Steinn Sigurðsson
Professor of Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University. Science Editor at Astrophysical Journal. Icelandic. Herder of Cats.
catdynamics
Posts by this author
January 4, 2015
One of the joys of the holidays and the University turning off the heating and locking us out, is that it provides time to catch up on things: papers, refereeing, recommendation letters, grading, syllabi, proposals, all the stuff one can rarely get to during actual working semester hours.
And,…
January 3, 2015
Happy New Year!
I heard that Killing The Internet is a Thing, and apparently keeping more than a few hundred tabs open in Firefox will do the trick, so I'm doing some blog dumps to get the year kicked off:
Quanta Magazine is an (editorially independent) publication of the Simons Foundation which…
August 27, 2014
In which Chris "Slick" Ford challenges me, and I accept.
In turn, I challenge Valerie, Diddi and Stefan.
You know who you are.
h/t to Sir Patrick Stewart for illustrating how to properly take on such challenges.
August 24, 2014
good thing about Icelandic, it is phonetic, almost all the words are pronounced the way they are spelled, including Bárðarbunga
the extra few letters are just what they look like.
Fortunately Biggi Lögga is there to set you straight.
August 22, 2014
Bárðarbunga is arguably the scariest of the 30 or so active volcanoes in Iceland.
Extreme volcanoes don't always have extreme eruptions, but they are scary because they have the capability for extreme events, uniquely so.
Bárðarbunga - under the ice cap at the top left - from Google maps
It is…
August 22, 2014
Science had a very interesting special section this spring: The Science of Inequality - basically doing a summary and review of issues related to the stuff in Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century
The section has a series of very interesting articles on a range of related topics:
"…
July 16, 2014
Astrophotography is the title of a gorgeous and very useful new book by Thierry Legault
I had to taper off doing book reviews, much to the annoyance of all those lovely people who persist in sending me just the sort of books that I actually really love to read - it just got too time consuming - but…
July 13, 2014
There was an interesting article in the Chronicle a few weeks ago:
The Soul of the Research University by Nicholas Lemann.
Lemann provides a very interesting discussion of the contradiction between the academic ideal of the research university and the political perspective of the vocational school…
July 10, 2014
A research group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has produced ultrastiff ultralowdensity metamaterials by 3D printing of microarchitected microlattices.
This is very cool - they do additive 3D printing using microstereolithography with nanocoating and postprocessing and can make self-…
June 18, 2014
Day two of the New Frontiers wrap-up conference. This is a slow liveblog with more cosmology and life in the universe. Yesterday's summary is here
A couple of years ago, the Templeton Foundation funded the New Frontiers program to pose "Big Questions" in some areas of science.
This is a slow…
June 17, 2014
A couple of years ago, the Templeton Foundation funded the New Frontiers program to pose "Big Questions" in some areas of science.
This is a slow liveblog - part II will be tomorrow with more cosmology and life in the universe
Seed funding was provided to 20 investigators and small groups to start…
June 9, 2014
Some people, with good cause, do not like the phrase "dark side of the Moon".
The reason they do not like it, is because of a common cognitive misconception.
Historically, the phrase refers to the farside of the Moon, which for most of history humanity could not observe, at all, because the Moon…
June 9, 2014
"There is no dark side of the moon really.
Matter of fact it's all dark."
While the Moon has a nearside and a farside, it does not, actually, have a dark side or a light side, now. At least not a fixed dark side, just a slowly moving night side, and day side.
But it used to. Sorta.
"I remember the…
June 8, 2014
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall on the Dark Side of the Moon..."
The Astrowright has been doing some lunatic slow blogging on an interesting problem:
The Nearside of the Moon
from Ron Hodges - NASA medialibrary
The Farside
from apod
One of these is not like the other...
Jason discusses how we…
June 3, 2014
Smile, and the whole Universe smiles with you! - A Happy Asterism for #AAS224
A beautiful UV co-added image of the UDF from Hubble
UV UDF
But, if you look closely...
Smile - it could be worse
June 2, 2014
yet again I trip across a snarky tweet about a distinguished scientist using comic sans
or some other whimsical and easily read on a screen unprofessional and unserious design choice in a presentation
these theological wars are becoming as bad as PC/Mac or emacs/vi flame wars of yore
anyone care…
May 28, 2014
"Standing down on this one" - was the first line of the email I read at about 7 am this morning as I rolled over and grabbed my phone, having had about 4 hours of sleep.
After staying up past 2 am to run some numbers, we would, after all, not be submitting a request for Director's Discretionary…
May 28, 2014
tab clearing:
A collection of maths GIFs posted purely for aesthetic reasons.
Simple Fractals
Minimalist Posters of MathematicalObjects...
May 27, 2014
Not entirely coincidentally the general topic of misogyny, microaggression and harassment was featured on the Women in Astronomy blog recently:
Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Defining the Problem
Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Survival of the Clueless
Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: The Serial…
May 15, 2014
Senior Review is out:
summary - Swift #1, then NuStar.
K2 gets partial funding. Spitzer is terminated.
Panel recommends not cutting off the bottom but balancing fields.
NASA Response to the 2014 Senior Review for Astrophysics Operating Missions - Final Version for Release (5.16.14) - this is an…
April 25, 2014
Why you might sometimes care about the sex lives of strangers.
A snarky comment over on an evanescent social media site lead me to shoot back from the hip, but on reflection, unusually enough, I decided I liked the retort enough to preserve it in more permanent intertoobz form.
The discussion was…
April 22, 2014
"The wonderful thing about Tiggers
Is Tiggers are wonderful things..."
Tigger was my favourite on the Hundred Acre Campus.
"...bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy
Fun, fun, fun, fun, FUN!"
Recently I was at a meeting, and a comment was made about how someone was being negative.
Not only was this a bit…
April 21, 2014
Julia is a nifty new language being developed at MIT
I stole this plot from github, it shows Julia's current performance on some standard benchmarks compared to a number of favourite tools like Python, Java and R. Normalized to optimized C code.
And, there, in a single plot, is why Real…
April 17, 2014
Big Eyed Beans from Venus - Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band!
Cool. Literally
Comparable to Mars in effective temperature, bit larger than Earth, probably slightly more massive than Earth (mean density could be lower), atmosphere unknown.
Might well have extensive surface regions with…
April 14, 2014
It goes like this...
The Kingswoods
Best Punkabilly ever finally on youtube!
The Original "Pretty Vacant" for reference,
for you young 'uns...
April 12, 2014
A frightening fraction of my open tabs are some of Bee's posts at Backreaction - so to save my browsers, I dump them here for further future perusal:
Are irreproducible scientific results okay and just business as usual?
Shut up and let me think
Should the Nobel Prize be given to…
April 11, 2014
In times past we have lovingly tracked the proposal frenzy as the near annual Hubble Space Telescope proposal deadline approaches.
As was noted by Julianne several years ago, and confirmed over the last half dozen cycles, the shape of the curve of number of submitted proposals as a function of time…
April 11, 2014
Notes on Academic Blogging - Crooked Timber pines for the Good Old days
Old School Blogging - seeing a pattern here...
Want an Academic job? Hold your tongue
Is it Journalism or just a prepackage press release - Sunlight Foundation's Churnalism tool.