New Paintings

A couple new paintings...

Send your name to the Moon

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team would like to invite you to send your name to the Moon onboard the LRO spacecraft:

http://lro.jhuapl.edu/NameToMoon/index.php

Unfortunately, it's just on the orbiter, so it looks like your name won't actually make it to the lunar surface (unless it crashes). They should totally put the names on the LCROSS part that is supposed to crash, that would be way cooler.

My name is already en route to the asteroid belt on board DAWN and it crashed into a comet on board Deep Impact, and I think I may be headed to Mercury on MESSENGER too, so I'm making some progress on spreading a little bit of me throughout the solar system.

New Painting

I call this one "Blue Moon"

13 year old smarter than NASA! Oh, and p.s. we're all going to die

German schoolboy, 13, corrects NASA's asteroid figures

I love that the big headline here is that this kid can do math better than NASA, and not that there's a 1 in 450 chance that life as we know it will supposedly be wiped out by this asteroid.

Apparently the whole thing is a hoax anyway: Apophis risk not increased: science fair judges, world media screw up big time

But it's still really funny.

OMG we're all doomed

Apparently, according to this article in the NYTimes, the amount of beer a scientist drinks is inversely proportional to the amount of science they publish (i.e. more beer = fewer papers).

What? That's so not fair, I spent like two years in grad school learning how to drink beer just so I could fit in with my colleagues, and now you tell that I would have been a "more productive scientist" if only I had stuck with mudslides and amaretto sours?

Of course, if you read to the end of the article, you find out that these results may only hold true for biologists in the Czech Republic (apparently that country has a "special relationship to beer"). So maybe we'll be okay, but just to be on the safe side, I think I'll drink wine this weekend instead of beer and see if that motivates me to work on one of those 3 papers I'm supposed to be writing.

Surviving LPSC

For the second year in a row, I was felled with the flu halfway through the week of LPSC, unbelievable. That will teach me not to get a flu shot. But even through the fever and chills and the drug-induced haze, I would have to say it was still a pretty good week.

For me, the highlight was all the fabulous stuff from the MESSENGER flyby of Mercury. Luckily those talks were on Monday when I was still fully conscience. What an incredible mother lode of data. I can't remember the last time I was this excited about science after a full day of talks. It's almost like whole new planet. My friend Emily over at the planetary society blog has great details from several of the talks from that session here.

Normally, I would give a rundown here of the various NASA night events and what the folks from headquarters had to say, but as I am now one of those HQ folks, that's probably not appropriate. I will say though that it was an interesting perspective sitting in the audience as one of "them" rather than just a member of the community, but in the end, I was proud to be one of those headquarters folks, I think we're doing a pretty good job, and the community mostly seems to appreciate the work we are putting in.

If you weren't there and would like to know what went down, Star Stryder has a good rundown of Mike Griffin's talk and q&a here.

and Emily has a good rundown of Alan Stern's here.

New Painting

Until I come up with something more interesting, I'm calling this one "Earth and Moon #3"

As always, if you like my art, you can find more here: