Blogs / Bad Astronomy

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Blog carnivals are collections of like-minded blog entries collected in one place. The premier science carnival is called The Tangled Bank, and is published bi-weekly.

This time, Tangled Bank #44 is up at Afarensis. There’s a great reading list there, including (modestly– sure) one by me.’

I love Hollywood, I really do. But studios and theaters have screwed with me for the last time.

I’ve seen maybe four movies this year (including two I reviewed). Setting aside for a moment that the movies were generally pretty bad (or okay at best), I had to pay upwards of ten bucks to see them. Then, after that particular gouging, I had to sit through ten — 10 — commercials! A couple of them were moderately entertaining, but I really, really hate commercials. Being basically held captive and forced to watch them is just plain bad business practice.

And I can see it’s going to get a lot worse:

Domestic revenues at movie theaters may fall below $9 billion for the first time since 2001 after averaging $9.3 billion over the last three years. Factoring in higher admission prices, the number of tickets sold is expected to finish at about 1.4 billion, the lowest since 1997.

So revenues are tanking. How will they make that up? Charge more? I doubt it; people will stay away in droves if they do that. No, they’ll add more commercials. And as fewer people put up with that, and stay home to use Pay Per View or Netflix (and as TVs get better, that’s a pretty good option), that’s a vicious cycle.

So I’m done. I may still go when a movie is reviewable for my site, but that’s it. I have a DVD player. I can wait.

‘We just watched Tim Burton’s remake, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory".

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a fun movie, and I do like Johnny Depp. But.

Gene Wilder is a god.

That’s all I’ll say about that.

In other news, after months of hounding by friends and BA readers, I finally picked up the DVDs for the science fiction show "Firefly".

Golram! It rocks! That was one of the best series in any genre I have ever seen. When the pilot for a show blows you away, you know you’re onto something: the pilots usually stink. The cast, the writing, the direction… it was all gold. We’re anxiously waiting to get the movie "Serenity" from Netflix.’

While surfing around the web, I found a statistic that said there were roughly 298 million people in the United States right now.

That surprised me. I thought we were hovering around 250 million. So I went to the source: the U.S. Census Bureau. On that site they have a population clock, and sure enough, we’re at 297+ million people here in the US of A^*. Wow.

According to that site, the population has a net increase of one person every 10 seconds (accounting for births, deaths, and net immigration). Given that rate, and the current number, it looks like we’ll hit the 300,000,000 mark in about 253 days, in early September (the 9th, according to my calculations). Since they use a formula to calculate the population instead of actually counting people, this is approximate, but probably close.

I’m not one for arbitrary milestones, but I have to admit that’s pretty interesting. I’ll have to check back on that clock in a few months and see how close we’re getting.

At Dec. 30 at 18:29 Greenwich time, we had 297,813,672 people. The world population was at 6,488,327,783. These are estimates based on formulae.

Comparison shopping websites are all the rage. They do the online searching for you, grab prices for products, and display them so you can pick which one you like best. In fact, it’s a pretty cool service, and I read a few every now and again.

But somehow I don’t think I’ll be using Your Shopping Showcase. Here is what they say they do:

Your Shopping Showcase features a wide variety of great products for home and work. We have done all the research on these on these fine merchants, so you can rest assured that you will find what you need at the right price. There are also articles and other bits of information that you can browse. Please feel free to look around and click on any of the links that interest you.

Great, eh? So let’s say you want to buy a shower curtain. Where does it send you?

To my pareidolia page. Seriously. Here’s the link: Shower Rods & Rings (Shower Curtain).

If my page helps you make your decision to buy bathroom supplies, then I have a Moon hoax to sell you.

Subtle. I like it. And appropriate, given yesterday’s radio debate.

Also available as postcards, posters, etc., as a holiday gift for that special someone with too-high aspirations.

Hat tip to Secular Front.

So, most people figured out the video I posted about on Friday. The camera was simply turned upside down, and that made the rocks appear to fall up. This was a very simple trick, and it’s not like the videographers were trying really hard to make it look real, yet a lot of people fell for it (haha! Get it? Fell!).

A lot of the comments on that entry were from people who couldn’t believe anyone would think it was real, given how simple (and in hindsight, how obvious) the trick was. But, in my experience, I’ve found that a lot of folks will quite easily be perplexed by such a thing. It’s not that they’re stupid; far from it. It’s just that they are not used to thinking critically about what they see. Thinking that way takes practice, and it’s easy — far too easy– to let those guards slip.

The vast majority of people in the world simply accept what they see and hear without analyzing it. It’s an evolutionary trait of humans, and maybe a long time ago had (and in some circumstances even now still has) survival traits. But in today’s world, with an easily-manipulated media, unedited opinions on the web, and — let’s face it– a whole lot of people who want to control you in one way or another, this is a dangerous thought process indeed.

So just think. Think! When you see something that you have a hard time believing, then maybe you should take it as a sign you shouldn’t believe in it. In my opinion, you shouldn’t believe in anything. Don’t just ask for proof: demand it!