Honestly — and frighteningly — I think Zach may be on to something. [NSFW language in the comic. But it's SMBC. You should be used to it by now.]

And yes, that’s me in the first panel. I always was more of a B’Etor than a Lursa man myself, of course.

My pal Len Peralta is doing this cool thing called Geek A Week, where he interviews one Alpha Nerd every week, and then draws them in his own nifty style.

He just interviewed Nerdist Chris Hardwick, which was pretty funny (though be ye fairly warned, says I: Chris is a bit of a potty mouth, in the sense that a GRB is a bit of an energy source). Here’s the whole list of interviews, where you may note he kicked off his second half with Steve Wozniak! Holy Apple Computers!

You’ll see lots of familiar names on that list, like Hwil Hwheaton, Adam Savage™, Brea Grant, and even, might I add, me. Do not taunt the Alpha Nerds, for we are mighty. But you should go listen to the interviews.

Oh– I’ll note that as you read this I’m getting ready to perform at w00tstock 2.5.1! I’ll be live-tweeting it, so check that out for more nerdery.

Cool news: Episode 2 of what has been said^* to be the greatest TV show ever made, "Phil Plait’s Bad Universe", will air on Discovery Channel on Wednesday, October 6 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern!

W00t!

Episode 2 is called "Alien Attack!", and is my take on whether aliens are out there and whether we should worry about being invaded. If you’ve read my book you have an idea about this already, but there’re some very cool things we did in this episode, including one or two I’m still rather amazed by.

I’m also thrilled to note that the lead-in for BU will be the season premiere of MythBusters! I mean, it’s cool they’re having their season premiere and all that, but wow, I couldn’t ask for a better show to be after. It’ll make for a very fun night for TV. MythBusters airs at 9:00 p.m. Eastern. Check your local listings.

In the coming week or two I’ll set up another Twitter giveaway contest; I have some more fun stuff from the show to give to a winner. In a few days there should be clips available, and I’ll tell you a bit more about the show, too.

As far as other ways of watching BU, Discovery Canada has made it official (there’s also some news here) that they’ll be running the first episode on October 3! I also heard that Discovery Asia will be running Episode 1 on November 17th. But that’s all the info I have. I don’t know if it’ll run on Hulu or iTunes or at Omicron Persei 8. If you want to see it and you live somewhere that’s not the US, then please send a (nice!) email to your local flavor of Discovery and see if they’ll run it. Those channels are all separate from DSC here in the States, so they make their own decisions. The Twitter tweeps got Discovery Canada to run it, so the power really is with the tweeple.

So: yay! I think this episode is even better than the first one, and I think you guys will really like it. Don’t forget to tell everyone you know, send out email, tweet, plant hypnogogic suggestions, txt msg ur BFF, and get into a relationship with it on Facebook.

Breathtaking. Simply, stunningly, breathtaking.

That’s the Earth as seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which just finished its first year orbiting the Moon. It sometimes points its cameras back home to take calibration images, and when it does, well. Wow.

This spectacular image shows the fully-sunlit western hemisphere of the Earth, with North and South America clearly visible. Apparently August 9 2010 was a nice day for this half of the planet, with minimal cloud cover. I wonder if anyone on that half of the world was looking up in the sky at that moment, maybe just checking the weather… the Moon was almost new and too close to the Sun to see, but it’s nice to think that at that moment, our robotic explorer was looking back at us.

[... and check out the full resolution zoomable/browsable version. Holy wow!]

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Know a physics website you love?

The Institute of Physics website physics.org is holding their first ever physics web awards! If there’s a site you like, you can nominate it to win in several categories, including:

* Best blog
* Best news site / online magazine
* Best podcast
* Best Q&A / ask the expert site
* Best revision site
* Best kids’ site
* President’s prize (anything which doesn’t fall under any of the categories above)

As it happens, I was asked to be a judge for the "Best ask the expert / Q&A site", no doubt because of my inexhaustible ability to obfuscate on matters scientific. Bribery and flattery will get you nowhere, but a site with fun, accurate, easy-to-understand answers certainly will! Other judges include my friends Gia Milinovich, (the Hive Overmind’s own) Amos Zeeberg, Alom Shaha (whom you may remember from the Science Is Important video effort), and astronomer-who-discovered-pulsars Jocelyn Bell-Burnell.

Nominations are open now, and close on October 10. So go through your bookmarks and start submitting!

There’s a hole in the Moon!

I mean, seriously, there’s a hole in the Moon:

Actually, it’s a pit, and there are several of these known in the lunar surface. I’ve even written about them before, but this shot from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is the best I’ve seen yet (and there are more at that link). You can clearly see the floor of the pit, with rubble strewn there, and the shadow gives it an excellent sense of relief (in fact, I have to laugh over how much the shadow looks like a little crescent Moon itself!).

These pits (or skylights as they’re sometimes called) form when lava flows over the surface of a world. The lava can carve a groove in the surface, and eventually the top of the lava flow solidifies even before the flow stops. When the lava flows away, you’re left with a tube under the surface, like a subway tunnel. At that point, the roof of the tube can collapse in spots; on Earth this is common in Hawaii and other volcanic spots. It happens on the Moon — perhaps there are seismic events, or nearby meteorite impacts — and we’ve even seen several on Mars, too.
(more…)

What happens when a star with a planetary system (or perhaps a close stellar companion) gets old, expands into a red giant, and engulfs its neighborhood?

This:

"This", in this case, is the star BP Piscium (or just BP Psc), a star a bit less than twice the mass of the Sun located about 1000 light years away. The picture is actually a composite of both an optical image from the Lick Observatory (in white and green) and X-rays using the orbiting Chandra Observatory (purple).

The jets of matter streaming away are usually seen around young stars. When a star forms, there is a thick disk of material surrounding it. Due to processes not fully understood yet (though we know it has to do with the disk, the star’s spin, and the star’s magnetic field), matter and energy can be focused into those two beams, and they can blast away from the star’s poles at high velocity, stretching for several light years.

But there’s a monkey in the wrench here: BP Psc isn’t a young star.
(more…)