Phil Plait

Philip Cary Plait (born September 30, 1964), also known as The Bad Astronomer, is an American astronomer, skeptic, writer and popular science blogger. Plait has worked as part of the Hubble Space Telescope team, images and spectra of astronomical objects, as well as engaging in public outreach advocacy for NASA missions. He has written two books, Bad Astronomy and Death from the Skies. He has also appeared in several science documentaries, including Phil Plait's Bad Universe on the Discovery Channel. From August 2008 through 2009, he served as President of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Additionally, he wrote and hosted episodes of Crash Course Astronomy, which has recently aired its last episode.

Early life

Plait grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. He has said he became interested in astronomy when his father brought home a telescope when Plait was 5 years old or so. According to Plait, he "aimed it at Saturn that night. One look, and that was it. I was hooked."

Career

Crash Course

Crash Course (also known as Driving Academy) is a 1988 made for television teen film directed by Oz Scott.

Plot

Crash Course centers on a group of high schoolers in a driver’s education class; many for the second or third time. The recently divorced teacher, super-passive Larry Pearl, is on thin ice with the football fanatic principal, Principal Paulson, who is being pressured by the district superintendent to raise driver’s education completion rates or lose his coveted football program. With this in mind, Principal Paulson and his assistant, with a secret desire for his job, Abner Frasier, hire an outside driver’s education instructor with a very tough reputation, Edna Savage, aka E.W. Savage, who quickly takes control of the class.

The plot focuses mostly on the students and their interactions with their teachers and each other. In the beginning, Rico is the loner with just a few friends, Chadley is the bookish nerd with few friends who longs to be cool and also longs to be a part of Vanessa’s life who is the young, friendly and attractive girl who had to fake her mother’s signature on her driver’s education permission slip. Kichi is the hip-hop Asian kid who often raps what he has to say and constantly flirts with Maria, the rich foreign girl who thinks that the right-of-way on the roadways always goes to (insert awesomely fake foreign Latino accent) “my father’s limo”. Finally you have stereotypical football meathead J.J., who needs to pass his English exam to keep his eligibility and constantly asks out and gets rejected by Alice, the tomboy whose father owns “Santini & Son” Concrete Company. Alice is portrayed as being the “son” her father wanted.

Bad Astronomy

Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax" is a non-fiction book by the American astronomer Phil Plait, also known as "the Bad Astronomer". The book was published in 2002 and deals with various misunderstandings about space and astronomy, such as sounds being audible in space (a misconception because in the vacuum of space, sound has no medium in which to propagate).

Plait's first book received generally favorable reviews within the academic and astronomy communities and was the first volume in the Bad Science series by John Wiley & Sons Publishing.

Overview

Inspired by the author's web site, "Bad Astronomy," the book attempts to explore twenty-four common astronomical fallacies and explain the scientific consensus concerning these topics within the field of astronomy.

The book explains and corrects many ideas relating to space that, according to Plait, are mistaken but nevertheless often portrayed in popular movies. Plait also dedicates much of the book to debunking the idea of a Moon landing hoax and explains why astrology should not be taken seriously. A part of the book describes the Moon's tidal effects and explains the Coriolis effect, why the sky is blue, the Big Bang and other related topics.

Want To

"Want To" is a song co-written and recorded by American country music duo Sugarland. It was released in August 2006 as the first single from the album Enjoy the Ride. It was their first single not to feature former member Kristen Hall, although Jennifer Nettles had previously been featured on Bon Jovi's Number One country hit, "Who Says You Can't Go Home", the song was also the first regular Number One hit of Sugarland's career in the U.S., spending two weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts in late 2006. The duo's members, Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush, wrote the song along with Bobby Pinson. The song has sold 856,000 copies in the US as of April 2013.

Chart performance

Year-end charts

Personnel

Astronomy

Astronomy, a natural science, is the study of celestial objects (such as stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets and nebulae) and processes (such as supernovae explosions, gamma ray bursts, and cosmic microwave background radiation), the physics, chemistry, and evolution of such objects and processes, and more generally all phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth. A related but distinct subject, physical cosmology, is concerned with studying the Universe as a whole.

Astronomy is one of the oldest sciences. The early civilizations in recorded history, such as the Babylonians, Greeks, Indians, Egyptians, Nubians, Iranians, Chinese, and Maya performed methodical observations of the night sky. However, the invention of the telescope was required before astronomy was able to develop into a modern science. Historically, astronomy has included disciplines as diverse as astrometry, celestial navigation, observational astronomy and the making of calendars, but professional astronomy is nowadays often considered to be synonymous with astrophysics.