Steinn Sigurðsson
Professor of Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University. Science Editor at Astrophysical Journal. Icelandic. Herder of Cats.
catdynamics
Posts by this author
June 3, 2011
In the infrared of course...
It is friday!
Proposal season coming to a very temporary end.
So...
what is with the flap over building, like, actual new ginormous telescopes?
What say thee Oh Mighty iPod?
Can we learn to Build Them, and Operate Them at the same time,
while still having the $$$ to…
June 1, 2011
some interesting astro happening over the last few days
The Next 40 Years of Exoplanets workshop took place at MIT. Website has archive of meeting.
Some fireworks there, Nature blogs has a take on it
NASAwatch discusses contradictory rumours of layoffs at JWST contractor
Two things to take away…
June 1, 2011
Remember the whole Rapture thing?
I just realized, wotsisface obviously worked in the Gregorian calendar,
and clearly that is all wrong!
See, back then they used the Julian calendar and the two calendars drift relative to each other, causing an offset between dates.
So, right now, to convert, just…
May 27, 2011
bloomin' proposal week...
Ok, them's the vagaries, but it is friday and it is the end of another and much fraught bloomin' proposal week,
so we ask the Mighty iPod: how about them proposals?
Woosh goes the randomizer.
Woosh.
The Covering: Friday Mourning - Morrissey
The Crossing: Run Like Hell -…
May 24, 2011
and it looks like it might be about over:
plume is about a tenth of its original size;
earthquake activity has tapered off to low levels;
no flash flood - between normal flood last year, and ice vapourized it doesn't look like there is any lake left to flash out the drainage channels under the ice…
May 23, 2011
visir.is has some very impressive up close photos of the eruption
set of 38 photos from the glacier
video of the trip
May 21, 2011
here we go again...
this is the map of earthquakes in the last 24 hours in Iceland,
kinda lit up there - nice illustration of the mid-atlantic ridge coming up from the south and south-west and bisecting the island
so that little cluster under Vatnajökull, that is Grímsvötn
Grímsvötn is a sub-…
May 19, 2011
Official word on Arecibo:
So, NSF met with Arecibo people today, I am told, and the new management consortium will be putting out an official press release real soon, was waiting for the internal communication to be done.
I was asked to put up the following (lightly edited):
"Please allow me to…
May 16, 2011
yo peeps
I hear buzz about fateful decisions on NAIC/Arecibo from NSF.
But... can't confirm anything.
Who knows, and who will tell?
PS: thanks to our intrepid commenter and other confirming sources...
Cornell did lose their bid.
Arecibo is being taken over by
"SRI" which is a in consortium of USRA…
May 13, 2011
So, reports are now out that one or more of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors really did meltdown, and TEPCO has come up with a great solution...
Told you so (well, ok so reactor 1 also slumped and breached the pressure vessel - hoocoodanode the water gauges were broken...?)
Good news is TEPCO now…
May 12, 2011
How do you move a private cannon across the USA in this day and age?
'cause in 2006, MIT students took the Fleming House cannon and moved it to MIT
This cannon
Well, apparently you wear overalls, and hitch it to a truck, or put it on a flatbed, and drive it,
presumably staying on the I-10 most of…
May 12, 2011
Kepler team has another excellent visualization of their discoveries.
An orrery of the currently known multi-planet systems, as a youtube animation.
Dan Fabrycky put this up
h/t Marketing for Scientists
May 11, 2011
Caltech strikes again!
The Legends of Caltech record many pranks, some of which were really quite excellent.
I am happy to report that the spirit of the Rose Bowl lives on!
At this rate they will have to do a Real Genius sequel!
TTardis Project 6: The Prank
Tardis Project 1: Explaining the…
May 7, 2011
Keeps on Rolling - but where.
Is this the year Ole Miss decides to break loose?
Back in '08 I noted that conditions were lining up for a risk of the Mississippi breaking out of its path, but that it was a low probability scenario/
Well, 2011 is looking much worse and there is now low probability…
May 6, 2011
happy friday, and spring is here
I even got some science done...
so, Oh Mighty iPod, this whole Dark Matter is pretty cool, and very topical.
Is it, or isn't it? And you know of what I speak.
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Somebody Got Murdered - Clash
The Crossing: Oliver/s…
May 3, 2011
Astonishing GeoEye imagery of bin Laden compound after the raid.
GeoEye took a clear 1m resolution image of Abbottabad the day after the raid, with a nice clear image, coincidentally, taken of the bin Laden compound
Click for high res image:
"Copyright © 2011 GeoEye - Satellite image courtesy of…
May 3, 2011
The Space Telescope Science Institute is hosting the annual Spring Symposium May 2-5, and this year the topic is Dark Matter
Good lineup of speakers.
The whole week is webcast at https://webcast.stsci.edu/webcast/ including live talks and archives of previous talks.
For those who enjoy that sort of…
May 1, 2011
IF reports that US assassinated Osama bin Laden are true,then the big question is how this affects US relations with Pakistan.
Particularly if, as rumoured, ObL was well housed near Islamabad.
Abottabad near Khyber?
Now with bonus maps!
Now with actual correct bonus maps.
Details on Wiki: Death of…
April 30, 2011
Time lapse movie of extensive aurora series over Iceland
Gorgeous.
AURORA ISLANDICA - a Northern Lights Timelapse from Agust Ingvarsson on Vimeo.
From pressan.is
Over many nights and multiple locations in and near Reykjavík.
April 29, 2011
end of semester? already?
ooh, boy.
so, as you all know, change is in the air, starting with the release last week of the revised, corrected, definitely final NRC Rankings of PhD Programs...
and we did rather well, again.
But, we must ask, Oh Mighty iPod:
what will come of this research endeavour…
April 27, 2011
NASA's Kepler mission has now been looking for transiting exoplanets for almost two years, and while we wait for the release of the next set of data and identified candidate exoplanets, they produced a very striking summary of what they got so far.
These are all 1235 exoplanet candidates from the…
April 24, 2011
curious flap over leaked internal memo from LHC's ATLAS collaboration over at "Not Even Wrong"
hints of Higgs at 115 GeV in γγ decay
intriguing but too vague and unconfirmed for the physics to be interesting at this point.
Sociology of the comments is interesting.
April 22, 2011
...and now we know where we have been
iSpy@home
as you know, Bob, there has been some flap in the intertoobz and old media that the iPhone keep GPS logs, automatically, by default, unencrypted, that are downloaded during backups...
Cool.
Er, well, maybe they should be turned off as default and…
April 18, 2011
View from Shizugawa high school as the tsunami comes in.
Very powerful and disturbing footage.
April 18, 2011
Dear Medical Doctors of America: the 1% does not include you.
You are the second percent and the top percent is about to dump you overboard.
Just be clear on that.
April 16, 2011
We should do microbooks.
Electronic microbooks.
Like Apps, for $.99 each - sold as iPad/Kindle reads, with graphic.
Shorter than proper books, longer than blog entries or articles, designed to be of some lasting value. Something to read on a train, or a plain.
Yes, in the fiction limit this is…
April 14, 2011
Null result reported from XENON100 experiment on Cold Dark Matter detection attempt.
Xenon100 reports no CDM detection
Parameter space starts groaning as it is squeezed tighter...
Definitely not croquet...
paper on arXiv
April 13, 2011
Official word on the IXO x-ray mission now, with rumours from Europe on what the European Space Agency has in mind.
LISA must be rebranded, quick!
IXO News
"This is an update on the discussions with the European Space Agency (ESA) at the recent ESA-NASA bilateral meeting.
...
ESA has ended…
April 8, 2011
NASA has some official word on what is going on in astrophysics in general and with LISA in particular.
LISA and IXO ended.
Teams supported through Oct '11, if budget is not cut more.
New concept studies.
LISA and Changes in the Cosmic Vision Programme (pdf)
LISA and Changes in the Cosmic Vision…
April 8, 2011
It is friday, and we prepare to close down for the weekend.
So we splish over to the iPod and we ask...
Oh, mighty iPod: what writing will we see on the wall when the slate is clean?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: The Message - Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
The…