No astronomy for average Americans!

Someone apparently showed John McCain -- and by "John McCain", I mean, "one of his aides" -- how to twitter. So we've been treated to a list of his Top 10 Porkiest Projects in the 2009 Omnibus Spending Bill. Most of them are science projects, but nothing makes me more irate than his #2 pick:

#2. $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii - because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy

I love the elitism here, that average Americans shouldn't bother with any interest in astronomy or any other science. For a variety of reasons, astronomy is a field that gets people excited about science. It's a great gateway to get people interested in other, related sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology. It's great motivation for the relevance of math classes. From here, we can get more people in STEM careers, and so on. What good comes from mocking science outreach to average Americans?

Is McCain bitter about this -- and, as we heard during the debates, the planetarium projector at Adler Planetarium [PDF] -- because it's astronomy money that's not going to Arizona? Or did he fail an astronomy class at some point in his life? Either way, I am so tired of the persistent anti-science attitude from the Republicans.

(I realize this was all over the blogs yesterday, but I have only just now calmed down enough to post without flailing about in all caps.)

The hell with Pluto (the dwarf planet AND the minor Disney character)

I was recently reminded that I simply do not understand the emotional attachment that people had to Pluto as a planet. It's another dinky ball of ice in the Kuiper Belt! I don't want to get caught up in semantics, but we should at least lump it in with similar objects in terms of composition and formation.

But I have a serious question here: is the attachment to Pluto a symptom of bad science education in this country? Have we failed at conveying that science is a system of inquiry, and not just a list of facts?

Dorky Fun with Wordle

It seems that wordle is all the rage these days. And I decided to look at what comes out of the RSS feed of astro-ph. Let's take a look (click image to enlarge):



I didn't realize that "magnetic" would be number one!

Planet: A self-gravitating body that is nearly round

The other day I was looking at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) database table on photometric classification. I needed to recall which type was a star and which was a galaxy. So I was interested to see the following two listings in this table buried deep in the SDSS information:

Galaxy: An extended object composed of many stars and other matter.

Star: A a self-luminous gaseous celestial body.

I guess I was just surprised at how pedantic it was.