• Counterculture RIPs

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    Two crucial figures from outside the mainstream of American culture have died. Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010) has been hanging around, writing about and stirring up trouble in New York’s Greenwich Village since the 1950s as a writer, poet, occasional political activist and rock ‘n’ roller. First in the late 60s and early 70s and occasionally thereafter,…

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  • The Planck Sky Previewed

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    The Planck Satellite was launched in May 2009, and started regular operations late last summer. This spring, we achieved an important milestone: the satellite has observed the whole sky. To celebrate, the Planck team have released an image of the full sky. The telescope has detectors which can see the sky with 9 bands at…

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  • Anonymous Comments

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    We get most of the official feedback on our teaching through a mechanism called SOLE — Student On-Line Evaluations — which asks a bunch of questions on the typical “Very Poor” … “Very Good” scale. I’ve written about my results before — they are useful, and there is even some space for ad-hoc comments, but…

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  • Training Scientists: What’s the Point?

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    My colleagues and I spend what is probably an inordinate amount of time complaining about the occasional lapses of the basic skills of our students, their inability to take notes, their obsession with marks and what’s going to be on the exams. Because, like everyone else, we like to complain. But pretty often I get…

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  • Pop Culture Notes

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    I’ve just finished marking this year’s Cosmology exams — I’m quite pleased with the outcome. But that’s meant that I’ve rewarded myself with some happily lowbrow (meant as a descriptive, not normative, term) entertainment: I finally got around to the finale of Lost. Watching it, I was disappointed with the purgatorial explanation for this season’s…

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  • Monsters from the Id

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    I’ve volunteered at the last minute to appear on a panel following a screening of Monsters from the Id, a documentary about 50s Sci-Fi movies and, apparently, their influence on science itself. The filmmaker is Homer Hickam, an engineer and novelist, author of Rocket Boys, the “novelized” memoir of his rocket-obsessed post-Sputnik childhood in the West…

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  • Building a time machine in the Dorset woods

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    A few weeks ago I wrote about my visit to Geneva as part of the Beyond Entropy art/architecture/science collaboration sponsored by the Architecture Association. We continued our work last weekend in the Dorset woods visiting the AA’s Hooke Park site, a 350-acre forest with a bit more space for workshops than their Bedford Square buildings in…

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  • Sympathy for the Music Industry

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    A couple of my friends have got into a bit of a spat on the internet. Megan McArdle, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote “The Freeloaders”, arguing that file sharing, as practiced by today’s 20-something young adults, is destroying the music industry. Marc Weidenbaum, who writes the wonderful disquiet blog, first first answered in…

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  • Herschel Papers (and a few words about Planck)

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    Results from the first major science papers from the Herschel Satellite were released this week at a conference in Holland. Launched almost a year ago on the same rocket as Planck, Herschel is an infrared and sub-millimeter telescope, which lets it see not only the stars that generate the visible light we see with our eyes…

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  • Secular or Sinister?

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    I first encountered Cristina Odone as one of the more strident contributors to the BBC Radio 4 Today Show‘s “Thought for the day“, a daily three-minute slot inexplicably (to me) handed over to some religious believer. In her blog post for the Telegraph today, however, Odone has opened up an ad hominem attack on the…

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