Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I just finished watching a live stream of a speech President Obama gave at the White House, pledging more support for science education in this country.

Woohoo!

[Edited to add: the speech transcript is now online, complete with Mythbusters shout-out.]

Science, technology, engineering, and math — STEM — education has been struggling for years. This new effort, called Educate to Innovate, is "…designed to energize and excite America’s students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics."

There are several avenues being taken, including partnering with the private sector. For example, Discovery Communications (the umbrella org for Discovery Channel and its sister channels) will be promoting science literacy, including a commercial-free science block of programming on the Science Channel, and STEM support for teachers.

I was particularly excited to hear Obama announce an annual science fair to be held at the White House! As he said, it’s time that people who have made extraordinary achievements in science stand beside athletes and others honored at the White House.

And as if he were channeling my brain, President Obama said this:

"We’re going to show young people how cool science can be."

Ah, hearing that is like a symphony to my ears. To which I’ll add: damn straight.

Also, I suspect that unlike many political statements, this is no mere lip service. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, is involved with this project, and at the press conference were Adam Savage™ and Jamie Hyneman — I know they’ll work hard to make sure this happens.

And it’s up to all of us, too. As I find out more about this I’ll post info here, and see what we all can do to make sure this not only becomes a reality, but persists as a concrete effort that will not sway with the political winds. Our future relies heavily on how well we understand science and technology, and if you read this blog you know full well how people manipulate the public’s misunderstanding of STEM topics for political gain. This must stop, and the best weapon is an educated public.

Picture from Lara Eakin’s Twitter feed.

The cool website Information is Beautiful presents, um, well, information in a beautiful way. They recently posted a good guide to the sense and nonsense of the 2012 phenom, pretty much showing that the major claims of the doomcriers are baloney.

I haven’t checked every factoid of the graphic, but the part pictured above is cool: I independently came to this same conclusion a few months ago using some planetarium software to plot the position of the Sun and the Galactic center (and presented this at TAM 7, in fact). There are people out there trying to spin, fold, and mutilate astronomy to fit their pre-manufactured conclusions about 2012, but — as usual when it comes to doomsday scenarios — the actual facts show that these scaremongers’ claims are as vacuous as space itself.

Speaking of the LHC, the Boston Globe’s terrific feature The Big Picture has a slew of gorgeous pictures of the Large Hadron Collider up on the site.

These images, as beautiful and hi-res as they are, still cannot convey the awesome size and scale of the LHC. It’s been a year and a half since I stood there, 100 meters below of the surface of the Earth, gawking slack-jawed at ATLAS, CMS, and the other magnificent machinery, and it almost seems like a dream to me. But then I shake out of it and remember: this is what we do, and it’s real.

Secrets of the Universe? We humans figure that stuff out over coffee. What’s next?

So, check out the latest xkcd web comic (or click the picture to see the rest). I have to admit, he’s got a good point. And it’s so crazy it just might work. Hardware stores near Michael Shermer’s house better start keeping track of who buys what.

And is the number of this particular comic coincidence? I have a hard time believing it is.

Just a quick note: Emily, at The Planetary Society Blog, just posted a way cool mosaic made up of four pictures from Cassini showing the Enceladus icescape. I love the perspective on it, and how you can tell you’re looking down on the tiny moon from an oblique angle. It’s quite lovely. Go look!

And in case you missed it, here are links to 3D red/green anaglyphs of Enceladus too. Awesome.

[For those complaining about my title, I said "midwest" because the meteor was seen as far east as Colorado, which sits on the west/midwest border, and, duh, I needed a word that started with "M".]

By now you’ve probably heard of the extremely bright fireball over Utah last Wednesday, proving once again that really cool stuff happens when I’m on travel and can’t write about it. Worse, it was seen from Denver, which means I might’ve had a shot at seeing it myself.

Sigh.

Anyway, this meteor was so bright it overexposed security cameras, turned night into day, and cast obvious shadows on the ground. This video shows several different views of it:

Whoa.

The coolest thing about these videos is, to me, the way the shadows of objects move rapidly around as the meteor flashes across the sky. I describe this very thing in the opening vignette of the asteroid impact chapter of my book Death from the Skies! The video is pretty much exactly as I imagined it would be. Yikes.

Of course, not everyone thinks this was just a chunk of rock burning up harmlessly in our atmosphere. Because, after all, why assume it was a natural event that occurs quite often, when you can add layers of nonsense and conspiracy to it? Fark alerted me to the idea that this was actually a nuclear missile shot down over the US, despite the video, pictures, and eyewitness accounts completely contradicting the idea that this was anything other than a meteor. But for some people, facts won’t get in the way of a good story!

Anyway, while spectacular, the Earth is probably subjected to meteors like this several times a year. As I have said before, now that we have security cameras and phones with video, we’ll be seeing more and more of videos like this, which is a good thing: it’ll make people more aware of the sky. I’m all for that!

Yesterday, the Large Hadron Collider once again had a beam of protons whizzing around its 27 km-long circumference!

After a series of setbacks — some devastating, holding up the world’s largest scientific experiment for many months — this milestone achieved shows that the collider is heading back to full operations, which should get started again next year. There will be press conference about this on Monday November 23rd at 1:00 p.m. GMT, which will be webcast live.

And if you’re wondering what the crew at CERN think of this latest news, then take a look at this picture of them looking at the results of the start up:

That picture makes me smile. Those unemotional, cold, calculating scientists. Why can’t they ever reveal their true feelings?