Two Carnivals

Two science-based blog carnivals have gone online recently. At Pharyngula the Creation Museum Carnival has just gone live. I appreciate the freedom of speech issue. If someone wants to spend millions of dollars fighting against science that it their right, but there’s no need to agree with or even respect dishonesty.

More cheerful is the Carnival of Space, hosted by Universe Today, which has a collection of links on Space Science and Astronomy from various weblogs.

The Amazing Colour Changing Card Trick

Found via Mixing Memory:

To my huge embarrassment I missed how it was done. I was so fixed looking for the magic tricks I know I skipped the obvious explanation.

The Quirkology website it’s promoting is well worth five minutes of anyone’s time to view the other videos. I’ll have to get the book, which you can read an extract from at the Guardian.

In related news the Best Visual Illusion of the Year 2007 has been announced. OmniBrain has the details.

Integrated Sciences

For the past year, I’ve been blogging on both WordPress and on Blogger. Having a foot in both camps, it’s interesting to watch the arms race between the platforms. Another thing this dual approach has allowed me to do is to take a more commercial approach to my Blogger blog, Science of the Invisible (great title!), which means, among other things, including a Google Adsense widget in the blog template. So it was interesting today to see an ad for Integrated Sciences BSc crop up for the first time. Integrated Sciences hits the bigtime?

Would you join a club that would have you as a member?

Ash. Photo (cc) Owen Booth.

There’s an interesting piece on the Grauniad’s Comment is Free today (yesterday by the time this goes live). People are campaigning for Hiasl of Austria to be considered comparable to people convicted of drug abuse, drink driving or George W. Bush.* Why would someone want that? They argue Hiasl should have basic human rights. Whether or not he’ll get them is uncertain because he’s a chimp.

Sex and Patrick Moore

I haven’t commented on this with the flood of other recent comments because I wanted to take time to think this over. If you haven’t seen the news recently Sky at Night presenter Patrick Moore has complained about banal television programmes and then blamed the fall in quality TV on women becoming bosses.

It’s a big disappointment. It would be an exaggeration to say Astronomy IS Patrick Moore in the UK, but he is an enormous influence. It’s likely that if he hadn’t been the presenter of Sky at Night for fifty years that the programme would have been repurposed like Tomorrow’s World. So I’ve been taking time trying to make sense of why he’d say such a thing and it’s difficult. I’m not eager to believe that he is so badly wrong. What makes it more difficult there aren’t really any mitigating factors and that he’s almost right.