Category Archives: blogging

DeLurking and the Center of the Universe

Over at Astronomy Blog, Stuart has made a list of us bloggers who reported from AAS, and along the way mentions that this is (was) Delurking Week. If you don’t know, this is the week that you should be commenting on blogs that you read, rather than leaving those commmenting boxes blank and lonely. So, comment away! I won’t mind.

Stuart also links to a great little vodcast created at the opening reception of the AAS meeting by the Slacker Astronomers. They went around the reception asking questions like “What size underwear do you wear” (to which Phil Plait answered “M”), and “What’s the center of the universe—Earth or the Sun?”

Lots of funny answers to that one, including one from Phil (again) who promptly said, “My daughter.” Of course, there is NO preferred spot in the universe, so you could say that Earth or the Sun are the center, but then again, if you were attending AAS on Alpha Centauri IV, you could say the center was there, too. At least most of the astronomers who answered knew that it was a funny question and had a good time with it.

A Questionable NASA Hire?

Normally I do not do political commentary, but occasionally a story comes across that requires a few words. What follows is one of them. I wonder what will happen to NASA now that a former second-in-command for FEMA during the Hurricane Katrina disaster has been hired as a so-called “senior advisor” to NASA administrator Michael Griffin?

In a Washington Post story, NASA spokesman David Mould said that Patrick Rhode, who started his unlikely career toward scientific policy as an advance man for the Bush-Cheney election campaign in 2000, was a good choice for the job because, “He’s done a lot of things.”

Some of those things include a well-circulated email that he sent to his boss during the Katrina disaster, telling Brown that he, too was sitting somewhere moussing his hair. (This while New Orleans drowned, homes in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, and Texas were torn apart, and thousands of people were left homeless and at the mercy of FEMA officials.)

Our top NASA officials should have science background, along with some solid policy and technology experience. Rhode does not. It seems that the Bush administration keeps topping its own worst picks record by choosing yet another politically connected insider for a job he’s apparently not-too-well-qualified-for. Rhode’s background apparently includes NO science and little technology expertise, he began his career as a TV reporter (not that being a journalist is bad, and I know some science journalists who have more science background than Rhode does), and wiggled his way into a series of policy jobs that appear to have been political payoff for his support of Bush/Cheney. Okay, let’s call this what it is: patronage. And,there are some jobs and places in our government where patronage hurts (think FEMA). NASA is another.

And you have to wonder why some kids in the U.S. think that NASA is irrelevant. When we see such poorly chosen officials rewarded with patronage jobs at the top of the NASA administration, it begins to look like our space agency isn’t taken seriously by the administration. These people seem to operate at the center of an alternate universe where ideology trumps logic and scientific expertise. Will “Mr. Mousse” choose politics over safety as he “advises” the NASA administrator in the months to come? We don’t want to see any more disasters at NASA, and we especially don’t want to see loss of life, followed by a Rose Garden medal ceremony for this hack, and a “heckuva job, Rhodie” slap on the back from his political godfathers in the White House.

An interesting note: the Washington Post picked this story up late Friday (the usual time the White House announces bad news) from the Associated Press, but I see nothing on it on CNN or MSNBC or any of the other main news outlets (as of Saturday night). Let’s see how it unfolds over the next few days.

What’s a BlogShare?

And What’s It Doing on An Astronomy Blog?

One of the things that fascinates me about blogs and blogging is the huge diversity of subjects that people write about in their daily entries. Just as I know I’m one of many folks who write about topics related to astronomy and space science, there are millions of people out there writing about everything you can possibly imagine. Some are fun to read, others are less so, but each one offers a window into some reality we might not otherwise get to experience.

About a year ago I ran across a virtual “stock exchange” in blogs called Blogshares.com. You might have noticed an icon for it over in my ever-growing list of links on the left. It’s actually a game site where you can register your own blog and “play investor” by buying shares in other blogs. The stock market is not just limited to blog shares, however. Traders also seek out and purchase ideas (which are linked to blog subjects), and artefacts (which are also linked to ideas industries). It’s a fascinating game to play, and I might add, a way to learn about the inexorable laws of supply and demand!

When I first joined I thought I might the only space blog registered, but it turns out there are lots of people who think “space is the place” and they blog about it! So, I got to looking around for other blog writers who chronicle a couple of my other interests—space music and planetariums.

Space music comes naturally for me, considering I’m married to and run a business with Mark Petersen—one of the world’s foremost space music composers. Now, space music is a pretty “niche” genre. In most record stores it doesn’t even have its own bin anymore (although it used to), so you have to look for it in the Ambient and New Age bins. Despite this unfortunate placement, space music IS thriving, particularly on the Web, where people like Mark sell their CDs and music to a dedicated following.

Space music is evocative of the wide-open spaces beyond the stars, going beyond the confines of traditional orchestral or electronic genres. Yet, it has roots in other genres: electronic music, ambient music, and I’d even say it might owe some of its existence to composers like Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughn Williams, and Alan Hovhaness. Certainly it has come to be best known in the planetarium, where it is used to help paint aural images for cosmic scenes like starbirth areas, distant galaxy clusters, and the longed-for dream of travel between the stars. Mark takes scenes like these and fuses them with music that fits the vast spacescapes made possible in the planetarium.

Some of the blogs about space music that I’ve run across are quite interesting indeed, and give us a peek into this very rarefied world. There are many, many blogs to visit about some aspect of ambient, space, and electronic music. Here are three that I visited lately:

Astreaux World Blog about ambient, space, and new age music.

Voyager Radio.

Dr. Tom’s music blog.
Now, Blogshares does have a music industry under which all kinds of ideas are swapped, so I think it would be neat to have a sub-industry called “space and ambient” music, and another called “new age” music. If that’s too specialized, then perhaps these could become sub sub-industries under “Indie and Alternative Music.” And, if the powers that be who run the game want a new artefact, then how about “synthesizer” since much of space music is created using these unique and facile instruments?

Of course, talking about space music brings me to planetariums, which also come easy for me, since I’ve been working in, with, or for them in one form or another since the early 1980s. They’re fascinating facilities—capable of taking us anywhere in the universe we want to go, in a quest for an understanding of the cosmos. Now, when I talk about planetariums, I’m thinking of the round rooms with the star projector in the center. There are also planetarium software programs, which also make stars for you, but only on your computer screen. However, there are few smart folks (like Sky-Skan, Inc., of Nashua, NH), who have harnessed the computer-generated starfield programs and are using computer systems and projectors to blast them up to the dome, but those aren’t in people’s homes— yet. Chances are when you’ve been to a planetarium, you’ve heard space music. It was probably what made you feel right at home in space!

So, are there blogs and blog entries about planetarium space theaters? Well, yes there are. In a cursory Google search I found hundreds of entries about experiences in the planetarium, ranging from that first visit to one as a grade-school child to the absolute awe and wonder these places spark in our minds. Here are a couple of examples:

Fancy Robot

Gone to Carolina, with an entry about going to the planetarium.

Planetarium visits seem to be a recurring theme across these blogs. While planetaria aren’t things you visit every day (unless you happen to be IN the biz), they ARE a part of our landscape, and I hope they continue this way for a long time!

As far as Blogshares goes, I think that the game could use a new entry under “Media” called “Planetariums”, with an artefact called “Planetarium show” and another called “Planetarium Instrument.” Sure, they’re esoteric, but life isn’t always about the everyday things. It’s also about the experiences we share in places like planetariums, where science, music, art, and the human voice all combine in new kinds of media vehicles that can take us to the stars.