catdynamics | June 27, 2006The first few minutes are not warm up.
The game is still on even if it is the last minute.
Fascinating game Gha vs Bra.
The Ghanan's are dominating the midfield and the Brazilians are relying on the quick counter.
The Brazilians look like they don't want to be there most of the time...
Oh, and the second Brazilian goal was off-side, twice.
But the score is still 2-0...
Ah well, at least the third goal was onside.
catdynamics | June 26, 2006DC flooded, more on the way
You should sooo read this book - 40 signs of rain by KSR
NSF panels, biotech, global climate change, NSA, and Tibetan Monks. What more could you want?
Sequel is good to.
From flickr...
catdynamics | June 26, 2006
There it is, back after a hundred years in the outer system.
From CARA - the Cometary Archive for Amateur Astronomers in Italy.
Nice one.
catdynamics | June 26, 2006Good game by the Ozzies, they are actually somewhat dominating the midfield at halftime and the Italians are trying to slow things down to regain control. Toni looks a bit off pace, he's had good shots, very good shots, but he's not been running onto balls his teammates looked for.
The Ozzies are incredibly fit, if this game is close late they'll run the Italians into the ground the way they've beat up other teams. If Italy goes one ahead look for them to try to close down the back and sit on it.
Fun.
That sucks.
Worst ref call ever. And that is saying something.
There was no foul, total…
catdynamics | June 25, 2006The Minor Planet Center reports the discovery by L. Buzzi of the Schiaparelli
Observatory, Varese, Italy of comet P/2006 M3.
Computations by Green strongly suggests it is Barnard's comet of 1889 (c). Returning with a about a 128 year period.
Welcome back.
New orbit estimate is 119 year period, with apperihelion at about 1.1 AU and eccentricity of 0.95.
Here is the original (pdf)
No picture yet from the current observations. Maybe someone will get one up tomorrow.
catdynamics | June 25, 2006Quick trip to California, and between life, the neighbours dogs, and a late connection I was drive to the ultimate in desperation...
I bought one of the "snack boxes" on United Airlines.
The "healthy" one.
Judging by the state of the contents, I was the only customer dumb enough to actually buy one this month. Though it had not quite hit the expiry date, I checked.
Anyway, you expect the crackers to be stale, but the rest was basically a tin of cat food and a jar of baby food. Suspicously mouldy looking baby food.
Ok, the mini-toblerone was ok, hard to go wrong there.
You have been warned.…
catdynamics | June 25, 2006The newly instated University of California at Santa Cruz Chancellor, Prof D. Denton died saturday in San Francisco in a fall from a tall building.
News media are conjecturing it was suicide.
There was a lot of media play over senior UC personnel in the last year or so, with a lot of insinuation of petty corruption, in particular over the hiring of partners of senior administrators in high rank, and high pay, university positions.
Some of that coverage was motivated by bias, rather than concern over the adminstration of the university. They may have gone too far.
InsideHigherEd has a lengthy…
catdynamics | June 23, 2006
Rainy friday, and we approach the mighty iPod with a topical question.
Oh, mighty iPod, when LISA is finally launched, will it see shitloads of EMRIs?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: La seenade interrompue - Claudio Arrau
The Crossing: Accident Waiting to Happen - Billy Bragg
The Crown: Do Anything you Wanna Do - Eddie and the Hot Rods
The Root: Sur Le Pont d'Avignon - Sien Diels
The Past: First of the Gang - Morrissey
The Future: Travelin' Soldier - Dixie Chicks
The Questioner: Lilli Hittir Mikka Ref - Thorbjorn Egner
The House: Waiting in Vain - Bob Marley
The Inside:…
catdynamics | June 22, 2006Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are on a roll tonight.
I too think the WSJ editorial board should be left behind to tough it out in the event of a suitable catastrophe. like the SCOTUS ruling gay marriage constitutional.
"More of the Same" I don't think so.
Red Staters to the Red Planet.
catdynamics | June 22, 2006I don't know. But I'll answer anyway.
Enthusiasm for the subject
Comfort with the level of knowledge and understanding of the material
Some minimal level of organization ability
Pacing
Some patience, but not too much
Some ineffable ability to explain stuff
Did I mention patience, lots of patience
Time. Practise. Time.
catdynamics | June 22, 2006I just bought $100 of skyr. Vanilla and blueberry, both.
And I transported it across State boundaries.
And now I am going to enjoy it. With my wife. The kids are asleep. Phbt.
catdynamics | June 21, 2006NASAwatch reports ACS outage
Electronics problems. ACS observations suspended for a week while a tiger team studies the issue.
Could be resolved quickly, or could be Really Bad News.
Will keep an eye out.
Hm, leaves WFPC2 and NICMOS operating. They'll run out of targets pretty quickly.
Hopefully they can just power up the spare "side 2" electronics and resume normal operation, though you never know until you try...
This is at least a warning to us all - this stuff is worryingly fragile in many ways, and operations are on a thread.
Update: apparently they think it is the power converter, not…
catdynamics | June 21, 2006
From Andrew Hamilton's black hole image collection
There are, for most practical purposed, two qualitatively distinct types of black holes: Schwarzschild - which are spherical and not spinning and Kerr - axisymmetric and spinning
So... I know how to spin up a non-spinning black hole, you drop matter in with some finite angular momentum.
I also know how to extract angular momentum from a black hole, eg through the Penrose process
What I do not know is how, or if, you can go exactly back to a non-spinning black hole.
Why is this? (J. Pedersen pointed this issue out to me and figured out many…
catdynamics | June 20, 2006
Video of meteor striking the Moon
Bad Astronomy has it also
Comparable to the one that hit Norway recently!
oops. video bit too big, cut header image down and left link, go take a peek
catdynamics | June 20, 2006
RPM writes about a senior female scientist resigning a post over a failure to hire a female editor
Astronomy is one of the sciences with very low senior female presence, not the lowest, but way down there. The incident RPM relates brings to mind a case...
I was asked by a very senior colleague what I thought about offering a policy/administrative position to a female colleague that I knew well. A auxillary position, to be done in parallel with her professorial duties as "service", but with a high profile, politically important and extremely time consuming.
I thought she was a great choice…
catdynamics | June 20, 2006
Seen on floppingaces.net
Operation "Valiant Shield" - 3 aircraft carriers doing operations together in the Pacific, off Guam, first time in 30 years.
USS Enterprise is in the Persian gulf and as far as I can tell three other aircraft carriers are at sea, two in the Atlantic and one off California.
That is a lot of firepower in an interesting place in the world.
China Post has an interesting wrap up article
New moon tomorrow - if anyone wants to use this beautiful group of ships, they have a 3-5 day window, then they'll disperse and conditions are non-optimal until July, and probably…
catdynamics | June 20, 2006Bloomin' heck, that combined the best and worst football I've seen for a while.
Good fun, but both teams need to be a bit more consistent if they're going to get through the next round...
Sunday morning should be interesting.
Shame about T&T they played a fun game.
catdynamics | June 20, 2006
The actual LISA spacecraft
Or, one of the three modules.
That is a 1.96 kg cube of 3/4 gold, 1/4 platinum.
The actual LISA spacecraft, in a very real sense, is three of those, separated by 5 million kms.
At about $600 per ounce, that is a little over $100,000 of precious metal. Each of these is surrounded by about a 2 m "saucer", which is the auxilliary spacecraft.
Somewhat amusingly, depending on how you do your accounting, the ~ 300kg of epoxy, metal, optics and electronics wrapped around the gold/platinum cube is the expensive part. Per unit mass the chunk of gold is the cheapest part…
catdynamics | June 20, 2006Beautiful post by Tara on network connectivity and outbreak of exponential spread in disease transmission.
catdynamics | June 19, 2006
Bats' ears at AMNH
To really see in the dark, at some point you must abandon the light...
You can go far in faint light by using high efficiency detectors, large collecting areas and amplification;
but, as nature discovered a long time ago, to really find things in the dark you need to switch to an entirely different spectrum and look at vibrations.
This is also true if you want to look at Black Holes.
You can do a lot with light, but to really probe what is going on with black holes, to come close to the event horizon, to test relativity, to measure spins and test astrophysics of formation…