Via my pal Miss Cellania (possibly not her real name) at Neatorama, I saw this short cat video which is really pretty funny:

Ha! This is a great example of audio pareidolia; hearing (instead of seeing, as it’s usually done) some recognizable pattern in a completely unrelated series of noises. It helps a lot if you’re cued in some way to hear it with subtitles. In this case the title of the Neatorama post had me listening for the words "I don’t want to", but I think I would’ve heard it anyway.

But I wonder: if they were going to a dispensary and asked the cat what they were getting, would you hear "marijuana"?

Check out the posts below for more of this sort of thing. The first one still makes me laugh.

One of the things I love about the internet, and specifically Twitter, is how an offhand comment turns into awesome. And it happens within seconds.

For some reason, a super-hi-res picture of the Earth is making the rounds right now. It’s a gorgeous pic, and lots of people are sending me the link via email and Twitter. The thing is, I wrote about this picture back in April, on Earth Day. But such is the nature of the interwebz that stuff pops back up.

I appreciate that folks think enough of me to send me stuff, in case I hadn’t seen it. But in this case I figured I’d better stem the tide, so I tweeted about it, just basically saying thanks, but I already wrote about it.

Right after tweeting that, I realized how hipster it sounded. So I decided to go full hipster, tweeting:

It says, "I wrote about the Earth, it’s an obscure planet, you’ve probably never heard of it. #BadAstrohipster". I added the #BadAstrohipster hashtag as an afterthought; hashtags were originally meant to be used as a way to organize and categorize tweets, but now most folks use them as punchlines.

What happened next is internet magic. People picked up on this immediately, and within seconds I was getting brilliant replies using the hashtag. I retweeted some, but they started coming in so quickly I gave up. Instead, I’ve collected a few here for you to enjoy. This isn’t all of them, but these are the ones that made me LOL. You can search on the hashtag to see what all the others are.

This one was retweeted by Neil Gaiman himself!

The beauty of this next one is hard to overstate. It may take a little reading to get it, but I have to respect a joke about obscuration that is itself obscure. Wow.

And finally this one, which is hands down my favorite:

Thanks to all my brilliant tweeps, and don’t ever let anyone say Twitter is useless. It made me laugh, a lot, and that’s worth everything there is.

I write a sporadically monthly column for Blastr, the science/science fiction web news portal for the SyFy channel. My latest is about asteroid mining — the company Planetary Resources announced recently they have big plans to Go Where No Mine Has Gone before, and I give it the once over.

As I said when I wrote about this earlier, I’m enthusiastic about it, but I’d like to see details. But I’ll say that the first few steps the company wants to take make a great deal of sense to me.

And hey, if you speak French — je ne pas parles merci bleh bleh PeeWee — the French newspaper 20 Minutes has an interview with me about all this as well. I think I come off sounding really smart, because I can’t understand a word of the interview.

More of my Blastr articles are listed below, too. I seem to have a predilection for destruction. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll write about unicorns and rainbows next.

Oh, wait.

- Blastr: In which I vaporize the Moon
- Blastr: Invasion Earth!
- 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

The sky is not as it seems.

Certainly, gazing upon it on a clear night you see so much: stars, planets, the glow of hot gas here and there… but there’s also darkness. Look at the Milky Way, its stream split down the middle by a rift of black. Gape at a gaudy nebula, and you’ll see it pocked here and there by pools of black.

But what is inky pitch to our eyes glows with a cold light to those attuned to it.

Tell me, what do you see here?

The bright star is obvious enough, but you can also, dimly, see a feathered stripe of black splashed across the vista, blocking, absorbing the light from stars behind it. Details are muted, structure difficult to ascertain, and you strain to see features that your brain cannot interpret.

But that’s with your eyes. Try again, look at it, but this time, widen your view. See it now?

Well done! Where before you saw material absorbing light, now it emits! Of course, unbeknownst to you, you had some help: the ESO APEX telescope in Chile. It sees into the far, far infrared, where light is so stretched out it is entirely invisible to humans. In fact, the wavelength of light is so wide there that if it were a vibrating string, you could physically see the crests and troughs, since each would be separated by the next by nearly a millimeter. The light your eye can see has a wavelength only a thousandth that wide.

When APEX looked at this ribbon of dark, frigidly cold dust, it sees the material glowing. What we see as dark, it sees as bright. You can even compare the two directly, using a slider over the two versions of this picture, unveiling precisely what your now-expanded vision can take in.

Cold dust is the bane of the astronomer who uses merely visible light, since it blocks the view behind it. But one person’s poison is another’s meat, and if you study the material that wends its way between the stars — and sometimes comes together to form them — then the view from APEX is sustenance for you. This material is barely above the ultimate freezing point of absolute zero, and you might think it dead and useless. But from such stuff are you and I descended, and everything you see around you.

So when you do peer around you, and take in your environment, your surroundings, your home, look again. You are surrounded by the invisible, permeated by it… but always remember, it was invisible only until we chose to look for it. We created the means necessary to do so, and when we did the Universe opened up before us.

Image credit: ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/A. Hacar et al./Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin.

I realized today that I have never really directly promoted Felicia Day’s new YouTube Channel, Geek and Sundry. If you don’t know who Felicia is, then a) what are you doing on the internet, and 2) seriously, what are you doing on the internet?

Felicia is an actor, producer, writer, funny person, dork, and all-around cool person. I can’t remember if I first saw her on Doctor Horrible, where she played Penny, or on The Guild, a massively (and deservedly so) successful web comedy series she essentially created herself out of thin air (well, with the awesometastic Kim Evey too, hi Kim! [waves]).

She decided that spending 23.9 hours per day working wasn’t enough, so she started up Geek and Sundry to highlight geek stuff. The channel has several shows on it, including the on-air book club Sword and Laser, and Wil Wheaton’s gaming show Table Top. She has her own short show called The Flog, where honestly it’s just her being adorable, which is apparently in her DNA. I’ve been watching them and they’re great… so imagine my surprise when I got to the 46 second mark of this week’s episode:

Oh my. No humorously false braggadocio here, folks: that’s just plain cool.

Thanks Felicia!

Hmmmm… the astronomer in today’s xkcd comic looks familiar, even as a stick figure.

At least he didn’t draw me as a zombie. But I’m no Feynman.

And hey, together with SMBC I think this makes me king of the four-letter comics. I mean, um. Well.

[N.B. And yes, it really is me, I got word from The Man himself. Funny how a minimalist drawing with some context invokes recognition; I've been getting notes from people all morning.]

Well, now I feel bad: when I deflated the Supermoon stuff over the weekend, I swear I didn’t mean it literally!

This amazing shot was taken by astronaut André Kuipers from the International Space Station on May 5, 2012, as the perigee full Moon set behind the Earth’s limb. The Earth’s atmosphere bends light from the Moon, acting like a lens, pushing the bottom part of the Moon up into the top.

Science once again saves me from embarrassment. I was pretty sure the Moon wouldn’t take it personally.

Image credit: ESA/NASA