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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As long as I’m mea culping… yesterday, I posted a fantastic picture of the Sun showing an enormous arc of material, called a prominence, looping off the Sun. In the post, I mentioned that most of these collapse. But this time, I was wrong: it turns out this one did indeed burst away from the Sun. And you can see it in this animation created from SDO images:

WOW. As you can see, the explosion happened away from us, so it doesn’t look like we’ll be affected by it at all… except, that is, by its utter beauty and mind-crushing size. Remember as you watch that: the Sun is 1.4 million kilometers (860,000 miles) across. When it does something, it does it BIG.

Credit: NASA/SDO

Two news updates, both of which are pretty interesting.

1) The arsenic-utilizing bacterium is still in the news… because a lot of scientists are casting serious doubt on the results. Carl Zimmer, biology journalist (and Discover blogger) wrote a very interesting article about it for Slate (and has followups on his Discover blog). The criticism is not mild, either, with words like "flim-flam" being used. Carl approached the investigators who wrote the paper for Science, and they declined to comment — that’s usually an excuse, but in this case I think they’re right; they don’t want to engage in a scientific debate through the media. But I certainly hope the investigations continue.

I’ll note I reported the press conference results straight — at some level, I have to trust the scientists know what they’re doing, that the peer-review process is working, and the results reliable. In this case, with a result depending on some relatively complex biological and chemical arguments, I was acting out of trust. This trust may yet be proven to be borne out, or it may not. It’s possible the original researchers are correct, and it’s possible their critics are. The best way to find out is more science.

But when it comes to astronomy news…
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