So we rearranged our schedules, met yesterday in Denver, woke up at 6 am this morning, and are now at Kennedy Space Center with 100 space twitterers. They’ve got a full program here with astronauts and a tour today, and the launch of mission STS-129 to the space station at 2:29 pm tomorrow. The event just started… So stay tuned, we’ll keep you posted. We will be blogging as well as loosing our tweeting virginity @cosmicvariance. You can follow the rest of the gang by looking for #nasatweetup.

• @CosmicVariance

This might seem superfluous, since we have, you know, a blog. Mostly the tweets will consist of pointers to the blog posts (automatically generated from the RSS feed). Perhaps the occasional special intervention. But this is a quick and dirty way to integrate with the twitterverse, if people want to follow us there and re-tweet and all that delicious stuff.

I’ll try to post something of substance soon. Hopefully I will elaborate on this picture:

By “we,” of course I mean the web gurus at Discover — your humble bloggers didn’t have to do a damn thing. Thanks, all.

You’ll also notice that the name of the author now appears at the top of the post, which is very helpful. We have a list of upgrades we’re trying to gradually implement, in order to make your blog-reading experience as pleasant as possible.

Takes place about a century from now. Humanity has discovered planets around other stars harbor life. We send out a generation ship, where multiple generations of intrepid explorers will be born and die before it reaches its destination. This show follows their journey, where they are faced with mechanical failure, collisions with small dust grains that cause lots of damage, and people who crack under the stress of their situation. Mostly it’d be about a human drama of extremely driven people who are in a difficult situation, and whose children are forced to carry the torch of their parents.

A well-deserved victory, as Jason has long been one of our most intelligent and helpful commenters. And it’s a good show idea, certainly comparable with many things actually appearing on TV. Jason, shoot us your address and a T-shirt will be forthcoming — soonish.

Interestingly, concepts that took the framework of a conventional sitcom or drama (Friends/ER) and made the characters scientists didn’t fare as well with our voters. This might be a reflection of our voting pool, or a real difficulty involved in translating the life of a scientist into compelling narrative.

Conway, John S.
University of California, Davis
Citation: For outstanding contributions in the search for the Higgs boson and physics beyond the Standard Model at high energy particle accelerators.
Nominated by: Particles and Fields (DPF)

And even more belated congratulations to our very own JoAnne Hewett, for being chosen last year, which I totally missed!

Hewett, Joanne
Stanford University
Citation: For her contributions to our understanding of constraints on and searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, and service to the particle physics community leading studies of future experiments.
Nominated by: Particles and Fields (DPF)

This is a great honor, which indicates that the newly-minted Fellow has advanced past a stage of callow youth and cheerful enthusiasm, to a status of grey eminence and profound wisdom. Those of us remaining in the youthful stage will endeavor to show proper respect.

So, in honor of the new program, we hereby announce the Cosmic Variance Elevator Pitch Contest. I don’t know about you, but many folks I know with an interest in science take great pleasure in complaining about the embarrassing lack of realism and respect for the laws of nature apparent in so many movies and TV shows. Here’s your (fictional) chance to do something about it.

Opening scene: you step into an elevator at the headquarters of CBS/Paramount Television in Hollywood. (Unclear why you are there — perhaps to have lunch with your more-successful friend from high school, who works for their legal team.) There is only one other person in the elevator with you for the journey to the top floor — and it’s Les Moonves, President and CEO of CBS! (Again, unclear why he is taking the same elevator as you — we’ll fix that in post-production.)

Here is the perfect opportunity for your elevator pitch.

You have thirty seconds — which, as this blog is still a text-based medium, we’ll approximate as strictly 100 words or less — to pitch your idea for a new TV show that is based on science. It can be an hour drama, a half-hour sitcom, a reality show, game show, documentary, science fiction, whatever you like. For example:

I have an idea for a show called Cosmic Variance. It’s about seven scientists who blog during the day, but at night they fight crime! And to do it, they used advanced notions from modern physics and astrophysics, from adaptive optics to quantum decoherence. They’re young, they’re sexy, and they break hearts as they bust heads. But their university colleagues are already suspicious of their blogging, so they have to keep the crime-fighting activities completely secret. They have a deep underground lab where they carry out cutting-edge experiments, and there’s a canine sidekick named Sparky.

Okay, that’s a fairly silly example. I’m not eligible to win the contest. But you, the reader, are! So here are some of the ideas you want to keep in mind while polishing your pitch:

Most importantly: Les Moonves’s goal in life is not to make science look good. It’s to make money. So don’t pitch that this show would make the world a better place, or make science seem interesting; convince him that it’s exciting to everyone and will attract millions of eyeballs.

Use the science. For our purposes, we’re less interested in a show idea that tacks on some science to make things sound cool, as we are in a concept that couldn’t happen without the science.

Story is paramount. As much as we love accuracy and realism, there has to be a compelling narrative. You need to convince Moonves that people will be emotionally connected to the characters and their situation.

It’s easy to mock the efforts of others, but here’s a chance to see whether you could really put together a compelling show idea. Leave your entry in the comments. They will be judged by our crack team of scientists/bloggers/crime-fighters, and the winner will get a Cosmic Variance T-shirt. (We have plans to upgrade the quality of our current swag options.) Please note that there is not some hidden plan to actually make any TV shows out of this — we have no clout along those lines, so if you are a professional scriptwriter, don’t dump your plans out in public here on our blog. But if you’re a pro you already knew that.

And then: memorize your pitch! You never know when you might find yourself trapped in an elevator with the right person, and you have to be ready.

We’ve been delaying the announcement of the results, as the entries were tightly bunched and it takes time for votes to trickle in. Indeed, Alaska still seems to be problematic, but patience is thin and it’s time to declare a winner! Visit here to be reminded of who had staked out which bits of territory. Here are the vote totals as of today:

Barack Obama: 66,679,600

John McCain: 58,227,508

which implies

f = 53.38.

The relevant entries, courtesy of wqz, are

( 52.81689, 53.10869): Tim
( 53.10869, 53.32282): Elliot
( 53.32282, 53.47922): Anonymous Snowoboarder
( 53.47922, 53.74739): Gabe
( 53.74739, 53.78569): joulesm

And so the winner is:

Anonymous Snowoboarder!

Who, I am guessing, may have mistyped their name. But when you have mad prediction skills like that, who cares about typographical irregularities?

Here were the distribution of predictions near the right value:

It’s interesting to note that the contest was announced in late June, just when Obama was hitting his summer peak of popularity (which was not as pronounced as his fall peak of popularity). I wonder how the predictions would have gone had we done the contest in September?