By now you may have seen this meme going around the blogosphere, where you can calculate how much your blog is “worth” in some sort of weird correspondence between links and money. I played with it, of course, but it seemed too self-indulgent to me to actually post it.

But then I started thinking… antiscientists aren’t going broke. Intelligent Design guru and known truth-stretcher Michael Behe is getting rich off his book. Antiscience is well-funded, and garbage-spouting pays quite well indeed.

So with this in mind, I thought it would be amusing to plug in some antiscience sites to see what I got in terms of their “dollar” amount. I’ve been doing a lot of Mars debunking lately, so naturally I put in Richard Hoagland’s site.

What I got was more than amusing. It was downright eerie in its accuracy.

First, here is my site (click the image to get a higher-res version):

Hey, more than a quarter million! Not bad! I wish that were real money. Sigh.

And then we have Hoagland’s site:

If you have a hard time seeing it, let me cut to the chase. Here we are for easy comparison.

The truth hurts, don’t it?

P.S. Yes, I know, these two sites aren’t blogs. Actually, Hoagland’s actual blog is “worth” at the time of this writing $19,194.36. Mine is $138,312.30. ’nuff said.

P.P.S. … and lest you think I am picking on Hoagland, Nancy Lieder’s Planet X website and Bart Sibrel’s Moon Hoax site also rate a big zippo on this scale.

Until recently, I was leaning toward Walken. But I’ve seen “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”, and I’ve found a better candidate.

You kinda have to vote for a guy who can do that.

Note: a BA hat tip to Larry Klaes for the heads-up on this one.

This is way cool: Ralph B. Roncoli of the Solar System Dynamics group at JPL has put together a document called Lunar Constants and Models Document. Sound boring? It’s anything but. Sure it’s loaded with numbers and tables and data only a major geek like me could love (did you know that “the latest lunar gravity field, LP150Q, is a 150th spherical harmonic degree and order model”? Me neither).

But it also has some very cool descriptions of our nearest cosmic neighbor. It talks about how the Moon’s orbit is changing (due to the influence of the Sun’s gravity), how lunar eclipses work, and how future astronauts can tell time on the Moon’s surface.

It also has fantastic images of the Moon. It has a relief and surface marking map of the nearside (here’s a taste, and you can even order a copy). My favorite, though is the link to this clickable, zoomable google-like map of the Moon.

You know, we’re going back to the Moon sometime pretty soon. This is a pretty handy thing to help pave the way.

What can I add to this? Except to say it’s brilliant, loyal to the movie (down to Forrester yelling “Sylvia!”), and funny for reasons I really don’t understand.

When you think about it, the Earth has had a rough time of it. You’d never guess by looking, but over its 4.5 billion year history it’s been hit a zillion times by asteroids, from dust motes up to something Mars-sized that whacked us and ended up forming the Moon.

You’d expect the planet to be scarred, pockmarked, from all this. But the Earth is restless, and shifty. Even though there probably isn’t a square meter of the planet that hasn’t been hit, over millions of years erosion has taken its toll, wiping out all but a few of the craters.

Some are obvious enough, like Barringer Crater in Arizona. I’ve been there, and it’s amazing. But the one that wiped out the dinosaurs is 100 or more kilometers across, and most of it’s underwater. It takes some pretty sophisticated technology to even know it’s there.

So what’s a crater aficionado to do? Why, go to the Impact Field Studies Group homepage, of course. This group is like Audubon for extinction-level events; they travel around doing field studies at impact sites. The site has pictures (the panorama above is from their page; click it for a better image and a bunch more), descriptions, and this is way cool, an Excel spreadsheet listing 540+ suspected impact sites across the planet. Want a nightmare? Sort them by crater diameter. Yikes.

I am very pleased to announce that there has been a major upgrade to the Bad Astronomy site: I have merged my Bad Astronomy Bulletin Board with the Universe Today board.

The new board is (at least temporarily) called The Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum, or just BAUT for short. Fraser Cain, the admin of UT, and I both think this is the next logical step for both our boards. His focused on space and astronomy, and mine was astronomy and space, if you catch the difference. We have a lot of overlap, and where we don’t overlap we can strengthen each other’s abilities. By merging, we increase our reach, and get two communities together who should really know each other.

The board went live on Saturday night/Sunday morning, with Fraser and I working hard to get it set up. Everything appears to be going well, with everyone posting merrily away. We’re talking about astronomy, space travel, extraterrestrial life, how to observe, what a moonbase would be like… literally everything from the ground up.

So come on over! It’s a good crowd. You’ll like it there.

Did I mention in an earlier entry that science is beauty?

I didn’t know the half of it. Princeton University has started an annual Art of Science competition. Take a few minutes to look through the entries for this year. Astonishing, amazing, and beautiful.