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
Posted by Bad Astronomy
Last week was Comic Con, and for the third year in a row, the Hive Overmind Discover Magazine sent me along to be on a panel. Every year we do a variation on discussing the science of science fiction, and this year we focused on its abuse. We asked our panelists (Jaime Paglia [Eureka], Kevin
Posted by Bad Astronomy
... love geeks. I love clever people. I love sciencey stuff. So this fills my heart with squishiness: a skirt with rows of lights that illuminate when facing north: Make those LEDs red and every astronomer could use it. Not to mention campers, hikers, and let's face it, nerds like all of us. I would dance
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... 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
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... 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
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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
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... incredible evening of geekery that was one of the most fun and wonderful things with which I have ever participated. Run by Adam Savage™, Wil Wheaton, and singer/songwriters Paul and Storm, it features lots of geeks singing and talking about the stuff they love. A
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... have no real news here, except that one of my missions at Comic Con was to meet up once again with Zach Weiner, who writes and draws my favorite web comic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. My wife and I went over to his booth, and there he was! As this picture shows, I was
Posted by Bad Astronomy
At Comic Con, I moderated a wonderful panel about how science sometimes gets screwed up by science fiction. Sponsored by Discover Magazine and The NAS Science and Entertainment Exchange, it's the third time we've done this panel, and it's been really fun every year. I already talked a bit about this — we had Jaime
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Last year I wrote about the nifty website Ficly, a community where you can write short fiction. And I mean short: each story can only be 1024 characters — roughly 200 words or so. It's incredibly limiting, which means you really have to be careful when you write. The story I wrote then was loosely based
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I'm in San Diego, at Comic Con! W00t!I've already been able to hang a bit with Craig Engler from SyFy, and a few other friends. Today, though, is a big day. I have my Hive Overmind Discover Magazine panel (Abusing the Sci of SciFi, with Jaime Paglia from "Eureka", Kevin Grazier (science advisor to Eureka),
Posted by Bad Astronomy
... am pleased to announce that I will be writing a periodic column for Blastr, the new incarnation of SciFIWire, the SyFy Channel's web news portal*!I've had an informal relationship with SyFy for a while. The panel I moderate at Comic Con every year has Jaime Paglia from the SyFy show "Eureka" on it, and
Posted by Bad Astronomy
... just want to send more love to Zach Weiner at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, who is, as usual, quite correct. The guy on the right doesn't look much like Hoagland, though. [Update: see my comment below.]
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Speaking of Brea Grant…Many years ago, I wasn't a huge fan of Kevin Bacon until I saw "The Big Picture", and then "Tremors", and so I finally decided he cracks me up and is cool. Then someone told me about the Oracle of Bacon, where you enter an actor's name and get their Bacon Number;
Posted by Bad Astronomy
The wonderfulicious Brea Grant is this week's Geek a Week. Brea's an actress who played Daphne, "The Speedster" on "Heroes", and I was tickled a while back to find out she reads my blog. I had a lot of fun hanging out with her at Comic Con last year (and hope to see her again
Posted by Bad Astronomy
... love stuff like this: what would the credits of "Firefly" have been like had the show been made in the 1980s? Pretty much like this:This was done by Garrison Dean and my bud Charlie Jane Anders from io9. I saw right away (like many others) that they left off Simon Tam from the credits!
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