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.

You may have heard of the Mercury 13, women who were trained for space flight back in the heyday of the Space Race, and then largely forgotten.

But did you know of the forgotten — some say suppressed — black astronaut program? You may want to watch the brilliant video The Old Negro Space Program. Listening once again to the adventures of Loopy Louie and Wallace "Suitcase" Jefferson brought me right back to the high adventure of the race to the Moon. Warning: movie contains adult language. Also requires senses of humor and social irony.

Speaking of which, you may not know the tale of the astronaut accidentally left on the Moon, stranded by a locked latch on the Lunar Module. Here are his tales. Warning: adult themes, some childish humor (which cracked me up), and lots of “bleeps”.

Finally, I was on Slacker Astronomy once again, because, evidently, repeated blows to their heads have permanently damaged Pamela’s, Travis’s's, and Aaron’s cognitive abilities. Here’s the interview, where I am even crueler to Tom Cruise than I am in my War of the Worlds review. Warning: outrageous and inappropriate (and gratuitous) sexual innuendo abounds in the interview.

I am too busy right now to do a full-on blog entry, so instead I’ll let everyone know that I will be doing a radio interview tonight (August 8, 2005) at 6:00 p.m. Eastern time on BBC 5 about creationism, ID, and President Bush; fallout from my blog entry about this. PZ Myers of Pharyngula will be on as well. If you want to listen, they have a streaming link.

Note added August 9, 2005: The interview is now online at at the BBC 5 website. My interview starts about 1 hour 11 minutes into the show. PZ Myers’ interview starts about 1 hour 5 minutes in.

In my last blog entry, I made it pretty clear that I think young Earth creationism and its bastard child, Intelligent Design, are full of crap. The argument that people just want to give competing theories “equal time” in the classroom with real science is also garbage. When Bush said that, did he mean just ID? After all, there are lots of other creation myths out there. Why stop at just one that is provably wrong? I can think of dozens!

But one stands out. Somehow, this one speaks to me. It certainly makes as much sense as creationism. Maybe more.

Of course, I speak of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. The logic is hard to deny: on that site there are graphics, drawings, even a mathematical plot (with numbers!) correlating the idea with pirates. I have a PhD and everything, and lemme tell you, that’s a pretty impressive plot.

At first, I didn’t understand why this theory appealed to me. Then I saw the reasons to convert, and the first one really made sense: “Flimsy moral standards”. I can’t argue with that.

Also, on his page about FSM, the author, Bobby Henderson, wrote a letter to the Kansas School Board exhorting them to teach FSM to the students. He ends his letter thusly:

I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

Even with a belief as rock solid as FSM, it’s still bound to create controversy. Some people will feel that it isn’t scientific, which is of course correct. After all, as a scientist, I can’t advocate teaching this in a biology or astronomy class. But if it has to be taught in school, then is should be taught in the class where it belongs:

Home Ec.

Remember the movie Forbidden Planet? (If you haven’t, shame on you! — go out and rent it). The movie was ground-breaking in many ways, one of which was the use of electronic noise instead of music in the background. It gives the movie, a strange, eerie, unearthly feel to it.

It turns out, sometimes, that nature imitates art.

Our story starts in the center of the solar system, where a wind blows from the Sun. This wind is ethereal, wispy, and makes a laboratory vacuum seem like maple syrup. It’s no warm earthly breeze; it’s more of a sandstorm, comprised of billions of tons of electrons, protons, and other subatomic particles leaving the Sun every second. It’s also fleet: it screams along at a million miles an hour, flowing ever-outward into space.

… unless something is in the way. Planets, for example, are an obstacle for this wind. If a planet has a magnetic field, it can deflect the particles, bending them and guiding them down onto the planet. They hit the atmosphere and slow down, generating radio waves. These waves can be recorded, and translated into sound in much the same way radio station signals are when you listen on your car radio (remember them? Before podcasts and MP3s).

The sounds generated this way are… well, they’re weird. Creepy. They whistle, chirp, whoop, and moan. I found these sound files a few years back when I was doing some research on converting electromagnetic data like radio waves into sound. I’m telling you, they are downright alien. You’d swear nothing on Earth would make that noise… but there you are.

But now the weirdest of them all has come out. The Cassini spacecraft is orbiting Saturn, and it has a radio wave detector on it. When the solar wind particles move along Saturn’s magnetic field, they generated radio waves with wavelengths that are kilometers long. The Cassini scientists converted them into sound. Want some nightmares tonight? Play the results while you’re in bed tonight. Yikes.

Sweet dreams…

"… monsters from the id! [...] The fool, the meddling idiot! As though his ape’s brain could contain the secrets of the Krell."

Pareidolia never sleeps.

That’s the psych term for seeing patterns (usually faces) in random patterns. Like, say, the “face” on Mars, or Lenin in a shower curtain, or, of course, the mother of all faces: the Virgin Mary in a stain on an underpass.

People tend to see what they wish to see, so of course any vaguely longish oval with a smear around it looks like Jesus. Scale is not important; you can see Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, or in a bank window (scroll down that page to see it).

Some people see Jesus in the Eagle Nebula, which is hard to beat for scale. Still for terrestrial terms, this new one ain’t so bad.

It’s brought to you courtesy of Google maps, it’s two miles wide and four long, and it’s in Peru. I’ll admit, it does look like a face, but unless Jesus bears an uncanny resemblance to Gandalf (or perhaps Confucius), I’m guessing that some people are seeing a wee bit too much into this. Of course, when you see something like this:

… maybe Gandalf isn’t such a bad guy to have around.