Cool news, math dorks: my friend Jennifer Ouellette's new book The Calculus Diaries comes out today!I've known Jennifer for a couple of years now. She helms the Science and Entertainment Exchange (trying to get better science into movies), she spoke (wonderfully) at TAM 7, she was at SETIcon and Comic Con, and I also know
Posted by Bad Astronomy
Crispian Jago makes completely transparent attempts to get linked from blogs. The thing is, he keeps doing spectacular stuff!This time it's a metro-subway-style map showing scientists of the past 400 or so years. It's wonderfully detailed! Here it is shrunk enough to fit on my meager 610-pixel wide blog:[Click to unsubwaynate and get the 2Mb
Posted by Bad Astronomy
Crispian Jago makes completely transparent attempts to get linked from blogs. The thing is, he keeps doing spectacular stuff!This time it's a metro-subway-style map showing scientists of the past 400 or so years. It's wonderfully detailed! Here it is shrunk enough to fit on my meager 610-pixel wide blog:[Click to unsubwaynate and get the 2Mb
Posted by Bad Astronomy
When I posted the awesome video of a fire tornado last week, I had only heard rumors of such things. Apparently, they're more common than I thought. Here's another amazing video, and this one is even better: it's longer, and you can see the rotating smoke cloud around the column of fire! This really is
Posted by Bad Astronomy
American authors, journalists, and bloggers can breathe a sigh of relief: with broad bipartisan support, a short time ago President Obama signed a bill into law that makes sure that the awful and regressive libel laws in the UK cannot be enforced here in the United States. I've written about this issue many times; skeptic and
Posted by Bad Astronomy
I've been posting a lot of extreme close-ups of the Moon, but sometimes you can learn something by taking a step back. For example, I imagine if I went out in the street and asked people what shape the Moon's orbit was, they'd say it was a circle (or, given recent poll results, they'd say it
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OK, I pretty much thought I had seen it all. Then I saw this video of a tornado (really, a dust devil) made of fire. Of FIRE. Via The Telegraph:Holy Frak. I guess this shouldn't be too surprising; after all, shear winds blowing over warm ground is how dust devils form, and what's warmer than
Posted by Bad Astronomy
If you're looking to support skepticism and science, a few grassroots efforts could use some attention:A while back I wrote about James Dunbar's way cool comic book about cosmology called "Bang!". He's starting up production on a sequel about the origin of life and evolution, and is looking for some funding so he can keep
Posted by Bad Astronomy
In case you haven't heard — and c'mon, do you live in some underground cavern with Morlocks and C. H. U. D. S.? — my new TV show "Phil Plait's Bad Universe" premieres this Sunday night August 29, at 10:00 p. m. on the Discovery Channel (check your local listings; for me it's on at 8:00). This first episode is
Posted by Bad Astronomy
When I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was "When Worlds Collide", about a rogue planet that collides with Earth, killing everyone (except for a few who escape on rockets). Science fiction, right? Right?Yeah, maybe not so much. It turns out, worlds really do collide. And we can see the shrapnel. Binary stars are stars
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The NASA Earth-science satellite Earth Observing-1 has returned another amazing picture: the calving of Petermann Glacier off Greenland. The break happened on August 5, and this shot was taken 11 days later: The fjord is to the bottom, and the ice island that broke off is moving to the upper left. The picture is so
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BREAKING: Japanese astronomer Masayuki Tachikawa may have spotted yet another impact on Jupiter! Here's the video:Emily Lakdawalla at The Planetary Society blog has the details. [UPDATE: Sky and Telescope has more info too.] The video looks legit, but to be absolutely sure we'll need to get either more video from a different location, or a
Posted by Bad Astronomy
... missed the Perseids last week — a combination of bad weather and having to get up early to go to SETIcon the next day — but I, and now you, can get a good feel for them via this lovely timelapse video taken by photographer Henry Jun Wah Lee:Joshua Tree Under the Milky Way
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The Moon is shrinking!Well, a little: new results from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate that over recent geological time, the Moon has shrunk by approximately 100 meters in diameter!Here's the evidence, or at least one piece of it:[Click to unshrinkenate.]That image shows the Gregory scarp, a cliff across the surface of the Moon. Scarps like
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... am very, very happy to announce that the pilot for my TV show, "Phil Plait's Bad Universe" now has an official slot in the Discovery Channel lineup: Sunday, August 29th at 10:00 p. m. (ET)!Woohoo! As a reminder, and because it cracks me up, here's the trailer for the show: Check your local listings for
Posted by Bad Astronomy
... am very, very happy to announce that the pilot for my TV show, "Phil Plait's Bad Universe" now has an official slot in the Discovery Channel lineup: Sunday, August 29th at 10:00 p. m. (ET)!Woohoo! As a reminder, and because it cracks me up, here's the trailer for the show: Check your local listings for
Posted by Bad Astronomy
Sometimes there are news stories with so much awesomeness to them it's hard to describe it all. This is one such item. It starts with a bruiser of a star cluster, and ends with astronomers scratching their heads over black holes. C'mon, I'll show you how this works. Awesome thing #1:Our tale starts with Westerlund 1,
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In June, I posted about a pinup calendar where the model was somewhat more naked than naked: in fact, the pictures were all X-rays!I was fascinated by the implied raciness of the pictures, given that at best all you could see was a hint of curves. The poses themselves were provocative as well, and I
Posted by Bad Astronomy
Rapper Dr. Dre is planning on an instrumental album based on the planets! From Vibe magazine:You mentioned a hip-hop album without rapping. Will we ever hear a Dr. Dre instrumental album?Oh yeah, that´s in the works. An instrumental album is something I´ve been wanting to do for a long time. I have the ideas
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Just a reminder: this coming weekend (August 13 – 15) is SETICon, a convention where science and science fiction meet. You can read all about it in my posts where I announced I'd be there, and a followup. It's still only $35 for the whole weekend, though there are options if you want to participate
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My friend, the geek-chanteuse Marian Call, is touring the United States, playing smaller venues in all the Lower 48 (and Hawaii!). I heard her sing in Boulder where she was incredible as always, and also at w00tstock, where a whole passel of folks were enthralled. If you need a sample of her stuff, check out
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Today happens to be the birthday of two people who are important to me: James Randi, and my sister Marci*. If you don't know Randi, that's OK: you can get some good info on him in this interview he did with Big Think, or this talk he gave at TED, or his annoucement when he came
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You know what's cool? This:I love this song. And yeah, that's me doing the voiceover for it. You should buy Geo's album "Trebuchet", too. It has that song and lots of other cool ones, too.
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On behalf of "Surly" Amy Roth and myself: thank you to everyone who bought Amy's necklaces.
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Yesterday, a judge ruled that California's Proposition 8 — which banned same sex marriage — is unconstitutional. He's quite correct. If you think letting gay people marry is somehow a threat to your marriage, you're quite wrong. Do yourself a favor: go look at these pictures. They may bother you, or even disgust you. But do
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The Cassini probe is orbiting Saturn, taking devastatingly beautiful pictures all the time. But sometimes one comes along, and while at first glance it looks like just another routine shot, when you look more closely you realizing you're gazing into awesomeness. This picture [click to enjovianate] looks like just another shot of the edge of
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This is wildly good news! Through Vaccine Central I learned that a major polio outbreak in Tajikistan has been stopped!How? Through vaccination. Yup. The first reports of polio were confirmed in April — 413 of them. However, that ended in late June, when no new cases were reported. That is credited to the thousands of doctors
Posted by Bad Astronomy
My friend Glenn Schneider is an astronomer, and also a little bit nuts. He's an umbraphile, an eclipse-chaser. But he's not just any guy who travels the world to watch solar eclipses, he gets neck-deep into them. He actually chartered a plane and organized an incredible trip to see the total solar eclipse a few
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