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100 Years
I have just had the honor of celebrating the 100th Birthday of Dora Jaffe, my grandmother, born March 14, 1911 (a date she shares with Albert Einstein!), in Shepetivka, Ukraine (then part of Russia). Her father, Leib (Lewis) Greenberg, emigrated just before the war, stranding her and her mother until they could make it across…
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Tacos and Power Spectra in LA
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One of the perks (perqs?) of academia is that occasionally I get an excuse to escape the damp grey of London Winters. The Planck Satellite is an international collaboration and, although largely backed by the European Space Agency, it has a large contribution from US scientists, who built the CMB detectors for Planck’s HFI instrument,…
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Les autres choses (scientifique)
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I’ve been meaning to give a shout-out to my colleagues on the ADAMIS team at the APC (AstroParticule et Cosmologie) Lab at the Université Paris 7 for a while: in addition to doing lots of great work on Planck, EBEX, PolarBear and other important CMB and cosmology experiments, they’ve also been running a group blog…
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Don Kirshner, R.I.P.
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Rock’n’roll impresario Don Kirshner, “the man with the golden ear”, but better known to members of my family as “Cousin Donny”, has died at 76. He was a fixture of American adolescence from the 50s through the 70s (when rock’n’roll was mostly about adolescence). He achieved his remarkable success behind the scenes of the music…
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Normal-ish
Ok, the blog is back up. Disasters averted and the design is a little less ragged than before, but I’m not sure of the details. I want to test that I can still post, and this seems a good opportunity to solicit comments to help me refine my aesthetic sensibilities. Are the sidebars over on…
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Oops!
I’ve recently “upgraded” my software which seems to be playing havoc with the format of the blog. The blog is visible, and in many ways nicer than before, but I’ve lost all of my lovely formatting… I hope we’ll be back to normal soon. In any event, you can probably ignore this and read my…
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Planck: First results
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The Satellite now known as the Planck Surveyor was first conceived in the mid-1990s, in the wake of the results from NASA’s COBE Satellite, the first to detect primordial anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), light from about 400,000 years after the big bang. (I am a relative latecomer to the project, having only…
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Marking Time: Longplayer
Yesterday, I went to visit Longplayer, Jem Finer‘s thousand-year composition, for the eleventh anniversary of its first note, played on New Years Day, 1999. Longplayer is currently controlled (performed?) from Trinity Buoy Wharf in London’s simultaneously desolate and overbuilt Docklands, covered in newly built flats and offices, with hardly a human in sight. Jem started…
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Bayes in the World II: Million Pound Drop
Embarrassing update: as pointed out by Vladimir Nesov in the comments, all of my quantitative points below are incorrect. To maximize expected winnings, you should bet on whichever alternative you judge to be most likely. If you have a so-called logarithmic utility function — which already has the property of growing faster for small amounts…
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Bayes in the World I: Wikileaks
I’ve come across a couple bits of popular/political culture that give me the opportunity to discuss one of my favorite topics: the uses and abuses of probability theory. The first is piece by Nate Silver of the New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog, dedicated to trying to crunch the political numbers of polls and other data…