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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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Category: Intellectual Property
You may have heard about the amendment proposed to a Higher Education act by Harry Reid that would make colleges responsible for enforcing RIAA and MPAA policy. The text of the amendment is absolutely every bit as scary as the...
Posted by Rob Knop at 8:37 AM • 9 Comments •
Category: Rant
Every day, reading the newspapers or listen to the radio, we are barraged with reminders of how screwed up our society, our country is. We see these things, and have a realization that there is little to no hope that...
Posted by Rob Knop at 10:18 AM • 12 Comments •
Category: Science & Culture
In a recent post, I expressed frustration with the observation that those who sometimes question the tactics and language of some fighting for gender-equality then get lumped in with "everybody else who is clueless and oppressive," even if we care...
Posted by Rob Knop at 12:30 PM • 17 Comments •
Category: Politics
This is an edited version of an earlier post. I came to realize from the response to it that I had inadvertently pulled out a canard that colored the post into something that was different from what I intended. The...
Posted by Rob Knop at 5:09 PM • 26 Comments •
Category: Politics
The tragedy in Virginia is horrifying. But an instinctive response of, "that convinces me, we need more gun control" is not a rational response to have right now. I argue that that response is part of a larger, and alarming, tendency for people to want to submit ever more to authority in the face of things that alarm them.
Posted by Rob Knop at 1:21 PM • 45 Comments •
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 •
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 •
