Science
-
Kind of Bayesian
·
[Apologies — this is long, technical, and there are too few examples. I am putting it out for commentary more than anything else…] In some recent articles and blog posts (including one in response to astronomer David Hogg), Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman has outlined the philosophical position that he and some of his colleagues…
-
Guest post: finding the most distant quasar
·
A couple of weeks ago, a few of my astrophysics colleagues here at Imperial found the most distant quasar yet discovered, the innocuous red spot in the centre of this image: One of them, Daniel Mortlock, has offered to explain a bit more: Surely there’s just no way that something which happened 13 billion years…
-
Sepia Astronomers
·
When cleaning out an office here in the Astrophysics Group in the Physics Department at Imperial College, we came across this photo: The background is the Mark I telescope at Jodrell Bank, and the man in the middle with the notebook has been identified as either Fred Hoyle or Francis Graham-Smith (which is more likely…
-
Distant objects and nearby music
Normally, I would be writing about the discovery of the most distant quasar by Imperial Astronomers using the UKIDSS survey (using excellent Bayesian methods), but Andy and Peter have beaten me to it. To make up for it, I’ll try to get one of the authors of the paper to discuss it here themselves, soon.…
-
Copenhagen
·
Like my friend and colleague Peter Coles, I am just returned from the fine wine-soaked dinner for the workshop “Cosmology and Astroparticle physics from the LHC to PLANCK” held at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. It is an honor to visit the place where so many discoveries of 20th Century physics were made, and…
-
More from the Spherical Cows
In a very different way of translating scientific ideas into other forms and media, my friend, colleague and collaborator Lloyd Knox is back with a new series of short video documentaries under the auspices of his Spherical Cow Company. After a hiatus of a few months, they set themselves a challenge of producing three videos…
-
Senses working overtime
·
I listened over the weekend to a story on the podcast of the radio show Studio 360 about Wanda Diaz-Merced, a blind astronomer. She is working hard at “sonification” — representing astronomical data in sound rather than in graphs. Of course, this works best for certain kinds of data — I gather from the piece…
-
Beyond Entropy and Ourselves
Last summer, I helped make a (fake) time machine, an exercise in “creative misinterpretation” (in the words of my architect partner, Shin Egashira). This was part of the Beyond Entropy project organized by the Architecture Association — we showed it then in Venice but now Londoners will get a chance to see the work in…
-
Spacetacular!
·
What are blogs for, if not self-publicity? In that vein, I’ll be appearing at the Spacetacular! night on April 12, in honor of Yuri’s night: the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first-ever manned space flight. The evening is organized by Londonist editor Matt Brown along with comedian and presenter Helen Keen, hosting a line-up of…
-
EBEX in Flight
·
Many of my colleagues in the EBEX experiment have just lit out for the west. Specifically, the team is heading off to Palestine (pronounced “Palesteen“), Texas, to get the telescope and instrument ready for its big Antarctic long-duration balloon flight at the end of the year, when we hope to gather our first real scientific…
Search
Recent Posts
Categories
- Academia (64)
- Art (57)
- Blog (1)
- Miscellanea (101)
- Music (71)
- Net (63)
- News (28)
- Politics (110)
- Science (332)
- Uncategorized (4)