Music
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Update
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Too busy for much blogging for the next few weeks. In the meantime: First, my grad students: Goodbye to one just finishing, hello to my new one, congratulations to the one who just transferred to official PhD-student status, and, finally, to the one staying on as a postdoc! I’m excited that I’m able to still…
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Apocalypse or synchronicity?
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End of the world or age of Aquarius?
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Space-age rapping
Also in honor of Sputnik, the best lyric of the year: “Driving herself crazy/ like that astronaut lady“, from the Common/Lily Allen collaboration, “Drivin’ Me Wild” (deconstructed by the Guardian here).
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Summer Break
Well, Summer break is over, the days are surprisingly short already, the sky is rarely clear, and the students are back. Warm-weather highlights ranged from the intellectual pleasures of my visits to Portugal and Chicago, to the rather more visceral ones of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation at the Roundhouse, The Hold Steady at Shepherds Bush,…
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Death of Punk, thirty years later
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A sad note from the other end of the pop-music spectrum: less than a year after the close of his downtown New York club, CBGB, its owner, Hilly Kristal, has died at the un-rock’n’roll age of 75 (but still too soon, of course). Intending to start a very different kind of club (the initials stand…
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More rock-star astrophysics
Combining as it does my vocation with my avocation, it’s impossible to resist an easy post about our favorite rock-star PhD student, especially when he’s made the Guardian’s Leader (aka Editorial) page and the front of the BBC News site (complete with a spiffy pic of the rock star with our new head of group).…
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Andrew’s post-gig guide
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When I’m not hanging out with astronomers or rock stars who want to be astronomers, I’ve been out to see rock stars (or at least rock ‘n’ roll journeymen and women) in their usual habitats. The Mekons have long been a favorite (obsession?) of mine: formed in Leeds during the UK punk explosion, they celebrated…
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Hard Rock in the Solar System
The Zodiacal Light is a fuzzy glow visible in the morning and evening sky, stretching along the line along which the constellations of the zodiac appear — the ecliptic that we now know to be the plane made up of the sun and the orbits of the planets. Observations of the zodiacal light show it…
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We’re the young generation and we’ve got something to say
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Coming down from a weekend of marking a couple of hundred exam problems, I spent a highbrow night in watching documentaries about Britain’s Coast, its buildings and, by no means least, the Monkees. The Monkees — the 60s manufactured TV band — have always held a fascination for me: not just because of their more…
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I realize that I haven’t posted in nearly two weeks. Between marking exams, gardening, attempting to solve differential equations and calculate integrals with several hundred terms, inspiration has been lacking. Here are some things I may yet get to: The book launch for Universe or Multiverse, edited by QMW Cosmologist Bernard Carr. Entertaining, for sure,…
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