By soon, I meant…

Last summer turned out to be a bit busier than anticipated. I had a press release, traveled a lot, supervised two excellent summer research students, submitted a paper, taught a class… well, you get the point. Now it’s time for my annual DragonCon recap. In addition to Live Astronomy (more below), I did a few other things … Read more

End of Semester Sci-Fi-stravaganza

I’m back! The course v1.0 went off fairly well and I’ll be teaching a modified version of it in July. I have quite a few new posts in the works, so expect some updates soon. In the meantime, here’s a nice article about an Astronomy on Tap event that I spoke at last week.

Outland

I swear I didn’t Netflix everything on Peter Boyle’s IMDb page. Outland is just a run-of-the-mill bad sci-fi film starring Sean Connery. It’s essentially a western set on Jupiter’s moon Io. That means there’s not much to report from a science perspective. In the opening credits they mention that Io has 1/6 the Earth’s gravity but … Read more

Solar Crisis

The release of Gravity got me thinking about astronaut movies. I’ve got some good ones in the hopper, but I want to start with a classic. 1990’s Solar Crisis is notoriously known as one of the worst sci-fi movies ever made. You might think that a film with a $55-million budget that starred Hollywood legends Charlton … Read more

DragonCon 2013 post-mortem

As many of you know, I somehow managed to obtain “Professional” status at this year’s DragonCon, the largest sci-fi/fantasy convention in the world. Professional status is a step down from “Guest”, which is generally reserved for famous people. Note that “famous” is a relative term, especially when talking about a convention that represents a lot … Read more