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Science, Blogs, Web II: iPhone ArXiv
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But not all the news on ScienceBlogs is bad: Dave Bacon reports that there is now access to the arXivvia the iPhone: http://arxiv.mobi has a very iPhone-ish interface, with easy access to the whole arXiv. (The arXiv is a freely-available repository of preprints and papers in astrophysics and many other scientific disciplines.) I wouldn’t want…
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Science, Blogs, Web I: Big Bang, Big Problem
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There’s a blog post about gender differences in scientific literacy over at The Intersection. And no doubt, it is a scary statement about our culture and educational system (in the US in this case, although I suspect the results would be similar elsewhere) that men uniformly score better than women. But (as other commenters have…
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STFC on Newsnight
I’ve been distracted from preparing a presentation trying to make the sure the UK (and, yes, our group at Imperial in particular) gets its fair share of the dwindling UK astrophysics budget: Newsnight has a pretty extensive package, filmed over the last few weeks, discussing the ongoing astrophysics funding issues. Most impressive was the strong…
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AstroGrid at NAM
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For the last decade, astronomers worldwide have slowly been bringing together the infrastructure to create a “Virtual Observatory” — uniform access to astronomy data from different telescopes, with different sorts of instruments, taken by different astronomers at different times. Very quickly in the process, astronomers realized that the main problems lay not in the underlying…
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Tales of the unexpected
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I’ve spent the last couple of days at a meeting of the STFC Projects Peer Review Panel (PPRP). We evaluate all of the large project proposals (big telescopes, satellites, detectors for particle and nuclear physics) that are submitted to the funding council. Despite the still-unresolved crisis in STFC funding, projects are still being proposed, and…
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“How did you know I was a new yorker?”
I spent the weekend in Oxford celebrating a friend’s landmark birthday, running around the town’s lovely Port Meadow and talking about the topology of the Universe. I planned to take the Oxford Tube bus service back to London. “excuse me, did you know we weren’t stopping when we all got on the bus? Why didn’t…
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Curb her Enthusiasm
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Larry David (!) on Hillary Clinton: “Does anyone want this nut answering the phone?” How is it that she became the one who’s perceived as more equipped to answer that 3 a.m. call?
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Space Kimchi
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Fermented cabbage makes the leap from earth to space, in a watershed moment for spicy foodstuffs the world over. Certainly tastes better than Tang — this is possibly the only interesting news ever to be associated with the International Space Station.
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Gemini telescope: back for the UK
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In an unexpectedly rational decision, STFC (UK astronomy’s funding council, if you haven’t been paying attention) and the board of the Gemini telescope, have come to some sort of agreement to reinstate UK observing time for the time being, with the further statement from Gemini that “The Board asks that the Chair and Designated Members,…
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Congratulations and be prosperous
新年快樂 Happy New Year of the Rat to all of the visitors landing here from Google, searching for “Gung hei fat choi“!