people’s ashes off into space, eventually the mass of the Earth will be so eroded that it will seriously affect our orbit. This must be stopped now!
April 25th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
The skeptics of the 1600′s were sharp as well… right up until the fire reached the stake to which they were tied.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Ya know, if they keep sending people’s ashes off into space, eventually the mass of the Earth will be so eroded that it will seriously affect our orbit. This must be stopped now!
Eh, we get so much dust incoming we could never counter it all.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
FrogMarch, when did liquid oxygen, hydrogen, aluminum and ammonium perchlorate become fossil fuels?
I don’t think anyone is saying “peek” oil.
“Peak” oil, maybe…
April 25th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
But of course there’s still snake-oil salesmen and wahoos. If there weren’t, skeptics wouldn’t have anything to predate on and their population would collapse, leading to extinction. Predator-prey relationships are all about sinusoidal stability.
April 25th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
On the older Bad Astronomy board, one of the funnier (though at the time exasperating) Mars rock-shape interpreters, not directly associated with Charles W. Shults III but a supporter of his shpiel, was the obsessive poster who continually revealed so-called “tiny observers”.
He/she would take Rover images off the NASA website, run them through filters and Photoshop tools to create a kind of ionized effect and then return it back to its somewhat original though compressed state, blurrier and much the worse for wear. This new image would create spurious shapes in the landscape and anything that remotely resembled the shape of a human being was defined as a tiny Martian observing the Rovers!
Its sad that they kept doing this nonsense rather than simply be amazed by the wonderful real images of Mars from Spirit and Opportunity!
And then there was the notorious “Piper” who saw tiny cities on the moon by greatly blowing up Apollo mission images of lunar soil off website sources.
April 26th, 2008 at 3:33 am
So Quiet_Desperation, you think that no fossil fuels will be used in the production of these Rich-Tosspot rockets?
April 26th, 2008 at 3:41 am
and I’m referring to a possible future industry, where ashes are flown into space or the moon…really green
April 26th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Well hopefully third time is the charm for SpaceX. There will be a lot of pissed of relatives if their loved ones ashes wind up somewhere in the Pacific.
April 27th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
“Woman says NASA probing husbands ashes ‘ungodly’.”
How long before someone sues NASA for disturbing a scared Indian Moon burial ground?