Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I know it’s traditional to take this time to look back, and to look ahead. And while I’m not a traditional sort of fellow, I do want to take just a moment here and indulge myself. New Year’s is rather arbitrary for a number of reasons, but there is one substantive change that happens today.

As of right now, I am no longer President of the James Randi Educational Foundation. That job now falls on the able shoulders of my friend D. J. Grothe, who takes that position as of today, January 1, 2010. D. J. is, quite simply, a tremendous guy, and if this is the time for looking ahead, then I see great things happening with him at the helm. He brings loads of experience to the job as well as a fresh perspective. I won’t wish him luck — I don’t put much stock in either that verb or that noun, but I hardly need to. D. J. has earned my trust, and I know he’ll be great.

Like everyone else, I don’t know what 2010 will bring. I’m working on my sooper sekrit TV project, and I’ll have news for that in the coming months, no doubt. I’m hoping to let people see my tattoo very soon, too. I’ll let y’all know as soon as I’m able.

And for astronomy, the future is always uncertain. We have astonishing capabilities coming online, with Herschel, Kepler, and WISE opening their eyes. Hubble is newly refitted, and has already once again proven its worth. Cassini still dances around Saturn, returning one breathtaking image after another. And we still have Spitzer, Chandra, and a fleet of other space-borne instruments, as well as the solid ground-based observatories that are making vast leaps in our knowledge of the heavens.

But we’re still in a recession. Times are tough for everyone, and we’re still not sure as I write this just what President Obama has in store for NASA. We may find out as early as next week, at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting, which I’ll be attending. Hopefully I’ll have some fun stories and pictures from the meeting; there is always big news revealed then.

Anyway, enough rambling. You’re probably just reading this waiting for the antacid tablets to dissolve, so I’ll sign off for now. But stay tuned. One thing I don’t need psychic powers to predict: there will be lots of good news for science, as well as bad. Either way, I’ll be here to talk about it on this blog, as will my friends and colleagues at Discover Magazine and other sites.

Thanks to all my readers for the past year — the past decade. See you for the next one!

For those of you who simply cannot get enough of my dulcet voice, I have recently appeared on two podcasts:

1) Monster Talk, with Blake Smith, Karen Stollznow, and Ben Radford. We talk Martian bacteria, Godzilla, and Five Million Years to Earth, one of my favorite movies. Here’s a direct link to the MP3.

2) That unhirsuit-bepated heartthrob, George Hrab, is giving a sneak peak to his new album, "Trebuchet", on his latest Geologic Podast. The song he has revealed is "Death from the Skies!", featuring moi. I even sing. Very briefly. Very. Thankfully.

DARPA is running an interesting contest: they are placing ten red balloons somewhere in the continental United States. Social media groups can register with DARPA, and the first one to submit the correct latitude and longitude of all 10 will get $40,000!

I found out about this at Fark, and so I’ll throw my hat — and all of you — in with them. If Fark wins, they’ll donate the $40k to Toys for Tots.

This all starts Saturday (December 5) at sunup! It’s already started! So read the DARPA page, and if you spot one of the balloons, don’t put it in the comments — we don’t want the competition to see! — but instead, send an email to the Farktabulous Melissa (her email is in that link).

Fark has been pretty good to me, so it’s nice to be able to send a little back. Let’s spot some balloons!

Note: I hate to say this, but if you have delicate sensibilities, then maybe Fark isn’t the best place for you. I, however, still have some atavistic humor left over from being a 15-year-old-boy some time ago, so I love Fark.

I found out today that radio’s Dr. Dean Edell not only gave me a shout out on his program, he read from my blog post excoriating Deepak Chopra!

Woohoo!

You can listen to it on KGO here or download the MP3; the Chopra stuff starts at about 14:30. Just before then he’s talking about the Denver UFO nonsense, too.

If you don’t know, Dean is one of the very few skeptical and critical thinking voices on the radio today. We could use a lot more like him.

Tip o’ the iPod to Lizditz and Evo.

My fellow Hive Overmind blogger Carl Zimmer just won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism Award for writing in large newspaper, specifically the New York Times.

Yay!

Carl Zimmer won in the large newspaper category for a trio of articles he wrote for The New York Times on aspects of genetics and evolution. "I sometimes feel a little embarrassed that I like to write articles about the kinds of basic questions my kids ask me," Zimmer said. “For the three stories I submitted, the questions were, "What’s a virus?" "What’s a gene?" and "Why do fireflies flash?" I had a marvelous time talking with scientists about the complex answers to those simple questions, and now, thanks to this award, I don’t have to feel at all embarrassed.” Zimmer previously won in the online category in 2004.

And he shouldn’t be embarrassed, because it’s exactly those kinds of questions that should be written about! Engaging the public is what more scientists should do, and if they did it as well as Carl the world would be a better place.

The Hive Overmind has been fiddling with the site, and I must say they’ve improved things around here!

For one, all our blog feeds are now being handled by Feedburner. Using feeds is actually pretty easy; think of it like a magazine you subscribe to that gets sent to your house. When a blog like mine is updated with a new post, the feed is updated, and if you subscribe to the feed you get the new post sent to you. I use Google Reader to keep up with blogs, for example. It keeps track of all my feeds so I don’t have to.

For another, the Discover Magazine website is now mobile phone friendly. I checked it out with my internationally-ridiculed pink iPhone and the site looked great. If you have a mobile device, just go to DiscoverMagazine.com and you should be redirected to the mobile site.

And just a note… there are social network buttons on every post here, just below the blog post title: Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon and so on. I would love it long time if, when you like a post, you were to vote it up or Digg it or whatever. It gets the word out to others, and allows me to eat and pay my utility bills, something I’m fond of being able to do.

Oh– you can follow me on Twitter, too. I tweet about all sorts of things, not just astronomy and skepticism, including most recently (and not necessarily in a related way) toilet paper, my tattoo, and Wil Wheaton.

And while I’m at it, please read my commenting policy, mmkay? I have noticed an uptick in people violating my one simple rule.

Thus ends our occasional BABlog notice. Thanks, and don’t forget to wash your hands.

As regular readers may recall, I made a bet with Hive Overmind Discover Magazine CEO Henry Donahue that if we hit a target number of page views to both the BA Blog and the DM site, we’d both get tattoos. I can’t reveal mine just yet, but here is a picture of Henry’s: it’s a Celtic salmon, and I must say it’s quite nice. I particularly like the waves over the fish.

The reason I can’t reveal mine is that I had it done as part of the TV show L.A. Ink, and I can’t post pictures or talk about the design until after the show airs. But don’t worry, I’ll post the whole painful (literally) story right here once I can.

Congrats to Henry for such a handsome ink job! I can’t wait until we meet up again, and we can compare tats in person. That’ll be a fun pic for the blog.