Common sense and the body of evidence; deductive logic and the scientific method; the Symphony of Science says it well.
Just a reminder that Sci-Fi London’s Oktoberfest kicks off tomorrow evening with the Life, but as we know it? event at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich (home of Greenwich Mean Time). This presentation investigates extraterrestrial life in science, science fiction, and comedy. They will also be unveiling their new planetarium program, Astrobiology on pretty much the same topic. I should mention you better already have your tickets if you wanted to see TRON on the big screen before the new version comes out, because that one is sold out. The Studio Ghibli All Nighter still has half the seats left, but tickets are going fast. They will be running Spirited Away, Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind, The Cat Returns, and Howl’s Moving Castle in that theater; I would pay to see any one of them in a movie theater, all four back to back would be a serious treat.
This one looks very interesting; from October 10th to the 24th this year the USA Science & Engineering Festival will take place in the Washington, D.C. area. Billing itself as the the country’s first national science festival, it already has over 500 organizations signed up to participate, and will end with a two day Expo in the nation’s capital according to their official blog. This event will give science & engineering groups the opportunity to present themselves to the public with hands-on science activities to inspire the next generation of researchers and developers. The teams involved are wide ranging, and include such diverse outfits and events as the 4H National Youth Science Day, the You Can Do The Cube competition, a presentation from Hollywood Movie Physics, and the Versatile Mr. Freeze from FermiLabs, to name but a few. And yes, you can follow them on a boatload of social media tools, including Twitter.
A very nice image capture sequence video presented by an Astrophysicist I trust on a news channel I don’t… thanks to Comcast Dot Net for the source video for this presentation, and The Hubblesite in the US and Space Telescope in Europe for the science behind it.
As it often does at this time of year, it will be raining rocks tonight and tomorrow morning, during the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. It should be good viewing everywhere without a lot of cloud cover, since it will be a moonless night. This is the main event, but not the complete show; while the peak is tonight as we hit the densest part of the cluster, from beginning to end takes a week or two to go through. You can see some good pictures already from this years presentation over at the National Geographic site, and Space Dot Com is reporting a quite bright fireball over Alabama the other night. The peak from the US East Coast is 3PM this afternoon to 3AM tomorrow morning, while the UK should be local midnight to dawn tonight. If you are looking for a list of other meteor showers to catch this year, Stardate has a short list of the good ones, and as always Heavens Above can be configured to inform you about anything interesting to watch in the sky at your location. Happy viewing!
One of the more interesting panels at Comic-Con this year was about good and bad science in science fiction TV and Movies. This is the third year I know of this panel has been presented, and they made some great points, as you can see for yourself.