catdynamics | March 11, 2009I originally thought this had to be a graduate student stunt
Watch Coin Dominoes and more funny videos on CollegeHumor
but then I realized i was being silly.
Graduate students don't have that much money.
Especially in the UK.
link
catdynamics | March 11, 2009everybody had been wondering what would lead personal consumer expenditure out of recession...
Apples
Shuffles specifically.
Drool.
But, does it come with its own set of tweezers?
Now just give me some of that stimulus grant and I'll get an 8 core custom Mac Pro exercising - what is not to like: it stimulates the Bay Area, ad agencies, UPS, disk manufacturers and semi fabs!
And Pennsylvania utilities...
I could use 2 or 3, easy...
Then we just need the rumoured 10" ebook/netbook from Apple and we're set for another 6-12 months.
catdynamics | March 11, 2009and we ponder the orbits of globulars, red and blue,
what does this tell us about where and when they formed
and where and when they get eaten
β(r) = 1 - σ2φ/&sigma22
- and be careful with your factors of 2 and φ here...
I just like this picture
ah, if we only knew that we would know something
in theory, we can look at the globular distribution - radial as we must, kinematic if we could
and hence infer whence they came at high z, given ΛCDM models
if we ignore the baryons, which i embarrassing, since globulars are baryonic and don't have much dark matter, at least not in the middle…
catdynamics | March 11, 2009Flashback!
live
by Derrick Morgan an' Skankin' Time, mon.
album version
FabricLive.07 - great great collection.
catdynamics | March 10, 2009we contemplate intermediate mass black holes and their possible presence in globular clusters
Eva gives us the summary:
Intermediate mass black holes, conventionally black holes with masses > 100 solar masses and less than about 10,000 solar masses, are interesting and useful beasties.
If any such things exist.
There are hints - superluminous x-ray sources in other galaxies in particular, and theoretical paths by which they could be made.
Several ways to make them suggest they ought to end up in the centers of globular clusters, and there have been repeated claims suggesting observational…
catdynamics | March 10, 2009There have been several interesting candidates for binary supermassive black holes found recently.
New data suggests one of the recently announced candidates is probably not a binary.
A recent press release from NOAO suggested that SDSS J153636.22+044127.0 might be a close binary supermassive black hole. (Nature paper here, subscription required).
The object was picked from the Sload Digital Sky Survey catalog of active galactic nuclei based on its extreme spectral properties.
click to embiggen
The observation was of a double peaked broad emission line spectrum, and Todd and Tod suggested…
catdynamics | March 9, 2009AIG confidential memo to US Treasury explaining the whole "why we need $30 billion more".
Bastards.
It is interesting reading, but they have $1,600 billion dollar derivatives exposure?!
WTF were those morons thinking?
h/t CR
catdynamics | March 9, 2009new week, new topic - actually we'll be doing a lot of extragalactic globulars and the mass function of the clusters, but we start with Guido summarizing what we know about the stellar mass function within the clusters - including mass segregation and differential mass loss.
Wheee.
Sometime things are all topsy-turvy
as you know, Bob, stars come in a range of masses - going from about 0.1 solar masses (stars less massive than that are demoted to being non-stars, since they do not support thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen (1) in their cores on a sustained basis), up to somewhere around 100…
catdynamics | March 9, 2009The Reality Check contemplates how (small) mid-year budget cuts are handled in practise
'cause, y'know, linking is good
catdynamics | March 8, 2009in which I ponder further a physicist's amateur perspective on the stupidities my ex-colleagues perpetrated
I have ranted before on the current aspects of the fiscal crisis, including the credit default swaps (CDS)
now, I don't pretent to be an expert, but I am somewhat numerate and the basic theory of CDS makes for interesting reading.
There are two root problems: one is the basic toy model assumes default probabilities are independent events (exponential in time, really? come on lads you can do better than that...) and uncorrelated; but, the other problem is that the amplitude of the…
catdynamics | March 6, 2009ideally, globular clusters are tidally truncated
since real tidal fields are not spherically symmetric and static
we expect time varying aspherical stripping and shocking, and
with relaxation additional diffusion outside the tidal boundary
so... globular clusters should have tidal tails
we contemplate the difference between rJ and rt
How to steal a million stars: leverage of course.
first set up an investment institution, then securitize the stars, then convince your local Galactic Senate representative to repeal the archaean regulation of stellar securitization, then move to the SMC with…
catdynamics | March 5, 2009some friday random music blogging
1 in 10
and, by request, your thematic ska special
catdynamics | March 5, 2009NASA's Science Mission Directorate produced a cross-discipline report on medium term needs for computational modeling capabilities; ie what serious iron NASA might want to get to play with
report is up here (pdf)
Panels from Earth System Modeling and Assimilation; Solid Earth and Natural Hazards; Astrophysics; Heliophysics; Planetary Science and Mission Engineering, considered current and near future needs and desire, scalability and both state of the art of the codes and development issues.
It is an interesting read, if you like that sort of thing.
Just for fun I did a keyword search:…
catdynamics | March 5, 2009is there, in fact, any system of globular clusters which actually traces the underlying stellar light across the underlying galaxy?
catdynamics | March 5, 2009we have our usual triplet of people talking about recent research on some theme
today we do first stars to first clusters
as usual these have video and podcasts for the hard core to enjoy
Matt on first stars - molecular association rates, accretion time scales onto protostars and reheating and shock dissociation of molecules, pre-enrichment and pop II.9 star formation
random recent reference
and Evan on Compact Stellar Clusters from galaxy outflows
random recent reference
oops coffee break, quick, before the String Theorists Eat All Our Cookies
and Loren on archaeology of merger remnants…
catdynamics | March 5, 2009we go back in time, to when the universe was young
and ponder when the globulars got made, how, why and why some are blue and some are red but very few are greenish
and we learn the globular cluster formation is not transitive
hah, and some people are impressed with mere non-commutation relations...
Jay is on deck, and he had drawn a lot of pictures.
I immediately conclude that not everything to do with globulars is monotonic or even convex.
I also conclude Jay talks faster than I can type...
Bimodality
generally see blue metal poor clusters and red metal rich(er) clusters
usually (…
catdynamics | March 5, 2009I actually got the "heads up" about this last night in time to catch the west coast showing.
Cancelling on the Daily Show clearly inspires them to ever greater journalism.
If you didn't see this, you ought to watch it.
*/
The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
CNBC Gives Financial Advice
Daily Show Full EpisodesImportant Things With Demetri Martin
Political HumorJoke of the Day
Plus, all the kewl kids are posting it, so this way you don't have to go to their blogs to find the links.
*/
The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
The Dow Knows All
Daily Show…
catdynamics | March 4, 2009In which Michael Lewis learns what a "ruddi" is.
Quite fascinating Vanity Fair article on Iceland's Finanicial Whiz Kids and the general mood.
Thanks for the pointer Bob.
Lewis, to be fair, misses out on some things.
First of all, the Icelandic financiers weren't as naive as he claims - for one thing many of them still have their money; for another, some of the really smart ones got out, or are embedded in US hedgies by now; and, finally, Lehman failed first, actually so did Bear Sterns - the Icelanders were overexposed and over-leveraged and had horrible systemic risk exposure, but they…
catdynamics | March 4, 2009we continue contemplation of stars going splat
there are blue stragglers in dwarf galaxies
they are presumably binaries merged through McCrea type I mass transfer
we're not sure exactly how that works in detail, but it must happen because we see it in progress - ie we see contact binaries on the main sequence which must eventually coalesce
if you look at the ratio of number of blue stragglers to some other stellar population, like horizontal branch stars, then the fraction of blue stragglers anti-correlates with the total luminosity of the parent dwarf galaxy
it is a weaker correlation then…