As you might expect, I am not a big fan of ghost hunting shows. Stopping every ten seconds and dramatically whispering "Did you hear that?" is not exactly the best way to run a scientific investigation.

So I’m pleased to see satires and such of those programs, and I think the web comic Dork Tower does it pretty well here.

Man, there’ve been a lot of good sciencey skeptical web comics lately. Keep ‘em coming, folks. It’s one of the best ways to spread the word.

If you were curious about what I’m doing tonight, here’s my schedule (all times Eastern):

7:00 p.m.: I’ll be watching the live stream performance from my friend Marian Call, who is singing at the Think Geek HQ in Washington DC! This is such a high density of nerdery it may collapse to form a black hole. I have links to various marianesque chanteusery in an earlier post about her.

9:00 p.m.: The premiere of season 8 of MythBusters on The Discovery Channel! Woohoo! The previews look great.

10:00 p.m.: Hmmm, I know there’s something going on at this time… oh, right. The premiere of Episode 2 of Bad Universe, "Alien Attack!" also on Discovery Channel! I showed a teaser yesterday, and here’s another one. In this, I went spelunking in an underground cave in New Mexico to look for extremophiles:

Did you catch the "O Brother Where Art Thou" reference? I have lots of stories about that cave, which I’ll be live-tweeting tonight during the premier!

So tune in and watch as I try to figure out if I, for one, am in imminent danger of having to welcome our new insect overlords. And don’t forget: there’s still a little bit of time left (if it’s before noon Mountain time, that is) to win free swag from this episode!

[UPDATE: We have a winner! @Pryced got the winning retweet, picked at random. He sent me an acknowledging email, and the package is on its way to him. But don't fret! More fun giveaways are coming soon...]

I haven’t done a contest in a while, but this one was worth the wait: I have some very cool Mythbusters swag I’m giving away!

Here’s the loot:

To wit:

• A ginormous Mythbusters swag bag from the San Diego Comic Con 2009,
• An autographed hardcopy of the cover of the September 2009 Popular Science magazine that had contributions by Jamie Hyneman and My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™,
• A t-shirt, size medium (though it’s a bit small for me and I’m average in build, so consider it a small), from Comic Con 2008. The shirt has a drawing of Jamie on the front (with the caption "METHODICAL") and Adam on the back ("IMPULSIVE"). This shirt is also autographed by both Adam and Jamie. The sleeve has the SDCC and MB logos on it. And…
• … what the heck: I also have a lot of miscellaneous cool stuff I’ve picked up over time, and I’ll throw a pile of it into the box. Stickers, buttons, things like that.

So how do you win this fabulous prize? Here’s the deal:
(more…)

I am a big fan of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and I’m also a fan, bordering on a man crush, of the Mythbusters (Kari Byron, of course, is not a man, so my crush on her is purely — OK, mostly — platonic). Adam, of course, has been relegated to My Close Personal Friend™ status, but still.

As it happens, Craig is a big Mythbusters fan as well. When he came up with the idea of having a robot skeleton sidekick, he turned to the one man who could realize his dream: Miles Dyson. I mean, Mythbuster Grant Imahara.

Grant has been working feverishly on the auto-sidekick for weeks, and tonight it will be unveiled on the show! I’m really squeeing over this, and can’t wait to see it.

I love The Late Late Show for many reasons, but the biggest is Craig himself: he’s very funny, and extremely smart. He’s self-taught in many ways, and has had a rough life — he’ll be the first to say it was self-inflicted, but the bottom line is he’s pulled himself out of the muck and turned it all around. His humor is whip-crack fast, and he’s clearly a big fan of science, so of course I am powerless not to like him. Did you see his 5 minute rant about Copernicus (starting around the four minute mark)? I mean, seriously, Copernicus? Craig, I less-than-three you.

And as part of his Robot Skeleton Army — as he calls his Twitter followers — I am very pleased that he’s using this occasion to raise money for Lollipop Theater, a way to get movies and TV shows to sick kids. If you see the hashtag #lollipoptheater in my own tweets today, that’s why.

You can read more about Craig and Grant’s excellent adventure on NPR’s Monkey See blog (where I got the picture of Grant above) and in a great post by my friend Erin McCarthy at the Popular Mechanics site.

And check your local listings for Craig’s show tonight. It’s on CBS, and is usually at 12:35 a.m. (11:35 p.m. central) though it may be delayed by basketball. And remember: it’s a great day for America everybody.

Image credit: Grant Imahara.

[Kari, Grant, and Tory from The Mythbusters will be on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson tonight, so it seems like a good time to post this.]

In case anyone was wondering if I would succumb to the bright lights of Hollywood, the answer is, of course: duh.

Last week I attended a wonderful party in Pasadena, thrown by the Discovery Channel for their 25th anniversary (my pictures from the party are on Flickr). My friend Katherine Nelson secured an invite for me; she does PR for the channel and we met at Comic Con in 2008 when I was tagging along with My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™. Last week I happened to be in LA working on my sooper sekrit project, and that timing happily coincided with the party.

I’m not used to high-end parties, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I decided to go all out and wear a tie. Go me.

I got to the hotel, located somewhere down twisty passages in Pasadena all of which look alike, and started wending my way to the party itself. As I randomly walked, I wondered to myself what celebs might be here, and at that very moment happened to see Ed Begley, Jr.

OK then.

When I finally reached the actual party location, I was happy to see Katherine taking pictures of Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Belecci from Mythbusters! I hadn’t seen Kari in a couple of years (I moderated a panel with three of them in Canada), but I saw Grant and Tory at Comic Con last year. It was nice to see them again. I hung out a bit with them, and, as always, found them to be fun and charming and pretty much what you see on TV. At least, they’re nice enough to a dork like me.

There were lots of Discovery Network celebs there (as well as a giraffe). I was completely unashamed to horn in on Stacey and Clinton from "What Not to Wear" and chat for a second. I was thrilled to get a chance to talk with Annabelle Gurwitch, who is on Planet Green now, but I know her from watching "Dinner and a Movie" on TBS a few years ago, and she was exactly as I had hoped: funny and sassy and totally approachable. Also? A doll. There, I said it.

I also dorked a bit when I got a chance to say hi to Kat von D from "L.A. Ink", since she wasn’t in the shop the day I got my tattoo. It was totally cool to show her my tattoo (patience; my show is supposed to air next month) and thank her for the experience. We swapped a couple of stories, and I found she was like everyone else I met at the party: approachable, open, and interesting.

In fact, if there was any disappointment with the party (besides not being allowed to actually eat the cakes made by the bakery from "Cake Boss" and realizing after I had gotten back to my hotel that the Meteorite Men were there and I missed them) it was of the snarky variety; that is, no one was a jerk. I mean, c’mon! This was a Hollywood party! No cocaine? No obnoxious divas?

Could it be that the portrayal of Hollywood in Hollywood films has been Hollywooded? Hmmm.

So all in all it was a fabulous event with a lot of people having lots of fun. It makes me wonder… could it be that because there is a science bent to the networks (not all the shows, but many) the party was more about the fun and less about the personalities? Hmmm again.

Maybe not. But still. Science is cool.

Well, not literally, though that would be really amusing.

Jamie Hyneman and My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™ were on the always-hilarious Late Night with Craig Ferguson show a little while back, and the video is on YouTube (note: somewhat NSFW dialogue):

Did you hear what Adam mentioned roughly six minutes in? The JREF! Woohoo! Adam is great about donating stuff from Mythbusters to the JREF so we can auction it off to raise money, and that particular gift was pretty special. Rarefied, you might say.

And, thanks to Greg Fish, I can add this:

Yer darn tootin’.

[Get it? Tootin'! Hahahaha!]

Image from ROFLRazzi.

Just a few things from here and there:

1) The 126th Carnival of Space is spacing it up at The Gish Bar Times (where I think they serve nice cold Gish Gallops). You know the deal: astronomy, space, blog posts, etc. Go there and read good stuff!

2) Speaking of good stuff, my Hive Overmind colleague Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance is taking antivaxxers to task, and got a visit by none other than JB Handley, head of the mouthfoaming antivax group Age of Autism. Handley left some spin in the comments, and I’ve taken him to task there, asking him some simple questions about studies which show that everything he claims is wrong. We’ll see what happens there.

3) I forgot to post Script PhD’s interview with the Mythbusters from Comic Con! It’s old, I know, but you might like it. Scroll waaaay down to get to it. Unless you’re a Lost or Fringe fan, then you can read the whole thing.