You are immersed in magnetic fields right now. Your computer, your house, your office, your street, your TV, your iPod… they all have magnetic fields around them, and you are embedded in them as well.

The Earth’s field surrounds all of us, and that interacts with the Sun’s field, which goes out and touches Mars. For billions more miles beyond that, the Sun reaches out, and that has effects that can be measured.

But now you can see them. Magnetic Movie, created by the company Semiconductor Films and filmed at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratories, uses animations based on magnetic measurements to visualize these fields. The result is a beautiful and yet very eerie — and sometimes downright creepy — movie depicting how these fields interact.

Magnetic fields are incredibly difficult to model and understand. I had to take a crash course when I was writing the chapter about solar flares in my book Death from the Skies!, and it was the hardest part of the whole writing process. I relied heavily on my friend (and genius) Craig DeForest, a solar astrophysicist here in Boulder at Southwest Research Institute. He schooled me multiple times on the ridiculous complexity of the solar magnetic field. The magnetic animation movie would have helped me a lot in understanding how this stuff works.

Tip o’ the Faraday cage to BABloggee Rene Maggio.

I don’t know if I wanna laugh at this kind of parody (which truly is funny) or cry that antiscience stupidosity has reached such a level of notoriety that it’s the target of web snarkery.

But it is funny.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to BABloggee Vernon Balbert and the ever-webalicious A.

It’s incredible to me that some people still buy into psychic spoon-bending. This silliness was promulgated by the faux-psychic (like there’s any other kind) Uri Geller back in the 70s, and has been rigorously debunked by James Randi. But there are still groups out there who do spoon bending like it’s a mental training exercise, along the lines of fire walking.

But it’s a trick, a sham, a fake, a hoax, a cheat, a con, a fraud.

I can prove it. If you take over 800 critical thinkers — self-proclaimed non-believers in anything psi — at a meeting to celebrate skepticism, give them each a spoon, and tell them to bend it with the power of their mind alone, what do you think would happen?

Richard Wiseman and Tracy King have the answer. And they have the video to back it up.

Richard is my evil twin and also a professor of psychology in England. He studies unusual thought processes, like how we perceive change — you may have seen his color-changing card video, for example.

So he and Tracy staged this spoon-bending exercise at TAM 6 in June, and we participated with gusto. It was fun! And I have my broken spoon along with Mrs. BA’s as souvenirs, right next to a third one bent by Randi his own self at TAM 5.5.

If you watch the video closely you can see me in the front row sitting next to Randi (Banachek and Adam Savage are there, too!). Note the closeup of BABloggee Jewel (with the red hair); her husband is next to her. BA minions are all over this video!

Of course, this isn’t proof that people like Geller aren’t bending spoons psychically. But which do you think is a better explanation? There is a psychic power that defies all the known laws of physics that have been so carefully tested for centuries… or that someone is pulling a scam, something we know humans have a predilection to do?

OK, looks like I’ll be doing the live video chat thing on Sunday, July 6, at 3:00 p.m. Mountain time (21:00 UT). I haven’t embedded a stream in this new bloggy hideaway, so we’ll see if this works.

As usual, if you see and hear me below talking about bending spoons, you’re all set.

Also as usual, I encourage people to particpate in the chat room on the UStream page; type "/nick John Hancock" to change your username.

Fark linked to this video of David Tennant as The Doctor. In one episode ("Family of Blood"), the Doctor must hide from aliens pursuing him, so he converts himself into a human. He leaves instructions for his companion Martha, and in the show we see her listening to them for just a moment, and the volume goes down. We see him talking, but don’t know what he’s saying.

Now we do. This is good stuff. I can’t imagine having to do this in front of a camera. It would be very tough.

Gotta admit: I though he said "Pez" until I realized it was "pears".

At TAM 6, I was honored to present James Randi with a unique gift: a trophy filled with comments from audience members about how Randi has affected their lives. Randi has had a profound influence on me and my journey to reality, and it was, well, amazing to stand on stage and give this to him. JREFer Kittynh got video of it; unfortunately her battery died just as Randi started speaking, but you can hear what I said.

In case you’re wondering, the pause in my speech was because something got stuck in my throat. Yeah, that’s it.

And that’s Hal Bidlack standing on stage with me. He’s running for Congress in Colorado against a Bush rubber-stamper, and needs your help.

Hat tip to Dean Baird for the photo.

I never know if repeating these posts helps or not. Oh well. I’m doing it anyway.

I’m doing another live video chat starting at 15:00 Mountain Time (21:00 UT) on Sunday June 15. I’ve embedded the stream below; if you see glare off my bald(ing) head, then we’re live. I urge you to go to the UStream page, though, so you can participate in the chat room (or find/use an IRC client you like; the server is chat1.ustream.tv and the room is #bad-astronomy). If you want to change your nickname there, type "/nick Billie Piper" (or whatever) in the text field.

Some potential topics for the chat: Hubble servicing mission, GLAST, organic compounds in meteorites, TAM 6. A search on this blog will turn up lots of things on these and other subjects!