Mars Curiosity Tweetup

After hearing such wonderful things from fellow skeptic, Trent Faust, about his Tweetup experience with NASA, I was super-excited to hear that I’d been chosen to attend the Mars Curiosity Tweetup and launch event in November. I debated whether to attend since the tweetup was scheduled for the day before Thanksgiving and the launch the day after. My wife, Sharon, encouraged and supported my attendance and I could not ignore this opportunity. I didn’t debate it for too long – only a few hours after receiving the invitation, I decided to attend.

Once I joined the closed FaceBook group dedicated to the event, information started pouring in like crazy. They wanted us all to vote on designs for patches, pins, teeshirts, etc. Suddenly, I felt like a pawn in a merchandising scheme. Many people in the group seemed to take a sense of pride in being part in what seemed to me a guerrilla marketing project.

I committed to buying three of the pins; but I expressed no interest in hats, teeshirts, patches, etc. I suppose NASA needs the money they get from all of the merchandise, but I felt no urge to participate much in this part of the festivities.  A good number of people attending are from out of state and some from overseas. So I get that they want to get all the souvenirs and memorabilia as they can get their hands on.

Some of us used the group page to arrange car pooling. There is also a special luncheon with an astronaut on Thanksgiving for those guests dining sans family due to participation. Some locals have also opened up their homes for people to sleep and/or dine on Thanksgiving evening. How’s that for Southern hospitality? So there are certainly some good uses for the Facebook group page.

What really interested me, though, is the opportunity to get a VIP tour of the Kennedy Space Center and front row seats to the launch. Yes – sign me up for that! After all, exploration is from where all of the excitement begins. What better way to celebrate Carl Sagan Day (Nov. 12) than with the thought of seeing a Mars Mission launch in the same month.

The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover is slated to land on Mars in August 2012. Its two-year mission is focused on finding any possible remnant of microbial life starting with the most likely locations near its landing site. This little guy is going to be a hard worker collecting rock and soil samples, pulverizing them, collecting and transmitting the resulting data back home to the JPL. It will also be sporting a number of cameras to help researchers navigate and explore, not to mention snapping more great photos of the red planet for all to see.

You can follow twitter accounts @MarsRovers and @MarsCuriosity or navigate to http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/overview/ to find up to date information.

Future and past NASA Tweetup info can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/connect/tweetup/index.html.

Carl Sagan Day info can be found at http://carlsaganday.com/

Come celebrate the upcoming Apocalypse with us this Saturday at Three Birds Tavern. And, in the unlikely event that we are still corporeal here on this material plane come 6:01, either because the Rapture did not in fact occur, or because we have been passed over and are now doomed to dwell in a blazing nightmare hellscape, we will at least be able to console ourselves with a few more drinks!

PZ Myers delivers a very entertaining talk at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne in 2010:

From Pharyngula.

Ray Comfort being interviewed on Atheist Experience on local public access television in Austin, TX. (How do you manage to sound like a blithering idiot within a minute-and-a-half of being introduced?)

The Pioneer Anomaly is a long-standing mystery where the solar-system-escaping Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft have been experiencing a tiny, unexplained sunward acceleration over the course of their journey

A beautiful (if disturbing) set of videos illustrating the Milgram experiments. Particularly interesting was the complete lack of empathy visible in the 19-year-old’s face (though many others followed just as far in the experiments) as she continues to deliver increasingly large shocks to the victim.

From the BBC Four program The Joy of Stats, an excellent, Tuftesque demonstration of the power of visual design combined with the presentation of statistics…

Were you the bored kid in math class who doodled rather than paying attention? (I was — I remember discovering the “crazy checkerboards” and star patterns myself, and still draw Sierpinski gaskets when I need to think-doodle.) Vi Hart’s Mathematical Doodling series is an impressive display of clear and simple explanations of topology, graph theory, etc. [...]

A nice summary of the research into whether there are any health risks posed by cell phone usage. tl;dr: There is no conceivable physical mechanism by which cell phones could cause harmful effects. Nor is the amount of energy emitted by them anywhere near enough to be dangerous. Finally, if they were at all dangerous, [...]

Last month I made a trip with friends to the other coast of Florida, and our route over there was the Tamiami trail. Guess what’s on that trail? The Skunk Ape Research Headquarters, of course!