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Mekonathon
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As I’ve said repeatedly, the Mekons are my favorite rock ’n’ roll band. Their music has sustained me since about 1990, after I first saw them at Chicago’s Cabaret Metro, already more than a decade into their careers. By then, they had already gone beyond their punk roots, invented alt.country avant la lettre, and skewered…
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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…
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Senses working overtime
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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…
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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…
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Submission
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Today, our Astrophysics Group at Imperial College submitted our first application for a new STFC “Consolidated Grant“. These are intended to cover all of the astrophysics being done in the department for three years at a time, combining aspects of former so-called “standard” and “rolling” grants, both of which it replaces. (If you don’t know…
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Spacetacular!
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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…
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End of Term
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I’ve just finished another term, in fact the heaviest teaching load I’ve ever had at once: a twenty-six hour lecture course, three hours a week as one of several computer lab “demonstrators”, and another four hours or so per week in first-year student tutorials. For those from outside of the Imperial system: our tutorials are…
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EBEX in Flight
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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…
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Industrial Action?
This week is the 100th anniversary of one of the most important events in the Labor movement (at least back in the US): the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a disaster in which the garment factory’s sweatshop conditions led to the death of almost 150 workers, mostly Jewish immigrant women, locked by their bosses into their…
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NAM 2011 — On the Lookout for Cosmologists
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(Apologies to the non-cosmologists and non-Brits who won’t find much of interest in the following.) This year’s UK National Astronomy Meeting will be held 17-21 April, in Llandudno, North Wales. In the usual way of British “seaside resorts” (scare quotes are certainly appropriate for that phrase) Llandudno sticks frighteningly out into the Irish Sea but,…