Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Tonight on Showtime, Penn & Teller take on astrology! You can take a peek at the show online here (with the bad words edited out), or you can watch the show at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time.

I happen to know that a certain Beloved Internet Personality who blogs about astronomy and Doctor Who is on the show briefly as well. Well, it’s probably a good episode anyway, so you should order Showtime and watch it, and buy the DVDs as well.

Bonus ironic pun: the episode is directed by Star Price. Siriusly.

So, if you are totally convinced that astrology actually works, despite an entire Universe of evidence stomping on your face telling you you’re wrong, then you can give P&T a piece of your mind personally, since they’ll be at TAM 7. You can yell at them then… but be prepared to have Penn enthusiastically join that Universe of evidence.

And don’t forget:

If you’re still sitting on the fence about going to The Amaz!ng Meeting — and it starts one week from right now — it’s time to jump off: online registration closes tonight at 17:00 Eastern time (21:00 GMT).

After that the only way to register is at the door, and due to an increase in Nevada tax, we’re forced to raise rates somewhat for walk-ins. You can find the price breakdown on the page linked above.

We’re in the final prep stages for the meeting, and it’s looking fantastic. I don’t know which part I’m most excited about, because honestly there’s so much good stuff going on. But actually, even with the talks, workshops, demos, and everything else, I know what the best part will be: the community. Getting together with old friends, meeting new ones, and being surrounded by a thousand other critical thinkers. It’s like breathing fresh air after a year of being locked up on a stifling planet.

So come join us at TAM. See you there!

Chris Pirillo is a web-borne god of teh intertoobz. Don’t believe me? Type "Chris" into Google and see what comes up first.

Every year he throws a tech conference called Gnomedex, which is about how we humans work and play online. It’s been growing for years, and I have watched it with envious eyes. I’ve always wanted to attend, and every year for the past three Chris has invited me to come, but I have always been busy.

A couple of months ago, while I was laboring away on my machine, a Skype window popped open. It was from Chris, and all it had was a link to Gnomedex and the words, "And ^%$#*^ you if you can’t do it this time."

How can I say no to that? So I am in fact going to Gnomedex this year! I’ll be talking about skepticism online: how we do it, why we need it, and what we can all do to participate. Or at least, that’s the plan. When I actually put my talk together I’ll know what it’s about then.

Gnomedex will be from August 20 - 22 in Seattle, Washington, and you can get some idea of what’s it like on Chris’s site (he also has a kinda-sorta FAQ, too).

I am really, really excited about this. Chris knows a lot of cool people, and in the rare circumstances when we get a chance to hang out I always have fun. It seems like I’ve known him forever, too, and so I’m pretty confident this will be an exceptional event. I hope to see a lot of BABloggees there!

My bud Neil Tyson was on Jimmy Fallon’s TV show the other day, and they asked him a series of questions. It’s worth watching:

About some people’s total credulity when it comes to ridiculous doomsday scenarios, Neil says:

It’s a profound absence of awareness of … how nature works. They’re missing some science classes in their training in high school or in college that would empower you to understand and to judge when someone else is basically full of it.

I actually disagree with Neil here; it’s not that students missed that part of science class, it’s that it was never taught in science class to start with. It’s very, very rare that science is taught as a process, as a way of knowing. Instead, it’s taught like a compendium of facts, as dry as a dictionary, and like a dictionary only pulled out when needed. In fact, the methods of science are a way of understanding everything in the whole Universe, and so can be used all the time, whether it’s when you’re deciding to eat a sandwich or when you’re trying to figure out why gamma-ray burst beams are collimated so tightly.

Being skeptical, asking for evidence, examining that evidence, and diagnosing it compared to the whole of learning that goes on around it is the way to go. That’s how you distinguish sense from nonsense. It takes work, and sometimes hard work, but it’s worth it. The prize is understanding.

And I do agree strongly with Neil when he says,

Sceince is basically an inoculation against charlatans.

Yup. One of many, but still the best.

My evil twin, psychologist and skeptic Richard Wiseman, has another winner: a video playing with your blind spot.

Very cool! I love illusions, and so I used to do all the blind spot tests when I was a kid… but I never knew this about it. I have lots of ideas about how this might work, but I’ll have to do a spot (haha) of research on it.

[Update 2: According to Bob Jacobs, NASA Deputy Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs, the Sunday Express article I link to below "is a fiction". Sounds to me like I got duped, and I apologize to everyone for forwarding this story. Hopefully more info will come out soon, and I’ll update as I hear it.]

[Update: folks at CollectSpace are saying this article is a hoax. I have no evidence either way, which is why I wrote this post using the "allegedly" format. Hopefully more evidence one way or another will come out soon.]

On July 20, just weeks from now, it will be the 40th anniversary of the moment a human stepped foot on another world.

You’ve seen the footage: Neil Armstrong in his bulky suit, stepping off the lunar module’s footpad. Ironically, though, for such a momentous occasion, the video looks awful. Noisy, low-res, and washed out. Well, it turns out that’s because this iconic scene, shown millions of times in the ensuing years, is not the original footage. It was actually taken using a 16mm camera aimed at a screen at NASA’s Mission Control room. And the screen was only showing highly compressed data, so the end result is the lousy stuff we’ve grown used to.

ZOMG! I can see right through NASA’s lies! And through Neil Armstrong, too.

But all that may now change. The UK Sunday Express is reporting that the original tapes have been found! This means that we may finally, after four decades, get the high-quality footage of Neil Armstrong’s small step that we’ve always wanted.

The deal is this: the video stream from the Moon was of a decent quality, but far too large too be able to be be sent to TVs around the country and the world. Using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, astronomers recorded the video beamed from the lunar surface in high quality, but what they transmitted to NASA was necessarily compressed. It’s the latter we’ve all seen. The thing is, the high quality tapes were then lost somehow. NASA admitted it a few years ago, and the search was on! According to the article the tapes were finally found recently in a storage facility on Perth.

This is very exciting, and I certainly hope it’s true. I’d love to see this moment once again, but this time with a beautiful clear picture!

And of course, me being who I am, I have to add this part:

Crucially, [the tapes] could once and for all dispel 40 years of wild conspiracy theories.

That is so wonderfully naive! First, conspiracy theories about the Moon landings aren’t based on facts. If they were, the hoax idea would have dried up and blown away 30 years ago. They have no facts. All they have is a zealous fervor and a gross misunderstanding of reality. Finding the tapes won’t help; you could fly a conspiracy theorist to the Moon and show them the equipment lying on the desolate surface, and they’d accuse you of drugging them. My advice: if you try this, leave that goofball on the Moon. That’ll give him plenty of time to think over his ideas.

Second, the use of the word "crucial" made me laugh. I’ve talked with dozens of people at NASA about the Hoax theory, and it’s hardly something that’s critical to them. They all regard it as an irritant, like a tiny pebble in your shoe or a pesky fold in your underwear you can only feel when you sit a certain way. Ignorable, but irksome when you’re reminded about it. And though they’d never admit it, I bet every single person at NASA loves how Buzz handled it.

And third, what the article author forgets is that, to a conspiracy nut, everything in the whole Universe is part of the conspiracy. So the fact that the tapes were missing is evidence of a coverup, and NASA finding the tapes is due to the massive pressure of the hoax community, and if the tapes aren’t exactly as promised that’s because NASA has doctored them, and if they are pristine and perfect then you can look just there and see the wires holding up the astroNOTS, and you still can’t see stars in the footage, and and and.

So, a few weeks before the 40th anniversary of this incredible moment in history, here’s what I think about the Moon Hoaxers: screw them. Let them gripe and moan and try to pee in the punch bowl of NASA. In reality, that punch bowl is way, way over their heads. I can see the magnificent achievement of Apollo for what it was, and I think the vast majority of people out there do as well.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Fark.

OMG OMG OMG. I’ll be the moderator for the Mythbusters panel at Comic Con this year!

Squeeee!

Comic Con is a HUGE scifi/fantasy/comic/gaming/pop culture convention held every year in San Diego. I’ve always wanted to go, and last year, the Hive Overmind Discover Magazine sent me there to be on a panel about science in science fiction (I have several blog posts about it; start here and click through to the next ones, in particular this one with a video of our panel). They’re sending me again this year (and I’ll have more about that a little later), and I’m really excited to go.

Then last week I get a call from My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™, asking me if I’d like to moderate their panel! I said yes immediately (and then cleared it with the magazine; maybe I did that a little backwards), because despite all indications I’m not a complete idiot.

Adam will be on the panel, as well as Jamie Hyneman, Tory Belleci, and Grant Imahara. Kari can’t attend, as by then she’ll be a brand new mommy. That’s wonderful for her, of course, though a bit of a bummer for us. Adam and Jamie were on a panel at CC last year (that’s the picture shown here) and it was a riot. This year, the room is twice as big, too. Discovery Channel has more info on their press release (PDF; click that link, select your location and "Discovery Channel" for network, then click the link on the right labeled "Mythbusters Comic Con panelists").

On the panel we’ll be talking about the new season, what they have planned for the next, and how their Moon Hoax testing episode would have been an unwatchable disaster without my science advice. I’ll really try to come up with some unusual questions for them, but I could use some help from you, me droogs. If you’ve got a good question for the ‘busters, put it in the comments below… and if I use it I’ll give you a shout-out.

And may I just say once again: squeee!

P.S. This is getting picked up a bit online, like at the San Diego City Guide and Pop Culture Zoo.