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Born to Run
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Finishing off my summer of aging-but-still-strong rock ’n’ rollers and jazzmen, I pilgrimaged to New Jersey, the state of my childhood and adolescence, to see Bruce Springsteen play Giants Stadium at the Meadowlands, one last gig before they tear the place down. I’ve seen Springsteen a few times before: my very first concert back in…
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Festschrift: Turner in Chicago
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Since Barcelona, I’ve also travelled to Chicago to attend a meeting in honor of the 60th birthday of Michael Turner, Professor at the University of Chicago, and a former head of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate of the US National Science Foundation. Mike was one of my Ph.D. Supervisors, along with Josh Frieman, and…
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Planck’s First Light
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I’m happy to be able to point to ESA’s first post-launch press release from the Planck Surveyor Satellite. Here is a picture of the area of sky that Planck has observed during its “First Light Survey”, superposed on an optical image of the Milky Way galaxy: (Image credit: ESA, LFI and HFI Consortia (Planck); Background…
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The Universe is a Beautiful Place
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Or at least it’s very pretty. These are new pictures from the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope: NGC 6302 is a “planetary nebula”, material ejected from an aging star in our Milky Way galaxy; Omega Centauri is a globular cluster, a dense agglomeration of stars on the outskirts of the galaxy; the Carina Nebula is the…
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Tying Myself in Knots
I’ll be appearing this Thursday, September 3, at the newly-reopened Whitechapel Gallery‘s Study Studio as part of “Knot Night“, hosted by sculptor Richard Wentworth. Richard has produced a box (or vitrine, if you want to be all art-world about it) called “A Confiscation of String” for the Gallery, and so a few of us have…
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Blogging Anniversary, and Other Celebrations
I was sitting in the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution at the Science Online London meeting (of which I hope to write more later, but you can retroactively follow the day’s tweets or just search for the day’s tags) when I realized I had missed the fifth anniversary of this blog this past July.…
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Elvis blues
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Today is the thirty-second anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. It was recently brought to my attention that I am now older than he was on that day. But rather than sit in the bathroom and eat cheeseburgers, I’ll just leave you with this: I was thinking that night about Elvis Day that he died, day…
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Healthcare for profit and for good
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OK, if you are bored with my occasional forays into politics or religion, I apologize for this post on a subject about which I know even less. I was preparing a long post on my expatriate view of the US healthcare system versus the UK NHS (and I’ve even had a few years under the…
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Astronomical Objects, Near and Far
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The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) is the “deepest” optical observation of the Universe: eleven days of Hubble Space Telescope observations concentrated on a tiny patch of sky. I recently came across this three-dimensional mockup of the HUDF, using our measurements of the redshifts (related to the distances) of each of the galaxies in the…
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