Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Hey, for you folks in and around the Boulder area, there is a Drinking Skeptically tonight at 6:00 at Old Chicago on the Pearl Street Mall. DS is a series of social events for skeptics, and they are held all over the place usually once per month.

DS in Boulder is new, and this’ll be my first time there. I hope to see some of you there!

So while searching for something on Google, I found out about a movie called, simply, "Astronomy". Weirdly, IMDB’s synopsis doesn’t even mention astronomy itself, and it’s difficult to find any info on it given the popularity of the two obvious keywords. The movie sounds more like a melodrama than anything else. Anyone here in BABlogland seen it? Opinions?

One thing that amazes me about Boulder is the capricious weather. April 30 was very warm, and after an 8 km bike ride I was exhausted and sweaty. The next day… well, see for yourself.

I do so love it here. When I left Maryland in 2000 to move to California, it was 22 Fahrenheit outside with piles of snow everywhere. Besides a light dusting the first winter there, I don’t think I ever saw snow in California and I certainly didn’t miss it. It’s nice to be able to enjoy it again, even if this May Day snowfall is probably it for six month or more.

And hey, this is my 50th video uploaded to YouTube! Cool. Literally.

I’m going to be heading to Michigan in May to attend the premier of — get this — the Bad Astronomy planetarium show!

I’ve been working with folks from the New Detroit Science Center for some time now on this project. Well, to be more honest, they’ve been working really hard, and I’ve been heckling them. Last year I flew to Detroit to film some segments for it, and from what I have seen the show will be funny, informative, silly, and perhaps with a slight hint of fromage. I have not seen the final product, so it’ll be as big a surprise to me as it is to everyone there.

I’ll be at the NDSC all day on May 10th from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and giving a talk at 1:00. They’re charging a nominal fee for this, seeing as how I’ll be a huge star after the premier. Click here for the flyer. I’ll be happy to sign books, too; they’ll have copies of my first book there for purchase. The second book, Death from the Skies!, won’t be out until October but as usual I’ll be shilling it mercilessly and without remorse.

While I’m in Michigan I’ll be giving a talk at the nearby Cranbrook Institute of Science, a nice museum outside of Detroit. The talk is on May 9th from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m., and tickets are $10 ($8 for members). They require pre-registration, so they know how many rotten tomatoes to stock.

I graduated from the University of Michigan, so it’ll be nice to be back in the land of harsh vowels, Vernor’s soda pop, and holding up your hand to show people where you’re from. And if you don’t get that last one, well, you’re just not from Meeechigan.

And so my adventure in Big Science ends.

We returned from the LHC, driving back across the ring, this time on the surface of the Earth and not 100 meters below it. We got back to the hotel, and I found myself dropped back in to the mundane world where protons were just constituents of what I saw around me, and travel speeds were measured in kilometers per hour, not large fractions of the speed of light.

I prepared for dinner, washing up and basically relaxing for a few minutes. It was hard to believe — maybe the best word under the circumstances — that I was done. Still, I was in Europe, in Switzerland, and there was still fun to be had and friends to enjoy.

We went to Geneva for dinner, parking a kilometer from the restaurant so we could walk through the magnificent city. Did you know that in Lake Geneva there is a fountain, the tallest in the world, jetting water straight into the sky 140 meters high? It was magnificent. Chris’s son thought it was a volcano at first, and I could hardly blame him.

We walked through old Geneva to the restaurant, and there we sat for several hours drinking, eating, and enjoying ourselves immensely. Chris told us about a new film project he’s working on, and we laughed ourselves hoarse thinking up outrageous scenarios and ridiculous titles. We chatted about protons, and muons, and relativity. Gia and I shared stories about our respective pasts, and our potential futures.

It was wonderful.

But the next day, Monday, I got to play tourist. Brian had to go to his house in Manchester to prepare for some talks he had to give, and from there he had to go back to CERN. We said goodbye, and he left me in Gia’s care. She took me to London, and we walked for kilometers, sightseeing. She took me to Forbidden Planet, a wonderful science fiction bookstore. There’s one in NYC I’d been to once or twice, but this was the original (well, the original original store moved once they got too big for their storefront). They had a ton of Doctor Who swag, and I picked up a plastic articulated Dalek for The Little Astronomer (and an extra one for reasons I’ll figure out later). There was a paper model TARDIS on display, but sadly there were out of the kits. I’ll have to find one online.

We had Thai food, and a capaccino, and walked through Soho: the music section, the shop section, the, um, physical pleasure section. We came out one street to see a mob scene: the road was blocked off by the police, and there were literally hundreds of people lining the sidewalks. Gia, herself in the TV industry, realized it was the British Annual Television and Film Awards show! We stayed for a while, watching people watching the stars as they were delivered by van, limo, and taxi. I got a kick out of it, not recognizing a single person who received the accolades of the crowd and had their name shouted by the paparazzi. I had hoped to see David Tennant, or at least someone from Doctor Who or Torchwood, but was sadly disappointed. Still, it was fun.

That night had one more event to unfold, though: Skeptics in the Pub, a monthly gathering of London skeptics. We arrived to a packed pub, where there must have been well over 100 people jammed into the bar. After a quick meal (a wonderful ham and cheese panini; don’t believe anyone who says British food is awful) I was on! I gave my Moon Hoax talk to the crowd, and was overwhelmed with the reception. The audience was raucus, warm, friendly (very friendly; hi Mark and Kelly!) and the Q&A session went on for quite some time. I got lots of laughs using British slang, and all in all it was the psychic equivalent of being carried around on peoples’ shoulders. And I have to say, it’s quite odd to come to a tavern in England thousands of kilometers from home and see so many friends, old and new. Tracy King from Skepchick was there, and Richard Wiseman, and Sid Rodrigues, and many people who had been at the meetup the week before. I also met several e-friends, like Maurizio, and Tom Siefert. Also attending, of all people, was Marcus Allen, the editor of Nexus magazine, who is, well, let’s just say he’s perhaps not a supporter of the idea that the Moon Landings were real. But we chatted amiably, which goes to show that just because two people are on opposite sides of an issue, even one like this, doesn’t mean they have to be wankers to each other.

I also met Gia’s friend Violet, a blogger and TV host who I really wish I could have spent more time with. She struck me as yet another Brit with a lot to say and the intellect to back it up. I found myself thinking this so many times… in fact, without exception, I liked every single person Gia and Brian introduced me to. They clearly travel in a good crowd, and on Day 3 or so I suddenly realized that they included me among them. What an honor!

I had lots of time to think on this trip — mostly at 3:00 a.m., struck by jet lag — and my thoughts have been good ones. I cannot really convey in words what this trip has meant to me. I’m pleased that Brian thought enough of me to invite to CERN so I could see it and be interviewed for their podcast (which will go live shortly). I’m in deep gratitude to both him and even more so to Gia for hosting me, and taking care of me and supporting me in a country where everyone talks funny and drives on the wrong side of the road. I’m still a bit overwhelmed from the support of the crowd of skeptics at the pub — battling nonsense on a daily basis is more draining than you can imagine, and hearing their applause will keep me energized and in fighting trim for months to come.

And I keep thinking of the LHC, and what it may mean to science. This is no joke, no exaggeration: it has the capacity to revolutionize science, to jump start new fields of physics, give us a literal quantum leap in learning and understanding. If that were the only aspect of my trip I took home, it would be enough. But I’m glad there was so much more. My horizons have been considerably broadened by the past week, and for that I am very grateful.

Day 2 started nice and early, which was a mixed blessing. It gave me a new chance to try to adapt to being 7 hours ahead of myself, but at the cost of getting like three hours of sleep. Well, a bit more than that, but at some point in the middle of the night that little circadian clock in my brain ticked over and said "Why are you still sleeping? It’s 7 o’clock at night!", while I grumpily told it Shut up, it’s 2 a.m.

Circadian clocks are notoriously deaf to such logic.

Anyway, I woke up in time to meet Gia’s lovely son Michael. I had brought along a meteorite to give him as a sort of house guest gift (the least I could do for eating their food and sleeping on their sofa was giving them a chunk of iron that fell from space) and he was pretty excited about it. I heard he showed it to his science teacher, and I’ll have to find out how that went.

The morning was spent doing the usual ablutions, and when Gia, Brian and I were ready it was off to the London City airport, a smaller airport on the east side of town. We took the train, which went right past Canary Wharf. This, for the hopelessly uncool, is where the Cybermen and Daleks had their final battle, and Rose was trapped in the parallel Universe. As we passed that site, I shed a silent tear for The Doctor’s loss.

Anyway, we were headed to the airport to take the short hop to Geneva. The flight was fun (Swiss Air planes have loads more room than United); we talked science and gravity and geekiness, which passes the time admirably. Unfortunately, a totally opaque cloud cover blocked my view of Europe the whole way, and when we landed in Switzerland it was pretty gray. Still, Europe! Geneva! Chocolate!

Admission time. Dork that I am, right before flying to the UK I went to Target to fill up on some things I needed for the trip, and realized I needed a snack for the flight. What did I buy? A Toblerone bar!

Idiot. I was flying to Geneva. Toblerone flows like water there. I think you get a 100 gram bar free simply for existing there. Oh well. I did get some private satisfaction that Toblerone was more expensive at the Geneva airport gift shop than it was in Target.

We rented a car (the rental garage was filled with oddly blocky and square cars with long funny license plates, which was yet another jarring reminder I was not in the US) and drove the short distance to CERN. I expected it to take a while, but it’s really only like 3 kilometers away. We stopped there long enough to visit the cafe and get some (incredible rich wonderful yum yum European) coffee and to chat, and then we drove across the border into France and our hotel. That was funny too; the border is a sort of no-man’s land (I referred to it as the DMZ) because, as Brian told me, Switzerland is not a member of the EU, but France is. There was an empty guard booth there, which made me chuckle: we were entering the EU, and no one seemed to care. The last time I drove from Canada into the US I had everything but a proctologist examine me, a reminder of the current state of affairs.

We met up with Julian, who will be running the podcast of us while we visit CERN, and then Nick Graham showed up. Brian and Gia met him at TED, and invited him to CERN as well. Nick is the founder of Joe Boxer, and is a very funny and delightful man. His son Chris is along as well. The six of us then went to the nearby village of Saint Genis Pouilly (pronounced "mrph mrph mrph")to eat dinner at Le Coq Rouge, a wonderful restaurant. We ate and drank and had a wonderful time (though the cheese table, wheeled over to us by the waiter, nearly blew my hypernosmic head off). My French, it turns out, is beyond rusty (I have a hard time saying even my stock phrase, "Je suis desole, Madam, mais nous n’avons pas du jambon aujord hui"). Luckily, the waiter understood the universal point-at-the-menu-and-horribly-pronounce-the-fish-dinner-name of speaking French.

When we finally made it back to the hotel, and after some excitement with my electrical current converter — did you know that in France, sparks are blue as well? — I fired up the Mac to write all this down, and found a peculiar thing: the BA website is blocked to me here! I cannot access it from the hotel (I borrowed Brian’s computer at CERN to post this). I’m not sure why, but it means it may be a few hours or even tomorrow before I can post again, so your patience is begged.

And that’s it. It’s now Saturday morning, and we’ll soon be touring the largest, most complicated experiment ever built: the Large Hadron Collider. I’m very excited, and you’ll be hearing lots more soon! Assuming that I can access my own ^#%*$(@!^ site.

We weren’t sure if we could pull this off, but now it’s official: on Monday, April 21, at 7:00 p.m. James Randi and I will be doing a Skeptics in the Pub: a free public skeptical talk in London. I’ll be doing the Moon Hoax talk, and Randi will be grumpy and charming and very very entertaining.

It will be held at The Penderel’s Oak, 283-288 High Holborn, London, WC1V 7HP. The phone number there is 020 7242 5669. I hope to see more of you left-side-of-the-road drivers there!

My thanks to Sid Rodrigues for getting this set up for us.