Steinn Sigurðsson
Professor of Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University. Science Editor at Astrophysical Journal. Icelandic. Herder of Cats.
catdynamics
Posts by this author
February 18, 2007
Crooked Timber poses an ethical issue: are anonymous comments fair game for consideration in admission if the committee can crack the anonymity?
I don't know, but I suspect that independent of the ethics, most committees would take the comments into account, and that most would not consider them…
February 18, 2007
After numerous flights, "Old Man's War" by Scalzi finally bubbled to the top of my pile and got read.
It is really good fun.
I heard about Scalzi a couple of years ago, snagged the book shortly afterwards but it entered at the bottom of the pile and took a while to resurface.
In the meantime I…
February 16, 2007
Warm and sunny friday by the sea.
So, oh mighty iPod, we beseech thee, the time has come, so tell us about ships and kings and whether pigs have wings.
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
NB: For technical reasons we are using a sharply reduced subset of the full collected wisdom of the iPod...…
February 16, 2007
The Navy did some slight unscheduled aircraft carrier moves in recent weeks...
The USS Stennis left harbour early to join the USS Eisenhower in the Persian Gulf/Arabian Sea.
Shortly after, the USS Reagan scooted out, to cover for the USS Kitty Hawk in the western Pacific.
The Kitty Hawk was going…
February 16, 2007
Apparently Standard Model cosmology is some sort of a Pharisee conspiracy.
Dearie me.
So, of course, they say, is evolution.
And given this astonishing revelation, the person in question feels it better no cosmology or evolution be taught.
Just to be safe.
This would certainly simplify life for…
February 15, 2007
WaPo has a story on a new Science result presented at the AAAS meeting about evidence for liquid water on Mars
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter info at JPL
This is the image.
This is the most viewed photo today on the WaPo website
Laura Bush's redecorations in the White House.
UPDATE: WaPo promoted…
February 15, 2007
"I always wondered how the "Dynamics of Cats" related to astronomy..."?
Asks the Mark the Fur Guy, and as it happens several other people around the blogosphere.
It sounded cooler than Dynamics of COATs
We acquired our second cat just before the first web presence occured
The blog name is actually…
February 15, 2007
Cats in Spaaaceee!!!
Someone took a cat up on a "vomit comet" - one of the planes used for long parabolic dives to provide many seconds of free fall.
Then they let it go...
Then someone YouTube'd it.
It is funny in a cruelly interesting sort of way.
All I can think is that if you gave the cat 20…
February 14, 2007
Bloomin Heck.
The US Air Force has revised its doctrine on operations for counterproliferation.
AF DD 2-1.8
Pages 8, 17-18, 26-28 and 46 make especially interesting reading.
I think my favourite bit is on page 26...
Legal Considerations
The preemptive nature of counterforce operations,…
February 14, 2007
star light
star bright
quarter of a million light years from home...
February 13, 2007
The Very Large Array has been doing a survey of HI - atomic hydrogen emission - in nearby galaxies.
The resulting data is pretty amazing.
Collage of the HI images from NRAO newsletter page 3 (pdf)
Note the range in morphology, and the range in scale - the images have been scales to match the…
February 13, 2007
Damm.
I knew some of the AAS presentations had been podcast, I just couldn't find the link...
Finally:
AAS podcasts - right now it is a dozen or so from the 2007 Jan meeting in Seattle.
I liked Brown's talk on hypervelocity stars.
I missed Brown's talk on Kuiper belt objects, but heard good…
February 13, 2007
Hogg is testing Planetarium software for the OLPC
Looks nice. I want.
For the children, of course...
I know the purpose of the OLPC project, but ya'know, I bet you could get a few million early adopters in the US and Europer.
Subsidise the early production until economy of scale is achieved.
February 13, 2007
Word is that Mary Cleave's successor as director of Science Mission at NASA has been announced.
And that it is Alan Stern. PI of the New Horizons mission enroute to Pluto right now. (ignore really annoying soundtrack) (ahem, admire really interesting soundtrack)
De gustibus non est disputandum, eh…
February 12, 2007
Turns out Iran does make its own ammunition, duh.
Question is: is that what the Pentagon showed?
PS: More at Entropic Memes
PPS: apparently someone at kos disputes the authenticity of diomil.ir - looked real enough, but these things can be faked.
Don't know why they'd bother, it is not going to be…
February 12, 2007
Once a scout, always a scout...
I was, really, in Iceland - learned useful skills, like how to make a snow cave when a sudden summer blizzard catches you on a hike, how to make a fire in a country with no trees, and how to make "flour bombs".
Excellent. Especially when by court order the scouts…
February 12, 2007
Good blog by John Spencer on the Planetary Society blog on rescheduling HST observations during a Jupiter flyby
They had ACS observations scheduled to coincide with pictures taken by the New Horizons Pluto Express probe.
They can use WFPC2 instead, lucky sods, but needed to put in a modified…
February 12, 2007
travel blogs get tiresome, but since I am trespassing on Cosmic Variance turf, I'll indulge
So: Bay Area, yay!
Expecting major snow storm in PA: ✓
Rain predicted in CA: ✓
PS: Damm! It really IS raining. Phooey.
Apparently I am now a Stanford employee: CA tax forms still a pain: ✓
I need to start…
February 10, 2007
Coturnix made me do it...
Which leader are you?
What Famous Leader Are You?personality tests by similarminds.com
February 10, 2007
Chloe, the senior feline catus domesticus member of the family, passed away friday afternoon.
Chloe was a very proper grand old lady cat.
She showed up in our garden in Aptos one spring and stayed with us for very many years through mutliple moves.
For the last four months she had been getting…
February 9, 2007
President's proposed 2008 NASA budget all glorious 623 pages, in full colour PDF.
So, where to begin:
Here is the slide version for lite readin'
NASAwatch has a good summary of links, including Griffin's spin
Science opines
The bottom line is roughly as Science notes - the story is in the out year…
February 9, 2007
Friday, and it is still freezing.
Much has happened since last friday, so we humbly approach the mighty iPod and implore it respectfully to guide us...
What, oh mighty iPod, is now going to happen with the Hubble Space Telescope?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Atomic - Blondie…
February 8, 2007
Effect Measure has an interesting entry on cancer deaths (down) and incidence (up), which got me theorizing...
So cancer is a mess - there are multiple causes - smoking, diet, heredity, chemicals, viruses and radiation.
Treatment has improved, and some environmental insults have been reduced -…
February 8, 2007
unverified blog link to a Greek story about an Israeli Air Force strike package buzzing the Greek Islands
Distance from Israel to Greek Islands is a bit shorter than to parts of Iran, but not by much (~ 1200km vs 1600km if my map reading skills don't fail me).
Interesting contingency exercise.
Hm,…
February 7, 2007
Mmm. With 48 hours to go for the extended Hubble proposal deadline, about 360 new proposals have been received.
A lot of these will be reworked ACS proposals, noting that if they only get 4-10 times more orbits, they could mostly do what the ACS could do with, but with WFPC2...
And some will be…
February 5, 2007
Talking Points Memo is not impressed with the Presidential Signing Statement either...
In a nutshell: President Bush is claiming extraordinary authority to circumvent Congressional restrictions on defence appropriations through a signing statement on the DoD appropriations bill.
A read of it…
February 4, 2007
First time in at least 5 years I am not on a plane or babysitting during the superbowl, and it is a decent game.
Sorry to say, Mr Smith, that it looks like Good Manning and Bad Grossman showed up.
Half-time show was one of the best in a long time, the mimic'd "wardrobe malfunction" by the dancers…