Blogs / Bad Astronomy

ALERT: I’ll be doing a live video webcast on Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour (aka This Week in Science) with Kiki Sanford and Leo Laporte at 3:00 Pacific time (22:00 GMT) today. We’ll be talking Hubble and what’s going in space over our heads even as we’re talking about it. I think it’ll be live on UStream.tv which also has a chat room embedded where you can leave comments and ask questions.

I’ll update this blog post and include more links as I figure them out. I’ll also post updates on Twitter too.

UPDATE: Try http://live.twit.tv/ for the live stream of the show, and the chat room is http://irc.twit.tv/.

Greg Fish from the blog World of Weird Things interviewed me about life, the JREF, and everything. It’s a pretty good blog and I recommend it; he always has cool pictures on it!

I’m always curious about who links to this blog; it can be very helpful as a blogger, and it can tell you what the buzz is. In my case it helps me find both opponents and allies, which in the skeptic business is important. So I have Google alert me when a link comes in.

Usually the links are from science sites, or scifi sites, or people who disagree with me. It’s pretty much what you’d expect.

So what the heck do I make of this one?

I’m guessing it’s some sort of ‘bot, grabbing various words and doing things with them that are inscrutable to man. Any web experts out there have a clue? I don’t remember ever being Australian. Though if I had to pick any other nationality to be, that would be it. Oi!

It’s time for a new BA Giveaway! And this time we have a twofer.

Alien not included.

Seth Shostak is an astronomer who hunts for aliens… with SETI. He just wrote a book called Confessions of an Alien Hunter, and it’s wonderful. It’s a fun discussion of looking for other civilizations among the stars and Seth’s involvement with SETI. In my opinion this is his best book yet, and that’s saying something.

I also have a two-CD set of Seth’s podcast/radio show "Are We Alone". It has recordings of several episodes, including one with moi — I do a Skeptical Sunday bit with Seth called "Brains on Vacation".

Both the book and the CD are signed by Seth his own self, and I put my signature on the CD too (the book actually has an official "Are We Alone" sticker that Seth signed for me because I stupidly forgot to get him to sign the book directly when he was here in Boulder last month). These items will be given away separately. I may throw in extra junk I have lying around my office too.

So how do you win these fabulous things? Easy.

All you have to do is leave a comment on this post. Just post something in the comments below, like "Phil rulez and Seth droolz" or something equally elegant. It doesn’t matter what you post as long as you post something. On Friday, May 8 at noon Mountain time (UTC – 6), I will generate a random number, and the person who leaves that number comment wins the book. I’ll then pick a second number, and that person wins the CD set. I’ll send the winners emails notifying them, and they’ll have until Monday May 11th at noon MT to get back to me. I’ll pick another commenter if I don’t hear back by then. That person will have until noon the next day to get back to me, and so one, until winners are chosen.

Here are some rules for you. READ THESE. Violate them and I’ll send your email address and IP to the ShamWOW guy.

1) Leave a comment ONLY ONCE. I trust you folks, but I feel I must make this warning: No matter how tempting it is to followup on someone else’s comment, don’t do it. Anyone caught doing that (or cheating in any way) not only won’t win the book, but your comment will simply be deleted. Be ye fairly warned, says I.

2) Make sure that you enter a valid email address in the form when you leave your comment. If you don’t, you won’t win, since email is how I will contact the winner. Since I’m busy and bore easily I won’t try to figure out your address; if there’s no valid email, I’ll simply pick another winner.

3) To be fair, if you’re an actual friend of mine IRL then please don’t apply. I’ll leave it up to your own judgment if you fall in that category or not.

4) Anyone else is eligible, including all you foreigner types.

Remember, you have until noon Friday! So comment away!

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an entry here about how science is all about imagination. It got some attention, which is always nice when I think science is being denigrated in some way; I see a whole lot of that, and I’m glad to be able to push back at the forces of darkness, even if just a little.

I got a request from Krzysztof Achinger, a skeptic in Poland who wanted to translate the article into Polish and post it on the rationalist site Racjonalista. The Hive Overmind granted permission, and the article is now up on their site.

It’s very gratifying to see something like this; it’s not easy keeping up with the skeptical movement in the US, let alone around the world! Antiscience is everywhere, and it’s wonderful to know that there are people around the planet who have formed groups and are fighting the good fight.

One of the funny happenstances of running a skeptical website that uses Google ads is that I sometimes get ads for services that are not, um, precisely aligned with my goals as a critical thinker. On my site I’ve seen ads for 2012, for psychics, for all kinds of nonsense (there was even a pro-Moon hoax ad on my page debunking the Moon Hoax!).

I’ve long held that this is not necessarily such a terrible thing; I think most people on the web are savvy enough to understand that I don’t endorse that nonsense. If the ad is particularly atrocious I’ll block it, but there are a thousand more elbowing each other out of the way to take its place. It’s a losing fight sometimes.

And there are other considerations too… but instead of explaining them here, I’ll let Tim Farley of the Skeptical Software Tools website take care of it. He makes a pretty good case that not only are these ads not bad, but they can actually do some good. [Note added after I initially wrote this post: Fraser at Universe Today has more to say on this.]

He’s right… but I do have to say that those ads can be downright ookie and skeevy, and I sometimes wish they weren’t there at all. When one pops up here, I let the Hive Overmind know and they block it. If you do see an overly egregious one here, let em know. I need to know the URL to which it links (just saying it’s an ad for, say, a creationist camp won’t help; I need the web address to block it), and then we can block it.

So in my mind the question is still up in the air: are contextual ads evil or not? Food for thought, to get comments rolling: the ad might be for something which is not nonsense, but may be for something I don’t care about… like say a particular movie I haven’t seen. People wouldn’t complain about that ad’s content, I suspect. So what to do?

Over the years I’ve needed to make simple illustrations for my blog posts, but I’ve been stymied by drawing simple circles. Looking up tutorials on how to do this in PhotoShop led me to confusing, weird, or just plain incorrect methods. However, I recently wanted to draw a circle for my post on the distance to the horizon, and decided to ask an expert: The Little Astronomer, who showed me how to do it in about 20 seconds. I wrote down what she said, and what the heck: if I post it here on the blog it’s there for me to reference, and maybe it’ll help you too.

For the record, I currently use Photoshop CS3 version 8 on a Mac running OS X 10.4. I don’t think that matters much though. If it does, leave a comment! And hey, comment if you know another method too. The more the merrier.

So:

0) Do the usual thing of opening an image or creating a new one.

1) Click on the pen tool in the toolbar.

2) On the new toolbar displayed at the top, click the button with the ellipse in it.

3) Draw the circle by dragging the cursor while holding down the Shift key (otherwise you get an ellipse). What you get is not an actual drawing of a circle, but what’s called a "path". Bear with me here. Adjust the size as needed. Note: where you initially click the pen marks the center of the circle, so you might want to note the coordinates (x and y) of the center if you plan on fiddling with the circle later.

4) Go to pencil tool. Select the thickness you want (you can do this before drawing the circle too). Make sure you have the color you want selected!

5) Go back to pen tool.

Oooooo, Ahhhhhh

6) Right click somewhere in the image. Select "Stroke Path". Options are listed. Select "Pencil" from the drop down menu.

7) Now you have the actual circle drawn. But you’ll see the dotted line still in there, which is the path from before. To delete it, right click again. Click "delete path". That gets rid of original circle path, and leaves you with a nice circle with the thickness you desire.

This may sound complicated to a newbie (like me), but it’s actually not hard at all, and you’ll see that there are lots of variations (you can make a fuzzy circle by picking the brush tool instead of the pencil, for example).

And I’m glad, because now I can make even more silly images to go with my posts. Huzzah!