The odds of successfully surviving an attack on an Imperial Star Destroyer are approximately…

Phil Plait — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 14:00:15 +0000

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?

Related posts:

-

Blastr: Invasion Earth!

Phil Plait — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:00:53 +0000

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 ...

Dr. Sith’s The Grinch Who Stole Christmas

Phil Plait — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:00:26 +0000

In retrospect, the story similarities seem obvious.

Via Neatorama on G+

Bad Astronomy review: Terra Nova

Phil Plait — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:30:45 +0000

So I finally watched the pilot episodes of the new Fox scifi drama "Terra Nova" (it airs Mondays at 8:00 p.m. ET). I found it watchable, with some potential, and like every other TV show in existence (except "Firefly") it had some things I liked and some I didn’t. I got email about it due to a couple of lines in the pilot, which I’ll get to in a sec. First, a quick overview.

Gotta get back in time

The idea behind the show (no real spoilers here, since this is all explained in the first minute of the program) is that by the year 2149, the Earth is dying. Pollution, global warming, and so on have made the planet nearly uninhabitable. People need rebreathers just to go outside, and many scenes show huge chimneys pumping smoke into the air just to hammer home that point. Population control is mandatory; having more than two kids is an invitation for the police to come.

The show centers on a family – cop father, brilliant doctor mother, rebellious teenage son, science whiz-kid teenage daughter, and their youngest, a girl. And ...

Doctor Who fan trailer to tide you over

Phil Plait — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 19:14:39 +0000

If the recent season finale of Doctor Who made you despair of waiting a year for the next season to start (with only two holiday episodes between now and then to alleviate the pain), then try watching this fan-made trailer for the show. It’s quite well-done (and there are no spoilers for the last episode).

Sigh. Yeah, now the wait will be even worse. And I should know: I’m a doctor.

Oh– there are two other fun DW vids, if you’re so inclined: this one, a Series 6 synopsis that is spoiler-ish, and this one, which is a quite spoilery funny mashup of the good Doctor with Tik Tok from Lady Gaga Ke$ha. Yes, seriously.

Tip o’ the sonic to Nerdist and Blastr.

Cosmic designs

Phil Plait — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:04:11 +0000

One of the more fascinating meta-qualities of the intertubez is how it’s opened up a bunch of sub-cultures to people who would otherwise have no idea they exist. Sure, we all know about Trekkers and Whovians and Steampunkers, but until the advent of Twitter, Facebook and the other social nets I was not aware of the popularity of crafters: people who make things. I mean people who knit, do papercraft, create clothes, and so on.

Oh sure, I knew it was a fun hobby and all that — what I didn’t know is how devoted some folks are to it. It’s pretty cool; they make cozies, socks, hats, skirts, dresses, sweaters… it’s amazing. And of course, this being the web and all, a lot of these folks are also space/math/science/scifi nerds. Still I never, ever, ever would’ve predicted this. I present to you The Vitruvian Dalek:

EXTERMIKNIT!*

Spoonflower, the site that hosts this pattern, has tons of other nerdy ones, like math equations, a solar system diagram, and even the odd Ood or two.

Winter’s coming… I could use a quilt. Hmmm.

Tip o’ the ...

Dragon*Con 2011

Phil Plait — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:30:33 +0000

I suddenly realized I never put my photos up from Dragon*Con a few weeks ago, so I’ve corrected that oversight.

Those pictures are just a taste of how much fun I had. If you’re an old school Doctor Who fan, then check this out:

That’s me with Sylvester McCoy, the Seventh Doctor! We chatted for a few minutes backstage before the Paul and Storm/Jonathan Coulton/Molly Lewis concert. I only got to see the first few minutes of the music because I had a panel at the same time and had to run. But Doctor McCoy (see what I did there?) was great. I was on a panel — really, a goofy quiz show that was uproarious and maybe a little naughty — with him the next night (and Doc Hammer from Venture Brothers; here’s proof) and it was awesome.

In fact, I’ll admit I felt like an A-list geek the whole con. It was amazing and gratifying and wonderful. I have been a fanboy my whole life; I went to science fiction cons when I was in high school and doted over my favorite authors. I stopped going ...

Astronomers discover a wretched hive of scum and villainy

Phil Plait — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 18:04:40 +0000

If there’s a bright center to the Universe, astronomers have found the planet it’s farthest from. Called Kepler-16b, it’s a Saturn-like world which has the distinction of being the first discovered to orbit both Sun-like stars in a binary system.

OK, Star Wars references aside, this is pretty cool. Most of the planets being found around other stars are orbiting single stars. A very few — like a possible planet orbiting Gamma Cephei — orbit one of the stars in a binary system, and some (like NN Serpentis b and c) orbit both stars, but one of them is a dead star like a white dwarf or a neutron star.

Unlike those, Kepler-16 is a binary where both stars, though dinky, are bona-fide stars like the Sun, and the planet orbits both. Actually, how it was found is pretty nifty. The orbiting Kepler observatory is designed to stare at over 100,000 stars and detect the tell-tale drop in light when a planet transits (that is, from our point of view passes directly in front of) its parent star. Kepler has found ...

Blastr: So, you wanna blow up the Earth?

Phil Plait — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:00:22 +0000

Blowing up a planet is hard. Really, really, really, really hard. In fact, if you had one "really" in that sentence for every Joule of energy it would take to make the Earth all explodey, you’d need more than 2 x 1032 of them. That’s a lot of "really"s.

I actually calculated that number using some basic physics and math, and then decided to write an entire article around it, which is now up on Blastr. It doesn’t matter how big a supervillain you are, blowing up a planet is next to impossible, despite the non-existence of Ceti Alpha 6.

There are ways of tearing a planet apart, actually, but I didn’t want the article to go on too long, and I figure exploding one versus ripping it apart are different things. Maybe I’ll do a follow up article. And really, why blow it up at all? If you want to kill everything on it, just set up a massive ad campaign for hair spray, sell the inhabitants a billion cans of the stuff, and then sit back and wait for them to destroy their ozone layer. ...

Spectacular sand pit found on Mars!

Phil Plait — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:50:56 +0000

Check. This. Out: a perfectly-formed collapse pit on Mars that leads to an underground cavern!

Amazing! [Click to barsoomenate.]

This was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in July 2011. See the hole in the bottom? You can tell from the lighting that this is an underground opening to a cavern — a skylight. Quite a few of these have been found on Mars, actually. We see them on Earth and even on the Moon. Given the angle of the shadows, the vertical distance from the bottom of the pit to the floor of the cavern is about 20 meters (65 feet). Watch your step!

Here’s how we think skylights like this form. In the distant past, Mars was geologically active. Rivers of lava ran across the surface. If the surface of the lava hardens it can form a roof, allowing the lava underneath to continue flowing; these are called lava tubes and there are bazillions of them in Hawaii, for example. Eventually, the source of the lava chokes off and the lava flows away, leaving the empty tube underground. If the roof is thin in ...

Kali ma… Kali ma… Kali ma, shakti deh!

Phil Plait — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 13:02:30 +0000

[I suppose this post has a PG-13 rating. Not for language or nudity, but for what may be a (humorously) disturbing image for some folks. Be ye fairly warned, says I.]

So the European Southern Observatory took the Very Large Telescope, pointed it at NGC 1929 — a cluster of stars 180,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud — and got this amazing picture:

[Click to ennebulenate, or grab the huger 1780 x 1780 pixel version.]

I was all set to talk about how this huge bubble — over 300 light years across! — is being blown into the gas surrounding the cluster by the combined mighty winds of the stars inside it, young massive stars that live short, violent lives that end in short, violent deaths, and how this will compress the gas further and induce even more star formation, but how in the meantime they’re flooding the gas with powerful ultraviolet radiation that’s lighting up the gas precisely like a neon sign, and how amazingly detailed this image is despite the cluster and gas being in another galaxy at a distance of nearly 2 quintillion kilometers…

My Dragon*Con schedule

Phil Plait — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 21:17:43 +0000

I received my schedule for Dragon*Con, a really big scifi/fantasy/what-have-you convention in Atlanta from September 1 – 5. If you’re going, this is where I’ll be (besides slowly traversing the huckster rooms). The descriptions are from TPTB at D*C, which I’ve modified here and there so they make more sense.

Thursday September 1:

Although not part of the official D*C schedule, the annual Star Party is becoming a fun tradition. It’ll be at 7:30 p.m. at Emory University, and details are online. It’s a fund raiser for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society; I’ll be there as well as George Hrab, Pamela Gay, and Nicole Gugliucci. We’ll have telescopes set up!

Friday September 2:

13:00 – Geek a Week Podcast Reunion

Description: Join artist Len Peralta as he talks with geek superstars that were featured on the Geek A Week Podcast.

Location: Regency VI – VII – Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)

Saturday September 3:

11:30 a.m.: These are the ways the world will end…

Description: Our panel tears apart the asteroid apocalypse theory, rips into the latest “world enders”, and answers questions. We’re probably safe (for now).

Location: 207 / 206 / 205 – ...

Doctor Who infographic

Phil Plait — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 13:19:00 +0000

I somehow totally missed the fact that the mid-season premier of Doctor Who will be August 27, in just three weeks! Yay!

Still, for us squeeing Whovians, that seems like ages. So why not fill this long, dark tea-time of the soul by looking over Bob Canada’s cheeky Doctor Who infographic? It’s pretty good, and has some solid stuff in it for newbies and Who veterans alike. He also has one for the 1960s and 70s era villains, too.

As for the premier, I’ve been trying to avoid spoilers as much as possible — I haven’t even watched the trailer for the next series. The past two series have opened up a lot of questions that remain unsolved, but I’ve been a Steven Moffat fan for a long time (have you watched the adult sitcom "Coupling"? Brilliant!) so I know patience will pay off.

BTW, Buzzfeed has a great gallery of Doctor Who graffiti too. And of course, there’s also this from your humble host.

Related posts:

- An observatory that’s bigger on the inside
- Blastr: My favorite ...

No on Comic Con, yes on Dragon*Con

Phil Plait — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:00:12 +0000

Because it’s a FAQ: I won’t be at the San Diego Comic Con this year, but I will be at Dragon*Con.

For the past few years, Discover Magazine has hosted an increasingly popular and extremely fun panel on Science and Science Fiction at Comic Con, which I’ve been honored to moderate. Unfortunately, this year we won’t be doing the panel, so I won’t be attending. I’m sad, but we’ll be there next year for sure. I hate to miss such a huge geekapalooza, but we’ll have to figure out some way to make the 2012 panel extra-awesome. I’m thinking the panelists will skydive in. Or we’ll fight with bat’leths. Something.

In better news, I’ll be at Dragon*Con on September 1-5. In fact, I’ll be at the becoming-an-annual-event star party on Thursday night, September 1, where we raise money for cancer research. D*C has a very strong skeptic track, and I’ll be there as well as doing other talks and fun things (like having a two-person panel with my friend Kevin Grazier, where we rip on science in movies and TV). There are also tons of other things going on ...

Melancholia

Phil Plait — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 13:00:51 +0000

I’ve been hearing rumors about an end-of-the-world movie called "Melancholia", and I finally stumbled on a trailer for it:

It looks pretty interesting. Without too many spoilers — it’s in the trailer, after all — the doomsday is caused by a planet approaching the Earth, and we hear someone say it was hidden behind the Sun.

Now, I’ll say that’s not really possible. A planet falling in from deep space and approaching us close enough to harm us would be visible for decades, and since the Earth circles the Sun once per year there’s no way the Sun could hide it for very long — if the Sun were hiding it in April, for example, by November it would be high in the night sky and visible to everyone. At first I interpreted the line to mean it was orbiting the Sun on the opposite side of our orbit, but that doesn’t work either; a planet big enough to hurt us would have revealed itself through its gravitational influence on other planets long before now (Gerry and Sylvia Anderson did a movie in the 60s based on this called "Journey to the Far ...

An observatory that’s bigger on the inside

Phil Plait — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:43:01 +0000

Duncan Kitchin is an amateur astronomer in Oregon. Like many of us, he has a telescope that’s kind of a pain lugging outside (my old ‘scope was the same size and shape as a water heater, leading to much hilarity as it sat in the living room). Duncan got tired of dragging it out when it was clear, then hauling back inside when the observing was done.

What’s a guy to do?

Well, if you’re an astronomer and a Doctor Who fan, the solution is obvious: pour a concrete pad, install the permanent mount for the ‘scope, and then make yourself a protective shell around the whole thing… shaped like the TARDIS!

FanTAStic. How flippin’ cool is this? It’s an excellent replica, and it’s functional (hmmmm). The side with the handles comes off, revealing the mount; the rest of the TARDIS is on wheels and can be rolled back, leaving just the ‘scope itself to bring out and install:

That makes for a much easier night of observing. Duncan notes it’s designed to keep water out. I hope it keeps water in as well, in case of any mishaps with the Doctor’s pool.

I ...

Oh, Ood Grief!

Phil Plait — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:00:19 +0000

So that’s why Charlie Brown never kicked the football. He blinked.

Credit: Wild Guru Larry. Tip o’ the sonic screwdriver to io9.

Blastr: My favorite TV scientists

Phil Plait — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 16:25:30 +0000

Good news, everyone!

I’ve written a new article for Blastr, the news and opinion web portal for the SyFy channel. This one is "7 TV scientists that even real scientists approve of", and is essentially my Top 6 (with a tie for second place, bringing it to 7) favorite fictional scientists on TV. The picture here may be something of a spoiler for one of them. Whaaaa?

I originally wrote the article as my favorite astronomers on TV, but decided to expand it to all scientists. That didn’t change my list much; it just made it easier to include a couple of folks. The problem with a list like this is, first, keeping it short — there are a lot of potential candidates. I got around that by adding an Honorable Mention at the bottom of each section.

Also, it’s hard to remember everyone! For example, several commenters on the article point out I didn’t include Walter Bishop from Fringe, and I have to cop to that one. I really like Walter, and to be honest the reason I ...

Space Girl

Phil Plait — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 13:00:45 +0000

How big a scifi dork are you? Probably not as much as Charmax76, who made this video called "Space Girl", from the song of the same name by The Imagined Village:

Wow. I like the song, but I love the graphics. I recognized something like 3/4 of those scenes, probably more. And I like the order she put them in: you see women in somewhat trivial roles at first, but as the video progresses they get tougher and tougher. Not always, but that’s the trend. That reflects TV and movies, I think, too. Again, not always, but women have much better roles in scifi than they did even 30 years ago. The way video ends is… well. It made me sad. Doctor Who fans know why.

Another very different but clever animation for this song is also online.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Buzzfeed.

Doc Savage

Phil Plait — Sun, 29 May 2011 13:30:54 +0000

Two of my favorite things in the world are Doctor Who and My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™. So what could be better than a video combining them, and throwing in two giant Tesla coils and a Faraday cage?

I think I have nothing to add to this.

Dammit, Jim, I *am* a doctor!

Phil Plait — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 13:01:07 +0000

With the new series of Doctor Who premiering today, why not poke a little fun?

It took me a second to recognize the voice as David Hyde Pierce, and the words are from "Treasure Planet", which I thought was actually quite an enjoyable movie.

But as an astronomer myself, I have to question the word "useless". Why, we have many uses! We help keep the coffee and polyester industries afloat, for one. And without us, people with no actual sense of humor wouldn’t be able to say "So, what’s your sign?" when they meet us, which, let me tell you, is awesomely hilarious every single time we hear it.

Anyway, if you’re expecting more out of me today, you don’t know me very well because I’ll be camped out in front of the TV waiting for the new series to premier.

Trust me. I am a doctor.

Two Sunday radio interviews

Phil Plait — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 16:49:09 +0000

You know what you don’t get enough of? Hearing me blather on about astronomy and skepticism on a Sunday. So you’re in luck: I’ll be doing two interviews on Sunday:

1) At 6:00 p.m. Eastern (US) time (22:00 UT) I’ll be on Star Talk Radio with my old pal and all around cool dude Neil deGrasse Tyson, and my new pal, comedian and all around cool chick Leighann Lord (we’re the three on the left of that pic with producers Helen Matsos and Leslie Mullen on the right). We’ll be dissecting the science in science fiction movies and basically having a good time with it. You can listen to the show when it airs, but keep in mind we pre-recorded it when I was in NYC last week for NECSS.

What I will do, though, is listen along when it airs Sunday, and then I’ll be on Twitter making dumb jokes and snarky comments as usual. So join me there and I’ll answer your questions if I can.

2) I’ll be on the Think Atheist radio/podcast at 8:00 ...

Blastroid

Phil Plait — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 18:30:21 +0000

I have a new article up on Blastr, the SyFy channel’s web site for news and info and scifi-y stuff.

The article is about asteroid impacts, and the lack of Hollywood accuracy thereof. I take a typical movie synopsis and destroy it plot device by plot device. It’s like taking all my movie reviews and condensing them down into one run-on snark.

And yes, I know that the illustration for the article (seen here) is scientifically inaccurate. I know what you’re thinking; it’s so obvious: no asteroid is actually flying saucer shaped! At least, that’s what they want you to think*.

So go over there, read the article, and leave your own complaints in the comments. I promise I will read them all and take them into consideration†.

* Dear readers with an impaired sense of humor: I know that’s not really how the picture is scientifically inaccurate. Of course, the actual mistake is that you should see thousands of stars in the background.

† No I won’t.

Related posts:

- Blastr: Other than that, Spock, how was the movie?

Bad Astronomy » SciFi

Nerdist + Boulder + … me!

I am the Piano Doctor Man

The odds of successfully surviving an attack on an Imperial Star Destroyer are approximately…

Blastr: Invasion Earth!

Dr. Sith’s The Grinch Who Stole Christmas

Bad Astronomy review: Terra Nova

Doctor Who fan trailer to tide you over

Cosmic designs

Dragon*Con 2011

Astronomers discover a wretched hive of scum and villainy

Blastr: So, you wanna blow up the Earth?

Spectacular sand pit found on Mars!

Kali ma… Kali ma… Kali ma, shakti deh!

My Dragon*Con schedule

Doctor Who infographic

No on Comic Con, yes on Dragon*Con

Melancholia

An observatory that’s bigger on the inside

Oh, Ood Grief!

Blastr: My favorite TV scientists

Space Girl

Doc Savage

Dammit, Jim, I am a doctor!

Two Sunday radio interviews

Blastroid