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Conditional Probability explained
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Before it happened, I would have said slim. But since it happened, 100%. –Lawrence Fishburne, CSI, on the chances of being hit in the head by a tortoise dropped by a bird of prey. (This goes well with Ted Bunn’s exegesis of the Daily Show’s brief foray into probability theory for their segment filmed at…
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Launch!
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Cross-posted on Andrew Jaffe’s Blog and the Planck Mission Blog. Planck and Herschel are en route to their orbit at L2! We were about 7.5 km from the launch, at the “Agami” viewing site. Here is my golden ticket: We all milled around for half an hour, snapping pictures of friends, eminent scientists, and at…
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Launch Blog — Day 2: Rollout
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Cross-posted on Andrew Jaffe’s Blog and the Planck Mission Blog. Today we saw the rollout of the gargantuan Planck/Herschel Ariane 5 rocket, when they move it from its assembly building to the launchpad. Spectacular! There are plenty more pictures, and some movies, which I’ll try to edit and post shortly. At the end of the…
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Launch blog — day 1
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Cross-posted from Andrew Jaffe’s Blog and the Planck Mission Blog Today was spent in Cayenne — the capital of French Guiana, where most of the hotels are located, and Kourou — home of ESA’a Centre Spatial Guianaise. We climbed up a nearby peak for a look over the Spaceport, but mostly we saw hand-sized spiders…
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Pre-launch blitz
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With less than a week to go before its planned launch, The Planck Surveyor Satellite has been loaded into the fairing of its Ariane 5 rocket along with its sister satellite, Herschel. It is scheduled to be rolled out to the pad on May 13, and the launch window opens on May 14 at 13:12…
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Musical Youth
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Sonic Youth on “Later with Jools Holland” reminds me of a US TV appearance by the band around 20 years ago, on a show called “Night Music” co-hosted by, in fact, Jools Holland and sax player David Sanborn. Sanborn’s solo recording career has largely (and not incorrectly) been tarred with “smooth jazz” brush; his broader…
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Planck Plonk
One of the perks of the project. (Don’t worry, not paid for by your tax dollars.)
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Bad Editing
The Astrophysical Journal has recently shifted publishers from the University of Chicago Press to the Institute of Physics. There seems to have been very little fuss in the process, but I was amused to notice this Erratum for the article “A Search for Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies on Arcminute Scales With Bolocam”: As a result…
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Dyson disturbs
In school, Freeman Dyson became one of my heroes when I read his first memoir, Disturbing the Universe. It was an incredibly honor to meet him when he came to speak at my school — one of the advantages to growing up in New Jersey. He wrote and talked movingly of war, peace, science, books,…
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In the Beginning
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Last week, I participated in the Dana Centre‘s Big Ideas series, an evening called “In the Beginning“. Former Imperial postgrad Kate Land and I gave the standard cosmology spiel, philosopher of science Roman Frigg took his remit to discuss science and religion very seriously, and Chris Lintott acted as master of ceremonies (and took charge…
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