catdynamics | December 12, 2012
Dr Brad Barlow was nominated by his Astro 001 students for a great honour - whichever class collected the most money for this year's THON would get to designate a lecture style of their choice, and Brad won...
so he got to lecture as a character from a "classic christmas movie"[sic]
As you can see, he really got into character.
catdynamics | December 10, 2012Hey, Santa Baby!
Psy does it Christmas Style for Obama
wrapped up with Hark the Herald Angels sing with Diana Ross and Psy.
video at Grauniad
Power hath privilege indeed.
catdynamics | December 5, 2012On the purity of science careers; the waste of civilization and other assorted snippets... and a happy Feast of St Nikolaus
The Rise of the Science Politician - Matt B. continues provocative Conversations.
There is an interesting thread on this on The Astronomers fb.
On The Inevitability of Kardashev Civilizations - the Astro Wright continues to lay the ground work for some fun speculation
Waste Heat: Parametrizing Alien Civilizations - the Astro Wright series continues with a reformulation of the Drake Equation appropriate to K3 civs.
What Do We Want Graduate School To Be? - astrobites…
catdynamics | November 27, 2012MINERVA - clever idea for high cadence RV searches around nearby bright stars, now under way.
Kardashev IV - from AstroWright.
Or, why the best way to achieve immortality is to not die.
how to make your bike sound like a horse - Brilliant! #ObMontyPython! From From Trotify.Physicists open mouth - PZ inserts booted foot
B on search for Planck scale physics on tabletops
The slightly more breathless view on the tabletop
Seeing the elephant - BaBar sees T violation. CPT rules!
Pontification on MOOCs
Astrobio MOOC (not for credit)
News Higgs results...
Death of SUSY?
Long live SUSYN!
Colossal…
catdynamics | November 16, 2012In which we dunk and pie our professors...
Much has been written about student morale and the problems of student-faculty relations and the implicit expectations faculty have of the students.
Over the last couple of weeks I have had occasion to test some of the more radical proposals to improve the interactions of our students with the faculty.
It started two weeks ago last wednesday: we were summoned to the coffee room with the promise of sweets.
Instead we were faced with a bizarre array of students and staff dressed in native costumes who, after some tribal dancing and handing out of…
catdynamics | November 15, 2012Visiting Astrobiology Chair in DC: research and engagement.
Applications and nominations are open for the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology.
"Established in the Fall of 2011, the Blumberg Astrobiology Chair is a distinguished senior position at the Library’s Kluge Center.
The incumbent conducts research at the intersection between the science of astrobiology and its humanistic aspects, particularly its societal implications, using the collections and services of the Library. The incumbent is expected to be in residence at the Kluge Center for a period of up to…
catdynamics | November 12, 2012Blows against supersymmetry and facebook.
Matthew Bailes continues ruminations at the Conversation - the general riff is on crowd sourcing and distributed computing, with a bit of bragging on The Beast they got down under.
Ok, I'm, just jealous.
I had not heard of Diaspora - be interesting to see if it can crowd out fb or other commercial social networks.
The Raspberry Pi I had indeed heard of, and will be acquisitioning. My kids are so looking forward to have their own computers... ;-)
But, what we really conclude, is that Matt needs to meet Charlie Stross for a quiet beer or three.
On a…
catdynamics | November 2, 2012113 Vælubíllinn
The all time classic modern Icelandic punk anthem, for kids.
Instant punk dance lesson just to complete the experience.
Try it.
It works.
catdynamics | November 1, 2012New faculty positions in multiple science and engineering disciplines, including astronomy, emphasizing computational analysis and data mining.
Penn State is embarking on a transformative cluster hiring initiative in cyberscience – computation- and data-enabled science and engineering – to lead through cyber-enabled innovation in interdisciplinary research. This cross-college endeavor will coordinate multiple faculty appointments to develop new functional capabilities centered on data, models and simulation for deeper insights into the critical problems in Science and Engineering.
We seek…
catdynamics | October 30, 2012Schrödinger's Qu'ran - a 2012 thought experiment - in The Conversation, Matthew Bailes updates a classic paradox...
"...a physicist could extend this thought experiment to write a php script that would randomly download one of the Bible, Qur’an or even a classical quantum mechanics textbook to the iPad..."
On the Dispositive Null in the Literature - on an unrelated subject, the AstroWright expounds on a subtle issue.
Trendy Companions - more AstroWright
What do we want graduate school to be?
When do we want it?
Real Soon Now!
I will have a report on a definitive solution to the whole climate…
catdynamics | October 16, 2012Given ηEarth=1
Find more terrestrial exoplanets.
Find habitable terrestrial exoplanets.
Find inhabited terrestrial exoplanets.
Go visit.
Consider the following snippets:
Kepler discover 5 planets orbiting inside 0.1 AUKepler: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet in a Quadruple Star SystemTerrestrial mass planet discovered around α Cen BKepler exoplanet survey jeopardized
Kepler has lost one of its reaction wheels.
That was the spare, one more goes, and it will not complete its mission, it will not be able to stay pointed at its target.
Because of stellar jitter, the science goal for Kepler, to…
catdynamics | October 16, 2012α Centauri B, a mere 4 lightyears away has a terrestrial planet orbiting it.
α Cen B b
The most interesting aspect of the discovery may be the inferences we can make rather than the planet itself.
The discovery by the Geneva Observatory team using the
HARPS spectrograph is a wonderful example of precision high cadence spectroscopy and the ability of observers to find planets wherever they may be. The precision of the measurment is 0.5 m/sec, which is astonishing.
The discovery will be published in Nature (X. Dumusque et al. Nature 17 Oct 2012) thursday, and was due to be announced wednesday…
catdynamics | October 13, 2012Continued slow liveblog of the New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology Conference at the Franklin Institute.
Lunch is almost over and we are headed into the final session of research presentations, clearly saving the best for last...
I am also reminded why we have these meetings, in person, the chats during break and back and forth in sessions provides very dense information transmission and tight feedback loops on news.
Big Question IV - Are we Alone in the universe?
Or, are there other life and intelligence beyond the solar system?
1) Jonathan Lunine from Cornell on "The search for life…
catdynamics | October 13, 2012Continued slow liveblog of the New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology Conference at the Franklin Institute.
We have had coffee and we are rested and ready after yesterdays 14 hour marathon session (graduate students please note - though it did include breakfast, lunch, dinner and two coffee breaks ("working breaks" natch, apart from the hour+ break before dinenr) - and I don't think any of the faculty could actually keep it up for more than 2-3 days, except in our imagination ('course we then went back to the hotel and had to catch up on class and administrative issues left unattended, but…
catdynamics | October 13, 2012The second session of the New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology conference was friday afternoon.
The plan was to do a leisurely liveblog of the talks.
However, during lunch, there were some interesting developments, which I can hopefully tell you about next week some time, and in the middle of the discussion I was told that I was the session chair for the afternoon and we were starting in two minutes.
And a brilliant session it was too.
But as chair it was a bit hard to take notes and blog it live...
So you get the tape delayed version, editors cut, instead:
We continued after lunch with…
catdynamics | October 12, 2012A slow liveblog of the conference.
The New Frontiers in Astronomy and Comsology is having its awards conference at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
The 20 odd winning researchers and research groups are presenting summaries of their proposed research, to be followed in a couple of years with another conference in Chicago where they will, hopefully, present their results.
The high school and college essay winners are also here to receive their awards and schmooze with the random astroboffins.
I plan to do my usual intermittent blogging of the presentations, time permitting.
The list…
catdynamics | October 11, 2012Or, how may hours should graduate students work?
Well, depends...
However Many You Like
As Many As They Can
As Many As Are Needed
All Of Them
The answer may sometimes lie in the above range, sometimes may be somewhat less, and occasionally even more.
We've all been there, and all suffer from survivor bias, confirmation bias and not a little survivor's guilt.
The occasion of course, is The Letter very helpfully sent to all the astronomy graduate students at a distinguished research university by a well intentioned distinguished faculty member.
It is causing quite the buzz in astro social…
catdynamics | October 5, 2012In which we win an award from the New Frontiers in Astronomy Program.
The New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology program announced its research grant award winners yesterday.
The last, but not least of the Big Questions solicited in the Call for Proposals, was:Are we alone in the universe? Or, are there other life and intelligence beyond the solar system?
There were four awards in this "Astrobiology and SETI" category, focusing on different approaches in the search for life elsewhere in the Universe.
We got one:
"Constraining the Abundance of Kardashev Type II and III Civilizations From…
catdynamics | October 4, 2012another selection of random snippets from the intertoobz
We are Number One! - and 8!
Wait, didn't I blog this one already?
Ah well, truth can never be told too often...
Forget PowerPoint: It turns out the secret to improving productivity at your job might be puppieskittens!
Win friends and influence people to boost research productivity
One Reason Horrible People Gain Power - Atrios comments
Chad has opened the Sb Nobel Prize betting pool
Announcement of Opportunity: get the UK Infrared Telescope...cheap
Save the GBT!