Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Amos, one of the drones at the Hive Overmind, pointed out to me that Wikio has chosen this humble blog as their Number 1 Top Science blog (well, at least for now; the top spots change). I would like to accept this honor, and praise Wikio for their obvious good taste and expertise in these matters.

I put a little button in the sidebar reflecting this fact, and will keep it there forever, or until my rank drops to unacceptable levels (#2).

I made it! 20,000 Twitter followers!

Thanks to everyone who joined up and/or decided they needed to hear even more of me, if only in 140 character form. I will endeavor to be even more banal and describe my breakfast more often.

And of course — as promised — I have donated $200 to the James Randi Educational Foundation. If you want to join me and give money to this worthy organization (full disclosure: I’m the President, but it is a good cause) then go to the JREF donation page, or if you’re on Twitter and have a PayPal account you can use Twitpay. Just sign up for the service (it only takes a couple of minutes) and send a Tweet that says @JREF twitpay $50 (you can add a note to the end like "because Phil made 20k tweeps") and the process will start up automatically.

Thanks to everyone who followed and to those who donated. It’s much appreciated, and you can know your money is going to help fight the forces of nonsense that are forever storming our gates.

And now my plan is complete. I have been made into a trading card.

The ever-traffic-begging Crispian Jago has created a set of Simspons-style gaming cards based on the most beloved and good-looking of skeptics, and then made an exception in my case.

These cards are really, really funny, and you need to go look at them. He’s got Randi, and Penn & Teller, and PZ, and My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™, and many more. These are the definition of Made of Win.

Of course, there are some problems with them… I’m a skeptic after all. He included bad words on the card, forcing me to do some COPS-style blurring, and my weapon of choice is the whole Universe, baby. I wield a +∞ ultimate doom there, baby.

But it does really look like me. Though I figured I’d look more like Philip J. Fry. Oh well.

[Update: Brea linked here on her blog!]

I make no apologies for being a fanboy, as I have a lot of lead time doing it (high school, if you must know, when I started going to scifi cons) and have built up a substantial amount of momentum. That’s why I thought it was so cool that actress Brea Grant (Heroes, Halloween 2) knew who I was. I met her for the first time at the astronomy panel I moderated in Pasadena, and I was excited to find out she’d be at Comic Con.

She took a few friends and me to a party hosted by Wired.com (I may have more on that at a later date) and agreed to go on camera for like one minute and let me be a dork.

The results:

My thanks to her for being so cool. I had a lot of fun hanging with her and her brother (I got one of her CDs too; I traded a copy of my book for it). I hope they’ll be at Comic Con next year!

Brea at her booth at Comic Con 2009

And check her out in the movie Halloween 2, which comes out August 28.

The winners of the "Capture the Universe" astrophotography contest have been announced and are now up for your viewing!

OK, I suppose that may need some explanation.

In June, Discover Magazine and Celestron announced a contest for people to submit their best pictures of the sky using Celestron equipment. For a judge they wisely chose an experienced and seasoned astronomer, skilled in the arcane arts of astrophotography and critical analysis of aesthetics… oh wait, no they didn’t, they asked me to do it.

The contest ran all month, and in the end there were over 150 pictures entered. It was very tough making the choices! For example, there lots of incredible images of galaxies, but I didn’t want five out of the top ten being all of one kind of object. I tried to spread it around, but even then it was difficult choosing.

But I finally made my decisions, and the Top Ten (actually 11, because I’m a wuss and ran two images tied) are now on display in a gorgeous gallery of galactic, uh, gorgeousness.

My congrats to the winner, who will receive a Celestron NexStar 8SE computerized telescope, a very nice prize that makes me very, very jealous! I’d also like to thank very much the fine folks at Celestron and of course The Hive Overmind Discover Magazine for running this contest and allowing me to judge it. It was an absolute pleasure to go through so many beautiful images of the night sky, even though it was torture picking the best ones.

Seeing all these entries reminds me that astronomy has come a long, long way in the past few years. Equipment that is very affordable allows people to make incredibly beautiful and astonishing pictures of celestial objects, images that even a couple of decades ago were only possible from professional astronomers using large observatories. Amazing.

I’m going to be speaking next week at Gnomedex, a premier tech conference held annually in Seattle and run by my friend the übergeek Chris Pirillo (and I mean that in a good way).

I’ll be talking about the spread of information and misinformation through social media, specifically Twitter. Remember the Texas fireball, and how the (wrong) idea that it was debris from a satellite collision spread like wildfire on Twitter? That’s the sort of thing I’ll be discussing.

I’m also going to talk about other social media/networks like Digg and Reddit. I happen to find both of those sites useful, but both have their disadvantages too. This blog gets linked commonly from both, and I’m looking into trending and such on them. But I want to get opinions from people who have used one or both of them: what do you like and dislike about them? Which one (if either) is easier to use, has more reliable commenting, links to better stuff?

I’d post this on those sites, but that would be like walking into an Apple store and declaring IE 8 to be the best browser ever. I prefer to keep any firefights local, thankyouverymuch.

So let me know what you think in the comments below! I can’t promise to use anything specific in the talk — and I’m sure I’ll be able to make some general observations based on what y’all say — but if you have specifics, let’s hear it!

The folks at Lifehacker sure know what to bring along when they travel.

I’m not so sure about The Elements of Style though. And if this were a survival kit I could recommend a different astronomy book…

Tip o’ the sun hat to Keith Cowing.