I did an interview chock full o’ DEATH with fine folks from the Cosmic Tea Party podcast, talking over all manners of cosmic catastrophes. I’m unusually lucid in this particular interview, perhaps because I love Australians so much. Besides Minties, Australians really are the best thing about Australia itself.
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If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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June 2nd, 2009 at 3:43 pm
June 2nd, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Oh minties, how I miss thee!
Minties should do an “it’s times like these you need….” wrapper depicting a debate with a creationist.
June 2nd, 2009 at 4:57 pm
That is a good link, I’ll book mark it.
It has the prior 12 podcasts of Cosmic Tea Party and Phil’s episode.
I am always looking for good podcasts and Phil seems to list a lot of good ones here at his blog
thanks, mate
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Hmm…
Phil is interfering with the age old rivalry between New Zealand and Australia!
I _DEMAND_ that he give a lecture in Wellington, New Zealand to even things up!!!
I assure you that the fact that I live in Wellington is purely a coincidence…
If Phil accepts EVERYTHING above as TOTALLY TRUE and UNBIASED, then I’m prepared to sell to him, for a very good price, a large amount of scrap iron in Sydney’s harbour!
June 2nd, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Cosmic Tea Party? Are you protesting galactic taxes on the highest marginal rates?
June 2nd, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Minties are good but we have so much more in Australia. We have the source of all goodness.
We have Tim Tams (best served as a Tim Tam Slammer at a Cosmic Tea Party).
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:14 pm
I did consider sending you a case of Vegemite as a reward for your comments Phil, but such a gift may cause you to re-evaluate your love of all Aussies.
Be sure to let the blogosphere know if you run short of Minties.
P.S. if you ever are tempted to do a lecture in Wellington make sure you fly into Auckland and drive down to Wellington – unless you like scary sideways landings that is.
June 2nd, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Apologies for straying off topic, Phil, but have you seen this?
http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/tv_shows/theothersiders/
It’s a new ‘reality show’ – AIMED AT CHILDREN – about ‘investigating’ the paranormal. It features a bunch of teens running around with EMF detectors and thermal cameras, convincing themselves that every odd reading or bump in the night is evidence of a ghost. Worse, their ‘findings’ are being presented to children as evidence that paranormal occurrences are real.
Just one more reason I hope your skeptologist pilot sometime sees the light of day…I intend to complain vocally about how wrong it is to air a show like this aimed at children, and was hoping for any support that could or would lend to the cuase.
June 2nd, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Cosmic Tea Party? What is Xenu raising our tax rates agin? Maybe we should have Stephen Colbert cast Xenu into a volcano.
June 2nd, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Haven’t listened to it yet, but it’s downloading.
A while ago, I was idly fantasising about going to a hypothetical public lecture by Phil Plait and asking the following question just for the fun of it. I decided I wouldn’t actually do this if it meant other people would have less time to ask sensible questions, but it can do no harm here. “So, when the sun explodes, the spectral lines will change, and the sunlight will be a different colour, and therefore presumably it will no longer be able to destroy vampires. So is the earth going to be overrun with vampires, and should we be worried about that?”
If anyone has a good answer to this, it’s probably Phil Plait.
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:57 pm
This Aussie says – Thanks Phil!
PS. Any chance of you coming down to Adelaide, South Australia? Perhaps giving a talk to the South Australian Astronomical Society? We’d love to have you here! (Hint, hint
)
@ #1 IVAN3MAN : Wasn’t Bertrand Russells’ teapot supposed to be found (or more precisely NOT found!) between the orbits of Mars and Earth? Because it looks from your illustration there like the teapot is orbiting between Saturn and Jupiter perhaps having flown off the nearby comet!
THIS IS HERESY AGAINST THE SACRED TEAPOT ! I DECREE A HOLY WAR ON YE INFIDEL!
PS. Of course, we could compromise and say the Teapot’s orbit has changed since the Prophet Russell’s (PEACE BE UPON HIM) day or is eccentric taking it from the vicinity between Mars & Earth at perihelion and out as far as near Saturn at apphelion (sp?) but, no, that’d be an irreligious, unholy bit of cool rationality!
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:54 am
@ # 10 Adrian Morgan :
“So, when the sun explodes, the spectral lines will change, and the sunlight will be a different colour, and therefore presumably it will no longer be able to destroy vampires. So is the earth going to be overrun with vampires, and should we be worried about that?”
Okay, first the Sun will NOT explode either as a nova or a supernova because it’s not that kind of star -it just isn’t massive enough to go supernova and it lacks a nearby companion star necessary for nova eruptions to occur.
However, the sun’s spectrum WILL change as it shifts from being a yellow G2 type main-sequence dwarf into first a yellow sub-giant then an orange giant and finally into a fully-fledged red giant star before it ejects its outer layers as a planetary nebulae leaving behind the stellar corpse of its core as a white dwarf.
Now to begin with, seeing as Vampires as imagined in horror movies, TV series and folklore do NOT really exist, I wouldn’t say we have any need to worry about them at any time.
However, if vampires as imagined in horror actually did exist then it would depend upon whether the spectra of sunlight specifically, or just having a bright daytime star over a certain magnitude was what killed ‘em.
If the exact spectra did matter then we’d be in trouble in about a billion or so years as our Sun’s spectrum starts to alter when it enters the transistional sub-dwarf stage en route to true gianthood.
Thing is though, that by this stage our hotter and brighter Sun will already have made Earth pretty much uninhabitable – well on its way to resembling today’s Venus – so humans and vampires alike will be in trouble!
(What are vampire’s heat tolerances and need for water I wonder?)
What if the precise spectra doesn’t matter, and simply having a bright Sun of some sort that keeps illumination over a certain level approximating at least twilight lighting conditions is all that counts? In that case then we don’t need to worry about sunlight being ineffective against vampires until the Sun has ceased all nuclear fusion and become a dead stars of the white dwarf variety.
(By then I think the likely extinction of garlic – not to mention humans – will be a greater concern vamps~wise.
)
Anyway if our Earth still exists at all then – after having its surface turned molten and its atmosphere probably entirely blown off during the red giant stage – it will be left orbiting further away from a much fainter and smaller, albeit also much hotter, star. This may serve the vampires’ interests if they have endured the several billion year long molten lava age – except that a white dwarf is extremey bright in UV or ultra-violet rays and its those rays that give *us* sunburn!
All up I don’t think we have anything to worry about on that score!
June 3rd, 2009 at 1:12 am
Oh & one final point – Vampires are essentially parasites that depend on humans for survival. As I understand it, if they don’t get human blood they perish of hunger or at least lose energy and the only (?) way they can create new vampires is to “turn” humans into their kind so they’d need to keep us (well some of us) alive in order to eat and reproduce.
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:47 am
And we Aussies love you Phil. Fascinating site — hadn’t heard of the CTP: thanks.
June 3rd, 2009 at 4:28 am
OFF-TOPIC
http://www.rtvc.es/noticias/dos-espa%C3%B1oles-en-el-avi%C3%B3n-desaparecido-de-air-france-37943.aspx
A photograph depicting -what I think- is an asteroid as seen from the Canary Islands. Canary TV news has said that is the Air France plane that crashed over the atlantic 700 miles off Recife’s coast. The photograph was taken at 07:30 local time, thats 01:30 in USA east coast.
The thing is that the plane crash debris has been found 700 miles off Recife’s coast, about 2.100 miles from the Canaries. So long to be the plane but I haven’t found any news about an asteroid so far.
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:19 am
A language note:
“Oh Minties, how I miss thee”…. Correction : “Oh Minties, how I miss ye” (plural!)
If thou wouldst speake the olde Englishe language, then thou shouldst first studye thine singulares and plurales. … And now, thou canst surely correcte me.
Cecil.
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:24 am
@IVAN3MAN
“But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is [an] intolerable assumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.”
Just want to clear up that the key error here isn’t believing in something that “cannot be disproved”, it is in the intolerance towards those who view the matter differently.
For example, it is unprovable that we will still be alive a year, month, week, or even a day from now. However, many act as if and plan as though they will be alive until an old age. This is not unreasonable. However, it would become unreasonable to then try to criminalize those who do not act in this way. You can believe it unwise of those who only live in the moment. But the moment you feel they should be ostracized, belittled, or otherwise attacked for their disbelief in something unprovable, your belief leaves the realm of reason all together.
Tolerance, not merely putting up with but genuinely understanding the validity of a belief different than your own, is the key.
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:47 am
OK, Help me out here… what, pray tell, is a Mintie and a Tim Tam?
June 3rd, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Why, thak you, Dr Plait.
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:00 pm
@ Brian M,
When in doubt, consult Wikipedia:
* Tim Tam
* Minties
For Minties image, click here.
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Caleb:
Of course, that is because we can observe those of advanced age around us; however, there is no direct observation of any future benefit in believing in some invisible deity.
Furthermore, it is Evangelical “fundie” creationists who usually demonstrate intolerance towards those who do not share their belief — even amongst themselves!
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Minties?! Tim Tams?! Will the stealing of our great cultural food icons never cease?!
- a grumpy New Zealander