End of 2022 is Upon Us!
Monday M.A.G.I.C.
(Memory, Appearance, Genius, Image, Conversation)
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from MAGIC!”
Sir Arthur C. Clarke
What’s Mike Tyson’s favorite holiday?
Boxing Day, of course!
Greetings from cloudy San Diego, where I am preparing to assault another mountain, this one for skiing, not for astronomy! Wish me luck. Just wanted to get out the final edition of the Monday M.A.G.I.C. message to your inbox while you’re still un-boxing things!
I had an amazing year, full of work and play that I will recap, along with my plans for 2023. But for now I just want to wish you blessings of peace, health, and happiness and curiosity as we end one year and begin another.
What are your New Year’s Resolutions?
Have a M.A.G.I.C. Week!
PS. Welcome to all the newbies. The year is going to be incredible! Stay tuned for guests Stacy McGaugh, Luke Barnes, and more!!
PPS. If you won a meteorite in one of my giveaways, it will be on the way to you in the next few weeks. For now, content yourself with this information about this coveted Space Schmutz™.
PPPS. I have a podcast which was downloaded over 1.2 million times this year. You should subscribe!
CONVERSATION Enjoy my chat with NYU Professor Charles Siefe about the hope and hype in last week’s fusion news!
IMAGE: I had a fantastic time hanging out with my good friend Professor Stephon Alexander of Brown U. Steph’s been a visiting Professor at Chapman U, here in SoCal and it’s been wonderful hanging out with him — even if some day-drinking was involved last week 😀
GENIUS: This year saw a lot of hype, but also a lot of genius-level breakthroughs. My favorite has to be the DART — Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission which slammed into a double asteroid that orbits the sun. The main asteroid, called Didymos, is about half-a-mile across. It has a teeny tiny moonlet of its own, and NASA showed you don’t need Bruce Willis up there nuking ‘roids… “That’s probably not the best way of doing it,” said NASA’s Elena Adams. “Because if you blow up an asteroid, you create a large number of chunks. And those chunks will still be going the same direction. The easiest thing to do is to actually just change its direction slightly, and then it will miss Earth entirely.”. Adams is the lead engineer on the DART mission, a joint venture of NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. It took off last November on a mission to change an asteroid’s path by crashing into it.
Appearance: Check out my conversation on the Citizen Podcast with Dan Halloway. We reviewed my interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and how political science is becoming. Warning: this is for 18+ viewers as our language got a little salty!
MEMORY: Remember you can win a free audiobook of Galileo Galilei’s Dialogue if you’re the first down the chimney before midnight tonight! Click to Enter.
The only thing I want for BOXING DAY is for you to leave a review of The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify & Audible. It only takes a SECOND!
