The Bad Astronomy Newsletter

Bad Astronomy Newsletter #10

Contents:

1. Calendar updates
2. Webspotting: My PaxTV appearance noted by HB
3. Bits and Pieces: the book, autographs, the newsletter and the store
4. Petition to Yahoo!Groups to prevent them for charging for service
5. Astronomy Tidbit: Monitoring the menace from space
6. Subscribe/Unsubscribe info

1) Calendar updates

I have been busy updating my calendar. It is now easier to read and has more info. I have also added a lot of public appearances I'll be making over the next few months, including Pittsburgh, Nashville, San Francisco, Pasadena and another bout of silliness on Tech TV. If you are in any of those areas, drop on by when I'm there!

2) Webspotting: My PaxTV appearance noted by HB

I received a bit of email about my appearance on the TV show "Encounters with the Unexplained" last week. Most of it was pretty positive, which was nice.

However, not everybody thought I was on the side of the Good Guys. There is a Hoax Believer's (HB) website which has a lengthy discussion of the hoax. He starts with a series of interesting but irrelevant quotations, then goes into a rant about the show. He mentions me specifically, saying I am "a recent-but-longtime employee of NASA (which was never mentioned in the PAX show)".

The reason it wasn't mentioned is that it isn't true. I said this specifically to the segment producer: I worked for 5 years as a contractor for NASA. That means I worked for a company which had NASA grants (which actually came through a completely different company, meaning I was removed even another step from NASA) but I was not a direct NASA employee. This is not mincing words; it is substantively different than being a NASA employee. For one thing, I was not (nor am I now) a civil servant. I work for a University, again with NASA grants, but also again that does not make me a NASA employee.

Anyway, the website is full of breathless but ultimately vacuous claims. A lot of HB sites are like this. It's too bad: the more careful ones are far more interesting; but the ones like this are clearly more paranoid and just plain weird than anything else.

The Moon hoax is a lively topic on the Bad Astronomy Bulletin Board (BABB to those in the know). Take a look!

3) Bits and Pieces: the book, autographs, the newsletter and the store

Book:
The book "Bad Astronomy" continues to sell fairly well. It has stayed between the ranks of 1000-4000 on Amazon for a while, which is pretty nice. I have heard a review of it will be in the next issue of Discover magazine, and it should be getting reviewed in other magazines soon too. I'll post more when I find out.

Autographs:
I have been getting requests for autographs for the book. I won't comment on what dire consequences this has for my opinion of the mental health of the country, but I have decided to acquiesce. If you have a copy of the book and want an autograph, email me at badastro@badastronomy.com. I will send you my snailmail address. Send me a self-addressed stamped envelope, and I will sign a sticker (called a "book plate" in the publishing biz) with my logo on it that you can put in the front of the book. The stickers are 9x13 millimeters (3.5x5 inches) so make sure the envelope is big enough. A standard business envelope should do the trick. Don't forget the stamp! This is a lot cheaper and easier than sending the actual book to me in the mail, so it seems like a good compromise.

Newsletter:
The newsletter is now at nearly 1200 subscribers, making it the seventh largest astronomy-related group on Yahoo!Groups. By the way, I have more about Yahoo! in item 4 below. Please give it a read.

Store:
Also, the Bad Astronomy store is doing nicely. I bought a mug and t-shirt through it and liked the quality. I gave the mug to the artist who put together the logo, and sent the shirt to my editor in New York who claimed he will wear it. He gets this newsletter, so I expect his admonitions to begin shortly after I send this out. ;-)

Thanks to everyone for supporting me in this. Here are the relevant links: Book and Store.

4) Petition to Yahoo!Groups to prevent them for charging for service

Note (added 11/18/02): This next bit turns out to have been not terribly useful. See the next issue for why.

Rumor has it that Yahoo!Groups wants to start charging for their service. I am not sure if that means that people who want to use it to distribute newsletters like this one must pay, or if people pay to read the newsletter. Either way, it strikes me as being a bit uncool to offer a free service, then load it with more and more ads, and then say they want to charge money for it.

They have this right, of course, but Yahoo! has been around a while, and must have known how much it costs to run a service like the groups, especially since they bought all the groups formerly run by Egroups. It smells suspiciously like bait-and-switch to me, though of course that is simply a suspicion.

There is an online petition for people who don't like the idea of Yahoo!Groups charging for what started as a free service. Check it out. I signed it last week; I am number 4693. As I write this, there are nearly 18,000 signatures on it.

5) Astronomy Tidbit: Monitoring the menace from space

Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) are in the news again. One just missed us by a paltry 460,000 kilometers last week. Luckily, some astronomers are on the job. A new system, called Sentry, is able to quickly alert astronomers when a potential impactor is found.

You can read more about it here and check out the latest NEAs that have been found here.

Also, an interesting report has been released by RAND about using asteroids as weapons. Yikes! You can read about it here.. It's a PDF file, and they have instructions on downloading the (free) reader. It's not exactly a reassuring document.

Finally, CNN has a page about the one that just missed us.

6) Subscribe/Unsubscribe Information

If, for some weird reason, you want to unsubscribe to this newsletter, just send email to badastronomy-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com with no body text. Make sure you send it from the address to which the newsletter is sent! Alternatively, you can unsubscribe from the Yahoo!Groups website. Go to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/groups/groups-32.html for more info.

Remember, the newsletters will be archived on the website at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/badastronomy so even if you unsubscribe you can still read them there. I suggest staying subscribed so you get them as soon as I send them.

Also, I do not sell your email addresses and neither does Yahoo! Take a gander at the Yahoo!Groups privacy message if it makes you feel better: http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy/us/ Note that the email addresses are visible to me, but I have no prurient use for them. If that makes you nervous for whatever reason, feel free to unsubscribe and simply read the archived newsletters at the website listed above.

Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
badastro@badastronomy.com
http://www.badastronomy.com