catdynamics | February 5, 2009Sign of the times.
Sotheby's Realty closes Aspen office
Hm, wonder how low those nice "smaller" pseudo-victorian homes on the north side, by the ACP are going to.
catdynamics | February 5, 2009most people really only think in microeconomic terms
and most of the time that is fine, except when it is not
an example of this, is the meme that governments ought to cut expenditure when economic times are hard, by analogy with families, which react rationally to budget shortages and overexpenditure by cutting back on spending
but, as was famously elucidated by one of the few economist to become rather rich through application of his own macroeconomic theories, this only works in the linear perturbative limit
we are not in the linear perturbative limit right now
covariance terms are large…
catdynamics | February 5, 2009just had an occasion to zip about the country a bit, and feel a need to free-associate random bits of anecdotal impression
The US Senate has stopped vote on the stimulus package, for tonight.
In the process of bipartisan cutting the package seems to have grown by few tens of billions.
Couple of days ago I was in line at a university cafeteria.
A well dressed young woman was holding up the line while she asked for a custom pack of sushi be made up - not someone to eat a 20 minute old pack of california roll, her.
But, oops, she had no money, and no funds left in her pre-paid campus card.
No…
catdynamics | February 5, 2009Krugman worried that any prospects for the US avoiding depression would be scuppered by the collective action of the "fifty Herbert Hoovers" - the individual state governors acting to cut spending as the federal government tried to boost spending.
If the states deflate faster than the feds can inflate, then depression comes.
Apparently that is not the threat, but the 99 Herberts in the upper house of congress.
Some of the states are cutting brutally - my proximate indicator is from the cuts I hear passed down, planned for or rumoured in the university systems. Pay freezes and hiring…
catdynamics | February 5, 2009Blue straggler stars are, formally, main sequence stars that are too blue and bright on the colour-magnitude diagram - they are more massive than they ought to be given their age, is the other way of looking at it.
They are found in the field, and you might rightly ponder how we can tell, but in globular clusters there are lots, they really stick out, and they are rather fascinating.
And they make great Hubble Space Telescope targets, being rather blue, in crowded regions and teach you about physics, stellar processes etc.
Blue Straggler Stars (wiki):
Nice illustration of Blue Stragglers…
catdynamics | February 3, 2009What is string theory anyway?
Well, now you can find out.
Joe Polchinski at UCSB just gave the Director's Blackboard Seminar at KITP, and as usual it is webcast and podcast.
Go be inspired.
catdynamics | February 2, 2009Globular Clusters - what drives the evolution of the mass function?
Mark Gieles take is online here
Mike Fall's preceding talk on the subject is not available online. Should have been there...
catdynamics | January 30, 2009in which we contemplate a compact accretor and a low mass donor, in theory
if you have a compact object, like a neutron star or black holes, then the potential energy at the surface is very negative, so any mass that falls onto the compact object may release a large amount of energy per unit mass
since this large amount of energy may be radiated (must in the case of a neutron star) and the object is compact, the characteristic temperature of the object is high - so they are typically x-ray bright
however, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to get a low mass star to be "in contact"…
catdynamics | January 29, 2009Grauniad reports Iceland to be fast tracked for EU membership.
We'll see, public could swing either way on the issue in the interval.
Real problem is the fish. If the grounds are opened to EU vessels and Iceland loses control of the catch allotment, then the fish will all die.
Yup, this has hit the Icelandic papers also.
Current spin is how good it'd be for the EU - as good as finding a whale...
catdynamics | January 29, 2009in which we ponder the globular cluster mass function and whether the current mass function really is lognormal and how this came about given that everybody but everybody believes the initial mass function must have been a power law...
wednesday afternoon was a good introduction and lively discussion of theoretical processes affecting globular cluster lifetimes and mass evolution - including some pdf of slides.
Just so we all remember what we are talking about:
log-normal
power law
people in other fields might know these as Somebody's Law, but physical scientists do not deign to name the…
catdynamics | January 28, 2009Cosmic Collisions: Galaxies, an astronomy special, one of three,
is airing tonight (wednesday 18th January) at 10 pm eastern/pacific, 9 pm central
oh it is on the discovery channel.
PS: here is the full schedule for Cosmic Collisions
the associated discover space web page
I hear two more "Cosmic Collisions" shows may be shown, don't know when.
I haven't seen the final version, but they had lots of cool graphics and animations, and inteviews with terribly distinguished and erudite scientists explaining clearly and cogently the wonders of it all.
Er, and me.
So, if you can't get to sleep, now…
catdynamics | January 28, 2009I missed the session on tuesday of "Short Talks: Structure of GCs and Their Dynamics",
fortunately the audio and video feed is here for posterity
Fujii, Varri and Waters present.
catdynamics | January 28, 2009how big is a globular cluster?
There are many ways to measure the size of a globular cluster, both observationally and theoretically.
This causes some confusion, especially when theorists try to talk to observers, or vica versa.
rc - the core radius
there are at least three definitions of this:
1) the observer definition is that this is the radius at which the surface brightness has dropped to half its central value; this assumes the surface brightness is flat at small radii and the core is resolved, otherwise the central surface brightness is underestimated by the convolution of the point…
catdynamics | January 26, 2009wherein you can learn about the "No Teleportation Theorem" and why there is no classical Scattering Theorem
or some such nonsense...
me, podcast with bonus video feed.
Argh.
one of the nice, but occasionally disturbing things about the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics is that they podcast and video essentially all their talks,
including
this one, with the soporifiic droning of yours truly
this is very, very disturbing...
there is also an audio podcast, not that I'd recommend having this on your iPod on long drives.
catdynamics | January 24, 2009"Making supplemental appropriations for job preservation and creation, infrastructure investment, energy efficiency and science..."
So, the supplemental funding bill is moving through the House committee in sub-sections as different "Titles" of it are processed through the political sausage factory.
It is "House Resolution 1" - which is a statement on its priority level.
Huffington Post very kindly put up a pdf - all 647 seven pages.
Science is in Title III - starting page 48.
What have we got?
NASA: $400M for science - at least $250M of which to accelerate climate research missions; $150M…
catdynamics | January 23, 2009Situation in Iceland is getting worse every day.
PM is out; fish exports are down sharply because of lack of buyers - partly lack of credit by European importers, partly economic collapse in eastern and southern Europe - this could crush any prospect for short term recovery.
Larger protests every day, with pattern of escalation - torches and teargas stage right now.
After violence earlier this week the protest organiser asked people to go home so that weekend drinking wouldn't lead to the situation getting out of hand tonight.
So, it is quiet tonight in Iceland.
But tomorrow is protest…
catdynamics | January 23, 2009it is still raining?!
so we have an east coaster telling us about actual data
on x-ray binaries
in clusters, globular clusters
in other galaxies...
there is an open-to-the-program-members blog over on the cluster09 wikispace.
It has some good summary of yesterdays in depth discussion on runaway mergers in the afternoon session.
Chandra image of NGC4697
so our pivot point is the issue of low mass x-ray binaries (LMXBs) - mass transfer binaries, with compact primary, generally a neutron star, and a companion with a mass lower than some vague mass that is either about a solar mass, or…