Anyway, if you’re Italian or know an Italian or play one on TV, then you may enjoy me making faces with Italian words flashing by underneath.

Shocker, I know. I’ve written on this topic extensively, but of course astrologers send me email — seriously — saying how their flavor of magic works, or that I wasn’t fair, or that if only I faced the right way and triantrilated my fibbertygibbet, astrology would be correct, despite my article very carefully showing that no matter how you slice it, astrology doesn’t work.

Obviously, astrology’s horse isn’t quite dead yet, so beating it isn’t such a bad idea. My friend Moriel Schottlender wrote up a nice dissection of astrology walking through the steps showing (despite many astrologers’ claims) that gravity clearly is not the force behind astrology. She even includes math.

Of course, those of us in the reality-based Universe knew this, since when tested properly astrology fails tests devised even by astrologers themselves (see my article linked above). So there is no force behind astrology, except that of the human mind to fool itself. Because of that, we’ll always be debunking bunk like this. I guess that’s one thing astronomers and astrologers really do have in common: there will always be work for us.

This is a perfect example of citizen science. There’s too much real estate — on Earth and in the sky — for what we normally think of as geologists and astronomers to examine carefully. And this shows there’s plenty of room for "amateurs" to help out… and that word always makes me laugh. I know a lot of amateur astronomers who know far more than I do about pointing a telescope. You’ll almost always find that at their borders, most definitions are pretty fuzzy.

Tip o’ the Whipple shield to David Kessler.

The fight is actually going well on both fronts, but, sadly, it’s claimed Simon as a victim: it’s eating up so much of his time that he can no longer write his monthly column for The Guardian. This is a shame. He’s a great writer and a voice that definitely needs to be heard. He fights the quacks, the antireality brigade, the poor thinkers, and the out-and-out frauds that occupy every crevice of medical altmeddery.

Still, he is pushing for libel reform, and I know his voice overall will not be silenced. Nor will ours. Give your support for libel reform, and make sure the forces of darkness don’t win.

Tip o’ the subluxation to Tony Piro.

He posted some great picture on Picasa, which you can see in the slideshow below or on Picasa directly.

I am totally blown away by the sculpture Solar Flares and CMEs. In the book, I describe how the tangling of the Sun’s magnetic field lines is like a bag full of springs under tension. How I pictured that in my head is almost exactly duplicated by that piece.

I could not get to NYC for the exhibit, but I really wish I had. The artwork is amazing, almost as amazing as the feeling I get thinking that a book I wrote for my own nefarious purposes actually inspired a group of artists to create such wonderful and astonishing pieces. My thanks to all of them for swelling my head just a little bit more.