Roger Ebert slams Ben Stein (2)
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Phil Plait (25)
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Roger Ebert is best known as a movie critic on TV, but he has been writing movie reviews for far longer. I’ve read a great number of his columns and his writing is in general excellent, with an obvious and profound depth of understanding of movies. Ebert has a fierce intellect backing up his writing, and that is on display very well in his review of the execrable "eXpelled: No Intelligence Allowed", the creationist "documentary" ...
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Jared Cherup said:
I love Roger Ebert more and hate Ben Stein more because of this well written article.
Doctor Who comes out of the Cybercloset (1)
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Make of that post title what you will, but it’ll make sense once you watch this promo for the Christmas programming on BBC: Cool. Looks like they’ve made a Christmas special I’ll be happy to see! I was not thrilled with the last one (the Space Titanic? Srsly?) but I do like the Cybermen. More Doctor Who soon! More running! Yay! Tip o’ the sonic screwdriver to io9.
Omega Cen’s millions of stars (1)
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I love it when astronomers release beautiful images simply because they are beautiful. That’s Omega Centauri, a globular cluster. It contains millions of stars, all gravitationally bound to one another. It orbits the Milky Way and is currently about 18,000 light years away. At 150 light years across, it’s a densely packed beehive of stars. It’s also easily visible to the unaided eye. Centaurus is a southern constellation, so it’s high overhead if you live ...
Venus, the Moon, and Jupiter [PIC] (5)
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On December 1, Venus, Jupiter, and the Moon made this pretty formation in the sky: That shot was taken on my little department store digital camera. All I did was mount it on a good tripod and bracket the exposure (that is, take a bunch of shots with different exposure times). I knew my neighbor’s tree would make an interesting sight in a longish (10 second) exposure, and tried to balance the foreground objects. The ...
Pining for Mars (2)
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Does this NASA photo from the rover Opportunity show a wooden log on Mars? Hard to tell? Then look at the zoomed-in image, and ask again: is this a log (petrified or otherwise) on the surface of the Red Planet? Duh. No. But if you read some websites, you might think it is. So what’s going on here? The quick answer is: this is another in a long line of examples of pareidolia; people seeing ...
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Andrew Taylor said:
Rock on Mars looks very slightly like plank of wood, Internet goes crazy.
Freedom of and from religion (1)
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This post sat as a draft for a long time, and I should have posted it ages ago. It’s about the election, but it’s something we should all keep in mind anyway, for now and forever. Watch this video. We need more like it. And I’m amazed some people can’t figure this out. it’s really pretty simple. Hat tip to Crooks and Liars.
Venus in a love triangle (2)
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O, how complicated our heavenly bodies, how lovely their trysts, how ephemeral their passings! Forgive me my waxing poetical, but this is astronomy, and if the Moon can wax, so can I. But what I said is true, and you can see it for yourself: take a walk outside over the next few evenings. In the west, just after sunset, Venus and Jupiter grace our skies.Over the course of several nights, as Venus orbits the ...
Breaking: Canadian fireball fragments found (1)
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Reports are coming in that fragments have been found from the bright meteor that lit up Canadian skies last week. I don’t have much info, but this is good news. The object that came in must have weighed several tons, so there should be plenty of meteorites to be found. This is very cool, obviously because it’s always good to get new samples. But also, the path of this object is very well observed from ...
Giving thanks (2)
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Today in the United States is the holiday of Thanksgiving, one of our more deeply tradition-laden days. I suspect most people in other countries know this as the time we eat turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie (though not me, I prefer chocolate pie). And then there’s the shopping the next day, of course. But there is also the tradition after which the holiday itself is named: giving thanks. People do it in different ...
Canadian fireball update (8)
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I still haven’t heard of any meteorites found from the Canadian fireball the other day, but lots of videos are turning up. The best is probably this one taken by the dashcam of a police car who happened to be facing the right way: Kinda makes you wonder why we never get good footage of all these bazillions of flying saucers eating our cow recta, doesn’t it?
Aliens? Yes. UFOs? No. (11)
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Dave Mosher over at the Discovery Channel blog collective (not to be confused with our own beloved Discover Magazine Hive Overmind) asked me if I could write down my thoughts about UFOs, so he could post it over at their site to support a show they’re airing about flying saucers. Because I’m a swell guy, I did. The essay is based on a question I get all the time when I give lectures, and it’s ...
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ZZamboni said:
Very interesting post about aliens and UFOs.
The Long Tail of skepticism (4)
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Tim Farley is a skeptic and the creator of the What’s the Harm? website, where he details the harm in believing in antiscience. He also writes a blog called Skeptical Software Tools, and he had a very interesting post recently about the Long Tail of blogging skeptically. The Long Tail is the idea that in any population, a few objects get the lion’s share of the influence. For example, take something you judge by popularity ...
The Big Picture does ISS (7)
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Whoa. The Big Picture does the International Space Station. Need I say more? Actually, yeah: the picture of astronaut Karen Nyberg cracked me. But they’re all really incredible.
Australian antiscience (3)
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Australia still has a long way to go. My friend and überskeptic Richard Saunders sent me this picture he took at a newspaper show: As my Jewish Australian friends would say: Oi!
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Aaron said:
Someone should upload this image to the failblog.
Run tiger, run! (6)
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I loves me some optical illusions. I’ve seen so many I can’t remember them all. But this one may be just about the coolest I’ve seen on teh intertoobz. If you play with it for a minute or two you’ll see how it works, and at what speed to drag the stripes over the pattern to make the best animation (it’s slower than you think). It’s very cool.
Chandrayaan-1 is mapping the Moon (4)
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The Indian lunar probe Chandrayaan-1 is now mapping the Moon! Here’s a sweet image they just released: Chandrayaan-1 image of the lunar south pole. Image courtesy ESA and ISRO. This is a shot of a region near the Moon’s south pole (click it to embiggen). The biggish crater is Moretus, and is 117 km (70 miles) across. The smallest features you can see here are roughly a mile across then. My mistake– what you’re seeing ...
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Nolan said:
Show me some foot prints damn it!
A Stern warning (1)
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Alan Stern is an astronomer, space scientist, and had a stint at NASA HQ as Associate Administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. While he was there he was appalled when he saw cost overruns eating away at various missions, and the collateral damage they were causing other missions. He wound up resigning when he realized he couldn’t do what he was tasked to do (including controlling costs), because he was countermanded by people higher up ...
Magazinalia (3)
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My congrats go to the fabulous Gia, who apparently is married to one of the sexiest men in the world: People Magazine rated Brian Cox thusly in their annual "Sexiest Men Alive" issue. Twitterer LALisa got a snap of the magazine picture of Brian: Judge for yourself. I’ve hung out with him, and yeah, it’s true. But then, science is sexy. Speaking of magazines, I was delighted to see that Skeptical Inquirer had a one-pager ...
SpaceX wakes up some Texans (6)
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Texans got a bit of a surprise Saturday night when the folks at SpaceX did a major test of their 9-engine cluster At 10:30 p.m. local time, the nine Merlin engines roared into life for a full-up test lasting 178 seconds — nearly three minutes. The test shook houses and rattled windows for miles, burned up a half million pounds of propellant, and generated 855,000 pounds of thrust: enough to launch a pretty big rocket ...
Canadian fireball was NOT the ISS toolbag (10)
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I’ve been getting email and comments on an earlier post wondering if the Canadian fireball seen on Thursday were actually the toolbag lost earlier this week by a spacewalking astronaut on the International Space Station. I’ve seen this question pop up elsewhere as well. I can say unequivocally that the answer is no, because it takes months or years for objects at the ISS’s height to have their orbits decay and burn up in our ...
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Ryan said:
I lol'd hard when I say this title.
