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Science: Commercially Useful or Theoretically Outstanding?
Today was the next drip in the ongoing water torture that is the upshot of the government’s funding cuts on UK science: BIS Minister Vince Cable gave the coalition government’s first major speech on science. Rumors have been flying around of cuts of 20-30%, and we have been searching for any hints of the Government’s…
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B/E at the Biennale
As a scientist, I am used to my work being read by my peers, and I’ve made it into the occasional magazine or newspaper article, and even the odd TV and radio slot. But last week I travelled to Venice’s Architecture Biennale for the culmination of the first phase of the Architectural Association’s Beyond Entropy art/science project…
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The next decade
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Every ten years or so, the US astronomy community, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, produces a road map for the next decade’s research in astronomy. The 2010 version, chaired by Roger Blandford, was just released, and astronomer/bloggers have already weighed in: Steinn Sigurðsson and Julianne Dalcanton (in two separate posts on…
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Swedish Statistics
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[Apologies to those of you who may have seen an inadvertantly-published unfinished version of this post] I’ve just returned from a week at the Annual meeting of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics in Gothenburg, Sweden. It’s always instructive to go to meetings outside of one’s specialty, outside of the proverbial comfort zone. I’ve been in…
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Run for the trees
Last year, I ran for cats and dogs. This year, it’s a different half-marathon, Run to the Beat on September 26 (“London’s Music Half-Marathon”), with a less conveniently located course in East London, and I’ve shifted Kingdoms in my charitable support: I will run for “Trees for Cities“, “an independent charity working to improve the…
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BPol++
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I spent part of this week in Paris (apparently at the same time as a large number of other London-based scientists who were here for other things) discussing whether the European CMB community should rally and respond to ESA’s latest call for proposals for a mission to be launched in the next open slot—which isn’t…
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Talking and blogging to ourselves
(Warning, scattershot blogging echo-chamber post follows.) Last week I went to the Science Blogging Talkfest sponsored by the Biochemical Society and led by Alice Bell from Imperial’s excellent Science Communication program. Partially because the event was mostly attended by science bloggers themselves, there was a bit of a preaching-to-the-converted sense to the proceedings. (I tried…
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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
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…