Science
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Existential Detectives and Bad Religion
“I ♥ Huckabees,” the new movie from David O. Russell, features Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman as “Jaffe & Jaffe, Existential Investigators.” (I’m always pleased to see my family name in lights.) Not a deeply philosophical movie, but entertaining and intelligent enough. Smarter than, say, this commentary from last weekend’s Guardian by Mike Purton, “Physics…
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Viva Hubble?
According to National Public Radio: Report Discourages NASA Plan to Save Hubble A confidential report commissioned by NASA has concluded that the space agency’s plan to use a robot to save the Hubble telescope is highly risky. The robot would install two new instruments and replace batteries and gyroscopes. But the report suggests NASA should…
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Big Eyed Beans from Venus
(First in a short series on Astro department Christmas parties) Just back from the Oxford Astronomy Department (where I proudly count myself as a visitor) Christmas/Holiday party. Aside from a fairly staggering amount of booze, featured entertainment was “Big-Eyed Beans From Venus”, a bluesy five-piece featuring students and postdocs from the astro group (and one…
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Science, Money and Teaching in Britain
With the closure of University departments throughout England (Chemistry at Exeter and Architecture at Cambridge just announced this week), and the Science Minister called to the Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee today, UK science funding has been making headlines (or at least showing up on media radar) over the last couple of days. Currently, departmental…
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Cosmology and schnitzel
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Recently back from a trip to the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik outside of Munich, Germany, where I talked with colleagues about ESA‘s upcoming Planck Surveyor mission to measure the Cosmic Microwave Background (which we’re working on here at Imperial College), and, of course, eat such delicacies as wandererpfandl mit hirschbraten and weissbraten mit weissbier. More on…
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NASA’s Future: man or machine?
New York Times Editorial: NASA’s Budgetary Gift Horse: With its hands free to redistribute a hefty 2005 budget, the space agency should funnel more resources into its unmanned programs. Congress … granted NASA unprecedented authority to move funds about … to stitch together a viable program within the available resources. That puts a special burden…
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Google Scholar
I just learned about Google Scholar, a new search engine devoted strictly to so-called scholarly or academic publishing, apparently replacing the html links used for the usual google ranking with citations (i.e., references). I’m not yet sure this is better than the ArXiv that I mentioned in this post, or subject-specific search engines such as…
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Science in Bush’s America
Wired News: Science Braces for Second Term Climate change. The teaching of Darwinian evolution. Stem Cell research and reproductive rights. Industrial waste. Exploring Mars. Many or most of us scientists disagree with the Bush Administration’s policies on many of these and other issues. That becomes a real problem when they start interfering with the flow…
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Academic blogs
Bloggercon happened last weekend at Stanford University in the USA. One of the sessions was on Blogging in Academia; I wasn’t there, but anyone can listen to it at IT Conversations. The moderator was Jay Rosen, and there are notes on the sessions at his site, and on the blogs One Pilgrim’s Walk and JZip.…
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Theory?
Evolution textbooks row goes to court: “United States: School board in court after it tried to placate Christian fundamentalist parents by placing a sticker on science textbooks saying evolution was ‘theory, not fact’.” (Via Guardian Unlimited.) With their usual linguistic slight of hand, the fanatics formerly known as the Christian Right have managed to conflate…
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