Science
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UK Physics on the chopping block
Today we heard that the (bizarrely agglomerated) UK Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills will be significantly cutting the physics budget that comes through the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). STFC was formed earlier this year out of PPARC (Particle Physics and Astrophysics) and the CCLRC (which ran big facilities like the Rutherford Appleton…
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More PhD goodness
Congratulations to Joe Zuntz, recipient of Imperial Astrophysics’ latest Doctorate for successfully defending his entertainingly-titled Ph.D. Thesis, “Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectrum Estimation and Prediction with Curious Methods and Theories”. Joe had been my student since 2004, working on topics from hard-core data analysis with the MAXIPOL team to exploring the repercussions of exotic theories…
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Cosmic Rays
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A few weeks ago, the Auger Project published results (with a news story here) from searching for the properties of the very highest-energy Cosmic Rays, determining that they seem to have come from nearby “Active Galactic Nuclei”, which are believed to be Super-Massive Black Holes at the centers of galaxies, surrounded by discs of accreting…
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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…