Sharp-eyed viewers may have noticed that the BA blog has a new banner! If you didn’t notice, then look up a few centimeters. See it?

All the Discover blogs got spiffy new banners to help individualize them, yet have a design theme to tie them together. If you look over on the right, at the sidebar, you’ll see the blogs linked by their banners. That’ll make it easier for you to read all the other science blogs enthralled to the Hive Overmind. If you haven’t checked them out, you should. We have quite a variety here, and they’re all really good.

An interview I did with Keith Daniels of the counter-culture site Suicide Girls is now up on the SG website.

I’ll be clear: that page should be OK, but the site itself may be somewhat more than NSFW, in much the same way that standing a meter away from a supernova is somewhat more than Not Safe For Staying a Solid.

I’ve been a fan of SG for a while — it gives a strong, nerdy voice to decidedly non-mainstream thinking in a wide variety of topics, and the interview is like that. We covered a lot of ground: Hubble, NASA, skepticism, politics, life on other planets, the media, and of course Not Being a Dick (while still maintaining a motivating level of anger and passion).

Clearly, after ten years or more of doing interviews, I still haven’t learned how to make a succinct, pithy point. And while I do suffer a bit from verbal diarrhea, I’ll note that some topics deserve more subtlety and longer discussion. Sound bites tend to gloss over vital details, and not everything can be adequately covered by a bumper sticker.

To give you a taste, here’s part of what I said about skepticism:

It’s really easy to fool people, and it’s really easy to fool yourself, and if you use these skeptical ideas, you find out what the truth is. The whole idea of skepticism and science is to find out what’s most likely to be true, and what’s most likely not to be true. That’s the goal: to not fool ourselves, and that’s where the real power of skepticism is. That’s why it bugs me when people think it’s a negative thing — it’s not! It’s the most positive thing we have. It is the search for the real, objective truth.

There are tons of fascinating interviews on SG, including talks with folks like Felicia Day, Danny Pudi (Abed from "Community"), comic book writer (and skeptic!) Gail Simone, and many more. You’ll happily lose a day reading them, I promise!

Oh for FSM’s sake. Again?

First, let me be clear: the odds of the 250-meter-wide asteroid Apophis hitting the Earth in 2036 are extremely slim, like less than 1 in 135,000 (and I just heard 1 in 250,000 from another expert). This is less than the odds of getting dealt a straight flush in five-card stud poker. Those are teeny tiny odds.

So then why oh why did The Huffington Post just put up an article about Apophis hitting us in 2036? With the headline "Apophis Asteroid Could Hit Earth In 2036, Scientists Say"? After I already posted that this original story was totally garbled by a Russian journalist, who grossly misquoted a Russian astronomer?

Sigh.

Now, they claim this info comes from a UPI article, but that article is pretty clear about the odds. While the HuffPo article also puts in the odds, they interlace it with a lot of doomsday stuff.

For example, they used a graphic illustration right at the top of a huge asteroid impact, just to make sure they scare their readers. They also include a video, saying "Watch a shocking visualization of what the event could look like,"… and the video shows what it would look like if the Earth were hit by an asteroid that was 800 km (500 miles) across.

That’s a little bit bigger than 250 meters. By a factor of 30 billion (in volume, which is what counts in impacts). I actually wrote about this video a couple of years ago. While an Apophis impact would suck (if it happened, which it almost certainly won’t), it would not rip the crust of the planet off and eject it into space, leaving behind a boiling, seething mass of lava and killing every thing down on Earth to the last bacterium.

OK?

Grrrrr.

So, nice going HuffPo. You’ve managed to once again mangle science and reality, adding to the already shameful articles about the Betelgeuse nonsense, and the nearly daily dangerous antivax and alt-med stuff.

Man. The least they could do is space this stuff out a little bit so I have time to breathe between debunkings.

So this morning I posted a rather lengthy and hopefully thorough debunking of an execrable doomsday story trying to tie the Earth’s magnetic field with big "superstorms" pummeling the US and Australia. I was pretty clear where I stand on this; I loathe it when people ramp up the pseudoscience to try to scare other people about an imagined doomsday scenario. You could probably point your finger anywhere in my post and find some stern words about how the Earth’s magnetic field is unrelated to these storms.

So why oh why did the Press-Enterprise website pull this quote from my article? Here’s a screen grab:

Whaaaaa? That quote says:

The earth’s climate has been significantly affected by the planet’s magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming. Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth’s magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics.

In fact, that quote was not from me. It was from a pseudoscience website I was quoting and debunking! So Press-Enterprise managed to find, extract, and post just about the only thing in my entire article that is the opposite of the entire point of what I wrote.

So in a blog post about media fail, I get a followup media fail.

It may be a media fail, but at least it’s an irony win.

It’s been a couple of days since the foofooraw involving Betelegeuse, 2012, and media laziness took place. As you may recall, a site in Australia made some dubious connections between 2012 and the red supergiant star Betelgeuse exploding, which you may imagine I took a fairly dim view on. As bad as that was, it got worse when The Huffington Post weighed in, adding their own nonsense to the story, misattributing parts of the story and making even more faulty connections to 2012.

The story went viral rapidly. Other media venues quickly picked up on it, furthering the nonsense without doing any independent investigation of it. Happily, not everyone got it wrong; I’ll note that the first venue that apparently got it right was Fox News, who linked to an earlier article I wrote about Betelgeuse.

I was also contacted by Jesse Emspak from International Business Times, who asked me specific questions about it and wrote a very well-written and factually accurate article about all this, doing something that made my heart sing: not just presenting the real science we could get out of a Betelgeuse supernova, but making that the focus of the article! As it should be. Kudos to him and IBT.

Stories like 2012 and nearby supernovae are sexy, easy to sell, and get eyeballs on a webpage. It’s the devil’s bargain to write about them even on a skeptical astronomy blog; it can reinforce bad science in people’s minds, or it might put a spotlight on something that could otherwise wither and die on its own (which is why I didn’t write about this story until HuffPo posted it). It’s also amazing to me how some media — some actual, mainstream news sources — didn’t do any real fact-checking before putting up links to HuffPo. It once again reinforces what I learned long ago: keep a very skeptical frame of mind when reading or listening to the news. If they can mess up something as simple as this, then what else are they getting wrong?

[UPDATE: We have a megawinner! @kurtjmac had the inning tweet, and the swag is on its way to him now. Thanks to everyone for joining in, and as always, stay tuned for more giveaways like this one. I still have a ton of stuff lying around.]

At the top of this year I had to do two things: replace my Mac laptop, which is so old the operating system is called Sabre Tooth (baddaBING!), which in turn meant rearranging my office as well (to make room for all the joyous new cables). While performing this archaeological dig I unearthed a lot of really cool stuff lying around in boxes and bags, plus a lot of what can only be called random crap, so I figure the sweat of my brow is your good fortune: I’m giving it away.

That’s right! I’m having Yet Another Bad Astronomy Giveaway contest, and this time it’ll be on Twitter. What am I including? This:

[Click to sharktopusenate.]

This is truly an awesome load of geekiness. To wit:

• A SyFy tote bag from Comic Con last year that says "GIANT BACK PACK" on one side and "MEGA TOTE" on the other. Yes.
• A copy of George Hrab’s CD "Trebuchet" (it has a track on it narrated by Yours Truly), signed by him and me.
• A pre-production signed copy of my book Death from the Skies!, because why not?
• A very cool 2011 desk calendar "The Year in Space", with tons of great pictures; that would normally run you $12 plus shipping. It’s published with cooperation by the wonderful Planetary Society.
• A copy of (the sadly now-defunct) Geek Monthly magazine that has an article about me, and another about Wil Wheaton — signed by both of us.
• A copy of Skeptical Inquirer with an article I wrote about star naming schemes.
• A bunch of stickers, including one signed by SETI astronomer Seth Shostak.
• Two anaglyph glasses (one red/blue, the other red/green) so you can see stuff posted in glorious 3D.
• The SkepStick, a flash drive given away at the first TAM London, with cool skeptical documents on it.
• A bunch of other stuff, including an NOAO four port USB hub, a plushy cosmic microwave background, some buttons, some postcards, a deck of Amazon cards I picked up at a conference, an origami flying pig folded by Aussie skeptic Richard Saunders, and more.

Phew! So, how do you win this megastuff? There are some rules, so avast:

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Like most of you, I’m human. I try to be as accurate as possible when I write, but sometimes I make mistakes. A lot of these errors are small and I just fix ‘em. Some of them are bigger, and I generally strike them through and correct them up front — leaving them public keeps me honest. Also, part of science is learning from your mistakes. If we don’t, we get ossified and dogmatic, and that’s the very antithesis of science!

Also, sometimes, these mistakes deserve more airtime. They deserve their own post, and it so happens I have a couple on which I’d like to elaborate. I want to clear the air, so to speak, and what better way to start than to talk about clear air?

In the past, when giving talks (as well as in my first book) I say that the Earth’s air is very transparent. In fact, based on the memory of a paper I read in grad school and which I can no longer find, I’ve said specifically that 98% of the visible light that enters our atmosphere from space will make it to the ground (barring clouds and so on). This is usually in response to people asking if they’d see more stars from space due to the lack of air, and my answer has always been "not really", most of the light from even faint stars makes it to your eye.

That turns out not to be correct.

To illustrate this, here’s a graph showing an example of how much light from the Sun actually gets to the ground:
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