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The Fermi Telescope
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NASA’s latest space-based telescope has, until now, been known as the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST). Today, they announced the very first results, and renamed it the Fermi Space Telescope, after physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi was one of the pioneers of modern particle physics, part of the Manhattan Project generation that created the fundamental…
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Writing about dancing about architecture
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For some reason a lot of music books have percolated to the top of my bedstand pile recently. I just finished Alex Ross‘ magisterial and definitive The Rest is Noise, a history of 20th Century “Western Classical” music. (Let’s pause for a moment and praise the genius of that title, by the way.) The book…
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Not Cuil
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There’s a new Google-competing search engine called Cuil (which I guess is meant to be pronounced as slacker-speak “kewl” or something). If I search for myself on it, my Imperial homepage comes up first, but for some reason accompanied by this picture. I promise that’s not me. Just as strange, a picture that is of…
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Broken
dreamsmug·
I’ve had this Fermilab-labeled mug ever since I spent the summer working there in 1990 (the picture is from a few years later — ignore the sartorial mis-step of the slouch-shouldered cardigan). Today, sadly, I dropped it fumbling with the keys to my office. Actually, that was a pretty fun summer. I was working on…
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What I did on my Summer Vacation, part I
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OK, not a vacation in the true sense of the word: I’ve been in the US, attending meetings (in Berkeley), workshops (in Santa Fe), conferences (in Pasadena) and, because I can’t seem to escape them, teleconferences everywhere and all the time. Berkeley In Berkeley, I attended the first all-hands collaboration meeting for PolarBear, an experiment…
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STFC Endgame
Thanks to Dave for pointing out that the final results of the STFC programmatic review sweepstakes popularity contest consultation exercise have been released. Following on from the recommendations, which grouped all projects into five projects, the STFC Council has decided where and how the money will flow. The best news overall is that only the…
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STFC Consultation results
No time for a full blog post, but I wanted to point out the results of the STFC Consultation, now available. Some of my favorite projects like AstroGrid seem to have not fared too well (the consultation panel rated it highly, but PPAN, responsible for the final ranks, disagreed). Nonetheless, Imperial Astrophysics projects like Planck,…
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Gruber Cosmology Prize 2008: Dick Bond
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Dick Bond, a friend, mentor and longtime collaborator has won the 2008 Gruber Cosmology prize. Dick’s work has been instrumental at bringing us into this age of “precision cosmology”. He has always concentrated on that interface between theory and observation, making predictions for what we would see in the Cosmic Microwave Background, and how we…
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Euphemisation
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From the New York Times. Pick one: Bush “overstated evidence” “exaggerated available intelligence” “systematically painted a more dire picture… than was justified” lied about Iraq before the invasion. Bonus points for what that implies about Tony Blair and the UK Government.
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Who Put the Pomp?
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I’ve been busy the last few weeks, writing documents for the Planck SGS RR, grant proposals, getting ready for the exam season, and (I know I can’t complain), travelling to the Aegean. But this afternoon I took a few hours off and attended the Imperial College postgraduate degree ceremony. In and amongst the several hundred…
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