Science
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Boy knitters, girl scientists
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New Cosmic Variance blogger Julianne Dalcanton draws a brilliant analogy between women in science and men in knitting.
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Yet another PhD
Congratulations to David Dawe, who passed his thesis exam today for his work on “The Dynamics of and Gravitational Radiation from Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei”. His research starts from the premise that most galaxies harbor very massive black holes (each millions or billions times the mass of the sun). We also know that…
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Après Café Sci
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There was a pretty good turnout a last night’s Café Scientifique in London. Thanks to any and all who showed up to hear my spiel about the cosmos (and, crucially, to talk back). We talked about matter & antimatter, the Cosmic Microwave Background, and even more esoteric topics like the origins of time (about which…
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The Carbon Budget of Cosmology
Antony Lewis over at CosmoCoffee has started a discussion of the environmental impact of scientists’ travel to conferences. Is this excusable, perhaps necessary, behavior, or a profligate waste of carbon? Sure, conferences are fun, especially when they’re in Taipei or Trieste, but I sometimes wonder whether those hours in the conference rooms are worth the…
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The Future of [Experimental Particle] Physics in the Times
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I was impressed (like Mark Trodden) by the lovely pictures, good PR, and even some lyrical prose on CERN‘s coming Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the New York Times. But I was annoyed by this statement: For the past generation, physics has been in something of a rut. There have been plenty of findings from…
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Café Scientifique
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I’ll be speaking at 7pm Tuesday, 16 January, at London’s Cafe Scientifique, held at the Photographers’ Gallery near Leicester Square. I’ll expound on “Why the Universe isn’t Boring” for about 20 minutes, followed by about an hour of questions and, apparently, free beer. I’ll be talking about why there is matter rather than an even…
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Signs and portents
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I can see Comet McNaught from my office window, bright in the evening sky due West over London!
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State of fear
Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to sign up with MI5 to receive an email notice when the “Threat Level” changes. Right now it’s “severe”, but they have the fine-grained menu of “low”, “moderate”, “substantial”, “severe” and “critical” to choose from — we certainly need that much more detail compared to the meagre green/yellow/red of the…
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The Guardian: Ivy Ceilings and Human Spaceflight
On a day in which Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the US House of Representatives, the Guardian reminds us that there are still plenty of jobs that discriminate between the sexes, including “Physics professors: There is a grand total of 515 physics professors in the UK, and a mere 25 of them…
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Carnival
My post on the topology of the Universe has been included in the latest edition of the physical science and technology “blog carnival”, Philosophia Naturalis, hosted on Chris Rowan’s excellent blog, Highly Allochthonous. If you liked what I wrote, there’s lots more physics, math and geology excitement for you over there.
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