Archives for March, 2011
Purpose of University
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on March 30, 2011 A university is a self-perpetuating oligarchy.
Economic Maxwell’s Daemon
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on March 30, 2011 Are Economic Maxwell’s Daemons allowed by the laws of econophysics? If so, who would have one? Presumably following the flow of hot money would reveal it.
Imminence of the Eschaton: ? – Google Fellowships
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on March 29, 2011 There ought to be some. Google Fellowships that is. Or better still, sabbaticals. Preferably for totally useless academics, like computational astrophysicists with random erratic interests. Just saying. ’cause I can. And you know they could… Please.
FOIA this
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on March 29, 2011 After the Cronon affair, more Freedom of Information Act requests targeting faculty at public universities. Clearly Walkers in Wisconsin in Labor are of interest to Republicans who Protest Democratic conspiracies against Governors and nothing makes the Maddow than Moore nonsense about injunctions and organized astroturf lawmaking. “The squid has eaten the squirrel!” These important matters…
What is University?
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on March 28, 2011 A rather radical proposal from Texas came across my desk recently, courtesy of the Texas Exes…
How to Survive From Tsunami
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on March 28, 2011 “How to Survive from Tsunami” by Murata et al, is vol 32 of the Advanced Series on Ocean Engineering from World Scientific Books Chapter 2 has the introductory phenomenology and basic physics, and the how-to-survive bit. In view of recent events, WorldSci is putting it up on their website for free: Knowledge for Tsunami Survival…
JWST hanging out there
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on March 27, 2011 Savage article on JWST history and funding from Ron Cowen at Science News. ““It’s a game of you lie and I’ll swear to it,” says Michael Griffin, NASA’s administrator from April 2005 to January 2009. “The whole community talks itself into unrealistic cost estimates…. Everyone knows it’s wrong. Every engineer knows it’s utterly without foundation,…
Fuk-D: more info from NISA
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on March 24, 2011 NISA has a concise summary of the status of the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi (pdf) Includes temperatures on reactor vessel surface where available. They show reactor 2 as cold and unpressured, the rise in temperature in reactor 1 – so something in there is generating heat at a significant rate, but at least the rector…
Fuk-D: what happened to the reactors?
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on March 21, 2011 It will probably be some years before we get the full story of what happened at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex after the earthquake. Information has not exactly been put out coherently or comprehensively, but we can make some inferences from the data that is out there. It is likely that one or two reactor…
iPod iChing: prospies 1
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on March 18, 2011 The weekend is almost here, and wot a week it was.