42 thoughts on “Rise up, Citizen Scientists!

        1. I certainly heard it on the Good Doctor's show, but I lived in a place with only one radio station when that came out. It would be another year before we got anything besides the one cowboy station, and damned if the new "rock" station didn't suck just as bad!

          1. wow, you sound like a friend of mine who grew up in central Washington state, the TV had "the channel" and that was it.

          2. Even though I was born and raised in and near San Francisco, we rarely had television and even when we did, it was only a few channels because I'm old. I moved up into the mountains when I was still a teenager. It was pretty remote. A cable company existed from before I got there, but TV didn't interest me. I never even bothered to bootleg it until they added FM to the lineup. Now, sadly, I am an addict.

          3. Pretty much after I was 18, TV was something I did mostly as a social event, other than watching the news when I exercised. Now I don't even do that (I go running). I'll watch the baseball playoffs, but that's 90% of my tee vee viewing over the year.

    1. Folks sometimes ask me why I don't paint my telescopes. My standard reply is "probably because I don't take them out in the rain"

          1. Did you know if you stretched a person's intestines out they would reach from here to the moon? Well, they're really long- miles or something.

    1. Also? I fucking love bats. Fly, my pretties! My first year in grad school, a bat got in my apt. One of my roommates was freaking out, she was yelling "Ahhhggh! All bats have rabies!". I said, no they don't, turned off the lights in the apt, opened the windows, the little guy let himself out in less than 10 minutes.

      1. There's a street light on my commute home under which at least one bat has an absolute field day. I'm worried it might die of overeating.

          1. No joke- the astronomy club I went to when I was a kid in NJ (Amateur Astronomers Incorporated- Cranford NJ), they had a bumper sticker up on the wall: Female Astronomers are Ladies of the Evening

          2. I gave up looking for a silent clip of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In of a man haggling with a hooker. They eventually come to an agreement, she takes his money, he takes her lamppost.

        1. They swoop down on my pool almost every evening at sunset. There's bunches of them in the hood. Bless their mosquito eating hearts…

      2. I found out there the local Little Brown Bats were sleeping when I inadvertently blew one out from behind a shutter while power-washing my house. He was pissed, but recovered fine and went off to eat greenheads with his buddies that night..

  1. slightly OT but the comments for this article are funny:

    "Great story. It made me think about how few scientific fields are there today, where amateurs can actively contribute?
    Besides astronomy, I can only think of archeology, botany and zoology."

    The most important thing needed to do good science is a good brain, pal. Electrochemistry with pencil graphite! X rays with scotch tape and a decent vacuum!

  2. Damn, that's beautiful! I've got a bridge pulling up on a low-end Takamine, wouldn't be economically feasible to take it to a luthier, I might try my hand at it. Even if I fail, it only cost $100 twenty years ago.

  3. No, I didn't hear Dr. Demento until later on when the world caught up with Mammoth somewhat. The local cable company gave us some FM stations, I can't remember if it was KZAP or KKCY that carried Dr. D.

  4. Damn right. There's a huge amount of Citizen Science being done, by amateurs, across just about all the natural science discipline. The very first one that should come to mind is Ornithology – the Christmas and Backyard bird counts by the Audubon society and all the others worldwide. There's people who volunteer fishery data, track algae blooms, spot storms, track invasive species, track rare and endangered species, count butterflies, spot bees, track asteroids, maintain weather records, you name it. I'm all for this and it's all good.

  5. There can never be enough data. Also, with the Arduinos and Raspberry pis around, making little widgets that can do stuff that was the domain of the(bigger) lab even 20 years ago is easy, and dirt dirt cheap. Sensors as well. I have found out that even though optics and astronomy are hobbies for me, you can still hang with the big dogs if you're hard core.

    Also: FUN!

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