You know what’s cool? This:
I love this song. And yeah, that’s me doing the voiceover for it. You should buy Geo’s album "Trebuchet", too. It has that song and lots of other cool ones, too.
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About Bad Astronomy
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's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
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August 6th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
Yep, that’s cool alright.
August 6th, 2010 at 12:23 pm
That really is one of my favorite songs on that album.
August 6th, 2010 at 12:56 pm
Can you here the drums?
August 6th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Phil Plait and William Shatner, two greatest spoken word artists of all time? Suck it Maya Angelou
August 6th, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Have you seen the BAA “death from the skies”-esque video promoting the Perseid meteor shower?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01-X_oj_j4A
August 6th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
The CME note is even topical. I want a clip of that part that I can play any time someone suggests that the sun’s recent eructations are going to doom us all.
August 6th, 2010 at 1:31 pm
I think I have a new earworm for the next 24 hours.
August 6th, 2010 at 1:41 pm
nice song Phil.
the GRB % made me wonder: how long do we have to wait to have a 50-50 chance of being cooked by GRs?
you state 1 in 14,000,000 chance in a lifetime.
so your chance of NOT getting fried is 13,999,999/14,000,000 or about 9.9999992857E-01 (which is nice, cause it’s pretty near 100%!!)
however, your chance of making n lifetimes is 9.9999992857E-01^n. if you keep plugging in increasing n values, when you get to 9,500,000 lifetimes the chance is roughly 50.7% of getting fried.
80 years times 9,500,000 is about 760 million years. (assuming no stoopid math error or decimal point mislocations)
that means every 760 million years or so it is a coin toss whether or not the earth’s etch-a-sketch is shaken. (*not* stirred)
given that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and redoing the calculation for that time frame, you get about 2/10 of a percent chance that the earth did not get GRB’d sometime since it’s formation. which means that it is overwhelmingly likely that the earth was scoured by gamma rays at one time.
is there geologic/paleontologic evidence of this? (any readers know? i suppose i could wikipedia it…)
August 6th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
LOVE it!
Reminds me a (very little) bit of Pink Floyd’s “keep talking”, with the voice over that sounds a lot like Dr. Hawking’s speech synthesizer.
August 6th, 2010 at 2:05 pm
For a second there I thought: “Phil Plait can play the drums? Cool!”. I think it’s the baldness that confused me.
August 6th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
@rob: There’s a theory that one of the late Ordovician extinctions was caused by a Gamma Ray Burst (and another by the end of the ice age triggered by it):
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4198-gamma-rays-may-have-devastated-life-on-earth.html
August 6th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
He’s a good drummer, tight beat! Nice bass line as well.
I like the song overall, but maybe it would have been cooler with more voiceover statistics and gruesome scenarios…although I guess you can’t give away the whole book in one song…
If this kind of thing is catching on, I need to get on the ball and write some more lyrics, and go have some fun at open mike nights. You got your rock & roll in my science…hey, you got your science in my rock & roll…Let’s try it!
August 6th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
My favourite track on my new favourite album. I love the way you say inevitable. George is a total horndog, and so are you, and you should make more beautiful music together.
Anybody who hasn’t grabbed Trebuchet yet totally should. The other tracks are also my favourites. Everything alive will die someday, and that’s OK. My philosophy in a nutshell.
August 6th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
You did a song?
August 6th, 2010 at 5:19 pm
It’s Levon Helm’s world. We just live in it.
August 6th, 2010 at 7:55 pm
Needs more cowbell.
August 7th, 2010 at 9:37 am
The broken cymbal quasi china sounds good…
I guess if you can’t afford a new cymbal you can’t afford any toms either? ;D
Say it ain’t so! I’m not going to go into astronomy as a career (at age 55) if I can’t even expect to be able to buy toms for my kit…
August 7th, 2010 at 9:09 pm
I’ve seen a lot of drummers hold their sticks that way. If he ever gets tired of the “numb thumb” effect, he might want to email me. I have a solution to that particular problem.
The probabilities mentioned seem way to high to me. 1 in 700,000 per 100 year(assumed) life span? With 7 billion people on earth, that should be saying about 100 people die from E.T. debris every year.
Maybe I’m just miss-hearing the odds?
Hey Phil, how come I’ve not been receiving your blog email updates for the last few weeks?
Gary 7