Blogs / Bad Astronomy

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.

So, I’m almost recovered from Comic Con.

It was, well, vast. And tiring. And exhilarating, and fun, and overwhelming. Pretty much what I expected.

Jaime Paglia and me

I was there ostensibly to moderate two panels: The Science of Science Fiction, and the Mythbusters. The former was the reason Discover Magazine sent me; the panel was sponsored by them as well as by the Science and Entertainment Exchange. It featured panelists Jaime Paglia and Kevin Grazier (the executive producer and science advisor for "Eureka", respectively), Glen Whitman, Rob Chiapetta, Ricardo Gil da Costa (writer, writer and suavely handsome science advisor for "Fringe"), and Jane Espenson (writer for "Caprica" as well as BSG and "Buffy"). That was huge fun, and instead of belaboring it here you can read reviews by Hyperborea, Script PhD, Discover’s own Eric Wolff, and my bud Jennifer Ouellette (who, as part of SEE, sponsored the panel). But I’ll note we covered a lot of ground, and I thought the topics were interesting and discussed thoughtfully and intelligently by everyone.

I had a great time sharing the stage with the panelists! I want to personally thank Henry Donahue and Tricia Gately from Discover for sending me to the con and for setting all this up. I’m a lucky guy to know them.

Tory, Adam, and Jamie from the Mythbusters, after the panel at a press event.

The scifi panel was Thursday night, and if it felt like getting three men on base, Saturday was the grand slam that drove them home. I moderated the Mythbusters panel, and that rocked the house. 3000+ fans filled the huge room, and the cheer that went up when I introduced Adam, Jamie, Grant, and Tory must’ve broken some windows in the convention center. We spent an hour previewing new episodes, discussing old ones, making jokes and generally enjoying ourselves. The four of them spent some time before the panel signing the insides of rolls of duct tape, and each person who asked a question of the panel got a roll. Discovery Channel also gave away a free iPod to someone who was able to identify Adam while he was in the exhibit hall in full costume, which was a great idea.

I’ll add that DC printed 40,000 giant swag bags with Adam and Jamie’s picture on the side, and gave them away for free. It was weird seeing thousands of people walking around with those bags!

What fun! I only get to see Adam at the odd TAM and other events, so it was very cool to hang with him and the other ‘busters. I met Grant and Tory at a talk in Alberta last year, and it was nice to see them again and joke around. I wish I could’ve gotten them all into the SyFy channel party, but that’s the topic for my next post…

My huge thanks to Katherine Nelson from Discovery Channel for organizing this madness and executing it so wonderfully, as well as to DC’s Nicole Reed. Both Discover and Discovery’s teams at Comic Con were incredible to work with, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Hint hint.

Pictures of all this and more are up on Flickr. I’ll have some back stories for those other shots up next. Stay Tuned!

Hey, this humble (ha!) blog got a shout-out on Ed Schultz’s show on MSNBC! He showed a clip of the Arizona state senator Sylvia Allen making her ridiculous creationist statements about the Earth and uranium mining, and then mentioned my blog entry on it. Here’s the video from the Schultz show:

Pretty cool. I almost hate to point out that even Ed got the age of the Earth wrong (he says billion when it’s 4.55 billion), but there’s a slight difference between getting a number wrong as a slip and getting it wrong due to clinging zealously to dogmatic nonsense. I’ll forgive a factor of four over a factor of a million any day.

Tip o’ the Geiger counter to my buddy Steve Andrew for posting about this!

Last year I strong-armed was generously sent to the vasty convention Comic Con by the Hive Overmind Discover Magazine, and had a blast. It’s a con for people into comics, science fiction, gaming, fantasy, manga, movies, and probably twenty or thirty other categories I missed. It’s a cozy meeting; only about 150,000 close friends attend.

The 2008 Comic Con panel. Kevin Grazier, Jaime Paglia, and me. Photo courtesy AKovacs.

Last year I was on a Discover Magazine-sponsored panel about science and science fiction, and it was so popular (standing room only in a room that held 1000 people!) that we’re doing it again. But this time it’ll be bigger and better.

First, I’m moderating it. That means I get to tell people when they can talk and when they have to shut up, which will be fun considering most of the panelists are awesome Hollywood types who make great shows, and can buy and sell me or have me killed on a whim.

Second, we have some new blood on the panel! Here’s the whole list:

Jaime Paglia — co-Executive Producer of Eureka
Kevin Grazier — Battlestar Galactica and Vituality science advisor
Jane Espenson — major scifi writer/producer: Firefly, Dollhouse, Battlestar, and on and on
Rob Chiappetta and Glenn Whitman — writers for Fringe
Ricardo Gil da Costa — neuroscientist and advisor for Fringe

Coooool. Really though, of all of them, the only one I’ll feel comfortable telling to shut up is Kevin, but that’s just because a) we’ve been friends a long time, and 2) I want his job. I’ve been watching all these shows as I can to bone up on ‘em, and I have lots of questions to ask at the panel, most of which inevitably lead to, "Why haven’t you hired me to vet your scripts?" That should go over well.

Other bloggers have taken notice, include the the Science and Entertainment Exchange and our very own DM blog Science Not Fiction.

Between this panel and moderating the Mythbusters panel, Comic Con will rock the west coast. I hope to see some of you there– maybe we can figure out some sort of BA meetup. If you’re going to CC, leave a comment here and let’s figure it out!

I am pleased and a bit surprised to learn that a blog post from Bad Astronomy was awarded third place in the 3 Quarks Daily science blog contest! A couple of my posts were submitted, but there were a lot of really good essays entered from other blogs (I spent a couple of hours reading that I should have spent on other things, but man, there was a lot of interesting stuff there) and I didn’t expect to win.

But Steven Pinker chose my Ten Things You Don’t Know About Hubble post as third place, with the first and second place spots going to Bands of Iron at Daylight Atheism (a beautifully-written piece on life and the ancient Earth) and The Ecological Disaster That Is Dolphin Safe Tuna (an interesting take on saving one species versus many) at Southern Fried Science.

As promised when I mentioned this contest a few weeks ago, I am donating the $200 prize money to the James Randi Educational Foundation (of which, in the interest of full disclosure, I am President). Besides being a fine non-profit charity dedicated to bringing the light of science and reason to the world, this also will ease any residual guilt I might have for plugging a contest for which I was a candidate. And, hint hint: the JREF does accept donations through the web.

I hope all my BABloggees out there will go over to 3QD and the other contestants’ sites and add them to your feed reader. There are a vast, vast number of good science blogs out there. Those are great places to start.

My thanks to everyone for this, especially to whoever submitted the Hubble post, and of course to Steven Pinker and 3 Quarks Daily.

A reminder: the Discover Magazine/Celestron "Capture the Universe" astrophotography contest is off to a great start. As I write this almost 100 photos have been submitted (including this one shown here of Mare Crisium on the Moon, selected randomly from the ones online).

I’m judging the contest, and I can already tell picking 10 will be difficult; there are a lot of very cool and very beautiful images up already. But don’t let that stop you! If you have Celestron equipment, haul it out, take some shots, and send them in! I’m looking for beauty, I’m looking for interest, I’m looking for odd, unusual, clever. Surprise me! I’m not saying that’ll win, but I am saying that you’ll want to stand out from the crowd. I expect there will be a lot of really terrific images to choose from.

Fellow skeptic Crispian Jago has a way cool blog called Science, Reason, and Critical Thinking, where he posted this way cool image of a bunch of way cool skeptics (with one exception of course).

What kind of dork wears a hat for a publicity still? Sigh. I’m thinking this may be the banner we use at TAM London. Or at least get it on t-shirts.