Blogs / Bad Astronomy

The reason I went to Comic Con was because the Hive Overmind (Discover Magazine) sponsored a panel discussion about the Science of Science Fiction, and invited me to be on it. They paid for my junket, which was very cool of them, and of course buys my loyalty for at least a week or two.

The panel was a lot of fun. They recorded it, and it’s now live:

The audience seemed to enjoy the discussion, and we got a lot of great questions. The panelists were me, Kevin Grazier (science advisor for Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, and The Zula Patrol), and Jaime Paglia (Executive Producer of Eureka). The moderator was Stephen Cass, who contributes to the Science Not Fiction blog at DM.

io9 has comments on the panel (more about them later), and it’s also up at the official Eureka writers’ blog, Eureka Unscripted.

After the panel, DM took us all out to dinner (Kevin had to leave early, which is too bad; we’ve been friends a while and I would’ve liked to have hung out more). Jaime went, as well as Eureka writer Eric Wallace and his wife Wendy (coproducer of seasons 1 and 2 of Eureka). Eric is teh awesome, and we spent a lot of time cracking each other up and squeeing over Doctor Who. In fact, everyone I met was totally cool. I’m really having a hard time assimilating that fact; everyone was fun to be with.

I have more Comic Con info coming later, but I’m still struggling to catch up with email, the blog, and life in general. But I have to tell y’all about the SciFi Channel’s afterparty… but that’ll have to wait for later.

But it was AWESOME.

A while back I wrote about the human-driven search engine called Mahalo.

Mahalo has a daily vidcast they do, and they’re here at Comic Con. Well, I was looking for Wil Wheaton to ask him about Manga (long story) and when I found him he was being interviewed by Mahalo. When he was done, he instantly told them they needed to interview me, because that’s just how super-awesome Wil is. So Leah D’Emilio, the host, talked to me about Bad Astronomy and Death from the Skies!

Spreading the love, after we were done I sent them to JSto. Push it forward, folks.

In my live video chat session Saturday, I was asked about the Lagrange points, places of gravitational stability. I decided I needed props for this (yes, the return of the Squishy Brain of Science and the Mintie of Science!), and it works even better with pictures, so I created a video for it.

You can learn more details about the Lagrange points at the Montana University site. The Lagrange point images (and the WMAP picture) come from the WMAP website. The JWST picture is from the (duh) JWST site. The portrait of Lagrange is from Wikipedia. Everything else is pure me, baby.

I am streaming my Comic Con panel right here, right now.

Update: We’re in the interview area waiting for them to show up. I still don’t know if I’ll be live streaming or not, so stay tuned! But I might simply have to tape it and edit it for later.

I’m off to ComiCon! I’ll be arriving around 1-ish, but I have to hit the ground running. My schedule has changed…

Here’s the deal: Steven Moffat (the new show runner for Doctor Who) as well as Julie Gardner (DW Producer) and Naoko Mori (Toshiko on Torchwood) will be doing interviews today, Wednesday, at ComiCon. I’ve signed up for this, and evidently there are too many journalists to do individual interviews, so they’re putting us at tables to do round-robins. Moffat is from 4:00 – 4:30, and Mori and Gardner are from 4:30 – 5:00; all times are Pacific time (add seven hours for UT).

So I get to ask all three of them questions, and I’m still brewing that in my head (suggestions are welcome; leave them in the comments!).

But what I’m going to try to do is do this live, streaming on my UStream channel. That means that if you tune in you can watch it live!

However, many things have to work: the connection must be good, the stream must not lag or be impossible to set up due to software glitches, and of course the BBC has to agree to this. They may not.

But I’ll try! And just in case I don’t have time to write a new page, I’ve embedded the player below.

In the live video chat over the weekend, I was asked a GREAT question: can you see more stars from a high altitude, like say from an airplane? This is a common question, and it makes the assumption that the Earth’s atmosphere absorbs starlight; so if you go up high enough you’ll see lots more stars.

Turns out, not so much. Here’s why:

If you’re curious, the image I put in the video from Hubble is reproduced below, but you really need to go take a look at the high-res version. It’s not color, but it’s still very cool.

Also, the beautiful image of Orion is from J P Stanley’s Flickr set (reproduced under Creative Commons licensing, so if you like his picture go show him some love on Flickr).

YALVC (yet another live video chat) is going down today at 15:00 Mountain time (21:00 UT). All you need to do is click play (the little curly arrow at the bottom left) in the embedded video player below. But! Just listening to me talk may be confusing (and has been determined by the AMA to cause vertigo, the vapors, and, in some people, swooning), so I encourage you to go to my UStream video page so you can participate in the chat. Once there, you can change your name by typing "/nick Steven Moffat" (or whatever) so you can be listed with an actual name. If you prefer to use mIRC or Colloquy or whatever, then the server is chat1.ustream.tv and the room is #bad-astronomy.