Steinn Sigurðsson
Professor of Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University. Science Editor at Astrophysical Journal. Icelandic. Herder of Cats.
catdynamics
Posts by this author
June 5, 2007
The first ever tropical cyclone in history is about to hit the Gulf of Oman after which it makes landfall in Iran
h/t in comments on "fatigue post"
Wunderblog has the details
Area has no experience dealing with this weather, and there are a lot of development and industrial and oild facilities at…
June 4, 2007
The Incoherent Ponderer does a quick'n'dirty analysis of physics department rankings and how their graduates place.
Shit scary stuff.
Don't just look at the absolute numbers, look at the percentages...
June 4, 2007
Prof Frank Douglas is resigning from MIT over the James Sherley tenure case...!
Something tells me this story is not over yet.
June 2, 2007
Joe P. is ok
For PSU & xPSU: heard from him today, they're still out in hostile country and took some more casualties.
He appreciates hearing from people, just casual chat stuff. More care packages wouldn't hurt either, he can always share.
June 2, 2007
Steve the News Blog Guy Gilliard has died
He was one of the early and more passionate bloggers, he wrote well and often and provided interesting perspective and insight on many issues, in particular the war in Iraq.
He wasn't always right, no one is, but he understood the situation better than most…
June 1, 2007
It is ok to piss in the forest.
It is natural, the bear behind you does it too, the plants need the water, and you're even recycling some valuable nitrogen and salt compounds.
It is not ok for 8 million people to take a piss in Central Park.
This is why climate change is important.
The problem is…
May 31, 2007
It is a blue friday, somewhere, and we precognitively ask the Mighty iPod One as topical question of stellar importance, remembering that we have the reduced traveling set...
So, oh mighty iPod One: what is the deal with pulsars in globular clusters? Are they high mass single progenitors with…
May 31, 2007
Lubos makes a provocative comment to my contemplation of Griffin's comments on climate change
I can't resist following it up, despite its inappropriateness.
Consider war.
People are killed in war, but we as a culture distinguish the manner and motive.
Let us ignore the issue of "who started it"…
May 31, 2007
NASA admin Mike Griffin noted that deciding the current climate is the best is a rather arrogant position.
Ok, there is a point there. But, we're making a choice whether we like it or not, so what should we choose?.
Not choosing is also a choice, and one no less arrogant.
The preindustrial mean…
May 31, 2007
It is a Blue Moon tonight at 9 pm Eastern.
For some of us, but not everyone, strangely enough.
At least if you're in the Americas. Rest of the world sees this full moon, on June 1st and has a blue moon in June instead. They have full moons June 1st and 30th, whereas the US has full moons May 2nd…
May 30, 2007
Interesting short opinion article in Wired
Gregg Easterbrook provides a sensible short list of what NASA priorities ought to be and contrast them with the reality.
Interesting reading, and some good points.
I don't know if Mike Griffin's thoughts on climate change will endear him to Easterbrook,…
May 30, 2007
Why do black holes stick around in galaxies despite their violent dynamical history?
A brilliant young postdoc has an answer!
Dr Bogdanovic has a nifty press release on why black holes do tend to stick around in galaxies
Recent results in numerical relativity have shown that the gravitational…
May 30, 2007
Click through for high-res version
From Mathias Pedersen, with permission
This is excellent, even got the planets accurate and as close to scale as one might manage.
Good stuff.
May 29, 2007
You have got to like a book which concludes with a tale from the Edda...
"Traveling at the Speed of Thought" is a new book by Daniel Kennefick on the history of the search for gravitational radiation.
It is a compact little book, at just under 300 pp.
Princeton University Press
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-…
May 29, 2007
The good thing about having semi-permanent outposts in alternative jurisdiction is you get so much more freedom in personnel matters
The WPSU base has some useful amenities for faculty
May 29, 2007
28 new planets announced at the AAS summer meeting
it is the Berkeley/Carnegie/Australian group - interesting bunch, including mostly Jovian planets with orbital radii greater than 1 AU.
Several are around G-subgiants, which are mostly descendants of A and F stars, somewhat more massive than…
May 29, 2007
Not satisfied with having conquered the 17th century canon, the Astrophysical Data System has a new (to me) feature...
The ADS now lists proposals.
A colleague of mine found this by accident, when he came across the phrase "all important" in an abstract. This is a curiously immodest turn for a…
May 28, 2007
There were three profound topics that I recall debating in my first year as a graduate student.
I mean real student debates over a heterogenous assortment of alcohol and gallons of bad coffee.
One was whether the Clash were sell-outs or deeply sardonic (sold-out, clearly);
one was on the pros and…
May 28, 2007
if you have a fine strong piece of metal, one you can barely bend, you can still break it with a bit of patient persistence
repeated bending will lead to metal fatigue, cracks will nucleate and migrate, then grow, until suddenly there is catastrophic failure.
Not from any stress that on its own…
May 28, 2007
So the "possibly habitable planet" probably isn't, as a number of people pointed out,
but the outer planet in the system may be, given some optimistic albedo and greenhouse assumptions
There was an interesting discovery last month, of a "super-Earth" formally within the habitable zone of a nearby…
May 27, 2007
It is good to observe
Shame NASA will be losing some of this capability over the next few years.
Maybe no one will notice next time.
Or you could go for the high-res version
More fun Earth Observing images
May 27, 2007
PulsarAstronomy.net
wiki based pulsar resource.
Catalogs, preprints, links to the people and institutions.
Go wild.
May 27, 2007
Y Ranter looks at current disposition and predicates
I think he is right, the US doesn't have the forces or the political positioning.
For the paranoid, there is clearly a ramp-up to prepare for some political forcing of the issue in September, predicated on whatever happens in August...
The US…
May 25, 2007
Steve was right...
Unclassified memo to forces in Iraq on the News Blog.
Hubris Sonic is covering for Steve G. who is critically ill.
Logistic interruptions for US forces in Iraq? Theater wide? WTF?!
UPDATE: Pat Lang speculates on causes - is it ambushes of convoys or failure to surge enough…
May 25, 2007
Tenure doesn't help you if you are dead - not funny, actually.
Advice for junior faculty at a research university
Chad started it
May 25, 2007
Hot Friday, and I just deleted this post by accident...
Oh, mighty iPod One, the committee has reached a conclusion and filed a report.
What is in store for Beyond Einstein?
The Covering: Twenty Four Hours - Joy Division
The Crossing: Búkalú - Stuðmenn
The Crown: Vorið Góða Græ:nt og…
May 25, 2007
PSU and xPSU folks:
FYI - heard from Joe P. last night.
He is ok, his platoon took some casualties though.
May 22, 2007
There is a most curious paper out on CU Virginis
CU Virginis is a magnetic chemically peculiar star about 250 light years away.
By peculiar, we mean it has significant overabundance of some elements (factors of ten or more), and the surface composition is visibly inhomogenous and variable.
It is…