Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Speaking of Sagan… BABlogee Rob Rollins sent me this link to a great essay by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson. It’s about science, how it’s done, and the sense of wonder it evokes.

One of my favorite things to do is to take a set of facts and use them to imagine how the world might work. In writing about some of these ideas, my aim is not to be correct — how can I be, when the answer isn’t known? — but to be thought-provoking, to ask questions, to make people wonder.

Speculation is a difficult thing to master, and far more difficult to control: when does speculation tread into the territory of nonsense, or jump too far in its suppositions? Yet without it, science is on a treadmill, going nowhere.

Happily, science does go somewhere. It goes everywhere! And best yet? It takes you with it.

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.

When I was in high school I was a marching band dork. Shocker, I know. But let me tell you something: we were good. Very good. We won a lot of competitions, and we hosted a drum and bugle corps competition at our school that pulled in the best from around the country. To this day, all these decades later, it’s still the loudest thing I have ever heard.

We humans have incredible talents: imagination, cleverness, dexterity, and musical abilities that are truly astonishing. Don’t believe me? Then behold:

Un. Flipping. Believable.

Those guys have major talent. Watch the bit from 4:50 to 5:10 again, and call those guys dorks. Holy mackerel, they rock.

Tip o’ the chapeau to Fark.

Just in case you’re wondering, Daylight Saving Time ends next week, on November 1, for the United States. On that date, us ‘muricans will set our clocks back an hour.

For those in Europe, though, European Summer Time ends now. I’m writing this at 18:00 my time, which is already past midnight in England. At 01:00 you set your clocks back an hour. I have checked some online clocks, and they are confused — or maybe I am, who knows — on what time it is right now. So my advice is to wait a while. Of course, since it’s late there, by the time you read this it’ll most likely be Sunday morning. So when you wake up and read this, make sure you set your clocks accordingly. That’ll make it easy on everybody.

And yeah, I’m no big fan of this either.

The Planetary Society is setting up a brand new online store, so they’re holding a blowout sale to get rid of all their old inventory. They have posters for $2, t-shirts for $5, and more. If you have a kid in a science class, then why not pick up some posters for the school?

While at TAM London I grabbed some short interviews with a handful of the speakers. Here’s the first one: me screwing around with podcaster, musician, skeptic, and funny guy George Hrab.

I’ll post the others next week. But if you like this sort of ridiculousness, then you should listen and subscribe to Geo’s podcast, too.

As regular readers may recall, I made a bet with Hive Overmind Discover Magazine CEO Henry Donahue that if we hit a target number of page views to both the BA Blog and the DM site, we’d both get tattoos. I can’t reveal mine just yet, but here is a picture of Henry’s: it’s a Celtic salmon, and I must say it’s quite nice. I particularly like the waves over the fish.

The reason I can’t reveal mine is that I had it done as part of the TV show L.A. Ink, and I can’t post pictures or talk about the design until after the show airs. But don’t worry, I’ll post the whole painful (literally) story right here once I can.

Congrats to Henry for such a handsome ink job! I can’t wait until we meet up again, and we can compare tats in person. That’ll be a fun pic for the blog.