By the time you read this, you have already heard or discovered that Mozilla, reddit, Wikipedia, and many others sites are going dark today to raise awareness about Congress’s highly regressive internet blocking legislation. The House’s version, SOPA, is making headlines, but the Senate version, PIPA, is pretty much the same.

I am not blacked out for two reasons. Since I am hosted on Discover’s site, I cannot take the whole thing down, and it would not be appropriate for me to ask. But also, simply blacking out raises awareness but doesn’t give information. I’m all about making sure people get good info, so below is a list of links where you’ll find why so many people hate this legislation so much.

- Google (!)

- reddit (they also have this page with many links to help you take action)

- Adam Savage at Popular Mechanics

- Forbes (though it’s clearly not correct to say SOPA is dead, and I no longer trust Obama will do as he says after signing the NDAA)

- Mashable

- Wil Wheaton

And I’ll note: I have a friend in the film industry whom I like and respect very much. She and I talked about this; she had a film pirated so much she made no money on it, and couldn’t pursue the pirates because they were overseas. She is right that we need a better way to find and prosecute (or at least stop) that sort of thing, and as far as I can tell SOPA would in fact stop what happened to her. Unfortunately, it does far, far more. I do not and cannot trust this government — or any that may follow — to use this kind of power judiciously. The links above will show you why.

I am against these bills, and I urge you to contact your Congresscritters. I already know my Representative, Jared Polis, is against PIPA, since he’s been fighting it nonstop. Find out what yours thinks, and act appropriately.

[Update: I had inadvertently switched which bill went with which part of Congress, and it's now fixed. My apologies.]

If you read my blog (and you’d better accept that as an axiom) then you have probably heard of Chris Hardwick. His podcast, Nerdist, is a monstrous juggernaut of podcasty geekiness, for one thing. And he’s been on Craig Ferguson’s show, and Conan, and Chelsea Lately, and a bunch of others. He wrote a book on how being a nerd can make your life better. Chris is something of a Doctor Who fan — proof, you want? — and so he and I have significant overlap in our lives. We met at Comic Con a couple of years ago, but we haven’t managed to get together since then.

But all that will change on Friday, March 2, when Chris will be bringing the Nerdist podcast here to Boulder, live at the Boulder Theater!

Chris and his co-hosts Jonah Ray and Matt Mira will be on stage making the nerdery in my fair town, and — wait for it, waaaiiittt for ittttt — Chris has invited me to be his guest.

I don’t know what we’ll be talking about, but I’m sure it will cover these topics at the least: the Doctor, growing up geeky, astronomy, w00tstock, space travel, the Mythbusters, zombies, and which of us wants to run off with River Song more. Probably pretty much in that order.

I feel obligated to note that if you’re not familiar with Chris’s podcast, it might be possible that it should be considered just ever so slightly NSFW. Or maybe a lot. Just so’s you know.

Tickets are on sale now! If you’re in the area come on by… and face it, if you’re reading this blog and you know who Chris is you have nothing else to do on a Friday night anyway.

P.S. If you’re not around Boulder, the Nerdist Podcast Live is going to be at a bunch of other towns as well, so look for one near you.

I make no excuses for my love of Doctor Who, and one of my favorite things about it since it was rebooted back in 2005 has been the music. I have always loved the title theme (originally written by Ron Grainer), ever since I was a little kid, and the modern orchestral reworking of it by Murray Gold is magnificent. I listen to the soundtracks all the time.

Gold wrote a new theme for The Doctor for Matt Smith’s version of the character, called "I Am the Doctor", and it’s fantastic. It’s got an odd beat to it, because it’s in 7 (as opposed to the usual 2, 3 or 4 beats per measure of most music). A bit off-kilter, just like the Time Lord himself, and with an underlying momentum and power. Also like The Doctor.

And that’s why I love this video: Murray Gold playing the theme on the piano — which he posted pseudonymously to YouTube!

Very cool. I’m looking forward to getting the Series 6 soundtrack as soon as it’s available here in the US. But for now, I think I’ll just go have a listen to this track from Series 5 played by the National Orchestra of Wales. Allons-y!

Tip o’ the sonic screwdriver to The Nerdist!

Never tell me the odds!

Yegads. I saw this while I was outside the other day; that’s a lenticular cloud, shaped by winds blowing over the Rocky Mountains. We see a lot of them around Boulder, but this one looked really familiar. I suddenly realized: it’s a ship from Star Wars!

I thought it looked a lot like Queen Amidala’s ship. But I couldn’t be sure, so I sent a note to my pal Bonnie Burton, aka BonnieGrrl, the proprietor of grrl.com, and major Star Wars dork. She concurred with my conclusion of the cloud looking like a Naboo Royal Starship (I was careful not to bias her by suggesting it; she mentioned it herself). And Bonnie should know: she literally wrote the book on Star Wars crafts!

Still, it looked like another ship from Star Wars, too… maybe even one that might be carrying Vader himself. If that’s the case, I know which cloud I could really use now!

Moisture and updrafts matter not. Look at me. Judge me by my convection do you? Hmm? Hmmm?

In what is becoming an annual January tradition celebrating my laziness, I’m reposting this article about why astronomers are no fun at New Year’s parties. Well, they can be, but only until you actually say "Happy New Year!" to them, whereupon they’ll corner and lecture you about how to measure orbital periods. It’s amazing any astronomers reproduce. Anyway, here’s the article, which was a lot of fun to originally write, and even more fun to cut and paste here.]

Yay! It’s a new year!

But what does that mean, exactly?

The year, of course, is the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the Sun, right? Well, not exactly. It depends on what you mean by "year", and how you measure it. This takes a wee bit of explaining, so while the antacid is dissolving in your stomach to remedy last night’s excesses, sit back and let me tell you the tale of the year.

First, I will ignore a few things. For example, time zones. These were invented by a sadistic watchmaker, who only wanted to keep people in thrall of his devious plans. So for now, let’s just ignore them, and assume that for these purposes you spend a whole year (whatever length of time that turns out to be) planted in one spot.

However, I will not ignore the rotation of the Earth. That turns (haha) out to be important.

Let’s take a look at the Earth from a distance. From our imaginary point in space, we look down and see the Earth and the Sun. The Earth is moving, orbiting the Sun. Of course it is, you think to yourself. But how do you measure that? For something to be moving, it has to be moving relative to something else. What can we use as a yardstick against which to measure the Earth’s motion?

Well, we might notice as we float in space that we are surrounded by zillions of pretty stars. We can use them! So we mark the position of the Earth and Sun using the stars as benchmarks, and then watch and wait. Some time later, the Earth has moved in a big circle and is back to where it started in reference to those stars. That’s called a "sidereal year" (sidus is the Latin word for star). How long did that take?

Let’s say we used a stopwatch to measure the elapsed time. We’ll see that it took the Earth 31,558,149 seconds (some people like to approximate that as pi x 10 million (31,415,926) seconds, which is an easy way to be pretty close). But how many days is that?
(more…)

Sometimes, over the holidays, it’s easy to think there’s nothing to do. If you feel that way, Sci-ence! wants to have a word with you.

[Click to exnihiloenate.]

And why, yes, that comic does describe me as a child.

… and maybe as an adult, too.

- In which I disagree with cartoon Neil Tyson

I watched "Battle: Los Angeles" recently, a movie about aliens invading the Earth. It wasn’t terrible, and it wasn’t great. It was watchable, and worked sufficiently well in lowering our supply of popcorn at Chez BA.

But like every alien invasion movie I see, there’s one small, really eensy-weensy problem: the reason they give for the invasion itself was dumb. [SPOILER] They came to steal our water? And use it for fuel? Say WHA?

Ignoring the silly idea of using water for fuel — that’s got physics exactly backwards, since you get energy out of combining oxygen and hydrogen to make water, and it takes energy to crack them apart — there’s an even bigger problem…

… which I won’t tell you here, because I go into all sorts of detail in my latest Blastr article, 6 Reasons Why Aliens Would NEVER Invade Earth. Mind you, I’m not talking about aliens just coming here to shoot the breeze, but aliens coming here to shoot us. It’s hard to think of a good reason they’d do so, and certainly the reasons given in pretty much every movie don’t make sense. And I have a real problem with just how bad aliens are at taking over. Wiping us out should be pretty easy; heck, I wrote a whole other Blastr article about that, too.

So head on over there and give it a read. Agree, disagree? Leave a comment there, too. But if you disagree, be nice: I’m way better at wiping out life on Earth than any Hollywood alien could hope to be.

- Blastr: So, you wanna blow up the Earth?
- Blastr: My Favorite TV Scientists
- Blastroid
- Blastr: Other than that, Spock, how was the movie?
- Blastr: I Was A Zombie For Science
- Big budget movies that got their science right
- Master of Blastr