On Friday, Thursday, December 1, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern (US) time (18:00 UTC) I’ll be doing a live online chat about asteroid impacts and astronomy at the TED website. This text-based chat is open to anyone; all you have to do is register which is free and only takes a moment.

The chat will revolve around my TED talk called "An Asteroid Impact Can Ruin Your Whole Day", which I gave here in Boulder in September. You can watch that talk online, which I suggest you do if you want to come to the chat. It’s only 14 minutes long, but it does feature me gesticulating a lot.

If you’re curious what it will be like, my Discover Magazine co-blogger Sean Carroll did a TED chat in May 2011. This is a fun way to interact with people, and I’m looking forward to it, so drop on by and ask a question!

OK, don’t slash me. But I have been Slashdotted!

Slashdot is one of the biggest news aggregators/social networks on the web, where users link to interesting stuff they find, and others can leave comments. They also do interviews, kinda: they line up an interviewee, people leave questions, and then the interviewee answers them en masse. They asked me to do this a few weeks ago, and now my responses are up at Slashdot!

This was a lot of fun. The questions were pretty varied, from JWST (of course!) to where we should be sending probes to look for extraterrestrial life. I tried to keep my answers relatively short but still give folks something to think about. It’s an interesting exercise, trying to do this all in one shot. I found myself thinking pretty hard about how to respond, and then, later, how to best ice down my aching wrists from typing so much. I wish I could’ve answered all the questions, but I’d probably have fatal carpal tunnel syndrome if I had.

My thanks to everyone at /, and to Tim Lord for setting this all up.

This morning, I posted an article where, looking at a database from the 2010 Census, I concluded that your chances of getting a job are a lot better if you major in a science field. Four of the ten college majors with the lowest unemployment rates were science-related.

It turns out I made some errors in the post. One is a logical fallacy, the other in my structure and wording, implying something I didn’t mean to. These were pointed out to me by a reader who makes several valid points, but then falls into errors of his own. This is worth sorting out, so I want to take a moment to show what’s what.

I was taken to task about my post on Twitter by Noahpinion, who pointed out (in tweets here and here) that many fields of science had higher unemployment rates. I replied that the numbers he quoted (6-7%) were still below the national average.

That was a mistake on my part. Noah pointed out that I was using 9% for the national unemployment average, but that’s overall unemployment. A better figure to use would have been 5%, which is the unemployment rate just for college graduates! That is correct; I should’ve used the lower number.

I’ll note that this doesn’t change the point I was trying to make: that a large fraction of the college majors with the lowest unemployment numbers are science-based. But that’s where I think I made a bigger mistake.
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I want to thank everyone who contributed to the Donors Choose science blogger challenge. Because of you all — 90 people who donated in total coming from this blog and my other outlets like Twitter and Google+ — we raised $5,887, and 2,480 students will see new science materials in their clasrooms!

Wow.

Think about that. Nearly 2500 students, positively affected by strangers who simply want more science taught in school. Some of the donations were for a little bit, and some for a lot, but they all added up to a huge effect on those kids’ lives.

So thank you to every who participated, and know that you have been a great help. And for those of you who donated in the last couple of days, I’ve been told the matching donation email has been sent. Check your inbox, and in just a minute of your time you can double your impact.

Y’all are great. Thanks again.

Slashdot is a news aggregator site where contributors submit interesting stories about science, tech, and assorted geekery. It’s one of the oldest and biggest social network sites on teh tubez^*, and still one of the best. I go there every day to see what’s buzzing. My own humble (ha!) site is linked from there every now and again as well, and I’m always happy when it is.

Every week or so, Slashdot does an interview with someone online. They open up questions, collect a few, and send them to the interviewee to answer via email. So guess who they just asked to participate?

That’s right! Rory Calhoun! No wait, it was me! They’ve opened up a page where you can leave a question. You don’t have to register to ask a question, but if you like fresh techy news, you should sign up anyway. Feel free to ask anything, though bear in mind I’ll be writing out the answer, so something like "Why is the Universe expanding?" might be more text than I’m willing to write and you’re willing to read.

But, to save you time, here are some answers so you don’t have to ask basic questions:

1) Yes, I’m married.

2) I worked on Hubble for ten years, but now I write about it.

3) No.

4) When I write about not wearing pants most of the time, I’m not kidding.

5) 13.73 +/- .12 billion years.

6) It’s a tough choice, but I’d have to say either Wil Wheaton or George Hrab.

So there you go. I hope that helps. Head on over to Slashdot, see what others have asked, and then leave your own question! And my sincere thanks to Slashdot for asking me to be a part of this. It’s an honor.

I’ll add that questions left in the comments on this very post won’t be part of the Q&A; you have to go to Slashdot and write it there. Thanks!

^* In fact, in the olden days of the web, when a site got linked by Slashdot it frequently overloaded the server, jamming it and making site loading very slow. This became known as "getting slashdotted" and it happened to me a few times way back when, before the Hive Overmind Discover Magazine started hosting my blog on a beefy server that can handle the load better.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been participating in a science blogger challenge with Donors Choose, to raise as much money as we can to go to classrooms that need science equipment.

The challenge ends Saturday at midnight Eastern US time. I just got a note from the folks at Donors Choose saying that from now until then, every dollar donated will be matched by their Board of Directors! This is a great chance to double the amount of money given to children who need to learn science in school. Once all the donations are in, the folks at Donors Choose will take the total amount and divide it by the number of people who donated. You will then receive a gift code via email that will allow you to give that amount to the classroom of your choice. So if the total is $15,000, and 150 people donated, then everyone gets a $100 gift code to donate, no matter how much you personally gave.

If you want more info you can read my original post about the challenge, or just go to the Donors Choose page I’ve set up.

The sidebar of my blog (over on the right) has a widget that says how much we’ve raised here at Bad Astronomy so far (nearly $4000 as I write this, much more than last year [UPDATE (18:30 Mountain time) Holy mackerel! Since I posted this, we're over $5k! Thanks everyone!]). To everyone who has donated and to everyone who will: my very large thanks. And I’m an astronomer, so "very large" to me is vast indeed. And for the kids who get to benefit from it, it’s even bigger.

The American Geophysical Union blog has a link up to a very interesting table, and I feel strongly enough about this topic that I want to share it with you. It’s a list of words scientists use when writing or otherwise communicating science, what the scientists mean when they use that word, and most importantly what the public hears.

[Click to enverbumnate.]

I’ll admit, when I read it I laughed. But then my chuckle dried up when I realized just how dead accurate this is. And the smile pretty much left my face when I read that this table is from an article called "Communicating the Science of Climate Change," by Richard C. J. Somerville and Susan Joy Hassol, from the October 2011 issue of Physics Today.

Yup. I think they have a pretty good point.

My career at the moment could pretty much be called "Science Communicator". I do it here on this blog, I do it on Blastr and in Discover magazine, and when I give talks. Before that (and I guess it’s an occupation that never really leaves you) I was a professional scientist for many years. My training ran deep: 4 years undergrad, 6-7 in grad school, then a decade or so of research after that. I could toss around the phrase "Don’t over-iterate the Lucy-Richardson deconvolution algorithm or else you’ll amplify the noise and get spurious data spikes" with the best of ‘em.

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