Brother Guy Discusses The Heavens Proclaim

Time: Friday, 02-12-2010 - 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm
Location: Botanic Garden B
Brother Guy discusses his newly published coffee-table book The Heavens Proclaim, a new book on celebration. As seen on TV!


A Celebration Of Bad Films

Time: Friday, 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Location: Birch A

They are the films you claim never to have seen, but when they come on cable, you can't turn away. You might even have a copy on DVD hidden behind the more sociably acceptable porn. What movies make Plan 9 From Outer Space look like a masterpiece of plotting, character, and special effects?

Brother Guy Consolmagno, Lee Darrow, Paul McComas (M), Lawrence Watt-Evans


Twittering SF: Summarize Your Favorite SF/F Book As a Twitter Post

Time: Friday, 10:00 pm to 11:30 pm
Location: Birch B

Bks R just way 2 long. Authors seem 2 think they need 2 include verbs & nouns & things. R panelists summarize their favrit bks in 140 ch.

Brother Guy Consolmagno, Lee Darrow, Dawn Kuczwara (M). Erik V. Olson - eriko@eriko.us


Assault On The Moon

Time: Saturday, 10:00 am to 11:30 am

Location: Ravinia B

Chasing lunar water with a new generation of lunar spacecraft. Scientists have long theorized that the Moon could harbor reserves of water. Recent use of robot probes has indicated that they were correct. But is there enough? Are we seeing the beginning of a new Moon Race?

Brother Guy Consolmagno, Bill Higgins (M)


Hidden Religion in SF/F

Time: Saturday, 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm
Location: Birch B

Authors don’t have to create religions in their stories to infuse the narrative with religious motifs, there are more subtle ways to bring beliefs and their religious convictions into a story in ways the reader might not even realize.

Brother Guy Consolmagno (M), Eileen Maksym, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Gene Wolfe


The Golden Age of 2010

Time: Saturday, 2:30 pm to 4:00 pm
Location: Ravinia A

What would SF pioneers think of the world today?

Brother Guy Consolmagno, Phyllis Eisenstein (M), Bill Higgins, Fred Pohl, Bill Thomasson


Manned visit to Mars: Round Table Discussion

Time: Saturday, 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Location: Birch A

Is it worth sending a man to Mars as opposed to unmanned probes?

Brother Guy Consolmagno, Jim Plaxco, Bill Thomasson (M)


Religion and Science: At Odds?

Time: Saturday, 8:30 pm to 10:00 pm
Location: Birch A

Although some religious groups are opposed to the theory of evolution, others don't have a problem with it. Is this opposition the result of simple misunderstanding, a firm tenet of belief, or something else? What is really meant when a scientist talks about a theory? What does a non-scientist hear when that word is said?

Brother Guy Consolmagno, Phyllis Eisenstein, kT FitzSimmons (M), Gene Wolfe

The wonderful folks at Ardlingly College, where I spoke on Tuesday, gave me £80 in book tokens. As I will be leaving for the US on Saturday, not likely to be back in the UK until the fall, it was incumbent on me to spend these as fast as possible.

Thursday I was in Cambridge giving another talk. So Friday morning found me prowling bookstores. In no particular order...

Chesteron and Tolkein as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real by Alison Milbank. The book intrigued me when I was last bookshopping but at £20 for a thin paperback I couldn't pull the trigger. Book tokens were invented for people like me and books like this.

The Cambridge Companion to The Beatles, edited by Kenneth Womack. A scholarly discussion... I saw this while visiting my editor at CUP, and as a CUP author I get a discount.

Churchill's Wizards: The British Genius for Deception 1914-1945, by Nicholas Rankin. The kind of pop history that I am a sucker for. Looks cheesy and fun.

The Accidental Sorcerer, by K. E. Mills. Good train/airplane reading.

Failure is Not an Option, by Gene Kranz. Wanted this for a while, picked it up in Heffer's and couldn't put it down.

The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome, by Roland Chambers. Was he a Bolshevik or a spy? This title has been quite controversial on The Arthur Ransome Society blog. Beside having fallen in love with Swallows and Amazons as a kid, I started reading up on Ransome in grad school. He was one of those almost impossible early 20th century English characters, the kind that no one would believe if you invented him.

UK, Jan. 23 - 30

Ardlingly College, Jan. 26
Dedication of Telescope, Headmaster's Lecture

Cambridge, Jan. 28
7:30 pm, speaking to Catholic Students, Fisher House

Boston, Jan. 30 - Feb. 1
Staying at Boston College

Cleveland, Feb. 2 - 6
Thurs: 12 noon and 8 pm, speaking at John Carroll University (two talks)

San Diego, Feb. 7-8
Mon: Lunchtime, speaking at: Scripps Ocean. Inst.

Merced, Feb. 8 - 10
Tue/Thurs: Speaking at UC Merced (classroom visits)

Chicago, Feb. 11 - 13
Speaking at: Capricon Science Fiction Convention (two panels Friday, five panels Saturday)

Atlanta, Feb. 14 - 16
Mon: 7:00 pm, speaking at Emory University
Tues: 7:00 pm, speaking at Agnes Scott College

Ann Arbor, Feb. 17 - 18
Wed: Speaking at: E. Mich. U Astronomy Club
Thur: 4:00 pm, U. of Michigan Physics and Astronomy; 7:30 pm, St. Mary’s Parish

Tucson, Feb. 19 - 28

Waco, Mar. 1 - 2
Tues: Speaking at Baylor University (several talks)

Youngstown, Mar. 3 - 4
Thur: Noon, First Friday Club of Youngstown (yes, they meet on Thursday!)

Stony Brook, New York, Mar. 5 - 7

Rome, Mar. 8
Arrive Monday morning...

Today is day two of the German invasion: a television crew from Bavaria who have come to film us at the Specola. I hate doing television. Ten people standing around, cameras never work right, three trucks filling our little parking lot, all so that they can get four-and-a-half minutes of material for a documentary film that few will see and no one will remember.

Then I have three days of being able to work, before I face a wasted Friday for a committee meeting in Rome to organize a meeting where my input is not at all needed. I fly off to London on Saturday.

Oh, yeah. Two talks in the UK. They are eagerly awaiting my arrival, to receive profound wisdom from me. Maybe I should prepare something?

(This text was originally an email to a friend, but I figured, why not use it to kvetch in public?)

It's chilly and rainy in Rome, though not nearly as cold as it was in Boston or even London. My weather station tells me it is 7 C outside, with 91% humidity.

I am still not used to our new quarters. Certainly I like it here; it's far more comfortable than living in a drafty 16th century castle, no matter how romantic that sounds. (Heat and running water are really nice ideas. Maybe we have made progress since then.) 

Thanks to the bad weather in London, my flight to Padua was canceled on Wednesday and again on Thursday, and overbooked on Friday. So I skipped the Galileo meeting and the closing of the IYA and flew back home to Rome instead.

I was scheduled to give the final talk of the Padua meeting on the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the Galilean moons, and my topic (assigned to me by the organizers) was "Other Worlds, Other Civilizations." I took that to mean they were looking for a discussion of how Galileo's discovery of those moons opened up our understanding of the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere, and I ended with speculations about life inside those moons... and other such moons around other such gas giant planets. 

George Coyne gave my talk for me -- thanks to email I could send him the Powerpoint, and in the airport lounge at Gatwick I quickly dashed off some words to fit the pictures. He wrote back: "Despite my best efforts your paper went well, delivered with a Baltimore accent. At least one person liked it - me. Torrance Johnson, Carl Pilcher and many others whom you used to call friends were hooting and howling." So I guess it was a success.

 I love snow. It was a delight to see a foot of snow in Boston during my brief (one day) stopover there this past weekend en route to Europe. And the snow has followed me to London, with a dusting on the streets here this morning.

I guess they aren't as used to snow as Boston is. Gatwick airport is currently closed and my flight to Italy this afternoon has been cancelled. (I don't need to be there until Saturday, so that's fine by me.)

Thus it appears I have a free afternoon and evening in London. Anyone here available for dinner?

Christmas and New Years is a time for remembering old times... chatting on iChat with my dad in Florida we got talking about a song he'd heard many years ago -- I remember hearing him sing it when I was a kid -- and we started looking for its roots on the internet.

He writes:

I first heard this song at a variety show at Stalag Luft III put on by American POWs in 1943. It was presented by a vaudeville act of two kriegies named Bud Gaston and Dick Coffey. They called themselves "Crowley and Shea."

The lyrics:

Let's all go down to Mary Ann's
And put a nickel in the pianola.
There's always something nice
Waiting on the ice
You never have to ask her twice
For even a Coca Cola.
It's not far
It's just around the block
The key is in the river
And the door is never locked.
You'll never know what time it is
The hands are off the clock,
Around at Mary Ann's.

Searching the internet, I find that there's a scuzzy student bar near Boston College called Mary Anne's. A little more searching found the liner notes (http://www.newworldrecords.org/linernotes/80291.pdf) to a folk music album that records a similar song, collected by the Smithsonian in the 1970's. According to the liner notes:

Round to Maryanne’s
Kenneth Atwood, vocal.
Recorded 1976 at Smithsonian Institution Festival of American Folklife, Washington, D.C.
“Round to Maryinne's” is a grown-up song that children like. It pokes fun at policemen who ignore obvious infringements of the law, at the mock heroism of sea captains, and at the “bravery” of generals in battle. It is the kind of song that your favorite uncle would always sing after Thanksgiving dinner, while your mother would object, “Not in front of the children.” (Such songs are often those that children remember with the greatest affection.) Its humorous advocacy of the workingman'a right to license is sure to appeal to young boys in search of a manly role model.Maryanne's is an Irish alehouse. The song probably stems from the period of the nineteenth century when the potato famines in Ireland drove many farmers from their homes to seek a livelihood in America. As a result of the influx of poor Irish competing for work, many songs were written from the fifties to the nineties both for and against the Irish, and the Irish policeman and the Irish biddy joined the ranks of American ethnic stereotypes (80265-2, Don't Give the Name a Bad Place: Types and Stereotypes in American Musical Theater—1870- 1900).

Kenneth Atwood is a lumberman who has worked most of his life in Utah. His repertoire reflects his identification with the American workingman. His original song “The Turkey Trail” tells of a wagon-busting, man-challenging trail littered with boulders strewn as thickly as hailstones, an image reminiscent of the Paul Bunyan tales. Other songs of his tell of the rigors of farm life or detail a hardened sailor's advice to a green sailor boy. Atwood learned “Round to Maryanne's” from a cousin.

Sunday night in your town,
Sunday night in ours,
Nothing to do on the outside,
nothing to do indoors.
They even shut the movies,
soon as it is dark;
They drive the people off the streets,
and then they lock the park.
But there's one place you can always find to go,
And as soon as the drugstore closes,
you will hear somebody say:

Chorus
“Let's all go around to Maryanne's
And pick 'em a tune upon the pianola!
There's something nice, it's always on the ice,
And you don't have to ask her twice
For a drink of Coca-Cola.
Her front-door key's always in the lock,
The door is standing open,
and you never have to knock,
For Mary is Irish,
and so is the cop that beats it around the block,
So you'll never go home till morning.
You're round to Maryanne's !”

Terrible thunder and lightning and storm from out the sky,
The good ship Helen Blaise is just struck on the rock.
One-half of the passengers lost their lives,
And the first mate lost his sock.
Well, then the captain cried, “It's up to you!”
And then the second assistant cook says,
“I know what let's do: (Chorus)

Cannonballs was flying, the fight was almost won,
Millions of people were dying, they had no place to run.
The general, he's the byros [sic], the pride of Mexico,
Was digging a hole to China, there or some other place to go.
And as he dropped his spade to take a rest,
The captain fell off from a bucking mule and cried,
“Well, I suggest: (Chorus)

From the internal evidence (references to pianolas, popular from 1890-1920) and Coca Cola, it probably dates from the early 20th century; and I suspect the scuzzy bar is named for the song, not the other way around.

Given the known overlap between my science fiction friends, my folksong friends, and my Boston friends, does anyone out there have any further information about this song?

Back in the land of sufficient oxygen. We had three good nights; the fourth night, the clouds came in and it threatened to snow, so we left the mountain a night early. (As it was, the road up and down was snow and ice covered...) Good news on the road home: the Horseshoe Cafe in Benson, Arizona, is open again!

On the mountain, I graded all my papers and turned in my grades. So far only two grade-grubbers have written to demand an accounting. (One of them, outraged that he only got an A-) I used "track changes" in Word to add my comments to their papers; I will review those comments, remove the actionable statements I wrote at three am under low oxygen, and send them back their papers... after Christmas.

Most of the papers were pretty good. A few were ludicrous. One of my fellow astronomers on the mountain was also grading papers; as the long nights went on, we got to chatting among ourselves about some of the "best" answers we've gotten over the years for various astronomy tests.

The winner:
Q: Why can't you see the stars during the daytime?"
A:"Because the stars are so far away that it takes all day for the light of the sun to reach them and then get reflected back to earth, so it is nighttime before we can see them."

Sunny and mid 60's (F--upper teens for you C fans) here in Tucson. I am off in a few hours to have the traditional aebelkivers with Stu Weidenschilling and his family. Happy Christmas Eve to all!

Don't expect much sanity from me for the next few days. I am grading 50 essays that count as final exams... while staying up all night to babysit a telescope, as we're doing light curves at the VATT for the next five nights. At 10,500 feet. The students may wind up with some very peculiar grades.

The VATT: our "advanced technology telescope" in southern Arizona.

Light curves: you sit on one object (in our case, a "centaur" -- an object that is half comet, half asteroid, and don't say that too quickly, orbiting between Jupiter and the regions out beyond Neptune) to see it slowly change brightness as it spins. The assumption is that it has a non-spherical shape, and that's what makes it change brightness; and that its spin axis is stable. If you observe such a light curve from three different aspects of the object's orbit, you can in theory work out a triaxial shape and a pole position, from which one can apply fancy mathematics that may not actually be valid, to come up with an estimate of its density... and I am rambling. The point of all this is to note that, first of all, this is dead boring work; and second, that you need about 15 years for a Centaur to have gone around enough in its orbit to make this figure, so there's not a real immediate payoff to this work. But it is important and someone has to do it.

And on the longest nights of the year. We won't be getting much sleep.

A lovely time... and somehow I didn't come across as a complete idiot. (Who would, next to the Colbert character?)

For those who want the details... I flew down from Syracuse in the afternoon, and a limo took me to the Colbert studios on 54th and 10th... a building with his name in big letters over the door, where his staff works and where the show is taped. They showed me into the Green Room (each guest had his own dressing room) where I dropped off my bag and my suit. The suit, which had been stuffed in the bag, was a mass of wrinkles; a staffer whisked it away.

Since I had chosen to take the earlier flight (in case of delays -- so, there were none) I had the afternoon free. I asked a producer if it would be good to mention my book, The Heavens Proclaim; she agreed, so one stop was to go to the only place in Manhattan that carries the book, the bookshop at St. Paul's Church on 9th and 59th (where I had given a talk last month). I also picked up a few essentials at the new Apple store on the upper west side. Dinner at the Carnegie Deli, which is a favorite of one of the Jesuits here at LeMoyne.

By 6:15 I was back at the studio. Waiting for me was a large shopping bag of goodies, none of which I could possibly take on the plane. My friend Tom from LeMoyne, who was in NYC on business, came to see the show so I had him take charge of the bag. I will do an inventory in a couple of days, when it arrives here.

About 6:30 I was taken into makeup and given a few brief instructions, to go with what had been told to me before. Basically... at a certain point, a stage manager carries a chair onstage, and I follow him and sit down. The camera is focussed on Colbert, who is still doing his routine, but then pulls back to reveal me sitting there. Colbert is the comedian; my task is to answer his questions, straight.

About quarter to seven, Stephen Colbert came by and introduced himself; we chatted for a few minutes, mentioning mutual friends (like my Jesuit colleague and friend, Jim Martin, who has been on the show a few times). As he put it, "I play a totally ignorant fool, a willfully stupid person. I am going to ask you a bunch of inane questions; your job is to put me straight."

"Ah, like a college freshman," I replied.

The next half hour I mostly spent alone in the room, fretting, looking at the food they'd left for me that I didn't have the stomach to touch. Then Colbert came back for one last round of make up and headed off to warm up the audience. I got to watch from the wings. He basically did a question-and-answer, straight (out of character), which got everyone in a friendly mood. (The audience is small, probably about 150 people; I was given only two tickets for guests, and they went to my LeMoyne friend Tom and his guest. Tom is the head of the program that brought me to LeMoyne this term, the Catholic Studies program.) At that point, I went back to my room and watched the taping from a monitor in the dressing room. He did flub one line, which was done over; watching it later, the cut was seamless.

I was warned, I would be in the second act. When the time came, I was called from my dressing room, fixed with a microphone (which I tested, right there), and then taken to the manager with the chair. I remembered to sit down... and you can see how the interview came out. It looks a lot better on TV than it felt when I was doing it; I thought I was off, I was nervous as hell, and the last question was so off the wall that I felt I was floundering. His reaction saved the day, in my opinion; he laughed as if my stupid comment was hilarious, and the audience bought it.

Immediately after it was over, I forgot my instructions ("stay seated! don't get up!") in my rush to get back to my dressing room. The taping, which in theory was supposed to run from 7 to 7:30, was still going on and it was 8:00 pm. And I had a 9:30 flight from LaGuardia. A limo was waiting, and I made the flight with plenty of time to spare. In fact, I got back here to Syracuse in time to watch the show as it aired with the rest of my Jesuit community.

An email from Steward Observatory, University of Arizona:

"I can not let this day pass without mentioning that the first celestial observation made with a telescope by Galileo Galilei was on November 30, 1609...exactly 400 years ago today!

"Galileo observed a waxing crescent Moon just after sunset. It was today's anniversary which prompted the United Nations to proclaim 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy."

My talk in Houston can now be found on-line. It's more than an hour long, however...

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/lectures/archive/20091119/Br-Guy-Consolmango.html

Next Tuesday, Dec. 1, I am being flown down to NYC to appear on The Colbert Report. It should air that night.

Those of you who know the show, nothing more need be said. Those of you who don't... it's an American thing, I'm afraid.

I am in Houston for the rest of this week, speaking (last night and today) at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, just down the road from the Johnson Space Center. This trip had been on my calendar for over a year, even before I knew I was going to be teaching in Syracuse, so my students at LeMoyne get a holiday today.

The talk last night was an oldie-but-goodie, "Astronomy, God and the Search for Elegance". They had a big crowd -- not much to do on a Thursday night, I guess.

What was fun for me were some of the folk who came up to see me after the talk. Some I was hoping to see, like my friend Rita from Peace Corps who now lives in Galveston; others, I had no idea...

1. "Glad to hear you mention our old advisor, John Lewis," said a man about ten years younger than me. We had the same advisor, I wondered? Who was this guy? He saw the look of confusion on my face, and introduced himself. "I'm Tom Jones." Oh, right. We had written a paper together in the 1980s, while he was a student at the U of Arizona... before he went off to become an astronaut.

2. "Hi, I'm Luanne," said a woman about my age. Luanne? The only Luanne I ever knew was the little girl who used to chase after me to play house when we were four years old, living in Harper Woods. Yeah, that Luanne. She lives in Texas now, and came to the talk when she saw that I was in town.

3. A little old lady waited patiently until she had a chance to tell me all about a book that I really must read; it was by Carl Sagan. I didn't know about the book, but I did tell her that, ahem, yes, ma'am, (strut-strut), you know I actually knew Carl Sagan. (We even spoke together a couple of times.) She let this flow on by her. Then replied, "I was Carl Sagan's sister." (She did look just like him, in fact.)

In about an hour I head off to Binghamton, NY to give a couple of talks to the Kopernik Observatory, an amateur astronomy group that meets in the Polish Cultural Center (and at their own observatory nearby). Alas, the weather has stripped most of the color from the trees but other than that it should be a pleasant drive -- unlike yesterday, when it was snowing here. My topics will be "The Heavens Proclaim" (basically a slide show of the pretty pictures from our book) and "Is Pluto a Planet -- And Why Does It Matter" which is an old standby.

I used to be defensive about my role in the Pluto "demotion" -- I had originally argued and voted against the IAU decision, but then as an officer of Commission 16, Planets and Moons, it was my job to explain and defend it. (And having lived with it for three years I actually think now we made the right choice.) Finally I got tired of all the ill-informed grief I was getting, and now my attitude when people accuse me of maligning poor little Pluto is to cackle with glee and insist, "Yes, I killed Pluto -- and I'd do it again! Ha-ha-ha!"

After all, how often does one get to use that mad-scientist chortle that we worked so hard to perfect when we were graduate students?

I am just back to Syracuse (NY) from two days in Rome (Italy). For my non-New Yorker readers I point out that there is also a Syracuse (Italy) and a Rome (New York), neither of which I saw this trip.

The event was the opening of the Vatican's display of antique astronomical instruments, gathered from observatories across Italy (including ours and the Vatican Museum) in honor of the International Year of Astronomy; the gathering was also an official opening of our new headquarters in the Papal Gardens. About 75 astronomers from Italy and around the world, including a number of impressive names, gathered on Friday at the headquarters of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (a lovely building in the gardens behind St. Peter's) to hear a presentation from John Huchra on telescopes past and future.

Then, after a bit of coffee, we walked over to the audience halls of the Vatican (on a path that takes you underneath the Vatican Museum and past the Sistine Chapel, which is not quite as impressive on the outside as it is on the inside!) where Pope Benedict XVI greeted the astronomers and said a few words about astronomy. He's all for it!

After lunch in the Pope Paul VI auditorium, we then split into three groups to do a round-robin tour of the new exhibit, the Sistine Chapel, and the Tower of the Winds. My task was to be the tour guide to the tower, so I didn't get to see the other spots. (I've seen the Sistine Chapel a few times now, and I'll be back in January to get a look at the exhibit.) So three times I (and a secretary from the Archives) led groups up the stairs to the Tower of the Winds. Yeah, stairs. Quite a few of them. It is a tower, after all... After that, we went into the "Secret Archives" where you can see a bit of the 85 kilometers of shelving. (The name is a bad translation of the Italian which would be better put as "Private Archives" -- the root word is the same as in "secretary" not "top secret.")

For next class: how many terabytes does 85 linear kilometers of shelving represent?

On Saturday, the group came by bus out to Castel Gandolfo. Chris Corbally, Paul Gabor, and I led three groups on a tour through the Papal Gardens -- took about an hour and a half, and we only saw half of them -- ending up at our new headquarters. We were going to do a formal tour of our library, rare books, and meteorites but by then everyone was exhausted so we just let people wander while we served a four course pranzo in the cobblestone courtyard. The weather (in the upper teens Celsius, and sunny) was almost as good as the food.

The group left at around 2:30; by 4:00 I was in the car heading back to the airport. And today I have two classes to teach at LeMoyne College.

(Crossposted at Cosmic Diary)

Sorry for the long delay posting. After Conclave I was staying at the Jesuit residence of U of Detroit High and they share their internet with the high school, which blocks sites like facebook and LJ. Then I was in London, Ontario, staying at the seminary in a room without internet connection. Then less than 24 hours in Georgia with no time. Finally I arrived in Syracuse on Sunday night; here, Wednesday am, is my first chance to blog.

While at the high school, I was asked to talk to students. I had been a student there in 1966-70. Having me talk to these kids was like having someone from the class of 1930 talking to us when we were students. Ouch.

I am teaching the second half of a course at LeMoyne College (a small, 2500 student, Jesuit undergraduate school on a hilltop in the middle of upstate New York famous mostly for its large snowfalls) called "Dynamic Creation" which looks at the interaction between cosmology and theology. Guess which half I am covering! More about that in later posts.

I will be here for two months, until the end of the term. Except, of course, for the trip to Rome for the last weekend in October; to Binghamton the following weekend, NYC the weekend after that, Houston the next weekend, then Rochester for Thanksgiving...

So what does my title have to do with anything? I was walking across campus yesterday and saw a student wearing a ratty Dark Side of the Moon tee-shirt. My first thought was that his parents were barely born when that record came out. (I heard Floyd perform it live, a year before the album came out.) Then I thought to myself, when my generation was in college did we go around glorying in bits of 40 year old pop culture?

Actually, yes, we did. The Marx Brothers. The cover of a Firesign Theatre album came to mind...

Hurrah for Captain Spalding! Shorter of breath, another day closer to death. Somehow seeing Pink Floyd as the Marx Brothers of the Millenials does nothing to make me feel younger.

I just got in from the annual Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Puerto Rico, to a rainy Detroit for ConClave. Met up with friends and fellow Guests in the Con Suite last night; the convention opens tonight. As the Science Guest of Honor I have a bunch of program items but I am too muddled at the moment to remember when and where. My task for today is to find a laundromat and replace the iPhone that I managed to lose in Puerto Rico. (A good excuse to upgrade my phone!)

The European Jesuits in Science met last month in Portugal, and came up with the following statement which we sent to Fr. Mark Rostaert, the president of the European Assistancy of Jesuits. (He was at our meeting and helped craft the message to one that he can then take to the higher-ups.) Following that, we then crafted a longer piece which is now done to expand on these themes.

Since many of you helped when I first asked for ideas and suggestions, I thought you might be interested in what we came up with. It's below the cut.

( Jesuits and Science )

My podcast is up for the 365 Days of Astronomy:

http://365daysofastronomy.org/2009/09/30/september-30th-the-delight-of-stars/