Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Looking for a little skeptical spookiness to add to your Halloween this year? The James Randi Educational Foundation will be holding a seance to contact the spirit of Harry Houdini live on the internet!

Houdini was a hero to James Randi, and he famously said that if there were an afterlife, he would do whatever he could after he died to contact his wife. She held a seance, and… nothing happened. However, when you have people like Randi and magician Andrew Mayne involved, why, anything can happen!

OK, maybe not anything. Like, say, actually contacting a dead spirit. But I bet this will be a very fun event, and I encourage all skeptics and believers — especially believers — young and old to drop in. For more info, stay tuned to Randi.org and WeirdThings.com.

[Note: NASA is trying to launch the new ARES I-X rocket, scheduled right now for 10:54 Eastern time. As I write this weather is not so great so it may be a scrub, but follow me on my BANews feed on Twitter for the latest!]

I don’t usually talk about iPhone-specific stuff, but as it happens I own (a spiffy pink) one, and this is pretty cool.

NASA just released a new app for the iPhone, and I like it. It has info on missions, pictures, videos (links to YouTube), and more. It’s a pretty slick app, professionally put together.

You can filter the missions to look at using categories like Earth, Solar System, Moon and Mars, and so on. It tells you when it launched, what the mission elapsed time is (which is pretty nifty), and from there you can access images and video related to the mission. Not only that, but if you tap the Earth icon when a mission is displayed, it will show you a real-time map of the location of the spacecraft over the Earth! I checked it using the space station against the info at Heavens Above, and it matched closely.

If you start from the home page and tap the image icon at the bottom, you get a choice of pictures from NASA’s Image of the Day as well as the venerable Astronomy Picture of the Day. I checked those and they were up to date with the current day’s images, too. Nice.

Videos appear to be in reverse chronological order, which is nice. Also, if you tap the RSS symbol you get the NASA Twitter stream. Very well done.

Any complaints I have are minor. It refers to Fermi as GLAST, which was its name before launch– a year ago. Some missions are missing, and I hope they’ll put them in when they update the software. Swift would be a great candidate for this, especially if they give real-time access to when it sees gamma-ray bursts. Things like that would turn this app from something cool into something extremely handy. Also, it seemed a little slow to get started, even using 3G. I turned on my wireless connection and it zipped right up though.

Still and all, it’s worth the download. If you’re a geek like me (and c’mon, admit it: if you’re reading this blog in the first place, it’s too late to hide it) you’ll enjoy it.

Regular readers know I have an marginally unhealthy crush on Felicia Day. Of course, so do millions of other people, so she’s probably relatively safe from me.

But are we safe from… colliding galaxies? Apparently, only Felicia knows for sure, as she demonstrates in this NASA PSA:

Hey! That was funny! Like, really funny! Lots of inside jokes for Felicia’s fans, too ("Is this your first time doing an internet video, Miss Day?") A lot of times videos like this are just painful, but this one is actually really good. Felicia is great, and the Sean Astin stuff cracked me up.

And I think someone’s been reading my book… OK, probably not. But the way she talked about all the astronomy was very natural and smooth, so I just know deep in her heart Felicia’s harboring a strong and undeniable love for astronomer. I mean astronomy. Yes! Astronomy! Of course that’s what I meant!

Sigh. We’ll always have Comic Con.

Tip o’ the Guilded lily (see what I did there?) to Javier Pazos.

The SETI Institute’s latest episode of the podcast Are We Alone is now up, and I talk with Seth Shostak about the idea that somehow, forces unknown (God? The Universe Itself? The Doctor? Tony Newman and Doug Phillips?) have tried to sabotage the Large Hadron Collider… from the future!

Personally, I’m not buying it, but it’s an interesting idea. The authors of a published study say that we should perform some sort of experiment before turning the LHC on to see if someone from the future is trying to contact us. But I have a better idea: let’s turn the LHC on and see if it works. If it does, then we’re done with this idea. And if it doesn’t, hand me my sonic screwdriver. There’s work to do!

[Edited to add: Well, the folks at CERN have been injecting particles into the LHC stream since Friday. They'll be ramping it up to full speed in the coming weeks, so we'll know soon enough about all this!]

According to Wikipedia, the last naturally occurring incident of smallpox (Variola minor) happened on this date in 1977:

By the end of 1975, smallpox persisted only in the Horn of Africa. Conditions were very difficult in Ethiopia and Somalia, where there were few roads. Civil war, famine, and refugees made the task even more difficult. An intensive surveillance and containment and vaccination program was undertaken in early and mid-1977. The last naturally occurring case of indigenous smallpox (Variola minor) was diagnosed in Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Merca, Somalia, on 26 October 1977.

In the 20th century, smallpox is estimated to have killed hundreds of millions of people. Hundreds of millions. Imagine the United States — the entire country, from the Pacific to the Atlantic — empty, devoid of people, dead. Smallpox wiped out that many people with room to spare.

And yet, today, it’s gone.

Why do you think that is? Homeopathy? Detoxification? Thinking good thoughts?

Nope. Vaccinations. A global campaign was undertaken in 1950, and within 30 years smallpox was struck from the face of the Earth.

Hey Jenny McCarthy, Meryl Dorey, and all you antivaxxers and your ilk: got a response to this? Still want to claim vaccines don’t work? Still want to stop people from getting them? Do you want to see this happen to children all over the planet again (WARNING – SERIOUSLY! -VERY DISTURBING IMAGE). Because if you are successful in your campaign to stop vaccinations, that’s what we’ll be facing again.

Vaccines are perhaps the single greatest triumph of modern medicine. Yet a vocal minority willing to trash facts, spin the truth, and generally spout misinformation is putting not only themselves but you, me, and everyone at risk.

Happy anniversary, smallpox, gone these past 32 years. And may I add, good damn riddance. May reason, rationality, and science-based medicine do the same for every other threat to the health and well being of the human race as well.

Tip o’ the syringe to Reddit.

The Planetary Society is setting up a brand new online store, so they’re holding a blowout sale to get rid of all their old inventory. They have posters for $2, t-shirts for $5, and more. If you have a kid in a science class, then why not pick up some posters for the school?

I just found out that my friend, fellow skeptic, multiple TAM speaker, and top-notch magician Jamy Ian Swiss will be performing his Heavy Mental show on Saturday at the HQ for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (!) in Washington, DC. I’ve seen this act before, and it’s a terrific mentalism performance. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. on October 24.

Also, earlier that day at 1:00, Jamy along with my friends and fellow skeptics D. J. Grothe and Chip Denman will be doing a lecture/workshop called "Science, Magic, and Skepticism: A Natural Relationship". They’ve been doing this together for quite some time and it gets rave reviews. You’ll learn a lot about critical thinking if you go.

If you’re in the DC area on Saturday and looking for something to do, then this is what you want. For a taste of Jamy’s abilities, check out this video interview I did with him at TAM 5.