catdynamics | July 21, 2006Yay! Fabulous Friday.
The third Billy Bragg podcast is online now
Includes the tale of the Famous Curry Incident.
Hm... I wonder if that'd work on Nature Editors?
catdynamics | July 21, 2006Keith Cowing ofNASAwatch now has a potentially interesting and useful Astrobiology.net site.
catdynamics | July 21, 2006It is friday, and we will be topical today.
So, Oh Mighty iPod, Oh Omniescent One...
Are there planets orbiting main sequence stars, within 100 parsecs of the Sun, which have abundant carbon based life producing biosignatures we can detect and recognise within the medium term, if we get the requisite technology built?
Whoosh, goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Rat Race - Specials
The Crossing: The Sorcerer's Apprentice - Rogé
The Crown: Sing Your Way Home - Twin Sister
The Root: Litli Tónlistarmaðurinn - Björk
The Past: Boys Own - Alison Moyet
The Future: North Sea Bubble - Billy…
catdynamics | July 20, 2006Spotted on Pharyngula, forwarded in case any astro/physics types are out there who don't scan PZ
What to say while having sex with atheists
FreeThunk illustrates the point
though I think in practise most atheists fall back on the cultural ambiance and go with colloquial blaspheming...
"Big Bang" might work though, especially if it follows a prolonged contemplation of the Steady State.
catdynamics | July 20, 2006As the sun blazes in the sky, and the heat climbs, people strip to the bare minimum and head for the pools and beaches. This morning a number of companies announced they would close for part of the afternoon to give employees a chance to cool off, you have to figure no one is going to be out doing business in this heat anyway...
Yes, the noon temperature in Reykjaík, Iceland, skyrocketed to a balmy 17.3 C (that's 63 F for the uninformed) and the Sun was shining.
No time to waste, tomorrow it is back to normal (12 C == 54 F and drizzle)
Original mbl.is story
Perfect place to visit, should…
catdynamics | July 19, 2006Our Master's Voice Speaks:
If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?...
Now. Of course.
Because we know more, we have a greater and more vibrant community than ever, we have more resources, tools and technology than ever.
I admit that it is tempting to contemplate life in Göttingen in the '20s, or in London in the late 17th century, or Athens with Socrates, but really? No.
Though I have to say, I expect it will be even better and more fun tomorrow.
Repeat as needed.
catdynamics | July 19, 2006There sure are a lot of angry bloggers out there...
Angry Physics is an old favourite
but I didn't know there was also an Angry Astronomer
who is not the same as Angry Stanek, who is an astronomer
but they may one day become like the legendary Angry Professors
but who is not Professor Angry
There is an Angry EconomistAngry CanadianAngry AtheistAngry ClamAngry Patriot (defunct?)
and the generic Angry Bloggers
there is Angry Arab - if you visceral sense of one side of the terrors of the Middle East, he is your blogger. The photos should make you cry.
The Angry Mathematician doesn't seem to…
catdynamics | July 18, 2006The title of my Phd Thesis was: Dynamics of Neutron Stars and Binaries in Globular Clustersor, Ménages à trois: revitalizing burnt out degenerates through partner swapping
This was not the best PhD thesis title ever, by a long shot.
The sub-title was actually an "in-joke", it was the working title of our Nature paper (Nature editors reserve the right to retitle papers for their audience, so a working title was good to have).
When I submitted, the sub-title was printed on the inside cover, and the Caltech Graduate Office, in a payback for many hours of Graduate Student Council liasion work,…
catdynamics | July 18, 2006I have learned many useful things recently:
It is harder to organize a birthday party for a dozen munchkins, then it is to organise a four day festival for several thousand people (the previous limit of my organizational reach)
Both "Average Angry Professor" and "Angry Average Professor" would be Great Blog Pseudonyms
Blog pseudonyms are not reliable for anonymity (but we knew that from Ye Olde Days on the Net)
If you want people to read and comment on blogs in large numbers you should say something outrageous about string theory, or cosmology, or religion, or politics, or war, or medicine,…
catdynamics | July 18, 2006I am going to go on a minor iTunes spending spree.
What music should I get?
Caveat: this is input for the output range of the Mighty iPod Oracle, so be careful what you recommend.
My tastes are not as limited as the current iTunes list might indicate - a large fraction of our music collection is on "cassette" and "LP" Gramophone Record... (including, sadly, much of my classic Icelandic rock collection) - I need to get digital copies of these, but have moral resistance to paying for the same music again - what I really need is a handy ADC gadget for Macs (hm, google time? oh, yes.…
catdynamics | July 18, 2006Revere on Effect Measure points us to an interesting fact I did not know....
The US charges its own citizens for evacuations from war zones.
"...The Department of State reminds American citizens that the U.S. government does not provide no-cost transportation but does have the authority to provide repatriation loans to those in financial need. For the portion of your trip directly handled by the U.S. Government we will ask you to sign a promissory note and we will bill you at a later date. In a subsequent message, when we have specific details about the transporation arrangments, we will…
catdynamics | July 17, 2006astroprof has a succinct semi-technical summary on the hardware raining down on north Israel
my 2c worth...
What Hezbollah did was an act of war, a breach of truce, a violation of agreements; it was not, in this instance (the ambush of an IDF patrol), an act of terrorism. Hezbollah has committed acts of terror, in this case they committed an act of war; they've trapped Israel in a moral reverse.
Israel had the right to respond, and they do have the right to insist Lebanon control its sovereign soil and preclude third parties, or Lebanese government factions, from attacking its soil.
From the…
catdynamics | July 17, 2006Shamelessly cribbing from the CosmicVariance gang, DataMining has a fascinating blogosphere connectivity web image
Fascinating stuff, be fun to explore where the Scienceblogs are - hopefully cut above the morass of poliblogs at the bottom right...
Am also very curious about the edge nodes, expect to spend some late night time fiddling with this and updating random insights.
Note: the data list is old - from June 2005, so a lot of sparse links will be outdated.
catdynamics | July 17, 2006
ACS first light images after the switch to the spare (side 2) electronics, after the failure of the side 1 power controller.
Found a redshift =1.4 supernova (~ 9 billion light years away), as part of Perlmutter's (LBL) high redshift supernova search, which is looking for additional date on the accelerating expansion of the universe and hence further confirmation of and testing of Dark Energy
catdynamics | July 17, 2006Just for yonks, I grabbed the WHO confirmed Avian Flu cases list and did a little plot of cumulative cases vs time...
The blue curve is cumulative cases; the red curve is cumulative deaths.
The date is the approximate date of WHO report, with 28 Jan 2004 as the zero date (11 cases, 8 deaths). The dates are approximate because I just counted months between the slightly uneven spaced report dates and assigned 30 days per month. Since the data is coarse grained this should not matter over this length time span.
If you fit it with an exponential, the doubling time is just about one year.
If I…
catdynamics | July 17, 2006Mark at CosmiVariance passes on a rumour that there is a new Astro Job Rumour Wiki
This potentially supercedes the legendary New Astro Rumour Mill which of course used to be here, which in turn superceded the legendary orginal Astro Rumour Mill started by Pat Hall.
Mark has some interesting discussion on the utility of the Rumour Mills.
His essential point is of course correct, the information is there, and it wants to be free...
Having also been on both sides of the rumours, I note that the public info is occasionally gamed, by both sides. Candidates may "leak" their status to the Mill to…
catdynamics | July 14, 2006Is every species of living thing on the planet equally deserving of protection?...
No.
Seriously. No.
Some must be protected.
Some ought to be protected.
It'd be pragmatic, prudent or prescient to protect most.
A few I'd just as soon see dead. Very few.
Some actually don't matter much either way, except in an abstract aesthetic sense.
Worst of all, the definition of "species" is biased towards charismatic species (we fine grain populations that look good, and coarse grain over populations we know little of or care little for); so at some deep level the question is poorly defined.
We should…
catdynamics | July 14, 2006Hot friday, and I am out of touch.
So we ask the Mighty iPod...
...Oh, Mighty iPod - are we getting a short term shortage of those ever so addictive Megaliters of hydrogenated carbon chains we find so useful?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: The Price I Pay - Billy Bragg
The Crossing: Russian Dance - Tchaikovsky
The Crown: Cadet Rousselle - Sien Diels
The Root: When Will I See You Again? - Billy Bragg
The Past: God's Footballer - Billy Bragg
The Future: Granada - Three Tenors
The Questioner: Víur um Ref
The House: Du reines Taubchen, nur Herein! - Mozart
The Inside: (The…
catdynamics | July 14, 2006That most reliable of sources, the friend of a friend of a friend, told us they know someone who works at the corporate HQ of a major petroleum retailer in the US.
In short: expect ~ 20% rise in retail prices of gas this weekend.
I wonder why, did I miss something?
Some unrest somewhere while I wasn't paying attention?
catdynamics | July 13, 2006Couple of interesting snippets on NASAwatch
SOFIA is back. SIM is slipped, which apparently saves everything. WISE, GLAST, JWST, even HST.
Who knew you could do so much by slipping a $100 million item...
Uh, oh, if you click through to the New Scientist story, we learn SIM is being "refocused". That can't be good.
Yee-Haw!!! - for True Space Cadets Only.
Bigelow launched and deployed successfully the "Genesis" 1/3 scale model of their inflatable space habitat. Full scale version is decent sized and planned to accommodate ~ half dozen people. Possible ISS add-ons if I read correctly, and…