In 2009, the blog 3 Quarks Daily set up an award for the best science blog writing of the year. It’s become very popular quite quickly, and they have announced the third annual contest. They accept public nominations, and that means you! If you have a science blog post you’ve read in the past year that you’ve simply loved, you can nominate it by leaving a comment in the 3QD post linked above. They have rules listed there, so please read them carefully before submitting.

I’m a little late getting it here on the blog, so I apologize, but the deadline is tomorrow, Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at one minute before midnight Eastern (US) time! I’ll note that the judge this year is theoretical physicist Lisa Randall — she studies what you might call fairly esoteric subjects like warped extraspatial dimensions, cosmology, particle physics, and the like. I’ll be very interested to see what articles she picks.

I’ll also note that this very blog won third place in that first contest, and last year two Discover Magazine bloggers took home the top two prizes. We’re very pleased here at the Hive Overmind that 3QD thought so highly of our work. But there’s a lot of really great writing out there, so get submitting!

Last week, I posted a picture taken by International Space Station astronaut Ron Garan, showing city lights at night. I was curious about what the cities were, and initially had a hard time figuring it out. But, using various tools — Wolfram Alpha to get the ISS position at the time the photo was taken, an atlas, and a rough direction and scale using the visibility of Orion’s belt in the picture — I took a stab at which cities were which.

A followup on that post is in order. A lot of people left comments on the post, and some went through similar sleuthing exercises as I did. Quite a few agree with my assessment: the city in the center of the picture is Warsaw, Poland. Berlin is on the horizon, and other cities are as I determined.

I used an old-fashioned atlas to find the cities because I couldn’t find a good piece of software to do it. But then I had a facepalmy moment when several people suggested Google Earth! I got a new computer when my Mac died a little while ago, and never installed GE on it. So I downloaded and started fiddling with it, and sure enough the cities do seem to match. If you’re curious, go to latitude 50.56 North, longitude 38.23 East, zoom out to an eye altitude of about 221 miles, and rotate the picture so you’re facing west.

At this point, you’ll see a big city centered in the frame that turns out to be Kiev, Ukraine. That threw me for a second, but I remembered that given Orion’s size in the ISS photo in question, it’s clear the picture is zoomed in a bit. Kiev is off the bottom of the frame. (more…)

So this is cool: the National Forensic League — the national honor society that promotes debating skills for high school students, and which suggests topics for debate teams — has announced their policy topic for the 2011 – 2012 debating season… and I like it!

Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its exploration and/or development of space beyond the Earth’s mesosphere.

Nice! I think this is an excellent topic, and I know it’ll get a lot of folks thinking about space. There are a lot of pros and cons to space exploration, of course, but to me the positives far, far outstrip the negatives. Not everyone agrees, so I’d be interested in seeing some of these debates.

I get a lot of questions — a lot — about astronomy and space from kids in this age group. I expect this debate topic will prompt many more, since I’m outspoken on the topic. So I’ll take this opportunity to link to a few of my earlier blog posts where I make my opinions pretty clear. I’ve divided them up into subtopics to make them a little easier to read, too. I have no problem trying to influence the opinions of others, but my intent here is to give any potential debaters a place to start, a jumping-off point.

Agree with me? Disagree? Why, that’s why we have debates!

Politics and space

- Space leaders to Congress: light this private candle
- Congress passes NASA authorization bill, but I’d rather watch sausages being made
- Obama lays out bold revised space policy
- Obama champions science… but where’s NASA?
- Obama and McCain on space exploration

Space exploration

- What value space exploration?
- 40 years later, failure is still no longer an option
- Give space a chance
- From distant planets to the deep blue sea
- Why explore space?
- Neil Tyson on exploring space
- Human exploration of Phobos and Deimos

NASA and space

- Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, and those who sacrifice for the stars
- Ten years of the International Space Station
- NASA’s next small step: to an asteroid
- Wait, how big is NASA’s budget again?
- My NASA Op-Ed in the New York Post
- Whence NASA?
- NASA’s budget… as far as American’s think
- Followup to Congressional NASA hearings and my thoughts
- An open letter to NASA

I expect I’ll be referring a few students to this blog post in the year to come… and if you know kids who are interested, let them know about the topic! And, as always: per ardua, ad astra.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Linda Mitts for this info.

This is just a quick note to let y’all know that the two radio interviews I did over the past weekend are now archived.

The Star Talk Radio interview with Neil Tyson and Leighann Lord is stored right here on Discover Magazine’s site, and you can also get it on iTunes.

The Think Atheist interview is available on their website.

They were both fun to do, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

For the TL;DR crowd: an artist buddy of mine has drawn the cartoon print seen here, and is auctioning it off on eBay.

OK, now the details:

My buddy Len Peralta — the fantastic comic artist of Geek A Week and w00tstock fame — has started a fun new series of drawings called 50vs50. The "50" refers to 50 heroes and 50 villains, and he’s selling them. Literally.

You submit the name and characteristics of said heroes and/or villains, and, for a fee, he’ll draw them for you and send you a signed print.

I found out about this when Google Alerts notified me of the drawing here entitled, simply, The Astronomer. The noble pate, the steely determination, the ability to manipulate black holes… the resemblance to that guy I see in the mirror when I shave was striking. And sure enough, Len told me he based it on me.

Me, a hero. Awesome. I love Len.

Anyway, Len is doing this to raise money so he can go to San Diego Comic Con this year; he was accepted to attend as an industry professional, which is very cool. 50vs50 is his way to raise cash and have fun doing it.

Len and I then hatched a plan: He printed a second copy of The Astronomer, sent it to me, and I’ve signed it. I have it right here on my desk, in fact. Do you want it? Then bid on it! Len has put it up for auction on eBay. I’ll send it to the winner from BA HQ here in Boulder. And what the heck, I’ll throw in a few miscellaneous spacey items I have lying around here, too.

The auction runs through Saturday, April 23, and ends at 7:30 a.m. PDT (14:30 UT). Get bidding!

Every year, a contest is held to find the best 50 science blog articles on the web. Submitted by popular vote and chosen by a set of editors, the winners are then printed in a book called The Open Laboratory. The newest edition for 2010 is now online and has been made available for ordering!

I’m proud to have my articles included in previous years’ books (2006, 2007, and 2008), and once again have one appear in this year’s version: Ten Things You Don’t Know About Comets. I had to do some editing to get this post into book form, and I hope you like the effort.

The essays chosen are quite good, so I recommend heading over to Lulu.com and ordering yourself a copy! It’s an awful lot of science geekery for just 18 bucks.

I’m guest hosting for Kiki on "Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour" today, interviewing Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal! If I have everything coded correctly, then from 4:00 to 5:00 Pacific time today you’ll be able to watch the streaming video live below:

[VIDEO REMOVED BECAUSE IT WAS AUTOPLAYING. And besides, the interview as days ago now.]

If you see nothing above this line, then a) I did it incorrectly (but it works for me), 2) something’s wrong on your end, γ) try clicking here for the stream at TWit TV (where there is also a chat room), or ∞) the interview is over. But it’ll be archived on Kiki’s website and I’ll link to it when it does.