On Rescuing Reporters and Accurate Language in Astronomy

I imagine the recent negotiations to have gone something like this. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I like to imagine that Uncle Bill threatened Kim Jong Il with a Roman spatha.
I for one am glad that Bill Clinton gets a little attention. He gets to be the goddamned hero [...]

Why Going to the Moon is Awesome

I want to make it perfectly clear that I am, in fact, totally pumped that we’re finally getting back into legitimate space exploration. The thing is, there are perfectly justifiable reasons for going to the moon aside from the obvious intrinsic merit–the “cool” factor that I’ve talked about in the past.
It’s all a test. [...]

You anti-Matter

The word for the day is bureaucracy. NASA is in the final stages of assembling the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Part of the machine’s purpose is to search for evidence of the existence of anti-matter by reading the cosmic rays. Since not all rays on planet Earth are, by their nature, cosmic, the [...]