Steinn Sigurðsson
Professor of Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University. Science Editor at Astrophysical Journal. Icelandic. Herder of Cats.
catdynamics
Posts by this author
June 22, 2006
I just bought $100 of skyr. Vanilla and blueberry, both.
And I transported it across State boundaries.
And now I am going to enjoy it. With my wife. The kids are asleep. Phbt.
June 21, 2006
NASAwatch reports ACS outage
Electronics problems. ACS observations suspended for a week while a tiger team studies the issue.
Could be resolved quickly, or could be Really Bad News.
Will keep an eye out.
Hm, leaves WFPC2 and NICMOS operating. They'll run out of targets pretty quickly.
Hopefully…
June 21, 2006
From Andrew Hamilton's black hole image collection
There are, for most practical purposed, two qualitatively distinct types of black holes: Schwarzschild - which are spherical and not spinning and Kerr - axisymmetric and spinning
So... I know how to spin up a non-spinning black hole, you drop…
June 20, 2006
Video of meteor striking the Moon
Bad Astronomy has it also
Comparable to the one that hit Norway recently!
oops. video bit too big, cut header image down and left link, go take a peek
June 20, 2006
RPM writes about a senior female scientist resigning a post over a failure to hire a female editor
Astronomy is one of the sciences with very low senior female presence, not the lowest, but way down there. The incident RPM relates brings to mind a case...
I was asked by a very senior colleague…
June 20, 2006
Seen on floppingaces.net
Operation "Valiant Shield" - 3 aircraft carriers doing operations together in the Pacific, off Guam, first time in 30 years.
USS Enterprise is in the Persian gulf and as far as I can tell three other aircraft carriers are at sea, two in the Atlantic and one off California…
June 20, 2006
Bloomin' heck, that combined the best and worst football I've seen for a while.
Good fun, but both teams need to be a bit more consistent if they're going to get through the next round...
Sunday morning should be interesting.
Shame about T&T they played a fun game.
June 20, 2006
The actual LISA spacecraft
Or, one of the three modules.
That is a 1.96 kg cube of 3/4 gold, 1/4 platinum.
The actual LISA spacecraft, in a very real sense, is three of those, separated by 5 million kms.
At about $600 per ounce, that is a little over $100,000 of precious metal. Each of these is…
June 20, 2006
Beautiful post by Tara on network connectivity and outbreak of exponential spread in disease transmission.
June 19, 2006
Bats' ears at AMNH
To really see in the dark, at some point you must abandon the light...
You can go far in faint light by using high efficiency detectors, large collecting areas and amplification;
but, as nature discovered a long time ago, to really find things in the dark you need to switch to…
June 17, 2006
Happy Father's Day!
The Big Kid sat through all of USA vs Italy, and enjoyed it.
Made for a good lesson in sportsmanlike conduct.
And. I was wrong, the USA team did show up, about 10 minutes into the game, and played at a world level, at least the few players that rather overzealous referee left on…
June 16, 2006
It is friday, and I am late.
We ask the Great and Mighty iPod: is there a reason for us to get a manned presence off Earth on a time scale of a century or less?
Whoosh goes the randomizer:
Whoosh...
The Covering: Boy Done Good - Billy Bragg
The Crossing: Don't Leave Me Now - Pink Floyd
The Crown…
June 16, 2006
Hvalur 8 RE-388
The Icelandic whaling fleet has been in harbour for 17 years now.
The International Whaling Commission is meeting in St Kitts right now the whaling nations may have bought in enough minor nations to get a majority in favour of resuming whaling although under voting rules that is…
June 16, 2006
How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?...
Er... ouch.
Notice the time stamps of ~ 1:30 am on many of my entries?
Actually, if I am dashing out a lot of blog…
June 16, 2006
So, I popped down to the campus bookstore and browsed C*u*ters latest tome on the "Church of Liberalism"...
A large part of the book is regurgitated crap from the intelligent design moron crowd, which PZ has dissected along with several other netizens.
Most of the rest is the usual incoherent…
June 16, 2006
SEED is doing a $10,000 match to charity donations to the "Donors Choose" educational charity.
Sounds like a good cause, and a lot of the Sb bloggers jumped in.
If you want to chip in, go for it, can I ask that you go to Uncertain Principles and click through there, I'm not in a place where I can…
June 15, 2006
I am hearing an irritating buzz in my ear...
Apparently cosmology is liberal.
Can someone tell me, what is a conservative cosmology? And what is the distinction?
June 15, 2006
Astrology is crap
You can not buy a star name
Yes, there really was a Big Bang
June 15, 2006
So Stephen Hawking spoke in defence of off-planet colonization
and got pounced by, among others, a trio of tough sciencebloggers.
Shelley, grrlscientist, and PZ.
Also Chris Clarke...
Sagrada Familia
This is an interesting situation - Stephen is at the best of times terse.
He is unlikely to expound…
June 14, 2006
European Southern Observatory press release on globular cluster 47 Tucanae
47 Tuc is one of my favourite globulars.
It is large, quite dense, metal rich as globulars go, and it is gorgeous.
It is full of pulsars, blue stragglers, x-ray binaries and other fun beasties.
A few years ago we looked…
June 14, 2006
Aftenposten reports a survey of 1736 Norwegians finds the majority think sex is better sober
The majority is larger for the women.
A full 1/4 of the men, and a surprising 1/5 of the women think sex is better after a couple of glasses of wine.
Be interesting to know the demographics, and correlate…
June 14, 2006
the Spirit Rover discovers a possible meteorite, on Mars
That is one way to find a meteorite, I wonder how the Rover spares would do north and east of Tromsø in mid-summer, there's Nkr 100,000 at stake.
About 870 days now, and still going...
June 14, 2006
Bérubé pontificates on Academic Freedom
Read it.
I don't want to tell you how much time was wasted chasing down the false allegation of the the "bio instructor who showed a Michael Moore movie in class" last year, this issue is not just one of principle for academia, it is a matter of pragmatism,…
June 13, 2006
Interesting piece of journalism by the Grauniad
They ordered a 78 "letter" piece of DNA for a smallpox envelope protein.
As they note, the actual genome is rather longer than that, but as they also note, there are techniques for reconstructing genomes from DNA pieces.
I don't think anyone will be…
June 13, 2006
Pancake family brunch; soccer (Big Kid playing, me assistant coach temp); ballet (family appreciation day); pig roast with belly dancing (really, organic pig at that).
There are worse ways to spend a day.
Perfect weather here this weekend, and after proposal hell week (more on that later) and…
June 12, 2006
As reported by Uncertain Principles and Bad Astronomy, there was a meteorite impact in Northern Norway - Tromsø area.
Initial reports were "impact compared to atomic bomb"...
here is the proper report, including seismic signal - really did impact.
Current reports suggest it was a ~ 10kg rocky…
June 12, 2006
Ok, I caught 5 mins of ESPN coverage this afternoon (during a commercial break in SpongeBob), and the commentator is standing in a suit, on an open floor, holding a soccer ball.
Why is he doing that?
June 11, 2006
Jane over at Ethics and Science tags the New Kids on the block with a Neighbourhood Pi mem
We obey, and please mam, may we have some more?
3 reasons you blog about science:
I know some.
I like it.
I think it is important.
Point at which you would stop blogging:
Real life catches up with me.
1…
June 10, 2006
Stochastic, our master's voice, asks:
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
Well, of course it'd be
bioinformatics.
Why?
Interestingly technical, lots of data, wide open…
June 9, 2006
Every friday, life permitting, we do an "iPod iChing".
It is well known that the randomizer on the iPod is oracular, and in recent times it has been used widely on the Net as a fountain of wisdom.
...
Most people use the iPod's powers trivially, for "random ten" lists to reflect their psychic…