A few things to amuse you over coffee today:
1) PZ has run into an old friend of Bad Astronomy: one Charles Schults III, who sees fossils littering the surface of Mars. His followers have been posting to the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today board for years. Needless to say, their arguments are impervious to such trivialities as logic, reason, and evidence.
2) A NASA intern hopes to go on a spacewalk before his term ends in June… at least, according to the Onion. It’s pretty funny, but in fact that sense of entitlement smacks a bit much of things I hear from antiscientists. They sent me a seven-screen email IN ALL CAPS, after all; how dare I not take several hours to go through their math to find they divided by zero in the third equation?
3) Skeptics in 1939 were pretty sharp. Too bad scammers and frauds still abound.
4) Celestis, the company that launches peoples’ ashes into space (and which launched, lost, and subsequently found the remains of Jimmy Doohan, Scotty from Star Trek), will be sending a new payload of ashes on the next SpaceX launch, scheduled for June. I hadn’t heard that SpaceX was trying to launch again so soon, and this is a weird and somewhat macabre way to find out. Incidentally, they want to launch human remains to the Moon by 2010.
Tips o’ the tin foil beanies to BABLoggees Shaven Yak (It’s Yaksmas!), Austin Burns, and Seonaid Barrett.
