Science
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Faith in Science
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Paul Davies had an op-ed in the New York Times, comparing scientists’ reliance “on the the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way” with religious faith. He wants to eschew both in favor of regarding “the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary…
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Scooped
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This week I had one of those disheartening experiences that happens every now and then in science: a collaborator and I discovered that something we had been working on has already been done. The competing paper had been out for about a year, but we missed it (even more embarassingly, I knew about the paper,…
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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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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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Is this still the Space Age?
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Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the dawn of the Space Age, measured from the launch of Sputnik. Google has a good celebratory logo in its honor: Now that we’re supposedly in the Information Age, does that mean the Space Age is over? I do spend most of my day on the internet — but…
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Me, the MP, Planck and Paris
If I’ve got any longtime readers, they may recall that I spent a week paired with Anne Snelgrove MP in the UK Parliament a couple of years ago, as part of a program connecting scienctists with Members of Parliament (described here and here). This week, Anne kept up her side of the bargain and visited…
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Reasonable Demands for the Caped Crusader
Most of us male academics acknowledge that it’s hard being a female in the male-dominated world of physics, with our own academic sort of testosterone and structural prejudices. Imagine what it’s like as a superhero: [Via Bedazzled, which also points to a campy Batgirl trailer (not to mention an unrelated weird clip of Astrud Gilberto…
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More on Google Sky
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Google Sky has been adding scientifically interesting (and maybe useful) astrophysical data since its introduction a few weeks ago. In particular, Geoff Marcy has added known exoplanets (i.e., planets around other stars) and Joshua Bloom has added support for VOEvents, a data format for distributing information about astrophysical events happening in real time, such as…
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Doctor Rock Star, and his younger peers
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Congratulations to Dr Brian May, PhD, for successfully defending his PhD thesis, “Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud”. At the time of his defense, I was up in Durham, lecturing to the mostly younger incoming class of STFC-supported UK grad students. Best of luck to them, too, and let’s hope they can finish before…
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Google Sky
Google has just released a new version of its Google Earth software — one that lets you look up to the sky instead of down to the ground. It’s essentially a consumer-grade Virtual Observatory, like the UK AstroGrid, the US National Virtual Observatory and the Euro-VO project. It’s not so obvious when you fire it…
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