catdynamics | October 8, 2009Obama and friends: Celebrating the Year of Astronomy in Style.
Obama Star Party!
With Bonus Real Stars.
"The President and First Lady host NASA astronauts, area middle schoolers, and innovators in the field of astronomy for a night of fun, learning, and stargazing on the South Lawn. October 7, 2009."
John Grunsfeld setting up the telescopes.
Ok, that might work...
Hope they turned those bloody lights down though...
click to embiggen - from Celestron Images
ε Lyrae - what Obama saw
Brought in two teen amateur astronomers - Caroline Moore, supernova hunter; and Maura's student from Green…
catdynamics | October 6, 2009Nobel Prize in Physics, in case you hadn't heard, went to Kao for Fiber Optics and Boyle and Smith for developing the fundamental CCD technology.
Some people, naming no names, seem a little unhappy about this.
Well, ol' Alfred had his purpose when he endowed the Nobel Foundation with his ill gotten gains, and such things are somewhat binding.
Further, pushing the Swedish Academy on these things, to do the "right thing" and give the Prize to one of your pet subfields, however more "fundamental" it may be, tends to backfire.
Think of the Academy as a very proper and very small club, about…
catdynamics | October 2, 2009The Ig Nobel Prizes are out, and Iceland wins big.
The title, explains it all (short version, with apologies to Krugman).
Long version, with translation, follows.
Yes, it is Ig Nobel Prize time, and the winner in Economics are the new Vikings of Finance:
"Economics: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks -- Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland -- for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa -- and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy."
Sadly…
catdynamics | September 30, 2009Have you ever been in the Zone?
Where you are totally Focused and just cranking it out?
I want to know what is going on in the Zone.
No, I don't mean Poisson noise while doing trivial kinematics with bouncy spheroids in bounded rectangular arenas!
I mean The Zone.
You find it when tackling very hard theoretical problems.
Sometimes.
When Focused on a deeply complex mathematics problem; or, thinking about very deep problems in physics; or, probably most commonly nowadays, when hacking a particularly elegant piece of code.
Getting there can be hard, it requires the right problem, the right…
catdynamics | September 29, 2009been a while
time for some assorted links
'cause y'know, linking is an intrinsic good
Robust Quantum Money - and who says theoretical physics is impractical?
A Small White Dot Gone
Oh, My Country - Iceland descends into a caricature of a bad joke about itself.
Told you, you should have thrown the bastard in the harbour while you were on a roll.
Decline of the Humanities - as long as we don't mention the percentages for maths and physical sciences...
Economists duel - but who will do the honourable thing?
Carnival of Space 120, 121, 122
Apparently, Obama is overly self-referential -
and…
catdynamics | September 25, 2009there's something wrong, metaphorically, with this image...
city folk...
from Gorbachev's NYTOpEd on nuclear weapons
catdynamics | September 25, 2009NASA sees water everywhere it looks! In surprising places.
With pictures.
But maybe not where you heard...
No, not the Moon, as interesting and useful it might be.
This is the other gorgeous water discovery, this thursday...
Yes, there is water on Mars, again.
This is actually a very nice result.
Although the timing of the announcement, hard on the heels of the quantitative measuring of OH on the lunar surface is opportune indeed.
MRO has seen small fresh meteorite craters Mars - with depths of 1-3 meters.
fresh crater cluster on Mars, from a year ago - dark splodges on right (click to…
catdynamics | September 25, 2009Peace feels like "the kiss you get from your Mom before you get on the bus for school!"
Diddi (via Ms Hurtz)
It is that old "warrior poet" tradition...
Apparently it is a good way to get lots of kisses.
catdynamics | September 25, 2009Explaining the post-deregulation investment banks of Iceland.
Or, how to make money off banana trees north of the arctic circle...
The Banana Republic of Iceland: Always Six Months Ahead of the Rest of the World
It is of course Inconceivable that something like this would actually happen in a modern democratic republic.
In the original:
catdynamics | September 23, 2009H1N1 swine 'flu is coming home, and it is a big hit on campus.
With universities starting, and the weather cooling, the prospect for an early and nasty 'flu season was evident, and, amazingly, proactive measures were taken.
The first signs were the free, stand-alone, water free, hand sanitizer dispensers, appearing in high traffic and food areas.
Then came the Fast, Foamy and Furious!
- signs that is.
In the bathrooms.
Apparently the best way to get people to lather up and scrub is to convince them to sing "Happy Birthday". Twice. Quietly.
Annoyingly enough, this clearly works, since weeks…
catdynamics | September 19, 2009So, having established that Obama is NOT truly beholden to the financiers, what may happen to settle the financial world and straighten the economy.
No, really, he is not: no more than he is beholden to, say UC or Harvard.
I mean it is not like his administration is stuffed with academics from those venerable institutions... er, well, you know what I mean.
But, clearly, with his #1 contributor, UC, having been sorted, we now have a guide for what we may do about the financiers.
We furlough the banksters!
Brilliant!
Seriously.
Note that in academia, the furloughs increase as you go up the…
catdynamics | September 18, 2009It is often noted on the Intertoobz that President Obama has a number of financial institutions in the top 20 list of "institutions whose invididual members donated to Obama's campaign".
So, the bankers bought Obama?
Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, UBS AG, Morgan Stanley
these come in at #2, 6, 7, 12, 17 - collectively well over $3 million in donations.
But... hold on:
#1 is University of California - $1.5 million
#3 is Harvard University - $850k
#10 is Stanford University - $600k
#16 is Columbia University - $500k
the big universities raised about as much as the financial…
catdynamics | September 18, 2009For over 20 years, the binary star DI Herculis has been measured to have anomalous precession, inconsistent with the predictions of general relativity, in the limit of two spherical masses orbiting with the measured orbital parameters.
So, either there were some other classical torques in the system, or general relativity was wrong.
DI Herculis is a close B star binary, with 10 day orbital period and eccentricity of ~0.5, that is orbiting near edge-on to our line of sight, and thus the stars eclipse each other.
The stars are hot and massive - 5.15 and 4.52 solar masses respectively, with…
catdynamics | September 18, 2009Check out the Revolutionary Minds guest blog. It is worth browsing through.
They invite people to comment on interdisciplinary questions of very broad nature.
Current topic is:
Cross-disciplinary work has sparked provocative new technologies, solutions, and insights. What problems do you see as ripe for cross-disciplinary research, and which fields would you choose to combine?
Previous question was:
The boundaries of science are continually expanding as scientists become increasingly integral to finding solutions for larger social issues, such as poverty, conflict, financial crises, etc. On…
catdynamics | September 18, 2009Scienceblogs is introducing an optional user membership program.
This would provide more control and filters and notice for regular readers.
Here is your opportunity to provide input.
You can tell me what features you'd like, or not like.. but really you should go to the
blog which binds and rank choices there
I also suspect we may end up using it to pre-filter comments - with registered users getting to comment, and others going into a manual filter.
At least that is what I'd plan to do if I were running it.
It may be as important to say what is not wanted as what is wanted.
eg. a number of…
catdynamics | September 17, 2009Quark Expeditions are running a competition to send your favourite blogger to Antarctica... you too can vote.
Nah, not for me, can't get rid of me that easily.
There are, currently, 613 entries - people who volunteered to go south and blog about the experience.
The competition closes on September 30th, and, realistically, it is down to the four most popular entries - many of the bloggers with large numbers of votes, but who are out of the top few, are now asking people to switch votes to one of their favourite top candidates.
Luis, Kristina, GrrlScientist and Don.
Yes, that is Sb's very own…
catdynamics | September 17, 2009Swift does a large field mosaic image in the ultraviolet of M31
Ok, so Astronomy Picture of the Day beat me to this...
Andromeda in optical (click to embiggen)
Swift took a 330 picture mosaic of our nearest respectably sized neighbour galaxy, the venerable, and naked eye Andromeda, aka M31. They used the itsy bitsy little Ulvtravioler/Optical telescope on board, which has surprisingly decent UV capability.
Andromeda - ultraviolet mosaic (click to embiggen)
Very, very nice.
Go to apod to get the nice gif flick between the UV and optical images.
The UV images preferentially trace young…
catdynamics | September 17, 2009I both really like this song and find it hard to listen to sometimes.
catdynamics | September 17, 2009HD61005 is a nice normal, young star with a dusty disk that will likely make planets one day. Real soon now in fact.
But HD61005, like some other stars, is different.
It is warped.
Well, the rim of its disk is.
Warped disk of HD61005 (click to embiggen)
The above picture is a Hubble image with the light from the central star suppressed, showing the extended disk of dust around the star.
As you can plainly see, the disk around the star is bent.
Question is why?
We've seen warped disks around stars, and often there is an apparent reason, such as radiation pressure from another, massive and…
catdynamics | September 13, 2009More State Universities are going to furloughs...
And the funding agencies may agree to let faculty take salary from grants for furloughs.
This is not a good thing, furloughs are rational if sharp cuts are a short term necessity, because they avoid long term job losses and they can be implemented rapidly.
Furloughs are also not paycuts - they preserve the benefits and retirement at the base level, and are done with the intent of salaries going back to previous level without having to go through an increase.
This is a rather important distinction, in the short term at least, if situations…