BAN #349: Nerd Disses, Triple impact on Mars

16 August 2021   Issue #349

August 16, 2021

[The planetary nebula M 2-9, winds from a dying star. Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Legacy Archive / Judy Schmidt]

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Upcoming Appearances/Shameless Self-Promotion

Where I’ll be doing things you can watch and listen to or read about

I was poking around Amazon recently looking to see how much they’re bilking customers for my book “Death from the Skies!” (affiliate link, and yes the irony is not lost on me, that’s the joke) and saw a link to a book you may not know I cowrote: “2^7 Nerd Disses: A Significant Quantity of Disrespect”.

It’s essentially 128 (2 to the seventh power, hence the title) “yo mamma” jokes except without the fat-shaming and misogyny. I wrote it with Zach Weinersmith (of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) after a Twitter exchange where he started posting nerdy insults, and I reparteed. We went back and forth for a while and then I sent him a note saying, “Y’know this is a book here.” 

He agreed, and the rest is very trivial history. Anyway, It’s a funny book and it’s only $3 for the e-version. Technically it’s educational, too, since we wrote an appendix explaining the jokes, many of which, trust me, need explaining (I didn’t understand some of Zach’s history-based jabs and I had to look them up; when I confronted him on this he admitted he didn’t get some of mine, so there you go).

And what the heck: My first book, “Bad Astronomy” is available too.

Blog Jam

What I’ve recently written on the blog, ICYMI

[I love me some optical illusions, and this one is simple and terrific. From Friday’s article. Credit: Akiyoshi Kitaoka]

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a short description so you can grok it

ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter is a joint mission by the European Space Agency and the Russian Roscosmos. It’s been orbiting Mars since 2016, looking for, well, trace gases, like methane. It also has a nice camera onboard called CASSIS (Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System) which takes lovely images of the surface, like this one:

[Three craters on Mars. Credit: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO]

How pretty! For scale, the middle crater is about a kilometer wide. Any one of those three impacts on Earth would be extremely bad, but on Mars things are different. Look away for a sec and those would be lost among the others. Don’t believe me? Here they are on Mars Trek, an interactive Mars atlas. The big crater is centered, and you can just see the other two above it and to the left. Zoom out and see what you see. This is Viking data so not super-high-resolution, but I think you’ll get the point.

The ESA page says these craters are near the Tharsis Montes volcanic region (for a sufficiently broad definition of near; it’s like 800 kilometers) and that there’s evidence of lava layers in the craters. I don’t really see that here (click through to get the high-res version) but that’s interesting; I’d assume the lava flowed multiple times, layering the landscape, and then the asteroids hit. I don’t see anything obvious to date the craters even in a relative sense, so I don’t know which one hit first, or if they all hit together, or what.

BTW this isn’t a natural color image; CASSIS has a filter set that includes a blue, red, near-infrared, and wide-band (PAN) visible light filter, and the color you see depends on the filter combination used (which aggravatingly isn’t listed on the web page for the image).

I don’t have anything pithy or cool to add to this. I just liked the image and figured y’all might, too.

Et alia

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