• O SOLE Mio

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    I just received the SOLE (Student On-Line Evaluation) results for my cosmology course. Overall, I was pleased: averaging between “good” and “very good” for “the structure and organisation of the lectures”, “the approachability of” and “the interest and enthusiasm generated by” the lecturer, as well as for “the support materials” (my lecture notes), although only…

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  • Meeting Ended Early Due to Volcano

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    Peter Coles has blogged about his latest experiences on the UK Astronomy Grants Panel (chaired by Andy Lawrence), so I thought I’d mention that I’ve spent the last couple of days up in Glasgow, not attending the UK National Astronomy Meeting, but as a member of the Projects Peer Review Panel (PPRP). Our job is…

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  • Flat rotation curves and Facebook

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    (See below for an update.) In one of the more bizarre meta-experiments that have come out of the latter-day social web, Trieste astrophysicist Paolo Salucci is trying to use Facebook to spread some astrophysics, not to the public, but within the astronomical community. Specifically, he’s trying to “eliminate the deep-routed [sic] wrong misconception [sic] of…

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  • Teaching Cosmology

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    I’ve just finished teaching my eleven-week winter-term Cosmology course at Imperial. Like all lecturing, it was exhilerating, and exhausting. And like usual, I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I think I understand the subject better than when I started out. (I hope that the students can say some of the same things. Comments from…

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  • Margaret Burbidge

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    (This is another Ada Lovelace day post. Ada Lovelace Day was started and organized by Suw Charman-Anderson. Even Sarah Brown, wife of UK PM Gordon Brown, has blogged and tweeted about it.) I was going to blog about the physicist Emmy Noether, but then I realized that someone beat me to it — last year.…

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  • Alex Chilton, 1950-2010

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    I awoke Thursday Morning to an email from an old friend: Alex Chilton had died. Chilton was one of America’s greatest songwriters and musicians, blossoming first as a Blue-eyed soul singer with The Box Tops as a teenager in the 60s. He reached a short-lived and (at the time) too-obscure peak as the leader of…

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  • 99 Years

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    Let me publicly wish a very Happy Birthday and much love to my wonderful grandmother, Dora Jaffe, born 99 years ago today in Shepetovka, then Russia, now Ukraine, on the eve of the First World War. Moving to New York City just after the war, she has outlasted the century, mothering my father and his…

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  • Adams and Glass in London

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    I steeped myself in some imported culture this week — modern classical music by two of the most famous living American composers. Thursday evening I went over to the Barbican to hear the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by John Adams, performing his own new City Noir, written about Los Angeles in honor of Gustavo Dudamel’s…

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  • Debating UK Science, Live and on the Net

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    Many different strands of the discussion of the UK science budget are coming together, starting with last week’s announcement of STFC‘s restructuring. This week the Royal Society released its report, “The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity“, arguing that this is a crucial time to emphasize and invest in science, rather than pull away from…

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  • Some — not enough? — help for the STFC

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    The latest act in the black comedy which is the running of the Science and Technology Funding Council is being played out. The Science Minister, Lord Drayson (which sounds, with “science”, “minister” and “lord” all in one title, to my US ears more like a character from bad science fiction than an actual member of…

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