Scientific Skepticism
Megameter chasm on an icy moon
I know I haven’t been posting much astronomy the past few days — Comic Con, w00tstock, and "Bad Universe" have kept me hopping — so to make up for it a little bit, here’s a lovely image sent back a billion kilometers from Cassini:
Flushed with pareidolia
Pareidolia is the psychology term for seeing faces in random patterns. This usually gets air time due to some vaguely Christlike shape in a stain or something, but not every instance has to be religiously motivated. I don’t want to ignore those secular ones, because, after all, I hate to let anything go to waste.
Behold!
This picture, taken by Mitchell Whitney, was snapped right after an, um, incident that required some vigorous plunging. The only conclusion is that the toilet itself was relieved when it was all over as well.
I have a series of puns all trying to push their way out of my brain, but I’ll let them go because it’s been an exhausting week. I’m pooped.
Tip o’ the plumber’s helper to Dan Durda.
Lunar triple sunset
I never get tired of the stunning pictures being sent to Earth from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. This one is particularly cool:
It’s a little weird, isn’t it? What you’re seeing is sunset over some mountains on the Moon, with only the peaks popping up into the sunlight. It might help to pull back a bit:
[Click to embiggen.]
AVN now routinely getting publicly humiliated
The Australian Vaccination Network, an antivax organization fronted by Meryl Dorey, has long been an antiscience group devoted to spreading any kind of nonsensical rhetoric they can. The good news? Now they’re being called out on it.
Bad Astronomy is still surly
As I wrote about recently, I have teamed up with Skepchick Surly Amy to raise money for the American Cancer Society: she has created 200 lovely hand-made ceramic Bad Astronomy pendant necklaces, and for each one she sells for $20 she’s donating $10 to the ACS. Each one is different, so check them all out!
w00tstock video
I just found out that video of my talk at w00tstock has been posted on YouTube. The quality is a little shaky, since it was a handheld video taken from a distance back, so some of the pictures may be hard to discern, but I think it suffices to get the point across.
This may surprise you, but the content is pretty much Not Safe For Work. Yeah, I know: I’m not generally known for that. But hey– it’s an astronomy talk! What better place to go a little blue?
The video is in two parts; the first has the last couple of minutes of the warmup before my talk (I came on after the intermission), and the second part includes the premier of the trailer for my new TV show. The reaction of the audience was… well. It made me happy indeed.
Here are both parts. Part 1…
Green Lantern inspires a kid at Comic Con
I was a big Green Lantern fan when I was a kid. It may have been my favorite comic book, and I used to sneak into my brother’s room and read every issue he got.
I’m a grownup now, more or less, but sometimes those comic book heroes still get to me. At Comic Con last week, this wonderful thing happened when a young lad asked Ryan Reynolds — who will play Hal Jordan in the upcoming movie – about the Green Lantern oath:
I still know that oath by memory. And you know what? In general, it’s a pretty good motto for life, too.
H-R Diagram of media stars
Graphing variables is a critical skill in science. If something depends on something else — like the speed of sounds depends on air density, or the surface gravity of an object depends on its size — then if you plot the two things on a graph, you should see a pattern. The result is a line, or a curve. If the two things don’t depend on each other, you get a random collection of dots: a scatter plot.
Bad Universe coming to a Discovery Channel near you
That NASA look
Yes, I know I just linked to a David Mitchell video the other day, but this one is so good I figured why not.
Ha! That’s from the UK show "That Mitchell and Webb Look", which is a great satirical show. There are about a gazillionty billion reasons the Moon Hoax folks are wrong, but M&W have boiled it down to its very essence. Well done!
Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to TheShickle.
