Steinn Sigurðsson
Professor of Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University. Science Editor at Astrophysical Journal. Icelandic. Herder of Cats.
catdynamics
Posts by this author
March 11, 2009
I originally thought this had to be a graduate student stunt
Watch Coin Dominoes and more funny videos on CollegeHumor
but then I realized i was being silly.
Graduate students don't have that much money.
Especially in the UK.
link
March 11, 2009
everybody had been wondering what would lead personal consumer expenditure out of recession...
Apples
Shuffles specifically.
Drool.
But, does it come with its own set of tweezers?
Now just give me some of that stimulus grant and I'll get an 8 core custom Mac Pro exercising - what is not to like…
March 11, 2009
and we ponder the orbits of globulars, red and blue,
what does this tell us about where and when they formed
and where and when they get eaten
β(r) = 1 - σ2φ/&sigma22
- and be careful with your factors of 2 and φ here...
I just like this picture
ah, if we only knew that we would know…
March 11, 2009
Flashback!
live
by Derrick Morgan an' Skankin' Time, mon.
album version
FabricLive.07 - great great collection.
March 10, 2009
we contemplate intermediate mass black holes and their possible presence in globular clusters
Eva gives us the summary:
Intermediate mass black holes, conventionally black holes with masses > 100 solar masses and less than about 10,000 solar masses, are interesting and useful beasties.
If any…
March 10, 2009
There have been several interesting candidates for binary supermassive black holes found recently.
New data suggests one of the recently announced candidates is probably not a binary.
A recent press release from NOAO suggested that SDSS J153636.22+044127.0 might be a close binary supermassive…
March 9, 2009
AIG confidential memo to US Treasury explaining the whole "why we need $30 billion more".
Bastards.
It is interesting reading, but they have $1,600 billion dollar derivatives exposure?!
WTF were those morons thinking?
h/t CR
March 9, 2009
new week, new topic - actually we'll be doing a lot of extragalactic globulars and the mass function of the clusters, but we start with Guido summarizing what we know about the stellar mass function within the clusters - including mass segregation and differential mass loss.
Wheee.
Sometime…
March 9, 2009
The Reality Check contemplates how (small) mid-year budget cuts are handled in practise
'cause, y'know, linking is good
March 8, 2009
in which I ponder further a physicist's amateur perspective on the stupidities my ex-colleagues perpetrated
I have ranted before on the current aspects of the fiscal crisis, including the credit default swaps (CDS)
now, I don't pretent to be an expert, but I am somewhat numerate and the basic…
March 6, 2009
ideally, globular clusters are tidally truncated
since real tidal fields are not spherically symmetric and static
we expect time varying aspherical stripping and shocking, and
with relaxation additional diffusion outside the tidal boundary
so... globular clusters should have tidal tails
we…
March 5, 2009
some friday random music blogging
1 in 10
and, by request, your thematic ska special
March 5, 2009
NASA's Science Mission Directorate produced a cross-discipline report on medium term needs for computational modeling capabilities; ie what serious iron NASA might want to get to play with
report is up here (pdf)
Panels from Earth System Modeling and Assimilation; Solid Earth and Natural Hazards…
March 5, 2009
is there, in fact, any system of globular clusters which actually traces the underlying stellar light across the underlying galaxy?
March 5, 2009
we have our usual triplet of people talking about recent research on some theme
today we do first stars to first clusters
as usual these have video and podcasts for the hard core to enjoy
Matt on first stars - molecular association rates, accretion time scales onto protostars and reheating and…
March 5, 2009
we go back in time, to when the universe was young
and ponder when the globulars got made, how, why and why some are blue and some are red but very few are greenish
and we learn the globular cluster formation is not transitive
hah, and some people are impressed with mere non-commutation relations…
March 5, 2009
I actually got the "heads up" about this last night in time to catch the west coast showing.
Cancelling on the Daily Show clearly inspires them to ever greater journalism.
If you didn't see this, you ought to watch it.
*/
The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
CNBC Gives Financial…
March 4, 2009
In which Michael Lewis learns what a "ruddi" is.
Quite fascinating Vanity Fair article on Iceland's Finanicial Whiz Kids and the general mood.
Thanks for the pointer Bob.
Lewis, to be fair, misses out on some things.
First of all, the Icelandic financiers weren't as naive as he claims - for one…
March 4, 2009
we continue contemplation of stars going splat
there are blue stragglers in dwarf galaxies
they are presumably binaries merged through McCrea type I mass transfer
we're not sure exactly how that works in detail, but it must happen because we see it in progress - ie we see contact binaries on the…
March 3, 2009
Alex has more on the possible hack to escalate India-Pakistan tension
March 3, 2009
Sheril over at the Intersection commits a fallacy.
Worse than that, she undermines the rationale for all science in the progress.
In a post over at the Intersection, Sheril makes a variation on an old argument - the "why spend money on space when there is so much that needs doing here on Earth".…
March 3, 2009
If the US assumes liability for Credit Default Swaps issued by financial institutions, its potential exposure is many times its gross domestic product.
If the US does not take on this liability it risks annihilation of the modern financial system.
The only solution is to seize both sides.…
March 3, 2009
ok, I am mightily puzzled by a technical issue and if anyone knows the answer authoritatively, then cough it up:
question is, does the radial non-adiabatic pulsation of δ Scu/SX Phæ stars really not depend on Y?
there are some theoretical papers in the literature, notably Templeton's thesis papers…
March 3, 2009
whee, we make stars go splat again!
what exactly does happen when stars collide,
just ordinary low mass main sequence stars
Glebbeek and Pols A&A 2008 - v 488 p 1007 and p 1017
BSE: binary stellar evolution code - Hurley et al 2002 from Tout et al 1997
- mass is wrong,
- lifetime is wrong…
March 3, 2009
as you know, we're in the opening round of the decadal survey, prioritizing astronomy research and facilities for the next decade - I occasionally suspect all of astronomy has shut down while all of us either write or read white papers and policy documents on some subfield or another...
anyway,…
March 2, 2009
so, as you may have heard, AIG, the insurance giant "lost" $61 billion and change this last quarter...
welll, I found it, I think,
but I can't be sure, since it could be someone else's $60 billion, I mean one big pile of used $20s looks much like another;
anyway, the US taxpayers are going to…
March 2, 2009
once, when the Net was young, I made the mistake of doing an image search for "Miranda",
in class.
It was a natural enough a mistake, a student had asked a question about the moons of Saturn and I recalled a recent NASA image which illustrated the point I wanted to make.
Try it.
the class got a…
March 2, 2009
is it worth blogging about science?
one of my doubts about blogging is that it really ought to be more about science
I worry when I see my ratio of random entries creep up, fillers, random rants, political stuff
but I am not terribly interested in being a conduit for press releases, or in doing…
March 2, 2009
is that I will agree to take on a major administrative role of some sort
and find that I actually like it...
actually, I fear that I would like it, yet not actually be any good at it
I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if I liked and were good at it
ok, so that isn't really my greatest fear: I mean it…