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.
April 30, 2007
Category: Intellectual Property
One of my pet peeves is when, in an attempt to help convey to others the seriousness of respecting copyrights, patents, and trademarks, somebody says, "Intellectual property is property!" This is often followed by an emotional appeal that just as...
Posted by Rob Knop at 7:52 PM • 32 Comments •
Category: Science Education & Outreach
Following Chad and Jake, I want to jump off from an article in Science about undergraduate research. It's always nice when some sort of survey confirms one's preexisting biases.... In short, the survey found that performing research increased undergraduates' interest...
Posted by Rob Knop at 5:19 PM • 9 Comments •
Category: About the Blog
Everybody welcome Mark Hoofnagle and Chris Hoofnagle (probably not their real names) of Denialism who are here to spread more of the commonly accepted lies about the truth of evolution, the Big Bang, gravity, 2+2=4, etc., that we in the...
Posted by Rob Knop at 3:13 PM • 1 Comments •
April 28, 2007
Category: Science & Culture
Uh, no. Look, we're all human, and we all have eyes and brains and things, and as such one may as well admit that if you look at the pictures that Shelly has of herself on her blog, there's a...
Posted by Rob Knop at 11:20 AM • 9 Comments •
April 27, 2007
Category: Culture
Check this poem out, posted at Bad Fortune Cookie (found via BoingBoing). Disturbing, eh? Of course, when a student writes a disturbing essay, what do we do in the post-VT massacre world? We lock him up! Freedom of speech be...
Posted by Rob Knop at 3:12 PM • 10 Comments •
Category: Astronomy Science
Are you ready for this? This week's Friday Galaxy is Mk509: DSS2 image from Skyview Admittedly, the image of this galaxy does not rank very high on the "wow, what a cool and pretty looking galaxy" scale. However, this is...
Posted by Rob Knop at 2:52 PM • 4 Comments •
April 26, 2007
Category: Intellectual Property
I guess we should excuse Wiley now, because they've backed down from pointing their lawyers at Shelly Potential cynic that I am, I have several residual thoughts on the issue. Thought #1: I really want to believe what was in...
Posted by Rob Knop at 1:47 PM • 7 Comments •
April 25, 2007
Category: Intellectual Property
Fair use? If it benefits the progress of science or the dissemination of scientific knowledge, it really ought to be fair use, no matter what. But when it's cropping out a piece of a figure for an illustration in an...
Posted by Rob Knop at 9:40 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Rant
Truth to be told, I'm not a gigantic fan of traveling. It can be entertaining and enriching sometimes, but too much travel all at once leaves me pining for home.... At the beginning of April, I went on a 3-day...
Posted by Rob Knop at 6:55 AM • 6 Comments •
April 22, 2007
Category: Second Life
Second Life is an online virtual world; some would call it an online game, but it's not really that. And, it's become one of my hobbies....
Posted by Rob Knop at 5:30 PM • 8 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.)
