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.

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 there, like the parties, the costumes, the dealer rooms, the general madness.

Read the links below in the Related Posts to get the idea. I’ll post my schedule when I get it, and if you’re a reader here, find me at one of my events!

… and I still want to bring a costume. I have an idea, but we’ll see if I can figure out how to pull it off.

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 Side of the Sun", in fact).

But that doesn’t matter. What good science fiction does is take a concept and see how it affects things, and in this case I’ll take a rogue planet as the plot device. "Melancholia" looks like a lovely movie, and I imagine I’ll watch it when it’s finally released in November.

Incidentally, a different movie called "Another Earth" will be coming out in a couple of weeks, but it’s also about a planet that appears in the sky, and also seems to be thoughtful and interesting. The trailer is on YouTube.

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 want one of these (and that telescope, a very yummy Takahashi FSQ-106ED) SO BAD! And Who wouldn’t? After all, it may look small on the outside, but it has access to the whole Universe on the inside.

Images courtesy of Duncan Kitchin.

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

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

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 didn’t include him is because of my initial astronomer prejudice, plus I haven’t watched the show in a while! I still haven’t gotten around to seeing the season finale because I’m trying to finish out Stargate Atlantis and the latest Doctor Who episodes.

And, oh yeah, having a life, too. So much TV to watch! But the weather’s nice in Boulder, and my bike gets so lonely…

Anyway, go give it a read and leave a comment there if you love it or hate it, or want to chastise me for leaving off some scientist or another.

And maybe I’ll have to do this same thing for movie scientists, too. After all, Clayton Forrester is top man in nuclear and astrophysics! He knows all about meteors!

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.