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Beautiful Evidence
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One excuse for not blogging over the last month was a couple of weeks spent in North America, first in and around New York and New Jersey, visiting my family, and then a stop in Montreal for the annual collaboration meeting for the EBEX CMB balloon project, which we expect to launch on its science…
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Good Cause #2: Revenge of the Mekons
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The Mekons are the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. They started in the 70s as a punk band from Leeds but by the mid-1980s had picked up fiddles and mandolins to go with their loud guitars, and learned to love Hank Williams and Gram Parsons as much as they’ve sadly learned to hate the…
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Good Cause #1: Imperial Students Power the Developing World
I try not to ask too much of my readers, but this post and the next are about a couple of worthwhile causes I’ve come across of late. The first project is the BBC World Challenge competition, supporting “social entrepreneurs”, grassroots projects making an impact in the developing world. One of the twelve finalists, e.quinox,…
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Astrostatistics at the Royal Astronomical Society
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This week I’m co-organizing a meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society in London, “Novel methods for the exploitation of large astronomical and cosmological data sets“. It’s an unwieldy title, but we’ll be discussing the implication of the huge flood of astronomical data for cosmology and astrophysics. How do we deal with the sheer volume —…
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Light and Gravity
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Yesterday, we at Imperial hosted the latest instalment of the London Cosmology Discussion Meetings (LCDM, which is a cosmology in-joke, of course), with about 40 participants — most of them students — from Imperial, QMUL and UCL. We heard talks about observing clusters of galaxies, different theories of gravity, and the observational repercussions of cosmic…
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Science is Vital
I don’t suppose that there are many readers of this blog who are not aware of the Science Is Vital campaign for the support of UK science, but just in case: in response to the likelihood of continuing cuts to the UK science budget as spun by business secretary Vince Cable, we in the science…
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Epistemology and Ontology Among Friends
A week or so ago, I had an extended “conversation” on Twitter with two very old friends, Erik Davis and Ted Friedman. Erik’s a writer, specializing in “modern esoterica” which ranges from psychedelia and Led Zeppelin to Philip K Dick and Cthulu. Like me, Ted’s an academic, but he’s Professor of Communication at Georgia State…
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Consider a Spherical Cow (Company)
One of my old friends from graduate school, and a colleague to the present day, Lloyd Knox — whom you may remember from such cosmology hits as the Dark Energy Song — has started an initiative to create “short documentary videos to demonstrate the explanatory power of simple physical models and to help us understand…
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“Public Service Review”?
A few months ago, I received a call from someone at the “Public Service Review”, supposedly a glossy magazine distributed to UK policymakers and influencers of various stripes. The gentleman on the line said that he was looking for someone to write an article for his magazine giving an example of what sort of space-related…
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Arvo Pärt at 75
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Today, among other less auspicious anniversaries, is one very worth celebrating: Arvo Pärt’s 75th Birthday. The Estonian “holy minimalist” composer has been featured at the BBC Proms this summer, including performance of his first new symphony since the early 1970s, his take on the St John Passion, and my favorite, the short, mesmerising Cantus in…