catdynamics | June 17, 2006Happy Father's Day!
The Big Kid sat through all of USA vs Italy, and enjoyed it.
Made for a good lesson in sportsmanlike conduct.
And. I was wrong, the USA team did show up, about 10 minutes into the game, and played at a world level, at least the few players that rather overzealous referee left on the field in the second half.
Bad luck not to beat the Italians, maybe next time they'll send their football team on, not the Olympic Diving team.
Ghana vs Czech was a joy, although the Czech's let themselves get ruffled and didn't play to their true level. Strangely group E now looks to be the…
catdynamics | June 16, 2006It is friday, and I am late.
We ask the Great and Mighty iPod: is there a reason for us to get a manned presence off Earth on a time scale of a century or less?
Whoosh goes the randomizer:
Whoosh...
The Covering: Boy Done Good - Billy Bragg
The Crossing: Don't Leave Me Now - Pink Floyd
The Crown: Train Train - Billy Bragg
The Root: Eisler on the Go - Billy Bragg
The Past: No Puede Ser - Three Tenors
The Future: Come un bel di di maggio - Pavarotti
The Questioner: In the Midnight Hour - Maloko
The House: Carnival of the Animals
The Inside: Bílavísur - Björk
The Outcome: Nicaragua,…
catdynamics | June 16, 2006
Hvalur 8 RE-388
The Icelandic whaling fleet has been in harbour for 17 years now.
The International Whaling Commission is meeting in St Kitts right now the whaling nations may have bought in enough minor nations to get a majority in favour of resuming whaling although under voting rules that is only a moral victory, takes a super-majority to resume.
This may seem like cheating, buying votes of nations, and it is. But what is sauce for the goose... the tactic of bringing in minor and landlocked nations to vote on whaling was an innovation by anti-whaling environmentalists 20-30 years ago..…
catdynamics | June 16, 2006How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?...
Er... ouch.
Notice the time stamps of ~ 1:30 am on many of my entries?
Actually, if I am dashing out a lot of blog entries it is a sign that I am particularly busy, it is when I am idle that I don't blog and instead revel in real life.
Time for a "blast from the past":
The more you write, the more you write
It is well known, that there is a standing secret committee of academics that keeps track of all the stupid…
catdynamics | June 16, 2006So, I popped down to the campus bookstore and browsed C*u*ters latest tome on the "Church of Liberalism"...
A large part of the book is regurgitated crap from the intelligent design moron crowd, which PZ has dissected along with several other netizens.
Most of the rest is the usual incoherent lunatic ravings about sex, crime and war.
So... what about "their own cosmology"?
Well, I was a bit disappointed, it is there in the preamble, but then nada.
Not in the index, couple of contextless asides on how "well at least relativity has experimental evidence", and a rambling listing of "famous…
catdynamics | June 16, 2006SEED is doing a $10,000 match to charity donations to the "Donors Choose" educational charity.
Sounds like a good cause, and a lot of the Sb bloggers jumped in.
If you want to chip in, go for it, can I ask that you go to Uncertain Principles and click through there, I'm not in a place where I can tinker with html button codes. Chad is all set up.
catdynamics | June 15, 2006I am hearing an irritating buzz in my ear...
Apparently cosmology is liberal.
Can someone tell me, what is a conservative cosmology? And what is the distinction?
catdynamics | June 15, 2006Astrology is crap
You can not buy a star name
Yes, there really was a Big Bang
catdynamics | June 15, 2006So Stephen Hawking spoke in defence of off-planet colonization
and got pounced by, among others, a trio of tough sciencebloggers.
Shelley, grrlscientist, and PZ.
Also Chris Clarke...
Sagrada Familia
This is an interesting situation - Stephen is at the best of times terse.
He is unlikely to expound in detail on his rationalisation or start commenting in blogs.
People who listen to him, and who are on the same page to begin with, tend to fill in the gap, under the assumption that he has made the full reasoned argument without expounding it - when I gave a talk to his group at DAMTP a few years…
catdynamics | June 14, 2006
European Southern Observatory press release on globular cluster 47 Tucanae
47 Tuc is one of my favourite globulars.
It is large, quite dense, metal rich as globulars go, and it is gorgeous.
It is full of pulsars, blue stragglers, x-ray binaries and other fun beasties.
A few years ago we looked there for planets - "hot Jupiters" to be specific
There were none. Which is moderately surprising in a subtle way.
catdynamics | June 14, 2006Aftenposten reports a survey of 1736 Norwegians finds the majority think sex is better sober
The majority is larger for the women.
A full 1/4 of the men, and a surprising 1/5 of the women think sex is better after a couple of glasses of wine.
Be interesting to know the demographics, and correlate...
For some reason I was checking the Aftenposten domestic pages for news, and I'm not even norwegian...
catdynamics | June 14, 2006
the Spirit Rover discovers a possible meteorite, on Mars
That is one way to find a meteorite, I wonder how the Rover spares would do north and east of Tromsø in mid-summer, there's Nkr 100,000 at stake.
About 870 days now, and still going...
catdynamics | June 14, 2006Bérubé pontificates on Academic Freedom
Read it.
I don't want to tell you how much time was wasted chasing down the false allegation of the the "bio instructor who showed a Michael Moore movie in class" last year, this issue is not just one of principle for academia, it is a matter of pragmatism, these idiots can smother a university for months by a single lie.
A colleague of mine likes to calculate the opportunity cost of administrative task; if you figure a mean cost of ~ $50 per faculty per hour then a committee of 8 people meeting for two hours four times in a semester is an effective…
catdynamics | June 13, 2006Interesting piece of journalism by the Grauniad
They ordered a 78 "letter" piece of DNA for a smallpox envelope protein.
As they note, the actual genome is rather longer than that, but as they also note, there are techniques for reconstructing genomes from DNA pieces.
I don't think anyone will be synthesizing smallpox from less than 100 base length pieces, got to be easier ways to do it (start from a chickenpox virus and edit it?); but they make an interesting if overhyped point.
Update: Nick at Scientific Activist also comments.
He notes that this suggests a need for more government…
catdynamics | June 13, 2006Pancake family brunch; soccer (Big Kid playing, me assistant coach temp); ballet (family appreciation day); pig roast with belly dancing (really, organic pig at that).
There are worse ways to spend a day.
Perfect weather here this weekend, and after proposal hell week (more on that later) and early summer stomach 'flu (everyone in rapid succession), it was nice to have a busy but pleasant day.
Got a large paper (thesis chapter) read and commented; one referee's report done.
That leaves 8 papers currently in various stages where I am the hold up, and one referee's report due that I remember.…
catdynamics | June 12, 2006As reported by Uncertain Principles and Bad Astronomy, there was a meteorite impact in Northern Norway - Tromsø area.
Initial reports were "impact compared to atomic bomb"...here is the proper report, including seismic signal - really did impact.
Current reports suggest it was a ~ 10kg rocky meteorite.
Meteors hit at 10-40 km/sec, typically, or 108-9 J/kg of energy.
Now there are 4.2 GigaJoules per ton of TNT. So the impact energy was actually about the same as a few hundred pounds of explosive, comparable, say, to a couple of 500pound USAF bombs.
Consistent with the eyewitness accounts.…
catdynamics | June 12, 2006Ok, I caught 5 mins of ESPN coverage this afternoon (during a commercial break in SpongeBob), and the commentator is standing in a suit, on an open floor, holding a soccer ball.
Why is he doing that?
catdynamics | June 11, 2006Jane over at Ethics and Science tags the New Kids on the block with a Neighbourhood Pi mem
We obey, and please mam, may we have some more?
3 reasons you blog about science:
I know some.
I like it.
I think it is important.
Point at which you would stop blogging:
Real life catches up with me.
1 thing you frequently blog besides science:
NASA politics
4 words that describe your blogging style:
Rambling
Cryptic
Occasionally strident
Casual
1 aspect of blogging you find difficult:
Keeping current with what is interesting.
5 ScienceBlogs blogs that are new to you:
Framing Science
The Loom…
catdynamics | June 10, 2006Stochastic, our master's voice, asks:
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
Well, of course it'd be
bioinformatics.
Why?
Interestingly technical, lots of data, wide open fundamental problems, impression that is is undersubscribed by researchers, both pure and applied problems, interdisciplinary.
I've seen some of the serious side of bioinfo related issues through my astrobiology hat, and it looks interesting and fun.
catdynamics | June 9, 2006Every friday, life permitting, we do an "iPod iChing".
It is well known that the randomizer on the iPod is oracular, and in recent times it has been used widely on the Net as a fountain of wisdom.
...
Most people use the iPod's powers trivially, for "random ten" lists to reflect their psychic angsts, here we do things scientifically! In 2005, Sean Carroll realised the fundamental structure of the iPod mimics that of the Tarot, so we thereofore do this scientifically.
Sean has moved on to greater things, pondering dark energy or some such nonsense, leaving me to keep up the tradition of…