Steinn Sigurðsson
Professor of Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University. Science Editor at Astrophysical Journal. Icelandic. Herder of Cats.
catdynamics
Posts by this author
February 12, 2009
All day discussion on white dwarfs today: cooling, kinematics, destruction etc
Starts off with Lars tutoring us in the morning...
Basics:
white dwarf origins - they are degenerate burnt out cores of low-to-medium mass main seqeunce stars
key issues still not fully resolved:
what is the…
February 11, 2009
there is a revised version of House Resolution 1 on thomas.loc.gov
looks like it might be the "final version" of the stimulus bill, post-conference
assuming that it is, here are the relevant bits (thomas.loc.gov is dynamic, can't provide static links):
UPDATE: Nope, those are too small - Pelosi…
February 11, 2009
Ok - lets move beyond anonymous confessions.
Which universities have gone public with the problems, and what are the public facts.
I'll aggregate links below.
Arizona State University - hard times and - mandatory unpaid furlough specifics - and budget reductions
University of Arizona mandatory…
February 11, 2009
so a deal has been reached on the stimulus bill
final version will be smaller than either house or senate version
science is too minor to be mentioned in the news summaries, will have to wait for the revised text to know what they did
but, NIH emerged as a "winner" - Sen Specter inserted $6.5…
February 11, 2009
Today we step back and Hans runs The Big Questions past us.
It is always good to think about the Big Picture.
The Big Questions
Most likely scenario for cluster formation:
a) compressed/triggered initial conditions: cloud collisions or intersecting shells, or
b) did globular clusters form as…
February 11, 2009
The Female Science Professor explains the whole grant thing to graduate students.
I really like the "SimGrant" suggestion - would make a very spiffy module for the Sims go to Uni package, or so I infer.
February 10, 2009
today we start turning our minds back to techniques, before we start contemplating what to do about white dwarfs
Stephan tutors us on SPH.
Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics models fluid flow using a Lagrangian method - rather than constructing a grid, as in Eulerian techniques, SPH is not constrained…
February 10, 2009
the other, other program running in parallel with the clusters09 program at KITP is "Low Dimensional Electron Systems", which seems intensely worried about the supply of pencils, or some such - at least graphene seems to be their buzzword du jour.
They, also, are having lots of talks, most all of…
February 9, 2009
ok folks, how bad is it getting out there?
I'm hearing lots of anecdotes: pay freezes galore, hiring freezes in places, whispers of mandatory cross-the-board paycuts if budgets are as projected, firing of non-tenured staff and class size cramming planned, and, ad hoc committees forming to consider…
February 9, 2009
the director of the central bank does what all bad boys do
the director of the central bank was late to work this morning, late enough the protests had fizzled by the time he showed, apparently
however, the intrepid reporters at Vísir tracked him down
they had the insight, that as with all naughty…
February 9, 2009
Mark Krumholz's talk is here - video and podcast
Genevieve Permentier's talk is here - cluster formation, video and podcast.
February 8, 2009
The head of the Icelandic central bank, and former prime minister, Davíð Oddsson, has refused to resign from his post, as requested by the new prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir
Farðu bölvaður frá mér brott
Forðist þig allt sem heitir gott
Yfir þig dynji hefndar hríð
Himin og jörð þér risti…
February 8, 2009
someone has dumped the entire collection of Congressional Research Service reports to wikileaks
this incidentally totally slashdotted their servers, but being good geeks they spawned copies to pirate bay and bittorrent
primary link is here
the congressional research service provides apolitical…
February 6, 2009
so the new senate version of the stimulus bill is revealed, the one that might actually pass.
It has a lot of cuts and some reduction in taxes, but with added programs that are not in the House version.
The final version does better for science than the original compromise being floated over the…
February 6, 2009
The Congressional Budget Office has a blog.
That is an interesting way to get the information out. Quite handy.
February 6, 2009
forming stars is easy, except for the details
Mark Krumholz is schooling us on the intricacies.
Awesome movies...
Binary star formation animation
Making a BIG star
Turbulence, dood - that one is just very pretty, nothing much to do with the talk.
February 6, 2009
Yesterday, there was much talking about blue stragglers.
All preserved for posterity.
Francesco on Hubble observations of blue stragglers in galactic globulars - and VLT and GALEX too.
Barbara on more observations and modeling too.
Nathan on modeling and the mystery correlations in the amazing…
February 6, 2009
when making sausage, you not only have to get the guts to stuff with ground up meat and grain, you also have to mix in some small lumps of fat and minced offal
From a "heads-up" e-mail from the ScienceDebate 2008 team:
"I am writing to alert you to efforts underway this morning to zero out a large…
February 5, 2009
So, Obama ought to now find himself in control of a remarkable and efficient surveillance apparatus, capable of tracking large numbers of electronic transactions and conversations.
All probably unconstitutional, and possibly still illegal, but the temptation to use them must be there.
But how...…
February 5, 2009
Sign of the times.
Sotheby's Realty closes Aspen office
Hm, wonder how low those nice "smaller" pseudo-victorian homes on the north side, by the ACP are going to.
February 5, 2009
most people really only think in microeconomic terms
and most of the time that is fine, except when it is not
an example of this, is the meme that governments ought to cut expenditure when economic times are hard, by analogy with families, which react rationally to budget shortages and…
February 5, 2009
just had an occasion to zip about the country a bit, and feel a need to free-associate random bits of anecdotal impression
The US Senate has stopped vote on the stimulus package, for tonight.
In the process of bipartisan cutting the package seems to have grown by few tens of billions.
Couple of…
February 5, 2009
Krugman worried that any prospects for the US avoiding depression would be scuppered by the collective action of the "fifty Herbert Hoovers" - the individual state governors acting to cut spending as the federal government tried to boost spending.
If the states deflate faster than the feds can…
February 5, 2009
Blue straggler stars are, formally, main sequence stars that are too blue and bright on the colour-magnitude diagram - they are more massive than they ought to be given their age, is the other way of looking at it.
They are found in the field, and you might rightly ponder how we can tell, but in…
February 3, 2009
What is string theory anyway?
Well, now you can find out.
Joe Polchinski at UCSB just gave the Director's Blackboard Seminar at KITP, and as usual it is webcast and podcast.
Go be inspired.
February 2, 2009
Globular Clusters - what drives the evolution of the mass function?
Mark Gieles take is online here
Mike Fall's preceding talk on the subject is not available online. Should have been there...
January 30, 2009
in which we contemplate a compact accretor and a low mass donor, in theory
if you have a compact object, like a neutron star or black holes, then the potential energy at the surface is very negative, so any mass that falls onto the compact object may release a large amount of energy per unit mass…
January 29, 2009
Grauniad reports Iceland to be fast tracked for EU membership.
We'll see, public could swing either way on the issue in the interval.
Real problem is the fish. If the grounds are opened to EU vessels and Iceland loses control of the catch allotment, then the fish will all die.
Yup, this has hit the…
January 29, 2009
in which we ponder the globular cluster mass function and whether the current mass function really is lognormal and how this came about given that everybody but everybody believes the initial mass function must have been a power law...
wednesday afternoon was a good introduction and lively…