Neil DeGrasse Tyson in votive candle form

I can't figure out if this Neil DeGrasse Tyson science-themed votive candle is an article of commerce or not, but man, it should be, oh yes, it should.

I Heart Chaos — Hail St. Neil. (via IO9)

Update: Buy 'em on Etsy

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Funny • Gadgets • happy mutants • religion • Science

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http://twitter.com/murtaugh Tim Murtaugh

The one behind him looks like it could be Bill Nye…
- http://beautifulsynthesis.com Andrea
  
  My thoughts exactly!
- edgore
  
  Pretty sure you are right on that, and I am guessing the quote beneath the picture is pulled from this:
  
  ““Science is the key to our future, and if you don’t believe in science, then you’re holding everybody back. And it’s fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don’t believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don’t believe in science, that’s a recipe for disaster. We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.” ”
  - Forced2Register
    
    It’s not that I “believe” in science… I just know that what science says is based on experiments I can double check if i don’t believe something
  - joshua a
    
    Nah, it’s actually a direct quote. He said it on Real Time last year.
- Cowicide
  
  http://www.etsy.com/listing/124748451/science-gawds-prayer-candle-set-bill-nye
  - noah django
    
    its missing the Carl Sagan one that says “smoke weed e’reday”
Jason Wood

Does anyone else get wrist pain just looking at that illustration, though? No?
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OAUXAA362EXWLYVMPJOKLFB5JQ Incipient Madness
  
  We don’t need to know how you got your repetitive stress injury.
  
  Oh, I see that you are talking about the position of his hands in the picture. I thought you TMI’d us there.
oligo pistos

Took 2 minutes of googling.

http://www.etsy.com/listing/124633603/neil-degrasse-tyson-prayer-candle?ref=v1_other_1

Give people credit for the things they create and that you use to drive traffic to your site.
tamgoddess

They’re more veladoras than votives.
anon0mouse

Science damn you!
http://joenolan.com/blog Joe Nolan

A light in the darkness.
dioptase

Neil, stop corrupting young minds! Science isn’t true. Science could be called the process of finding what is true. Or we could say science appears to be true, subject to new evidence. But saying science is true diminishes science.

And those sheep? They are black on the side facing us.
crenquis

One can get Einstein, Hawking, and Ronald Mallet — the Patron Saints of Time Travel — from 826LA’s Time Travel Mart:
http://826la.org/store/decorative-dowry/patron-saint-of-time-travel-candle-set.html
Jewels Vern

I have to disagree with the quote in the picture. Several scientists have said that at least half of what they believed is not true, but they didn’t know which half.
- http://2012diaries.blogspot.com/ tristan eldritch
  
  Science: The best method we currently have at our disposal for figuring out which half of science is true.
  - Jewels Vern
    
    I’m not sure what your point is. Most arguments in science are settled by one side outliving the other. For example, hand washing is considered important because all the doctors who thought it was junk science have died.
    - http://2012diaries.blogspot.com/ tristan eldritch
      
      To be honest, I’m not sure what my point was either, I just thought it sounded funny! But I guess my thinking was something along the lines of when DeGrasse Tyson says “Science is true whether we believe it or not” one would query what precisely he means. Good science? Current science? Scientific method or what people call the scientific worldview or philosophy? Some people find the primary appeal of science in that it appears to offer hard, incontrovertible, nailed-down for all time truths; for others, the appeal lies more in a recognition of the provisional, work in progress nature of knowledge acquisition, the sense that nothing is necessarily true for the long haul, everything is subject to be revised, improved, or scrapped. There is a degree of validity to both viewpoints (and Tyson’s quote would seem to appeal to the first), but if you are more sympathetic to the Popperian view of scientific method as a self-correcting rather than ideal state of affairs, then a statement like “Science is true” would be a little problematical, or at least oversimplified. I’ve always enjoyed the passage from Popper where he says that neither democracy or science are ideal states of affairs in themselves, but their virtue lies in allowing us to change things when people really start fucking up. So I guess my point was a Popperian riposte to De Grasse’s more gung-ho sentiment (which I actually thought was what you were getting at too), combined with a quote from William James that’s always been in the back of my head: “There is no noncircular set of criteria for knowing whether a particular belief is true, no appeal to some standard outside the process of coming to the belief itself. For thinking just is a circular process, in which some end, some imagined outcome, is already present at the start of any train of thought….”
      
      And now, my friend, I bet you’re sorry you asked!
      - Jewels Vern
        
        I agree with the first viewpoint: scientists would rather be wrong than uncertain.
hungryjoe

The people who made this misunderstand “Science” in the same way that creationists do.
erratic

I don’t like this quote for the same reason that was already pointing out, but also because I grew up hearing this basic quote from the most closed minded of religious adherents as “The good thing about (my religion) is that it’s true whether or not you believe it to be true”. It’s a thought stopping mechanism and a communication killer.
- monkey magic
  
  The difference being: science is the name given to finding out how the universe works; an ongoing process of refinement or: religion where you are told how it works; there’s no search for the truth. But I may be wrong: I am still refining the truth.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=587743800 David Romer

There’s a problem. It has 9 planets behind his head. Not 8.
- Jean Baptiste
  
  But but but Science is TRUUUUUE…..whether or not you believe in it….
http://www.facebook.com/jeselvis.ala.king Tim Anderson

reminiscent of my personally designed candle of Taint Gary Busey
ldobe

What’s not to like? He’s said a lot of inspiring things about science, he’s an astrophysicist and president of the Hayden Planetarium in NY.

He’s good for science generally. He’s helping to inform the public, and making science a little more accessible to everyone.

Also, he’s a funny guy and doesn’t take himself too seriously. And when he’s chatting with laypeople on the air, he can bring up relevant scientific topics to contribute to what people are talking about.
bobchadwick

I’ve often wondered the same thing about that white churchy guy, the pope.
Brainspore

what is with you nerds and your obsession with this black science guy

What is it with you ignorant blowhards and your obsession with a science guy’s skin color?
TooGoodToCheck

I regret to inform you, sir, that you are feeding the troll
Brainspore

Yes, I shall take a time-out as penance now.
Navin_Johnson

A white power troll too, I see after looking at their twitter.
edgore

As opposed to Jesus, that black churchy guy.
evilJaze

Did you mean “its” twitter?