I’m writing for Scientific American!

Subscribers may not all be American but they’re scientific

Upcoming Appearances/Shameless Self-Promotion

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

When I was a kid, we had a half-finished basement in our suburban house. I didn’t like going down there much; the lighting was weird and the floor hard to keep clean and one of the back doors led out to a dank north-facing cement stairwell that always had bugs and rotting leaves and stuff in it since it never got direct sunlight. The kind of thing that wouldn’t bother me at all now, but as a kid, ewww.

In the unfinished part of the basement my parents had a small laundry area, with the two machines sitting across from a set of fairly rough-hewn shelves. My dad kept a lot of stuff on those shelves, including issues of various magazine he got.

On the top shelf was a collection of issues of Scientific American. There were a lot; they must have taken up half a meter of shelf space going back many years. When I was not even yet a teenager I’d sometimes screw up my courage, go down into the basement, pull out one of those issues, scootch my butt onto the top of the washing machine, and page through it.

It was filled with wonders; glossy color photos of distant lands, articles about biology and physics and geology. Sometimes, wonder of wonders, there was something about astronomy, and I could gape at the photos taken through telescopes of sights I could only imagine otherwise. Due to my youth I’d also struggle to read and understand what was written. As I got older it got easier.

These are very fond memories of mine, ones that always make me smile.

That smile has broadened considerably now, because Scientific American just published their very first article from me online.

!!!!

[Note: It’s not behind a paywall per se, but you need to sign up for a free account to read it. This only takes literally a few seconds, though.]

It’s about a gamma-ray burst, a ridiculously powerful explosion that occurs when in this particular case a massive star dies, forms a black hole, and blast out twin Death Rays that flash across the Universe. GRB 221009A was the closest of these ever detected — though at 2 billion light years in no way a danger to us — and we’re already learning a lot about them from it.

[That’s my Crash Course Astronomy episode about GRBs, which I had a lot of fun putting together. The history of how we discovered and eventually understood them — well, kinda sorta understood them —  is just too cool.]

Before I went freelance full time, I worked at Sonoma State University doing education and public outreach for a number of NASA satellites, including Swift and Fermi, both of which detect gamma-ray bursts, and both of which played a big role in this new one. So this article was a joy for a number of reasons, including being able to read about people I know doing work I’m familiar with on an event of unprecedented brightness. Bonus: The Editor-in-Chief of SciAm is Laura Helmuth, who was my editor for many years when I wrote for Slate. We had a great working relationship then, and while she’s at least two levels above me now it’s still pretty cool to write under her auspice.

Moreover, it’s a wonderfully satisfying feeling having come around full circle in a way, writing for a magazine that helped inspire me to become an astronomer in the first place. I think my dad would’ve been pretty happy to see that.

I’ll be writing more for SciAm, too; it’s a freelance gig on an irregular schedule, but I’ll make sure to mention when anything goes live here in the newsletter as well as on Twitter. Stay Tuned.

Upcoming Appearances/Shameless Self-Promotion

Yup. A second one. I’ve been busy.

A few days ago an interview I did with author John Michael Godier for his Event Horizon podcast went online. We cover a lot of territory, including critical thinking, my book, what aliens might look like, unidentified aerial phenomena, space flight, astronomical doommongers, and more.

Listen/watch here:

My thoughts on ghosts (re: their not existing) earned me a 3000-word email diatribe from someone within an hour of the podcast’s airing, so yay?

I’ll note this is the very first interview I have done for my new book, which is cool. I hope to do lots more.

About this newsletter

Ooo, meta

Every now and again as I’m putting together a BAN issue I’ll look up the number of the issue itself and see if it’s something interesting.

For example, this is the 477th issue, and it turns out 477 is the 18th pentagonal number!

Is that interesting? It is to me, or at least an excuse to point you to an earlier issue where I describe pentagonal numbers and tip my hat to The Doctor. I do enjoy playing with numbers!

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!