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Training Scientists: What’s the Point?
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
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
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
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
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?
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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O SOLE Mio
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
(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…