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Rob Knop's Blog -- ramblings and rants about astronomy, cosmology, science education, general nerdism, and anything else.
Rob Knop earned a PhD in Physics from Caltech in 1997, and did a 5-year post-doc with the Supernova Cosmology Project, and contributed to the discovery of the accelerating Universe. He was an assistant professor of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt for 6 years before scattering out of academia. He now works for Linden Lab, the producers of Second LIfe. (Note: this is not an official site of Linden Lab! Although I work for Linden Lab, all content in this blog is posted without the review or approval of Linden Lab. All statements and opinions expressed here are my own.)
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The contents of each Galactic Interactions post are under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
March 24, 2007
Category: Politics
Alberto Gonzales said that he had was not involved in discussions about the firing of attorneys who, let's be honest, were obviously fired for political reasons. It turns out that he was. Already, he was presiding over an office that...
Posted by Rob Knop at 9:35 AM • 20 Comments •
March 23, 2007
Category: Pretty Pictures
M82 is a galaxy that's relatively near to the Milky Way. It's not in our own local group, but it's in a nearby group of galaxies (the "M81 group"), and is only about 12 million light-years away (which is close...
Posted by Rob Knop at 1:51 PM • 11 Comments •
March 21, 2007
Category: Intellectual Property
I love the way Cory Doctorow expresses it in this BoingBoing post: Now, whenever I write about trademarks, I get a bunch of emails asserting the voodoo theory of trademark: every conceivable use of a trademark has to be policed...
Posted by Rob Knop at 6:08 PM • 10 Comments •
March 20, 2007
Category: Nerdism
Find out who won the second round of the Orbit Bracket showdown! And find out: can Rob come anywhere close to Chad's amazing Dork Post? Well, no, but that won't stop him from being a dork all by himself.
Posted by Rob Knop at 10:59 PM • 6 Comments •
Category: Astronomy Science
The story of going from careful observations about planetary positions, through empirical laws of planetary orbits, to a fundamental and universal theory of gravity is one of the most compelling stories in the history of astronomy, or even in the history of science in general.
Posted by Rob Knop at 10:33 AM • 24 Comments •
March 18, 2007
Category: General Science
Vote Early, Vote Often! Well, Vote Early, anyway. Which of these concepts from physical science should advance to the next round of the Showdown? Get your vote in before Tuesday night!
Posted by Rob Knop at 1:20 PM • 23 Comments •
March 16, 2007
Category: Pretty Pictures
This is an image of NGC 6744, taken with the South African Large Telescope. NGC 6744 is a classic spiral galaxy, and appears similar to how the Milky Way would look if we were able to get outside of the...
Posted by Rob Knop at 9:02 AM • 6 Comments •
March 15, 2007
Category: Science & Religion
WARNING : no science in this post. Skip it if that will bother you. In this post, I try to explain why I say that I'm a Christian, and what I see as the core of Christian theology.
Posted by Rob Knop at 9:10 AM • 176 Comments •
March 13, 2007
Category: Astronomy Science
I try to explain what redshift is, and why astronomers care. First, I define and explain the observational quantity that is redshift. Then, I try to explain two different things that can cause a redshift: the Doppler effect, and gravitational redshift. For the latter, I focus particularly on the cosmological redshift.
Posted by Rob Knop at 9:53 PM • 46 Comments •
Category: Politics
It's all over the news. The FBI has violated the PATRIOT act numerous times by using "national security letters" where it wasn't legitimate to do so. Naughty FBI. Clean your house. The problem is, we need our House to clean...
Posted by Rob Knop at 10:03 AM • 4 Comments •
YES! Send me a free issue of Seed.
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $14.95. That's 50% off the cover price! If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
(Non-U.S. subscribers, click here.)
