Uncertain Dots 21

Our little hangout thing is now old enough to drink, in episode-years anyway, and to celebrate, we finally figured out how to get live audience feedback during the hangout. Which takes the first couple of minutes of the video, because we're highly trained professional scientists.

Once we got that sorted, we talked about a bunch of stuff, including but not limited to crazy space drives, the history of major concepts in physics, space probes and asteroids, and "native advertising" and how it relates to blog history. Some links:

-- My post on the impossible space drive, which has links to others.

-- Rhett on whether you could walk on a comet and whether you could jump onto it from a passing spacecraft.

-- John Oliver on "native advertising"

-- PepsiGate, back in the day.

It'll be a few weeks before the next one of these, as I'm going to be appearing at the Worldcon in London, then the Nordita Workshop for Science Writers. It'll probably be September before we have Episode 22, by which time we'll have forgotten how to do the live-feedback thing again...

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You're thinking about the Shell Energy Blog that was run on Scienceblogs, right?

I think the Shell thing at ScienceBlogs predated the Pepsi one. There was something more recent, but I honestly don't remember what the kerfuffle was about. I didn't actually care very much, whatever it was.

Shell was before Pepsi. I do remember some folks were pretty annoyed at the thought of it.