Steinn Sigurðsson
Professor of Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University. Science Editor at Astrophysical Journal. Icelandic. Herder of Cats.
catdynamics
Posts by this author
July 25, 2006
deLong explains why academic blogging is good for the soul
I would not have dared to blog openly before tenure (and, no, I did not blog anonymously back then), basically it would not have been well received by most of the tenure committee, or the Dean.
Strangely, if I had been writing a regular…
July 25, 2006
Pat Lang looks at the situation in Lebanon
Belmont Club games the IDF plan
For what little it is worth, I fear Lang is closer to the truth.
The reported IDF forces seem too small for some grand enveloping thrust up to the Bekka valley on the east of Lebanon, not to mention the threat of Syrian…
July 24, 2006
JC sends a link to an excellent version of Love Will Tear Us Apart - mellow, by Susanna and the Magical Orchestra
July 24, 2006
One More Way in Which Global Warming Can Kill You - Iceland shows how
Wolfgang of In Search of 42 has moved to the Daily Llama - did he find 42? Or 56 maybe?
Astroprof talks about Pulsar Planets - no, the other astroprof...
PP Cook joins in the You Tube wars with The Klein Four's rendition of…
July 24, 2006
A decent article on small scale evolutionary changes in human populations in the Washington Post.
More detail and an actual Synopsis or pointer to the papers - PLoS Bio and here in Science (subscription) would have been nice.
PS as The Loom notes, the QT movie accompanying the piece is moronic and…
July 24, 2006
From CosmicVariance and Baez
Fun, high symmetry, exact solutions of the N-body Coulomb problem. From Cris Moore's web page at the Santa Fe Institute
Pretty. Everybody is doing it, might as well Google it on.
July 24, 2006
That reminds me...
The relationship between a thesis advisor and a PhD student is the best example of Lamarckian Evolution: Discuss
July 24, 2006
Sometimes Lamarckian evolution does operate... - click through to read Ralph Peter's article also.
Hezbollah learned over 25 years of conflict, and has adapted.
Israel has put itself in a real bind by acting hastily and without thinking things through.
To "win" all Hezbollah has to do is survive…
July 21, 2006
A lot of brain power has been devoted to establishing Biosignatures, as a means for remotely detecting alien life.
But, what if alien cows don't fart? Can we still conceive of robust generic biosignatures that are not just slavish restatements of what we think we know about the Earth?
One of my…
July 21, 2006
Two astronomy papers are up on the Nature website for open critique, the new experiment with open peer review that Nature is conducting.
A new type of massive stellar death: no supernovae from two nearby long gamma ray bursts - Fynbo et al
Baryonic sweeping as the origin of the darkest galaxies in…
July 21, 2006
Yay! Fabulous Friday.
The third Billy Bragg podcast is online now
Includes the tale of the Famous Curry Incident.
Hm... I wonder if that'd work on Nature Editors?
July 21, 2006
Keith Cowing ofNASAwatch now has a potentially interesting and useful Astrobiology.net site.
July 21, 2006
It is friday, and we will be topical today.
So, Oh Mighty iPod, Oh Omniescent One...
Are there planets orbiting main sequence stars, within 100 parsecs of the Sun, which have abundant carbon based life producing biosignatures we can detect and recognise within the medium term, if we get the…
July 20, 2006
Spotted on Pharyngula, forwarded in case any astro/physics types are out there who don't scan PZ
What to say while having sex with atheists
FreeThunk illustrates the point
though I think in practise most atheists fall back on the cultural ambiance and go with colloquial blaspheming...
"Big Bang"…
July 20, 2006
As the sun blazes in the sky, and the heat climbs, people strip to the bare minimum and head for the pools and beaches. This morning a number of companies announced they would close for part of the afternoon to give employees a chance to cool off, you have to figure no one is going to be out doing…
July 19, 2006
Our Master's Voice Speaks:
If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?...
Now. Of course.
Because we know more, we have a greater and more vibrant community than ever, we have more resources, tools and technology than ever.
I admit…
July 19, 2006
There sure are a lot of angry bloggers out there...
Angry Physics is an old favourite
but I didn't know there was also an Angry Astronomer
who is not the same as Angry Stanek, who is an astronomer
but they may one day become like the legendary Angry Professors
but who is not Professor Angry
There…
July 18, 2006
The title of my Phd Thesis was:
Dynamics of Neutron Stars and Binaries in Globular Clusters
or, Ménages à trois: revitalizing burnt out degenerates through partner swapping
This was not the best PhD thesis title ever, by a long shot.
The sub-title was actually an "in-joke", it was the working…
July 18, 2006
I have learned many useful things recently:
It is harder to organize a birthday party for a dozen munchkins, then it is to organise a four day festival for several thousand people (the previous limit of my organizational reach)
Both "Average Angry Professor" and "Angry Average Professor" would be…
July 18, 2006
I am going to go on a minor iTunes spending spree.
What music should I get?
Caveat: this is input for the output range of the Mighty iPod Oracle, so be careful what you recommend.
My tastes are not as limited as the current iTunes list might indicate - a large fraction of our music collection is…
July 18, 2006
Revere on Effect Measure points us to an interesting fact I did not know....
The US charges its own citizens for evacuations from war zones.
"...The Department of State reminds American citizens that the U.S. government does not provide no-cost transportation but does have the authority to provide…
July 17, 2006
astroprof has a succinct semi-technical summary on the hardware raining down on north Israel
my 2c worth...
What Hezbollah did was an act of war, a breach of truce, a violation of agreements; it was not, in this instance (the ambush of an IDF patrol), an act of terrorism. Hezbollah has committed…
July 17, 2006
Shamelessly cribbing from the CosmicVariance gang, DataMining has a fascinating blogosphere connectivity web image
Fascinating stuff, be fun to explore where the Scienceblogs are - hopefully cut above the morass of poliblogs at the bottom right...
Am also very curious about the edge nodes, expect…
July 17, 2006
ACS first light images after the switch to the spare (side 2) electronics, after the failure of the side 1 power controller.
Found a redshift =1.4 supernova (~ 9 billion light years away), as part of Perlmutter's (LBL) high redshift supernova search, which is looking for additional date on the…
July 17, 2006
Just for yonks, I grabbed the WHO confirmed Avian Flu cases list and did a little plot of cumulative cases vs time...
The blue curve is cumulative cases; the red curve is cumulative deaths.
The date is the approximate date of WHO report, with 28 Jan 2004 as the zero date (11 cases, 8 deaths).…
July 17, 2006
Mark at CosmiVariance passes on a rumour that there is a new Astro Job Rumour Wiki
This potentially supercedes the legendary New Astro Rumour Mill which of course used to be here, which in turn superceded the legendary orginal Astro Rumour Mill started by Pat Hall.
Mark has some interesting…
July 14, 2006
Is every species of living thing on the planet equally deserving of protection?...
No.
Seriously. No.
Some must be protected.
Some ought to be protected.
It'd be pragmatic, prudent or prescient to protect most.
A few I'd just as soon see dead. Very few.
Some actually don't matter much either way,…
July 14, 2006
Hot friday, and I am out of touch.
So we ask the Mighty iPod...
...Oh, Mighty iPod - are we getting a short term shortage of those ever so addictive Megaliters of hydrogenated carbon chains we find so useful?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: The Price I Pay - Billy Bragg
The…
July 14, 2006
That most reliable of sources, the friend of a friend of a friend, told us they know someone who works at the corporate HQ of a major petroleum retailer in the US.
In short: expect ~ 20% rise in retail prices of gas this weekend.
I wonder why, did I miss something?
Some unrest somewhere while I…
July 13, 2006
Couple of interesting snippets on NASAwatch
SOFIA is back. SIM is slipped, which apparently saves everything. WISE, GLAST, JWST, even HST.
Who knew you could do so much by slipping a $100 million item...
Uh, oh, if you click through to the New Scientist story, we learn SIM is being "refocused".…