Via James Nicoll, a post he describes as "someone actively working in a particular field of science talk[ing] about how they went from embracing wingnuttery to more fruitful activities," in this case regarding the "Face on Mars."
Sadly, other than a couple of passing mentions (he name-checks Richard Hoagland and Carl Sagan, and mentions overdosing on Art Bell), there's very little detail about that transition. And, really, I think hearing the story of how the author went from believing in a real face on Mars to taking high-resolution pictures of the Cydonia plateau would be a lot more interesting than, well, than another picture of the Cydonia plateau.
It's a cool picture, though.
More like this
I realize that PZ and Skeptico have already posted this, but it's just too hilarious for me, as a bit of a
The baseball player Jose Canseco made a remarkable series of tweets yesterday.
Brandenburg is a physicist who submitted a paper to the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference a few years ago.
We could use more examples of the wignuttery-to-rationality phase transition. A classic (in a new edition) is:
The God That Failed (Paperback)
by Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis Fischer, Stephen Spender, David Engerman (Foreword), Richard Howard Stafford Crossman (Editor).
Pity that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn't live long enough to renounce Spiritualism, Shockley to renounce racism. Pity that we couldn't shock Egnor into renouncing Intelligent Design. But it would be VERY GOOD to have a lapsed ID-er on the lecture circuit.