Bad Astronomy

Ask me something on Slashdot!

Slashdot is a news aggregator site where contributors submit interesting stories about science, tech, and assorted geekery. It’s one of the oldest and biggest social network sites on teh tubez*, and still one of the best. I go there every day to see what’s buzzing. My own humble (ha!) site is linked from there every now and again as well, and I’m always happy when it is.

Every week or so, Slashdot does an interview with someone online. They open up questions, collect a few, and send them to the interviewee to answer via email. So guess who they just asked to participate?

That’s right! Rory Calhoun! No wait, it was me! They’ve opened up a page where you can leave a question. You don’t have to register to ask a question, but if you like fresh techy news, you should sign up anyway. Feel free to ask anything, though bear in mind I’ll be writing out the answer, so something like “Why is the Universe expanding?” might be more text than I’m willing to write and you’re willing to read.

But, to save you time, here are some answers so you don’t have to ask basic questions:

1) Yes, I’m married.

2) I worked on Hubble for ten years, but now I write about it.

3) No.

4) When I write about not wearing pants most of the time, I’m not kidding.

5) 13.73 +/- .12 billion years.

6) It’s a tough choice, but I’d have to say either Wil Wheaton or George Hrab.

So there you go. I hope that helps. Head on over to Slashdot, see what others have asked, and then leave your own question! And my sincere thanks to Slashdot for asking me to be a part of this. It’s an honor.

I’ll add that questions left in the comments on this very post won’t be part of the Q&A; you have to go to Slashdot and write it there. Thanks!

* In fact, in the olden days of the web, when a site got linked by Slashdot it frequently overloaded the server, jamming it and making site loading very slow. This became known as “getting slashdotted” and it happened to me a few times way back when, before the Hive Overmind Discover Magazine started hosting my blog on a beefy server that can handle the load better.