Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Clearly, the artist behind The Stonemaker Argument is after my heart. And his daughter is an awful lot like mine…

[Click to see the whole thing...]

The link to this cartoon was left in the comments to an earlier post of mine, but deserves its on post, so tip o’ the Treknobabble to Andrew.

Hey, it’s been a while since we’ve had some good ol’ pareidolia — seeing faces in random patterns — here on BA, and since Halloween just passed, here’s a goodie: a demon in a door’s wood grain:

Hmmm, not bad. For what it’s worth, the father doesn’t claim it’s actually a demon, though he does claim it wasn’t there before Halloween and now it is. I suspect it’s more likely due to no one noticing it before, but hey! That’s just me.

And the instant I saw the face I knew it wasn’t a demon. There’s a far more likely explanation:

Better call Ahnold.

My favorite part was the father saying the face didn’t freak out the kids. I’m not surprised, since clearly they’ve gotten used to Bambi’s dad hanging on the wall.

Tip o’ the demonic alien cornrows to Fark.

On Halloween, Justin Robert Young and my friend Andrew Mayne tried to raise the spirit of Harry Houdini in a seance at the James Randi Educational Foundation HQ in Florida. The event was live on the intertubez and and the recorded stream is on UStream. The whole thing is over an hour long, but well worth your time! A bunch of people (including Penn & Teller, David Copperfield, Michael Shermer, and me) were asked to send in secret words for Houdini to divine at the seance. This wasn’t a foolproof scientific experiment, but it’s fun.

Here’s the show below. Note: some NSFW language.

They picked my word starting at about 39 minutes into the video. And what was my word? Well, at the risk of generating the ire of Houdini’s shade, it was floccinaucinihilipilification, a word I remembered from when I was a kid and read the Guinness Book of World Records (it was in the list for, duh, longest words). It means "the act of estimating something as being worthless". I didn’t realize they were using a Ouija board at the seance, though, so perhaps choosing a word that’s about 30 letters long may have been a little irritating. However, I really wanted to make sure they wouldn’t pick it by chance. Infinite monkeys, and all that.

The Denver Skeptics divined my word as "shor". I have to count that as a definite hit.

I should have picked pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

Regular readers know that Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is one of my favorite web comics. This morning, he had an astronomy-themed bit of snark:

I’ve blocked out the woman’s reply, so you’ll have to click through to see the punch line.

And I love Zach, the artist, I really do, but…

SPOILER for the joke:

Meteorites are after they hit the ground. Meteors are when they are still in the air and glowing, and the solid part is called a meteoroid. There is no semantic definition of when a meteoroid is is big enough to be called an asteroid, but given the size depicted in the cartoon, I’d say that one counts.

See? This is why you shouldn’t date an astronomer. Unless you like that sort of thing. Oh baby! Talk cosmic to me!

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Brian Carroll who tweeted the link to Rebecca at Skepchick, who is in turn technically correct in her title since I’m married and Mrs. BA can kick anyone else’s asteroid herself.

It’s almost Halloween! As a scifi dork, I love this time of year. But also as a man of a certain age, another thing I love is the master of humor his own self, Bug Bunny. So to get you in the Halloweeny mood, soak in the genius of Hare Raising Hare

Tip o’ the brow ridge to Samurai Frog.

As promised, Brian Cox was on The Colbert Report last night, and hit it out of the park. The whole show was better than average (which is saying a lot) but Brian truly rocked!

If you missed it (and live in the States) the whole episode is online (Brian’s segment is about 13:50 into the episode). Comedy Central won’t allow embedding the whole show (sigh), and Brian’s segment isn’t separated out on the CC site, but right before he was on Colbert ragged on physics and the LHC:

In the full segment, they talk about Brian’s book Why E=mc², which was excellent. I’ll try to write a review of it as soon as I can. In the meantime, I do have to praise Colbert for his insight; as Brian points out he was correct in his ideas! I was cheering along with the segment. It still cracks me up that the smartest and most insightful commentary on TV is not from any of the "real" news stations, but from satirical shows like Colbert and The Daily Show. They have better science coverage than CNN, MSNBC and anyone else combined.

Thanks to the website Geekologie, I learned that there is a town called Dinosaur in Colorado! It sounds like a fun place. Who wouldn’t want to live on Ceratosaurus Circle or Diploducus Drive? Too bad it’s 500 km away from my house. But given that it’s in Colorado, I wonder if any of those streets are older than 6000 years?