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
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.
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.
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?
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.
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
Bad Astronomy is a Wikio Top Blog! Clearly, Wikio has excellent taste.
"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?" -- Adam Savage, Mythbusters
"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating." -- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising