Phil Plait on the move

By sb admin on April 16, 2007.

Anybody who reads this blog is probably familiar with Bad Astronomy. If you're not— if you know my blog and not his— then you live in a really bizarre alternate Earth. Just in case that's you, go and read it. He's probably the web's most popular astronomy blogger, but he's been a blogger longer than he's been a blogger. (Huh?) His "Bad Astronomy" site is loaded with all sorts of goodness. The names comes from the fact that he's long dedicated himself to debunking bad astronomy in the popular media. Indeed, he has a book of the same title. If anybody ever gives you crap about the Moon Landings, Phil's pages on the topic and his book are the places you should point them to.

In any event, Phil has been on the faculty at Cal State Sonoma. But he's quitting! He's going to become a writer full time! This sort of boggles me; as another academic type, it sounds a little to me like Phil is going to stop cutting his hair (which he probably doesn't need to do anyway) and run off to join the circus.

I wish him the best! I hope this really works out for him. I hope that he's successful as a writer. I know he's successful as a blogger, but that doesn't pay the rent... so I hope that whatever happens, he and the Bad Family have a way to support themselves.

Phil is also going to be the guest at an informal chit-chat in Second Life next Saturday (April 21), hosted by Slacker Astronomy. Read more about it on that website. (And I'm gonna write a lot more about Second Life sometime soon.)

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The Business of Astronomy

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Thanks for the link love, Rob! But one correction-- I'm not faculty, I'm staff. So technically I'm in academia, but I'm not an academic. :-) But either way, I'm giving up a salary and giving this a shot. I'm terrified, but it's a good kind fo scared.

Sorry about the error. Although, given the staff position you were working on, you can see where I made it. You're a science guy, and even if you focus on outreach instead of research, that doesn't make you not a science guy, or not an academic-sort-of-thingy-kind-of-whatsit.

Anyway, good luck with all of it! I hope your extensive writer's expense account will allow you to keep showing up at AAS meetings.

Can I have his job?