Hello everyone and welcome to Talk Nurdy.

It's Monday January 9th and I'm your host Kara Santa Maria.

This is our first week back after taking two weeks off for the holiday break. I had a good

holiday I hope you guys did too we had some good dinners with friends I didn't get to

go home to see my family but I had a lot of great support here in the Los Angeles area and then I was able to take a nice vacation to Hawaii.

Unfortunately I got a little bit sick before we left.

I think I caught Naurovirus, which we'll talk about later in the show.

And my immune system was not happy,

so when we went to Hawaii, I think I picked up a bit of a bug you can hear the

gravelly nature of my voice during this recording headed to the doctor tomorrow

hopefully we'll get this taken care of.

But in the meantime, I wanted to make sure that we got a new episode up

and this is going to be a good one because it features one of my good friends

and someone who I respect immensely,

the astronomer Phil Plate.

He actually writes the Bad Astronomy blog,

which you can find at Slate, and he is the author of two books,

Bad Astronomy, Misconceptions and Misuse is Revealed,

from Astrology to the Moon Landing quote-unquote hoax and death from the skies the science behind the end of the world

Phil is also I don't know he's just like the go-to astronomer I think everybody who's listening to the show

already knows him he's very active in social media he is an expert that's often

called upon on television shows regarding space and the Cosmos and he is also a

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