catdynamics | June 5, 2007The first ever tropical cyclone in history is about to hit the Gulf of Oman after which it makes landfall in Iran
h/t in comments on "fatigue post"
Wunderblog has the details
Area has no experience dealing with this weather, and there are a lot of development and industrial and oild facilities at risk.
The Nimitz and Stennis were in the gulf of Oman about 3 days ago "showing the flag" (in you face, Iran), presumably the US still has enough weather satellites to have seen this coming and backed them out into the Arabian Sea east of the cyclone track.
All these changes.
catdynamics | June 4, 2007The Incoherent Ponderer does a quick'n'dirty analysis of physics department rankings and how their graduates place.
Shit scary stuff.
Don't just look at the absolute numbers, look at the percentages...
catdynamics | June 4, 2007Prof Frank Douglas is resigning from MIT over the James Sherley tenure case...!
Something tells me this story is not over yet.
catdynamics | June 2, 2007Joe P. is ok
For PSU & xPSU: heard from him today, they're still out in hostile country and took some more casualties.
He appreciates hearing from people, just casual chat stuff. More care packages wouldn't hurt either, he can always share.
catdynamics | June 2, 2007Steve the News Blog Guy Gilliard has died
He was one of the early and more passionate bloggers, he wrote well and often and provided interesting perspective and insight on many issues, in particular the war in Iraq.
He wasn't always right, no one is, but he understood the situation better than most of DC or main stream journalist and he was not shy about telling us.
He'll be missed.
catdynamics | June 1, 2007It is ok to piss in the forest.
It is natural, the bear behind you does it too, the plants need the water, and you're even recycling some valuable nitrogen and salt compounds.
It is not ok for 8 million people to take a piss in Central Park.
This is why climate change is important.
The problem is not the working schlob in his SUV, the problem is that he is one of a hundred million.
We exhale carbon dioxide, and that is ok. What is not ok is that we dump several gigatons of carbon in CO2 into the atmosphere every year for many decades.
This is not a matter of marxist theory or liberal…
catdynamics | May 31, 2007It is a blue friday, somewhere, and we precognitively ask the Mighty iPod One as topical question of stellar importance, remembering that we have the reduced traveling set...
So, oh mighty iPod One: what is the deal with pulsars in globular clusters? Are they high mass single progenitors with anomalous cooling, or are they low mass electron capture supernovae descendants, formed in intermediate mass binaries?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Get Over You - Undertones
The Crossing: Always Look On The Bright Side of Life - Monty Python
The Crown: The Selecter - The Selecter…
catdynamics | May 31, 2007Lubos makes a provocative comment to my contemplation of Griffin's comments on climate change
I can't resist following it up, despite its inappropriateness.
Consider war.
People are killed in war, but we as a culture distinguish the manner and motive.
Let us ignore the issue of "who started it" and just consider the process.
People fighting the war kill their opponent, it is a matter of kill or be killed and is broadly considered justified.
People die incidentally to the process of fighting. The "collateral casualties". This is an inevitable consequence of the process as it is conducted in…
catdynamics | May 31, 2007NASA admin Mike Griffin noted that deciding the current climate is the best is a rather arrogant position.
Ok, there is a point there. But, we're making a choice whether we like it or not, so what should we choose?.
Not choosing is also a choice, and one no less arrogant.
The preindustrial mean atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was about 275 ppm, plus or minus maybe 5%, with rare intermittent spikes which drew down rapidly, probably due to volcanic injections followed by oceanic and biospheric re-equilibrium.
The current concentration just went over 375 ppm and is trending inexorably…
catdynamics | May 31, 2007It is a Blue Moon tonight at 9 pm Eastern.
For some of us, but not everyone, strangely enough.
At least if you're in the Americas. Rest of the world sees this full moon, on June 1st and has a blue moon in June instead. They have full moons June 1st and 30th, whereas the US has full moons May 2nd and 31st.
That is even rarer than a normal Blue Moon, but not amazingly so,
catdynamics | May 30, 2007Interesting short opinion article in Wired
Gregg Easterbrook provides a sensible short list of what NASA priorities ought to be and contrast them with the reality.
Interesting reading, and some good points.
I don't know if Mike Griffin's thoughts on climate change will endear him to Easterbrook, but Griffin does rather clumsily raise an interesting point that we should return to.
catdynamics | May 30, 2007Why do black holes stick around in galaxies despite their violent dynamical history?
A brilliant young postdoc has an answer!
Dr Bogdanovic has a nifty press release on why black holes do tend to stick around in galaxies
Recent results in numerical relativity have shown that the gravitational radiation reaction is strong and asymmetric.
What this means is that when black holes coalesce through gravitational radiation emission, the final stage of emission is asymmetric, and if the black holes have different (but not too different masses) or different spins, there is an impulsive recoil to the…
catdynamics | May 30, 2007
Click through for high-res version
From Mathias Pedersen, with permission
This is excellent, even got the planets accurate and as close to scale as one might manage.
Good stuff.
catdynamics | May 29, 2007You have got to like a book which concludes with a tale from the Edda...
"Traveling at the Speed of Thought" is a new book by Daniel Kennefick on the history of the search for gravitational radiation.
It is a compact little book, at just under 300 pp.
Princeton University Press
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-11727-0
Daniel knows of what he writes, as a physics PhD from the Caltech Theoretical Astrophysics group (disclaimer: so was I, and I overlapped with Daniel by a year or two).
In addition to his work as a historian of science, he has also published a number of papers on gravitational radiation and…
catdynamics | May 29, 2007The good thing about having semi-permanent outposts in alternative jurisdiction is you get so much more freedom in personnel matters
The WPSU base has some useful amenities for faculty
catdynamics | May 29, 200728 new planets announced at the AAS summer meeting
it is the Berkeley/Carnegie/Australian group - interesting bunch, including mostly Jovian planets with orbital radii greater than 1 AU.
Several are around G-subgiants, which are mostly descendants of A and F stars, somewhat more massive than the Sun (mass estimates can be hard for those stars) , four multiple planet systems and three planetary systems containing a brown dwarf as well as planet.
Hm, the most interesting new one seems to be missing from the list... I guess we'll get a separate announcement on that one.
Good haul, not done…
catdynamics | May 29, 2007Not satisfied with having conquered the 17th century canon, the Astrophysical Data System has a new (to me) feature...
The ADS now lists proposals.
A colleague of mine found this by accident, when he came across the phrase "all important" in an abstract. This is a curiously immodest turn for a paper, but it turned out to be an XMM proposal... like this one
Wot?
A quick browse revealed a shocking number of "all important" entried in ADS, and the 2006 proposals for XMM and Chandra and NOAO
Cool.
Now, NASA usually publishes successful proposal abstracts as a matter of policy, if you know…
catdynamics | May 28, 2007There were three profound topics that I recall debating in my first year as a graduate student.
I mean real student debates over a heterogenous assortment of alcohol and gallons of bad coffee.
One was whether the Clash were sell-outs or deeply sardonic (sold-out, clearly);
one was on the pros and cons of unionization (long story, MIT libertarians vs Europeans);
but the longest was on the Axiom of Choice
Mark C-C explains the axiom of choice
I like the "given a collection of bins each containing at least one object, exactly one object from each bin can be picked and gathered in another bin…
catdynamics | May 28, 2007if you have a fine strong piece of metal, one you can barely bend, you can still break it with a bit of patient persistence
repeated bending will lead to metal fatigue, cracks will nucleate and migrate, then grow, until suddenly there is catastrophic failure.
Not from any stress that on its own would break the piece, but rather from persistent cumulative light stress that concentrates flaws into weak points until a finely engineered working tool falls to pieces.
On a completely unrelated issue, here is a zoomable chart of US Army division deployment during world war II.
Out of almost 100…