If you’ve read my book (and doing the math from the number of my readers versus number of books sold, I’m guessing some of you aren’t pulling your weight here) then you know I love me some death by black hole. Fun! Get fried, get sucked down, get smashed, get… spaghettified?

Yeah, you heard me. If you don’t know about spaghettification, then I suggest you sit back, relax, and enjoy my bud Neil Tyson as he explains all.

This is cool news: on page 15 of Sunday’s Book World insert, the Washington Post gave my book a really good review! It’s online, too. You have to register at the site, but it’s free.

Here’s an excerpt:

Plait, a popular astronomer and blogger, describes each doomsday scenario with glee — for instance, how humanity could be roasted by the sun in its red-giant phase, crushed into spaghetti by the gravitational force of a black hole or blasted to smithereens by an incoming asteroid. Yet for all that, his book is strangely comforting. The sun will begin dying about 1.1 billion years from now, but it won’t explode (it isn’t big enough), nor will most stars in our neighborhood. If aliens were going to come, we would probably have seen them already. The eventual death of the universe is so many years away that it’s nearly inconceivable.

That was one of my big points: this stuff is fun to think about, but in reality the odds of anything actually happening to wipe out the Earth are really low.

Plait rolls through these explanations in the same easy way that makes his “Bad Astronomy” blog for Discover magazine so popular. Occasionally the more inquisitive reader might be disappointed by the superficial nature of some of the physics explanations… Nevertheless, the decision to avoid scary equations does render this work comprehensible and engaging for the neophyte.

… which was part of the point. I want this book to have a wide appeal, so calculus might be out! I actually considered an appendix with some math in it, but decided it wasn’t necessary for a book like this, and in fact most of the calculations I needed were already done in papers too complex to explain, or from things that are easy to find online.

Anyway, I’m pleased with the review. Almost all the reviews or notes I’m getting back are favorable, in fact, which makes me glad; I would expect some hate mail, but I literally have had none. And I’m still waiting to hear from Two Large Print Venues who were planning on doing a review of the book as well. I’d cross my fingers, but duh.

I’ll be on TV tonight and all this week: The History Channel is airing a show called "Seven Signs of the Apocalypse" at 21:00 Eastern (US) time (but check your local listings). I did what I call a "stand-up interview" for this show: me standing in front of some interesting background while I talk astronomy. In this case, it was asteroid impacts and gamma-ray bursts, two of my fave death-from-the-skies scenarios.

I’ve seen some of the graphics from the show, and they are spectacular. It should be pretty cool, even if couched in an "End Times" framework.

A couple of interviews I did to start off 2009:

1) I chatted with Reed Braden from the podcast Two Smokin’ Hot Freethinkers (some NSFW language, here’s the family-friendly one). He also got some brief words from other bloggers like Splendid Elles, PZ whats-his-name, Rebecca Watson, and Hemant Mehta. My part starts at 7:30 in.

2) I was the guest on AstroCast.tv (not to be confused with Pamela and Fraser’s AstronomyCast) for a longer discussion about bad astronomy and Death from the Skies! Part 1 is online now, and there will be two more parts that’ll go up later in the month.

I think if I created a black hole, things would actually go a lot worse for me. And everyone.

This is really just an extension of the old Road Runner idea, but it’s still cute.

Tip o’ the Schwarzschild radius to James Randi. Yes, that Randi!

I am getting quite a few messages on Twitter (what? You don’t follow me on Twitter?) and Facebook from folks who got my book for the holidays. To save myself time — I’m too full of cookies and chocolate to do much by way of anything useful today — I’ll say here: enjoy! I don’t know if reading about a gamma-ray burst sterilizing half the planet in under three seconds is a good tribute to Peace on Earth, but who am I to argue with people with such extraordinary taste in holiday gifts?

I did a couple of podcasts recently, with slightly varied results.

The first is the BBC Sky at Night ‘cast with Will Gater and Chris Bramley (direct link to MP3). We talk DftS!, astronomy, evil doomcriers, misconceptions, movies, Obama’s influence on space science, and IYA 2009.

The second, and decidedly different contribution, was for the third Skepchick ‘cast, where they have some fun with The War on Christmas ™ (direct link to MP3). They got a bunch of people to send snarky and sarcastic messages about how they’re contributing to The War. I show up at 24:40. And hey: the podcast itself is pretty much wall-to-wall NSFW. There’s some stuff that’ll offend a lot of people, of course, but also some pretty adult conversations about gift giving. I’m just sayin’.