Bad Astronomy, Good Explanations

Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy website started out mainly as a forum for nitpicking the science in movies (hence the name) but over the years, Phil has turned it into a valuable and entertaining way of educating people about astronomy. Here's a video of Phil answering an intriguing question, "why don't giant clouds of gas dissipate in space?"

Here's an interesting review of the movie Expelled. It is documentary narrated by Ben Stein about the "Intelligent Design" movement. ID is essentially creationism repackaged to sound more "scientific." But for the most part, it consists of repeating the same claims and using the same tactics that creation uses to try to use doubts and create controversy to discredit the theory of evolution.

One of the things that I liked about the review is the calmness and objectivity of the reviewer. He doesn't call Stein and his friends "liars" or "idiots" and rightfully points out that this movie is essentially "preaching to the choir" of people whom are already predisposed to distrust evolutionary theory. He does note that it is a propaganda film but doesn't stoop to the level of the propagandists. Too often on the Internet, I see a lot of noise and very little signal as threads of comments frequently devolve into name-calling contests.