{"id":40460,"date":"2011-10-16T15:45:08","date_gmt":"2011-10-16T15:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/i-am-interviewed-by-the-weinersmiths-bad-astronomy\/"},"modified":"2011-10-16T15:45:08","modified_gmt":"2011-10-16T15:45:08","slug":"i-am-interviewed-by-the-weinersmiths-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/i-am-interviewed-by-the-weinersmiths-bad-astronomy.php","title":{"rendered":"I am interviewed by the Weinersmiths | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Zach Weiner, of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal<\/a>, and Kelly Smith, of Weinersmith<\/a>, interviewed me for their new podcast, The Weekly Weinersmith<\/a>. I am actually only their second guest, so we’ll see if the podcast survives.<\/p>

We talked about the James Webb Space Telescope, mostly, though as usual when I talk to Zach we both revert to 15 year old boys. But only briefly, and only if 15 year old boys paid attention in world history class.<\/p>

I’ll note I made a mistake in the interview: I said JWST will have 6 mirrors, but it actually has 18<\/strong><\/a>. D’oh! I remember very clearly picturing the telescope in my head (it’s hard to do a web search during an interview) and for some dumb reason I was thinking of the old MMT<\/a>, which I’ll admit is a little bizarre. Heat of the moment, I guess. I wasn’t even within an astronomer’s usual factor of two, so I guess I have to give myself three geek demerits.<\/p>

I think I made up for it by calling JWST — since its future is uncertain — \"Schrödinger’s telescope\".<\/p>

In fact, the stuff I said about JWST deals mostly with its politics and budgetary woes. I’ve written about this before:<\/p>

- Where will JWST’s money come from?<\/a>
- The Senate has “saved” JWST? Hang on a sec, folks…<\/a>
- The watershed moment for JWST<\/a>
- Hubble’s successor: doomed or saved?<\/a>
- Congress puts NASA and JWST on the chopping block<\/a><\/p>

So there you go. I’ll note that it’s mostly wondering about JWST’s and NASA’s future until about 45 minutes in, and then we get all optimistic and fun.<\/p>

Zach and Kelly were great hosts, letting me blather on until I ran out of air. Knowing them both — Kelly’s a scientist, and Zach a hugely<\/em> devoted science enthusiast and supporter (he’s teaching himself advanced calculus and blogging about it<\/a><\/em>) — this will be a podcast to keep your ear on. Subscribe to it!<\/a><\/p>

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Zach Weiner, of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and Kelly Smith, of Weinersmith, interviewed me for their new podcast, The Weekly Weinersmith. I am actually only their second guest, so we’ll see if the podcast survives.We talked about the James Webb … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40460"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}