Skywise Unlimited

The beaten path that the Sun appears to trod on its yearly trek among the stars is the oldest known method of mapping our way around the sky. So the Sun was the center of celestial attention even before people promoted it to admin of the solar system. That makes a lot of sense to […]

Shatter not the darkness at the site of observing. Man-made lights thou shalt eschew, save the faint of red. Thou shalt not illuminate thy headlights of thy automobile, nor the car door shalt thy open before the disconnecting of thy dome light. Even a match strucketh in haste is mightily unpleasing in the dark-adapted eyes […]

John was a geek. No one doubted that. He liked three things; math, physics, and math. He spent hours every day at his little desk, drawing circles and triangles and weirdly nested multi-faceted polyhedrons, and he played around with the associated mathematical formulae. He made pretty good money these days at least, even though almost […]

There is a hero. Everyone loves him because he is charitable and people’s lives tend to flourish under his watchful eye. But there is a nemesis, a huge and hideous reptile, the largest ever seen, who rises slowly from beneath the Earth bringing death and darkness and fear in his wake. The hero goes down […]

To My Tweeps I have a message to those thousands of space geeks who wanted to go to the JPL Mars landing tweet-up, to those who wound up on the waiting list hoping for an opening, and especially to those rogues who showed up anyway and tweeted the event from off-campus. I sympathize with you […]

Bad Brad’s Big Blog Theory Suddenly, there was a huge cacophonous sound. The event was actually unimaginably tiny, and there was probably nothing quite like sound yet, but FINALLY, after who knows how long, time itself was invented. At long last, with the appearance of sensible chronologies, event could follow event, and shit happened. At […]