Steinn Sigurðsson
Professor of Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University. Science Editor at Astrophysical Journal. Icelandic. Herder of Cats.
catdynamics
Posts by this author
December 4, 2007
Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revalation
And the mind's true liberation
Confused about Iran?
Doc Foland at Nuclear Mangos explains it all.
FWIW, I broadly concur with him.
The published NIE is…
December 3, 2007
Coming soon.
For the unintiated, CoRoT is a French small space telescope, optimised for high precision relative photometry of bright stars observed in the optical.
Originally conceived as an astroseismology mission, to study the oscillations and variability of solar like stars in the neighbourhood…
December 3, 2007
it would appear that meetings are now being cancelled at a rate asymptotically approaching the rate at which they are being called...
31st Carnival of Space is Out of the Cradle
November 30, 2007
It lives...
Philosophia Naturalis #15 is up on Sorting Out Science.
Volunteers needed for #16 before christmas...
November 30, 2007
bring me some paperwork!
Lest I become in danger of committing science.
November 30, 2007
Crisp and clear friday, and we approach the iPod with Intent and ask:
so, iPod dude, will we really get bucketloads of snow this weekend?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Mi-Aout - Henri Des
The Crossing: Le vent dans la plaine - Claudio Arrau
The Crown: Stir It Up - Bob Marley…
November 28, 2007
The Angry Physicist is really irate
He read Jacques' recent Musings on things Exceptionally Simple and was not amused.
Can I please first note that Lisi's infamous title is a PUN!
It is a joke, folks, and it is funny.
See, E8... it is an exceptional Lie group, and it is simple... argh. Never mind…
November 26, 2007
Pittsburgh 3 Miami 0
24 yard field coal with 20 seconds to go in 4th quarter.
Ugh.
November 26, 2007
ships are sailing and oil is flowing and nukes are being fueled
weird little snips of news piled over the last week:
the US navy is still heavily out - the USS Truman has joined the Enterprise in the Gulf, where they should overlap for a few weeks if the Enterprise does a normal length tour. Though…
November 26, 2007
UK announced it is withdrawing from Gemini
The Gemini twin telescopes, one in the "north" on Hawaii, and one south in Chile, are one of the few major (8-10m) optical/near-infrared telescope facilities.
The telescopes are a joint US (NSF national), UK, Canada, Chile, Australia, Argentina and Brazil…
November 26, 2007
He could buy his own 1% share in Gemini!
This, btw, confirms my belief that a secret cabal of astronomers will take over the University of California in its entirety in the near future.
I, personally, will welcome their new starry overlords.
November 26, 2007
Thankfully someone remembered to put up The Carnival of Space - #30
November 22, 2007
thankfully it is friday, and we pose a big question to the Mighty iPod:
is it a correct simple theory of something?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Torna a Surriento - Three Tenors
The Crossing: Fashion - David Bowie
The Crown: Venus in Flares - Half Man Half Biscuit
The Root:…
November 22, 2007
for all practical purposes we can do most physics under the assumption that space-time is locally flat
but it isn't.
Locally space-time has some curvature, but that doesn't matter so much.
Globally, there is also an issue, since we seem to live in a universe with a positive cosmological constant,…
November 20, 2007
Can you, in fact, add ordered sets of unlike things?
One of the main objections to Lisi's simple theory of everything is that he cavalierly sets up ordered sets of mixed quantities - under the broad heading of they are all Grassman numbers
In particular, his connection puts in both fermions and…
November 19, 2007
The blogosphere is a-twitter over surfer dude paper modestly titled An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything by Garrett Lisi
Just maybe he is onto something, but it is way overhyped
And so it is.
Lisi's homepage (currently severly slashdotted) and wiki
There is extensive discussion at…
November 19, 2007
Sun Microsystems to put 10,000 servers in a box in a Japanese coal mine
I kid you not
"Sun and a consortium of other businesses are going to lower self-contained computing facilities into a no-longer-used Japanese coal mine. The goal is to create an underground data center that will use up to 50%…
November 19, 2007
Snowy morning
fingers numb
large hot coffee
on the run
Loose lid pops
liquid flows
keyboard fizzles
so it goes
Fortunately my many "to do" lists soaked up the main pool of coffee, which seems to have saved the cpu and disk.
There are advantages to a messy desk.
I think I will use this as a reason…
November 18, 2007
Nuclear Mangos says US aid on Pakistan nukes did not include PALs
There have been news reports that the US provided ~ $100 million assistance to Pakistan over the last few years to "secure" their nuclear weapons, and there was some speculation as to whether this included providing them with…
November 18, 2007
When there was a channel on television that showed music videos...
...nothing but. New and interesting, old and familiar. Brilliant it was.
A news headline channel, 24 hour per day, continually updated news headlines from around the world.
No opinion. No celebrity. No talking heads.
Very handy. It…
November 16, 2007
WebMD stirred up the news recently when they drew attention to recent fatal cases of the common cold.
Specifically, the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report feature on Ad 14
Adenovirus is one of the common respiratory viruses that cause the "common cold" (which is really a catch all for…
November 16, 2007
Penn State engineers have come up with an interesting twist on fuel production, coming up with a cell that very efficiently produces hydrogen
Here is the NSF headline press release on this
The cell uses microbial fermentation of acetic acid to generate hydrogen, but with a twist. Oh, and the…
November 16, 2007
Chad, inspired by Mark's contradictions, asks for peoples' favourite dubious proofs.
Dave contributes some classics, but
Astronomers excel at dubious proofs.
Mathematicians despair of "physics proofs".
They lack rigour, shall we say. Often such trivia as uniqueness, or even existence are omitted,…
November 16, 2007
Joyous Happy Sunny Day!
Billy Bragg Podcast #8 is up: Waiting For the Great Leap Forward
In which Billy and Wiggy discuss the making of "Workers Playtime".
Yay.
November 16, 2007
I. Hate. Proposal. Season.
Even mini-proposal season...
So, as we rush to the bus stop through the snow, clad in t-shirt and sneakers, we ask...
Oh, Mighty iPod, modulo the Vagaries of Fallible Panels, what will the Fate of Our Proposals be, this season.
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The…
November 14, 2007
Froomkin at the WaPo catches Bush making a signing statement.
Bush made another of his curious signing statements to the DoD 2008 appropriations bill
"This one says: "The Act contains certain provisions identical to those found in prior bills passed by the Congress that might be construed to be…
November 14, 2007
so... does anyone know if signatures drawn using Adobe Illustrator, or equivalent, count?
yes it is mini-proposal season and the e-mails and faxed are humming
I actually played with illustrator to see if I could do a convincing signature writing with a mouse - couldn't quite pull it off and was…
November 14, 2007
Kaguya images rock!
Bonus added earthrise video
Click for hi-res
wide angle view
all the new images