catdynamics | February 12, 2009All day discussion on white dwarfs today: cooling, kinematics, destruction etc
Starts off with Lars tutoring us in the morning...
Basics:
white dwarf origins - they are degenerate burnt out cores of low-to-medium mass main seqeunce stars
key issues still not fully resolved:
what is the relationship between the main sequence initial mass and the white dwarf final mass?
to what extent does it depend on main sequence composition?
binary companion? formation of He core white dwarfs due to envelope stripping - see white dwarfs with He cores and masses less than 0.48 solar mass, so no He core…
catdynamics | February 11, 2009there is a revised version of House Resolution 1 on thomas.loc.gov
looks like it might be the "final version" of the stimulus bill, post-conference
assuming that it is, here are the relevant bits (thomas.loc.gov is dynamic, can't provide static links):
UPDATE: Nope, those are too small - Pelosi put back a lot of the science funding
and it is even better than this version of the compromise - see David Bacon's comment
I'll update later.
Ok, there is an eighth revision of the stimulus bill, which puts in even more money for science, I thought I had it right last night because the seventh…
catdynamics | February 11, 2009Ok - lets move beyond anonymous confessions.
Which universities have gone public with the problems, and what are the public facts.
I'll aggregate links below.
Arizona State University - hard times and - mandatory unpaid furlough specifics - and budget reductions
University of Arizona mandatory furloughs
University of California - minor adjustments; enrollment cuts and senior administrator pay freeze
Emory University - cuts
University of Florida - Faculty Senate Budget blog...
University of Idaho - program prioritization, 41 degree programs up for closure
Kansas system cuts
University of…
catdynamics | February 11, 2009so a deal has been reached on the stimulus bill
final version will be smaller than either house or senate version
science is too minor to be mentioned in the news summaries, will have to wait for the revised text to know what they did
but, NIH emerged as a "winner" - Sen Specter inserted $6.5 billion as short term boost for NIH
Good for them, or is it... that is a heck of percentage chunk to absorb short term.
But, did the conference decide that was good enough for all the science?
Or did some NSF, NOAA, DoE and even NASA stimulus survive?
We'll find out, all too soon.
I don't know how they…
catdynamics | February 11, 2009Today we step back and Hans runs The Big Questions past us.
It is always good to think about the Big Picture.
The Big Questions
Most likely scenario for cluster formation:
a) compressed/triggered initial conditions: cloud collisions or intersecting shells, or
b) did globular clusters form as nuclei in dwarf galaxies that got accreted by our MW (dE,N hypothesis), or
c) scaled-up version of open cluster formation in mol. clouds? (Pudritz papers, Krumholz talk); the role of high pressure?
Relation of halo stars and globular cluster destruction ... (are Pop II stars dissolved globular…
catdynamics | February 11, 2009The Female Science Professor explains the whole grant thing to graduate students.
I really like the "SimGrant" suggestion - would make a very spiffy module for the Sims go to Uni package, or so I infer.
catdynamics | February 10, 2009today we start turning our minds back to techniques, before we start contemplating what to do about white dwarfs
Stephan tutors us on SPH.
Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics models fluid flow using a Lagrangian method - rather than constructing a grid, as in Eulerian techniques, SPH is not constrained by prior geometry.
Rather SPH samples the fluid flow with particles, which have a compact smoothing kernel to sample overlapping adjacent fluid elements.
The modern implementation of SPH as used in astrophysics goes back to the classic paper of Hernquist and Katz (1988), who combined the relatively…
catdynamics | February 10, 2009the other, other program running in parallel with the clusters09 program at KITP is "Low Dimensional Electron Systems", which seems intensely worried about the supply of pencils, or some such - at least graphene seems to be their buzzword du jour.
They, also, are having lots of talks, most all of which are also online video and podcast.
Monday they had their "Director's Seminar", to explain what the big deal is to the rest of us, and themselves:
Sankar Das Sarma "Low Dimensional Electron Systems: A Landscape of Graphene, Quantum Hall Effects, MOSFET, Luttinger Liquid, and Beyond"
most…
catdynamics | February 9, 2009ok folks, how bad is it getting out there?
I'm hearing lots of anecdotes: pay freezes galore, hiring freezes in places, whispers of mandatory cross-the-board paycuts if budgets are as projected, firing of non-tenured staff and class size cramming planned, and, ad hoc committees forming to consider closure of departments and dismissal of tenured staff en masse.
Truth?
catdynamics | February 9, 2009the director of the central bank does what all bad boys do
the director of the central bank was late to work this morning, late enough the protests had fizzled by the time he showed, apparently
however, the intrepid reporters at Vísir tracked him down
they had the insight, that as with all naughty boys being accused of misbehaviour, Dabbi would have gone home to mummy; where they picked up his trail and followed him from the west end to town, where he pulled into the national hospital
when a reporter tried to ask him questions, he reacted rather negatively claiming to have a doctors…
catdynamics | February 9, 2009Mark Krumholz's talk is here - video and podcast
Genevieve Permentier's talk is here - cluster formation, video and podcast.
catdynamics | February 8, 2009The head of the Icelandic central bank, and former prime minister, Davíð Oddsson, has refused to resign from his post, as requested by the new prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir
Farðu bölvaður frá mér brott
Forðist þig allt sem heitir gott
Yfir þig dynji hefndar hríð
Himin og jörð þér risti níð
Update: by Kristján Jónsson, the "Mountain Skáld" (1842-1869).
Rough translation:
Go away from me now and be damned
May all that is good avoid you
Snowstorm of vengeance pile on you
Heaven and earth carve you curses
A second director is also refusing to resign, while the third has done so.…
catdynamics | February 8, 2009someone has dumped the entire collection of Congressional Research Service reports to wikileaks
this incidentally totally slashdotted their servers, but being good geeks they spawned copies to pirate bay and bittorrent
primary link is here
the congressional research service provides apolitical reports to congress at the request of representatives, the reports are public, in principle, but most are withheld at the request of congress - some because they contradict policy or politics, some because of some perceived inconvenience, principle or other issue
over 6,000 new reports were released…
catdynamics | February 6, 2009so the new senate version of the stimulus bill is revealed, the one that might actually pass.
It has a lot of cuts and some reduction in taxes, but with added programs that are not in the House version.
The final version does better for science than the original compromise being floated over the last day or two
data from ScienceDebate2008 folks
their summary shows:
NASA $1.3 billion - more than House version - I'm guessing $400M for science if the changes from original Senate version are equally spread
NSF gets $1.4 billion - that is substantially less than the House version and much of…
catdynamics | February 6, 2009The Congressional Budget Office has a blog.
That is an interesting way to get the information out. Quite handy.
catdynamics | February 6, 2009forming stars is easy, except for the details
Mark Krumholz is schooling us on the intricacies.
Awesome movies...
Binary star formation animation
Making a BIG star
Turbulence, dood - that one is just very pretty, nothing much to do with the talk.
catdynamics | February 6, 2009Yesterday, there was much talking about blue stragglers.
All preserved for posterity.
Francesco on Hubble observations of blue stragglers in galactic globulars - and VLT and GALEX too.
Barbara on more observations and modeling too.
Nathan on modeling and the mystery correlations in the amazing Nature paper too.
All with live high res video also.
This morning we move on to global properties of globulars and star formation processes.
Hm, globual is actually a potentially useful word, methinks.
catdynamics | February 6, 2009when making sausage, you not only have to get the guts to stuff with ground up meat and grain, you also have to mix in some small lumps of fat and minced offal
From a "heads-up" e-mail from the ScienceDebate 2008 team:
"I am writing to alert you to efforts underway this morning to zero out a large portion of the science funding from the Senate American Reinvestment and Recovery Act as a part of a $77.9B reduction effort led by Senators Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Susan Collins (R-ME).
As you know better than most, science and technology are responsible for half of the economic development of the…
catdynamics | February 5, 2009So, Obama ought to now find himself in control of a remarkable and efficient surveillance apparatus, capable of tracking large numbers of electronic transactions and conversations.
All probably unconstitutional, and possibly still illegal, but the temptation to use them must be there.
But how...
First, clearly, I think all former Coalition Provisional Authority employees must be put under surveillance.
They could be the biggest threat facing the nation.
No telling how many might have "gone native", become aQ symps.
Bug them. Tape their calls, survey their homes, track their financial…