Ever wanted to drop in on a bunch of space nerds discussing the top stories of the week? Of course you do. You are reading this blog.

All of the episodes are now also archived on CosmoQuest, where you can watch the show live, every Thursday at 18 UTC. Find your timezone for next week here!

Also, I’ve been dumping some personal videos that I’ve dug up onto YouTube. Here is a panorama of the PAPER-South Africa site from June 2011:

There’s also my skydiving video that was on VHS (thank you, Tim, for converting it!) and some “Occupy” and related protest footage from recent travels. I figured, why not share the bits.

So… just as I was saying how I need to spew forth words into a thesis by April… I’ve also joined SkepChick as a new blogger! I figure, if I just keep writing and writing and writing in different places, something good will come out. Right?

In any case, I’m honored to join such a creative, fun, smart, and nerdy group. My first two posts focus on exoplanets and aliens, as I get right into my favorite topics.

Also, I finally posted a blog again on Discovery, this time about the very cool APOGEE project that has had its first observations.

And in one more announcement… the Weekly Space Hangout now has a home on CosmoQuest! Thanks to Pamela Gay’s impressive coding-fu, you can now go to one place for the hangout, live Astronomy Cast recordings, Questions with the Bad Astronomer, live virtual star parties, and whatever other astronomical goodness we can stream into your eyeholes.

Citizen science online is catching on these days. Not just for your screensaver anymore, these projects let you get your hands dirty, metaphorically speaking. You can classify galaxies or fold proteins.

I am really happy to share this project which is now in beta and building a community for astronomical research: CosmoQuest.

The first project, Moon Mappers, is underway, where you can classify surface features from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s images of the Moon. Get started with crater classifications, or pit your visual recognition software (aka your brain) against a computer.

CosmoQuest is more than just a place in which to play with data, though that is pretty cool. It’s a blog, a community forum, and a place to learn and share. And, it’s growing, so join in now! Coming soon are projects mapping the surface of asteroid Vesta and the planet Mercury.

Also, I am very happy to say that I will be working for CosmoQuest as a post-doc in a few months. That’s right; #WillAstronomForNoms was a success, and I’m going to be Pamela Gay‘s clone! Or something like that… we haven’t worked out the genetics yet.

So, I’m pretty excited, and I’m also trying to finish my thesis so I can get there! Lots. Of. Words. Wheee! Target defense date is sometime in the first week of May. So when I lose my mind between now and then, you know why.

Aaaannnnddd… back. In Charlottesville. The last week and a half saw me in two of the most fun cities I know and at two different conferences presenting my thesis work and all kinds of other professional stuff. Crazy.

You can get a nice sense of the week’s astronomy and space stories by watching the weekly astronomy video chat:

Thanks to Google+ master of the universe, Fraser Cain, we’re doing a live chat about astronomy every Thursday at 10amPT/1pm ET (that’s 18 UTC; check here for your local time.) You can ask questions in the chat during the event or watch the recorded video after it’s done. Last week, I called in from the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, and was graced with the presence of such stellar people as Pamela Gay, Phil Plait, Jon Voisey, Nancy Atkinson, Alan Boyle, Emily Lakdawalla, and Ian O’Neill.

If you watch closely you may catch wind of some excellent personal news that I will blog about shortly, if you don’t already know… Also, with the last month of Serious Work® under my belt, I’m making a return to blogging, at least occasionally, over at Discovery Space News. My latest article on the APOGEE project, built at UVa, is forthcoming. AND, I have some other news about blogging to share in a bit… TEASE.

That’s all for now. Enjoy the video!

Greetings from Boulder! I’m at the National Radio Sciences Meeting of URSI, listening to lots of talks on radio astronomy and geosciences, as well as madly finishing my own talk which I gave yesterday.

I just had to share this cool website that was in one of the talks in the education section of the radio astronomy session. The Long Wavelength Array is a telescope in New Mexico that is being developed to study very low frequency radio waves from the cosmos, just a bit lower in frequency than the PAPER project that I work on. They are at a point where they can image the entire sky every few minutes seconds*, and they are making these images available in real time. Check out what the sky looks like at a few 10s of megahertz right now at LWA TV.

Here is the sky at the time of this draft:

The circle on the left is the entire sky overhead. Note that, as it is late afternoon in winter, the Sun is fairly low in the sky. The color scale ranges from dimmest (blue) to brightest (red). The Sun isn’t all that bright, though that is partly because it is low in the antenna “beam” where it is less sensitive. However, even when it is high in the sky, it does not necessarily dominate. The circle on the right represents the polarized emission from the sky at these frequencies.

Cyg and Cas refer to Cygnus A and Cassiopeia A, the two brightest radio sources in the sky. I love these two, as they are the first things to pop up in our own PAPER images from the Northern Hemisphere. Cygnus A is actually an active galactic nucleus, or a supermassive black hole that is eating up material around it, spewing out jets of high energy material since it’s a very messy eater. If you zoom way in on Cygnus A with something like the Very Large Array, you get this gorgeous image:

Cassiopeia A is a remnant from a supernova, or a massive star that exploded at the end of its lifetime. To the VLA, it looks like this:

And those are just TWO of the THOUSANDS of radio sources in the sky. With more data, more averaging, and improved techniques, radio astronomers are drilling further down to fainter and fainter sources in these low frequency maps. But point sources aren’t the only things to see. That dotted line across the middle represents the Milky Way, our own spiral galaxy. Unlike the starlight that we see in visible wavelengths, however, what we see in the radio is emission from electrons, tiny charged particles, as they spiral through the galaxy’s magnetic fields near the speed of light. Really cool.

With realtime data like this, the LWA and other such projects will open up a new dimension to the radio sky: the time domain. That is, with such an all-sky monitor, we’ll have records of radio sources that flare-up brightly, some of which are still unexplained. The sky is actually a huge area to search, and strange things may be happening when we are not looking. We’ve only seen the tip of the radio flare iceberg, and new tools like LWA-TV will expand our view.

*Whoops! Thanks for the correction, Jake!

Just got home from a whirlwind of family holiday travel, and I’m not even going to put my suitcase away. In a few days, I’ll be leaving again for the National Radio Sciences Meeting of URSI in Boulder, Colorado. I give a talk there on Wednesday afternoon, then I fly out to Austin two days later for the American Astronomical Society 219th Meeting. There, I’ll be at an education research workshop on Saturday morning, and my talk is Thursday afternoon. (Yes, I got *that* slot. Instrumentation, represent!) Looks like I’ll be involved in a splinter meeting about education and outreach on Thursday morning, so you’d better recover from “the party” quickly if you plan on coming! Dark Skies, Bright Kids will have a poster, so come and say hello on Wednesday. I’m sure there will be be some sort of TweetUp during the week as well. Just keep tabs on #aas219. Finally, if you happen to be applying to University of Virginia for graduate school in astronomy, email me! We love to meet prospectives.

I love visiting both of these cities, as they are full of great places to eat, listen to music, get coffee, and enjoy beautiful vistas. Of course, I might be behind my laptop working most of the time that I’m not scientifically socializing, since I have just four more months to finish this thesis. My lovely new headphones from Tim’s parents have been helpful in letting me get my work done with minimal distraction wherever I am. So, don’t make fun of me too much for looking like a radio DJ, okay? This won’t be the first time I’m working from a AAS meeting, however, as one year several of us had our laptops at the hotel bar in a frantic push to finish the DSBK website the night before our poster presentation. Fun times! When Phil Plait is making fun of you for being a nerd, you know you may have gone too far…

Here’s some interesting stuff of note from the last few weeks:

Have a Happy and Healthy New Year by telling ABC that we won’t stand for anti-vaccine ads in Times Square.

Top 10 (or 11) space stories of 2011, according to Discovery News readers. (My sunspot viewing post is #3! Thanks, guys and gals!)

The Bad Astronomer serves up the best gorgeous deep space and solar system and space pictures of 2011. Comet Lovejoy deserves an honorable mention.

Also, science vacations!

If you missed this very lovely post on “Fantasy Armor and Lady Bits,” do check it out. And the nerdalicious follow-up.

George Privon wins at Christmas cards this year. He also explains why astronomers love to increase their signal-to-noise.

Astrobites takes a look at low frequency radio astronomy with LOFAR.

SPARKLECORN!

I got this CD for Tim for Christmas. I nearly died of happiness when this song played in the car.

And finally…

Tim converted my 2002 skydiving video from VHS to something I can actually watch with modern technology! Look at what a youngin’ I was…

I woke up to the news that Christopher Hitchens has died. Well, that sucks. Controversial and ornery though he could be, he was also a superb writer, thinker, and pusher-of-boundaries. So, in his honor, I’ve dug up an old post I did in 2008, reporting on his debate with Frank Turek over the existence of god at VCU. Hope you enjoy.

September 11, 2008:

On Tuesday night, I joined my VAA fellows in going to Richmond to see Frank Turek and Christopher Hitchens debate the existence of god, as mentioned in an earlier post. And I took notes. Boy did I take notes. I was jumping up and down in my seat at some points with retorts and comments bubbling out of my brain! I don’t know why I’m so darn hyper sometimes. I’ve written about it and it’s appearing as a two-part post on Brother Richard’s Life Without Faith. [Editor's note: link no longer goes to my post. See below!] Many many thanks to him for taking me on as a guest blogger!

Thanks again to the fabulous guys and gals of the VCU United Secular Alliance for hosting this incredible event. And a “hello!” to their president, Roy, who I finally met in person but have known as the “bionic atheist” online. And of course, to the VAA people who were just great and witty and fun and intelligent and entertaining on the drive there and back, before the debate, after the debate, and at dinner.

Also, *fangirl moment.* So we were waiting on this huuuge line to get Hitchens to sign our books and chat and such. And I knew what I wanted to say, which I wrote about in my long post above, but what I didn’t mention is that I’m an idiot when talking to people I admire and stumble over my words, but I think it came out okay. However, when I went to shake Christopher Hitchens’s hand, he took it up and he kissed it! So of course I’m stumbling even more like a moron, but I think he took my compliment and understood my point. Anyway, that was charming and cool.

Off to go play with my new iPod Touch… I mean, get work done.

What follows is the review of the debate, at least the version that exists on my computer:

10 September 2008

On September 9th, the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) United Secular Alliance hosted a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Frank Turek on the pressing question, “Does God Exist?” Christopher Hitchens is well known in the atheist community for his book “God is Not Great” but has an impressive list of publications on the subjects of religions, politics, and anything else under the sun. Frank Turek, is co-author of “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist” and promises to show why you shouldn’t either on the video on his website. This was setting up to be a great debate. So, I headed on over to Richmond with the fabulous members of Virginia Atheists and Agnostics (VAA) from UVa. After a hilarious and intellectually stimulating car ride, we sat in the packed auditorium (there were TWO overflow rooms) chatting about our expectations for the debate and trying to pick out the Christians from the atheists by sight. Needless to say, t-shirts tend to give it away.

The debate was moderated by Dr. Timothy Hulsey, the Dean of the Honors College and Associate Professor of Psychology at VCU. He asked Turek to start the debate since he was arguing in the affirmative. To be honest, I was actually excited to hear what Turek had to say. After all, can he really show that atheism depends on faith? Can he bring something new to the discussion and make a convincing argument for a god or gods? However, one of his first statements struck a wrong note. he said that both he and his opponent had the burden of proof to present in this argument. He seemed to fail to realize that the burden of proof rest on the affirmative, or on the believer, in any test of reality. Okay, let’s let him make his points.

He claimed three arguments: cosmological, teleological, and moral. (Oh goodie, I’m an astronomer, I can’t wait to hear the cosmological argument.) Turek talked about the Big Bang and evidence for it, including the second law of thermodynamics (okay…), the expansion of the universe (good), the cosmic microwave background (great!), the irregularities in that background radiation (good), and Einstein’s relativity which links time and space (well done, sir!). His argument then turns to, and I paraphrase, “nothing was before the Big Bang, and something came from nothing, therefore an intelligent creator had to make that choice to bring it into being.” Hold it now, what? The current understanding of physics only probes back to the fraction of a second after the Big Bang, so we don’t know what came before it. For a time, before it was realized that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, it was considered possible that the expansion could decelerate, and the universe would collapse back on itself to create another Big Bang and another universe with a different set of conditions. There is also the hypothesis that there are many universes, or a multiverse, such that Big Bangs are happening all the time, creating different universes. The point is, we just don’t know. Science has a gap, and Turek is happy to fill that gap with his creator god. Has he not learned from the lessons of history that the “god of the gaps” argument falls apart in light of new evidence? Also, he ignores the problem of infinite regression. If the creator created the universe, how was the creator created from nothing? Turek basically proclaims, with a bit of arrogance, in my opinion, that he has all the answers in the face of deep questions about the universe and our existence. This is starting to sound like every other weak argument for god that I have heard. He falls right into the logical fallacy that just because something is currently unexplained that is must be forever unexplainable and thus relegated to the supernatural. And atheists are the ones with too much faith?

This argument continues with a string of quote mining from too many astronomers for me to count. Many scientists, whether theist, deist, or atheist, have used the word “God” to emphasize a gap in our knowledge or wonder at the majesty of the cosmos and how little of it we understand to date. So, that is fertile ground for quote mining, as if arguments from authority hold any weight in science. He extensively quotes Fred Hoyle, who, as any astronomer could tell you, rejected the Big Bang hypothesis in favor of the discredited Steady State universe, shunning scientific evidence and discourse to do so. Next, Turek goes on to explain that the constants of the universe and the placement of our planet and all of that is tuned just perfectly for life to exist. To be honest, I haven’t been able to sit down and work out the math, but I suspect that the error bars for the balance of forces in the universe are larger than many claim them to be, and that some sort of matter could still arise from a host of conditions, thus opening up the door for replicating matter, or life. I will get to more objections to Turek’s points through the words of Hitchens later on.

His teleological argument springs forward from this, claiming that life is clearly intelligently designed. He talks about “macroevolution” and the complexity of DNA and the impossibility of all of these arising by “pure chance.” This is, again, the same old drek that you hear from creationists, IDists, and others that gets shot down again and again. Natural selection is NOT equivalent to pure chance! Mutations occur by chance, and only the tiny fraction of those that actually help the organism thrive survive to spread throughout the gene pool. Evolution is an observed fact; natural selection is the clearest, simplest, and most well supported explanation and is widely accepted by the scientific community. You know the drill by now.

The final piece of the puzzle is morality. This is a concept that Turek twisted and misunderstood and kept ramming into the debate time and time again throughout the evening. Basically, he says that there cannot be moral objectivity without god, or, we do not know what is right and wrong without some higher power governing us. He points out that this does not mean that atheists cannot be moral or that theists cannot be immoral, just that morality must come from on high. After all, how can rationality and mathematics come from randomness? How does reason come about from chemical interactions within our brain? Here, he makes the fatal mistake of equating atheism with determinism, despite the fact that, and I paraphrase John Cleese, “since the 1920s quantum mechanics has destroyed forever the notion that everything can be described mechanically.” Turek again sees a gap in our knowledge, that being the questions, “Where does our morality come from? How should we determine it? What causes reason, consciousness, and the mind?” He says it must be another mind, that of our creator, again ignoring infinite regression. He ignores the advances in neurobiology that have discovered chemicals that create feelings of love and happiness. He ignores evolution and sociology and humanism. I strongly recommend that you read Michael Shermer’s “The Science of Good and Evil” to get a feel for this field of study, and to avoid sticking god into this gap.

Now, on to Hitchens’s opening statements. I’d like to pause to apologize for the long summary of Turek’s opening statements, since they are so full of my own rebuttals. Since Hitchens is not a scientist, he did not address those points in the way that I would have, so I have included my own for completeness, lest you think that Turek’s claims could go unanswered. But more on that later.

Hitchens points out that god is real, at least to some people. Just as heaven is real, and hell is real in the fear of children, and limbo is real to distraught Catholic mothers who have lost their unbaptized babies, even after the Catholic Church has said that limbo does not exist. Hitchens sees it as his mission of sorts to overthrow the type of people that would use this type of lying and fear to subjugate people under their supposed moral superiority. (May I say, wow.) He points out that religion in general claims infallibility of its belief system. In particular, the Catholic Church claims infallibility of the papal teachings, and yet the late John Paul II had to apologize for the mistakes in the Church’s past, such as the Holocaust and the Crusades. And people of faith just have to accept that. An atheist such as himself will not take that for an answer, and he has seen no convincing argument to date that says that god should exist.

Hitchens accuses Turek of “tap dancing” from deism to theism to Christianity in his arguments, and wonders how he knows which of the many gods throughout history, or which personal god, is this creator. He links religion to servility, wishful thinking, and ignorance. After all, there is no need for gods or supernatural explanations when natural explanations do a much better job. (Here, a reference to Laplace would have been appropriate, but again, I am astronomy-biased.) And even still, how does one get from a deistic designer to a personal god that answers prayers and all the rest? He calls the argument from morality “egregious.” After all, instructions from on high reflect a certain need for servility that is just callous and cruel in his point of view. He challenges the audience to think of one moral action or thought that a believer can do or think that a non-believer cannot. (It’s hard, and I couldn’t do it.) Then, think of an immoral action or thought that a believer can commit that a non-believer cannot. His examples include suicide bombing and genital mutilation. After all, instructions from on high certainly trump all else. Here, I digress to disagree slightly. Although I understand that religion is dangerous and allows for these sorts of atrocities to be considered moral, I do not think that these atrocities would not exist without religion. There are a host of irrational beliefs that need not be supernatural to encourage such immorality and claim superior authority. Racism, tribalism, patriotism, hero-worship, and many more can be used and misused without religion to attain these ends.

I’ll get back to Hitchens’s argument, where he points out that all the cosmological evidence points to a “heat death” of the universe. How does theism’s god allow for that? How does he or she or it allow for suffering? This creator is simply a totalitarian monarch, the ultimate “Big Brother” that looks for your mistakes and can convict you of thoughtcrime. Why would we “wish to live as an abject slave?”

Next, each speaker got five minutes for rebuttal, then asked questions of each other directly. This was followed by questions from the audience that were written on index cards and collected by ushers. I’ll try and keep this brief and point out the highlights, since after all, video should be available soon to satiate your hunger for the whole thing! Turek claims that other gods, such as Zeus, do not fit his notion of a personal god (isn’t that convenient) in response to the challenge to explain why his god is better than all the rest. He challenges Hitchens to a second debate in which they can argue New Testament theology and evidence, which prompts Hitchens to later point out that Turek never talks about his own faith, but instead hides behind scanty attempts at evidence in order to support his unsupportable world view. Hitchens also points out the obvious fact that theism asks us to turn away from scientific and moral inquiry. Here, I interject to mention Laplace again and his lack of a need for a “god hypothesis” in the motions of the planets. I am particularly moved by Neil deGrasse Tyson’s observations that Newton may have been able to figure out perturbation theory before Laplace if he hadn’t given up and said “god did it” when faced with scientific difficulty.

Hitchens conservatively estimates that homo sapiens has existed on the planet, at least once nearing extinction, a fate which has consumed at least 98% of the world’s species, for 70,000 years. First, this answers Turek’s point about the perfect design of the universe for life. After all, in this wide universe, only an immeasurably tiny speck that is this planet is known to support life, and is in precarious balance for life as we know it. Humans have just barely adapted to survive here, and not with the best of design either. The designer isn’t very good. Also, monotheism has existed for only 5,000 years at most, so what took heaven so long to intervene in our species?

The period in which they questioned each other convinced me that each man was talking past the other. Not on purpose, mind you, but each starting set of assumptions is so different, that they just couldn’t accept the basic premises of some of the questions. Turek kept harping on determinism and claiming to have all the answers, such as the belief that god will intervene before the universe’s heat death. Hitchens cannot possibly respond rationally to this and says, “Have it your way.” At one point, Turek keeps hounding on his “molecules” and starts to ask, “But where does evil come from…?” and Hitchens interrupts with, “Religion. Where does good come from? Humanism.” Turek proceeds to Godwin the whole discussion and Hitchens replies that Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito, and the like were anything but secular. I guess that answers my earlier disagreement with Hitchens that religion is not the only irrational, destructive belief system. Hitchens, finally, at one point, tells the audience that Turek has not produced on shred of scientific evidence for his claims of a creator.

Many more points are discussed, such as abortion, the meaning of a conscience, evidence that would change one’s mind, and a little bit about sex. At the end, Hitchens declines to make a closing statement, since he feels he has already made his case (”shot my wad” was the actual wording). Instead, he asks if anyone in the audience has a question for him. One man near the front raises his hand and asks why, if he does not believe in a god, does he spend so much time refuting one? Hitchens’s answer is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard, and I will not do it enough justice except to say that he has been galvanized by the events of 9/11 to fight the evil in the world brought on by religion and to oppose theocracy. Man, what a hero. Turek then closes with a summary of his (awful) points and a little bit of weirdness. He says that even though Hitchens seems to say, “There is no god and I hate him,” that god knows there is a Hitchens and…. wait for it…. wait for it… god loves him. Half the audience groaned while the other half applauded. Amazing. Turek then likens Hitchens to an Old Testament prophet and even to Jesus, calling the supposedly religious away from tradition and back to morality, only it is Hitchens’s morality (actually the Enlightenment as mentioned in “God is Not Great”), and thus Hitchens wants to be god. The laughter from the atheist crowd was response enough.

After the debate, we joined the huge line that formed to speak to Hitchens, books to be signed clutched in hand. Turek also had a table with a few people around it, where he tried to defend his claims to questioning audience members. Why most of the theists in the audience did not stick around, I’m not sure. At one point during this, he abused Occam’s Razor and then went on to say that the multiverse hypothesis calls for multiple creators, and so nothing good was going on there. I finally got up to Hitchens’s table where we chatted for a bit about how he should visit UVa since, after all, he quite admires Thomas Jefferson. I complimented him on his speaking style and expressed my wish that more scientists could speak like that to refute the misuse of science by people like Turek. He agreed, and was of course just as tired of hearing the same old rubbish. Overall, he was charming and intelligent and very laid back. Hopefully, we can get him to come to UVa and spend more time discussing!

So who won the debate? It’s hard to pick a clear winner when neither side could accept the other’s starting premises. It’s crystal clear which side I favor, but I hope that Hitchens’s words have planted a seed of doubt in someone’s mind. After all, he is on a heroic mission, and he doesn’t need a god to send him on his way.

Links of interest:

Christopher Hitchens
Frank Turek
“God is Not Great”
“I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist”
Wikipedia on the Big Bang
Wikipedia on Natural Selection
John Cleese Podcast
Neil deGrasse Tyson on God’s retreat from cosmology
Wikipedia on Godwin’s Law
Wikipedia on Occam’s Razor

And finally, the debate itself, all delicious 2 hours of it, was posted online several months later.

Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist? from Andrew Ketchum on Vimeo.

Apparently my weekly updates are now… monthly. Or of some periodicity that is too long for this to be considered a consistent blog. Or something. But it’s my website and I’ll post if I want to, right?

Interesting Things on the Internet

Carnival(s) of Space 224 (Smaller Questions), 225 (me!), 226 (Dear Astronomer), and 227 (Next Big Future)! Phew.

THIS:

TimeScapes 4K from Tom Lowe on Vimeo.

Another reason why Elyse “El Mofo” is my hero.

Research for complementary and alternative medicine? Survey says… doesn’t work. Move on. (Major love to the DC-area skeptics who have been working hard on this project.)

Metallic hydrogen? It’s thought to make up the bulk of the volume of the gas giant planets, like Jupiter, but making it on Earth isn’t so easy.

Pamela Gay blogs about the state of science education to come.

Help Astronomers Without Borders with an astronomy-related Apple Store purchase.

Edmund Scientific responds to the criticism of their boys’ and girls’ science kits.

Science makes us feel stupid. Here here. Related, Scientific Perspiration. And, Feeling Stupid Doesn’t Have to Hurt.

You can’t stop the bellydancers. Raq on, ladies.

I Just Want to Go on a Walk. Fascinating and moving read for women, and men who know women. So, everyone.

Maria subjects herself to another Twilight movie, just for us. Also, the Bloggess wears a wolf to see the movie. That’s right. A WOLF. On her HEAD. I like to think that she and I are internet soul mates, connected in some cosmic way by our Ambien-induced hallucinations.

I can always count on my boyfriend to post awesome videos of Shatner singing.

Borg Cube from Jesus. What? I… what?! If that’s not enough crazy for you, A gets gazed at.

Do I even need to mention that Rick Perry is a moron? I’m not even going to link to that stupid, stupid video. But I will encourage you to come to the highly irreverent Debate-O-Rama live-blog by the Death Panel on Thursday night.

The Personal

I really should be saving up words for my thesis. I’m trying to finish it. I know, I know. You’re saying, “But haven’t you been working on that this, like, forever?” Yeah, it feels like it sometimes, but now I’m actually putting WORDS to PAPER. Or text to LaTeX. Yes, thesis.tex actually exists. A large-ish chunk of it is under (hopefully) final revisions to be submitted to a journal, and the rest is finally pouring forth in a torrent of science-y sounding text. The whole thing is going to be done and defended within the next few months because… well… I probably can’t tell you that yet.

But I’m currently stuck for words, so I thought that a blog post might help shake loose the words from the language center of my brain. I’ll make up for not posting here so much by posting my thesis when it’s done. Fair? I’m sure it’ll make good bedtime reading material. But most importantly, it needs to be done.

Here’s “ambien turtle” again, just for kicks…

Greetings, fellow space nerds and geeks! For the US folks, I hope you have recovered from your turkey coma and are getting back to your regularly scheduled week. We’re getting ready to celebrate the longest night of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere, while you Southern Hemispherers approach summer. However you celebrate the impending holiday, I hope its a peaceful and cheery time! Now, on to the astronomical goodness…

Feeling generous? Help fellow astronomy blogger Ray Sanders win a blogging scholarship! Go over to Dear Astronomer for more details, and vote for Ray until November 30th. Ray also has an article on Universe Today this week exploring the bizarre magnetic properties of pulsars.

The exoplanet count tops 700 as Ian O’Neill examines what is counted as a planet and what is still in the candidate category at Discovery News. With all of these exoplanets, many have held out hope of finding evidence of extraterrestrial life in the galaxy. Paul Scott Anderson wonders if extraterrestrial artifacts are lurking in our own solar system, just waiting to be discovered, at Meridiani Journal. (Of course, there are those that believe such artifacts have already been discovered, but, unfortunately, their cases are less than convincing.)

Back in the 18th century, the Titus-Bode Law was used to study the distances between planets, as explained at Vega 0.0 (spanish). A new age of exploring Mars has begun this past weekend with the successful launch of the Mars Curiosity rover. Weird Warp has more on this car-sized robotic science lab, set to land in August 2012. Stuart Atkinson tells us more about the successful liftoff at The Road to Endeavor, while assuring Opportunity that we still love her, too! The landing for Curiosity is set to be pretty spectacular, with a parachute, rockets, AND a crane:

Though Mars gets much of the attention these days, Venus was once a prime target for robotic exploration. Vintage Space looks back at NASA’s very first interplanetary mission with Mariner 2 in 1962. In that same decade, the United States and Soviet Union were racing to get people into space and to the Moon. So why didn’t the Soviets win the Moon race? Colin explains at Astronotes.

Switching to future modes of transportation, listen to Steve Nerlich at Cheap Astronomy on why faster-than-light travel is, sadly, out of the question. Lest you suffer from buzzkill after that, check out a report on carbon nanotubes that may be used for deep space camouflage at Next Big Future. Cloaking devices, activate! Back to the present, Next Big Future also tells us about a report by the FAA on the US commercial suborbital industries.

Turns out, you don’t have to go far from our home planet to encounter bizarre scientific phenomena. Niall at We are all in the gutter explores terrestrial gamma-ray flashes and their somewhat unknown origin.

That’s it for this week’s Carnival of Space! I’ll leave you with a replay of Curiosity’s launch from Saturday morning:

Even though it’s been a few weeks, I still want to bring attention to some of the interesting stuff on the internet that has caught my attention…

via NASA

Earth had a visitor of the rocky kind in YU55 which passed within the distance of the Moon’s orbit. See the radar video from NASA and get your dose of science from the Bad Astronomer. I got to see the asteroid fly through the field of view of the 26-inch telescope at McCormick Observatory, thanks to Ed Murphy, who is my new favorite candidate for space-laser-operator after the great job he did of finding and tracking it.

Then, it’s the Carnival of Spaaaaaace! Latest one is 223 with a fun picture of Apollo astronauts just lounging about.

Chances are, you don’t suck at that thing you think you suck at. Another reason to *heart* LifeHacker.

More solid information on flu vaccine safety and efficacy from Dr. Steven Novella. I got my shot!

Meanwhile, Delta Airlines is running a public “service” announcement by the National Center for Vaccine Information. It actually seems like a disservice to public health, promoting the NVIC’s anti-vaccine agenda. Delta has responded, but they have not yet removed the ad. Elyse from Skepchick has collated all the ways that you can tell Delta that you are unhappy with this, so keep the pressure on.

The Skeptical Teacher, Matt Lowry, encourages us to support Science Debate 2012. See story immediately above this one to be reminded of why science literacy is important in the public sphere. Shouldn’t our elected representatives know their science, too? This group got Obama and McCain to respond to their questions about science policy in 2008.

More on the science behind Celiac disease, or the autoimmune disease that responds to gluten, from “Smaller Questions”.

A really great example of why falsification is important to science, by Barbara Drescher.

George Hrab exposes the idiocy of “77 non-religious reasons for man/woman marriage,” including the silly use of a slash in their title.

The creative minds at Mad Art Lab have gotten hold of a 3-D printer. Only awesome-ness can come from this. Or the robot apocalypse. Or both. Maybe they’ll even make a space laser!

I found this to be a rather poignant essay on the “Occupy” movements and rape culture. (Not found on my own, but found it here.) Also, the Occupy Wall Street protestors were kicked out in the middle of the night, but have returned this evening. Rock on.

For me, last weekend was pretty fun. I went to Philly, spent some time with Tim, hung out with an old college friend with whom I have way too much fun, took a workshop in “Circus Aerials,” and did a really cool historical walking tour. And I took part in my very first TuacaCon! This is a really fun virtual event where authors read their work to you. It’s like storytime for adults! At least some of the segments are posted on the UStream site, so check it out! I got to talk about astronomy and extraterrestrials with P.G. Holyfield for a bit which was really great. He’s particularly interested in astronomy due to a story that he’s working on right now that I can’t wait to read. In the meantime, you can read or listen to “Murder at Avedon Hill” which combines fantasy and mystery in a world that I very much hope he revisits in the future. Also, I learned about Write Or Die. NOW I can finish my thesis.

Speaking of podcasts, I had a lovely chat about astronomy with Kylie Sturgess a while back, at Dragon*Con actually, which she recorded and posted, and I don’t think I ever linked to that. Sorry about that, Kylie! Some of her other recent episodes are from SkepTrack, so you can re-live (or for-the-first-time-live) those panels.

Finally, if that’s not enough to keep you informed and entertained for a while, the James Randi Educational Foundation posted two talks from The Amazing Meeting 9 so far, one by Sadie Crabtree on skeptical activism:

Sadie Crabtree – Winning Hearts and Minds for Skepticism from JREF on Vimeo.

… and the rather spirited panel on space, which contains the “shush heard round the world.”

TAM Panel – Our Future in Space from JREF on Vimeo.

If you’ve made it this far down the page, then you probably have time for this (via Tim).