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!

I was told about this video by a woman whose husband filmed it. I believe it was made in the Cavorite mine, near Bedford, by some old wells. But I can’t be sure.

Astonishing! I’m short on time tonight as I write this, but I’ll have more about this next week.

Back in July, the NASA Deep Impact probe smacked into a comet, which was scientifically interesting, data-intensive, and downright fun. At the time, I was interviewed by Dr. Brian Cox about the Hollywood connection to the probe as part of a StarDate episode aired on the BBC. Brian and I connected well; he is interesting and funny and charming and (dagnappit) good-looking, and like me does a lot of public outreach.

Brian’s not the only one in his family who’s pretty cool. His wife, Gia, turns out to be a wholly engaging person herself. She’s hosted a few TV shows in the UK (her online video reels are hilarious), is a good photographer, and, it turns out, is also writing a blog for an upcoming science fiction movie called "Sunshine" which is filming in the UK (Brian is the science advisor). She decided to interview me for the blog, and that interview is now online.

It’s a bit scattered, but then I never found a topic I couldn’t carom tangentially off of. But mostly it’s about astronomy and science fiction, and me not letting Gia get a word in at all. That was probably a mistake; she is fabulous, and if she ever lets me interview with her again I’ll definitely (try to) let her squeeze a few words in. In the meantime, I’m thinking about the idea I had at the end of the interview on how to get a probe to the Sun. I may have to write up that idea before someone steals it…

Is that image from real footage of a meteorite impact in a desert?

Nope, but it’s pretty convincing! I’m getting a bit of email about it. The video clip in question (Quicktime format) seems to show a couple of guys in the desert filming their friends in a Toyota Tacoma truck. One of them says, “What’s that?”, and you can see a smoke trail in the sky. Suddenly, a meteorite slams into the ground a few meters away, right where the truck was! There’s an explosion, and the cameraman is knocked off his feet.

There are a few sites on the web that post weird or funny video clips, and this video can be found on some of them. Most of them have trimmed the last few seconds of the video off. However, if you find a site with the complete version, you’ll see the truck emerge unscratched from the explosion, and then a tagline appears: "TACOMA/METEOR-PROOF". That should make it clear this is just a put-on.

Since this is the Bad Astronomy Blog, I should point out that meteoroids that small won’t hit the ground with a huge bang, smoke, and fire. I wrote an article about this for space.com. Meteoroids that size slow down extremely rapidly high in the atmosphere, and take several minutes to fall the rest of the way to the ground at relatively low speed (maybe a few hundred miles per hour, compared to several thousand m.p.h. when they first hit the top of the atmosphere). Since they spend so much time way up in the atmosphere, where it’s very cold, they have plenty of time to cool off — especially since the heated outer layers of the meteoroid generally slough off while it’s still moving rapidly. It’s only really big meteoroids — many meters wide — that hit the ground while still moving quickly enough to generate heat.

And even then it’s no guarantee: while the impact that created Meteor Crater in Arizona was from the impact of a chunk of iron about 100 meters across, the explosion in Siberia in 1908 was an airburst, a rock that exploded many kilometers above the surface. So composition matters as well.

Note that I wrote that space.com article back in 2002. No one ever listens to me, though, so I expect this myth of hot meteor impacts to go on a long time. At least until a small meteorite hits CNN headquarters or some other news outlet. Then they’ll probably call it a comet.

Are those pesky government mind-controlling rays getting you down, forcing you to pay taxes, making you believe that Intelligent Design is an actual scientific theory?

Then do I have a paper for you! As only those wackheads at MIT can do, they tested the permeability and opacity of aluminum-foil hats to various emissions, to see how well they actually work to block any telekinetically-imposed outside behavioral patterns on an otherwise innocent population. And then they published their results!

They found that the hats do well blocking some transmissions, but surprisingly appear to have amplified some wavelength ranges of electromagnetic energy… suspiciously, a band reserved by the government for its own (presumably nefarious) reasons!

I think this was an interesting test, but they missed a very obvious problem: they used aluminum foil for their hats, and not tin, as they should have ("aluminum-foil hats" doesn’t have the same ring to it). Without this control, how can we know if we are safe or not? Perhaps someone at MIT reads this blog, and will do the obvious follow-up experiment. Don’t expect government funding, though.

Their results are nonetheless intriguing, and make me even more suspicious of any group who claim to make an off-the-shelf model.

One of the best things about the web is how someone will come up with some app, and then it evolves into a million little cool things.

Google maps is the killerest of killer apps. It has a million uses (I have a friend who uses it to map out arcologies for Shadowrun, for example, and if you don’t know what that means you are terminally uncool– wait, no, it’s an RPG so you probably are cool if you don’t know what all that means). One use has been exploited by Frappr, where you can create your own map and let people sign up with their location. A nifty use for it is for a blog, where readers can stick in their own locations.

So I had to do this for the Bad Astro Blog.

BABloggers, sign up! Show me where you are (you can add a picture too). You can keep up with the map by clicking this icon on the sidebar of my blog:

Amazingly, before I had even posted this blog entry, I had four people sign up, one of whom is in Spain. Pretty nifty. And it would be soooo cool to find that someone at Outpost 31 reads this blog…

I knew it!

Way back in June 2005 I wrote a blog entry about Light Emitting Diodes, or LEDs, and how they will soon become household products. They can emit white light with really low electricity consumption, can take a beating, and last a long, long time.

Well, I told you so.

Now all I need to do is predict my own immense wealth that will befall me in a week, and all will be good.