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How to Be a Good Graduate Student
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Sean Carroll over in Cosmic Variance has some excellent “Unsolicited Advice” on “How to be a Good Graduate Student”. Some of it is more appropriate for American grad students with their longer periods and higher courseloads (and of course they’re called “graduate students” rather than “postgraduate students” as they are here in the UK), but,…
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Yom Kippur
Saturday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Jews are meant to fast (among other prohibitions), and spend the day in Temple, communally asking forgiveness for our sins. I’m a secular, atheist Jew. So why do I feel guilty for all of my meals yesterday? It’s not Pascal’s Wager; it’s not a lurking agnosticism.…
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Me, the MP, Planck and Paris
If I’ve got any longtime readers, they may recall that I spent a week paired with Anne Snelgrove MP in the UK Parliament a couple of years ago, as part of a program connecting scienctists with Members of Parliament (described here and here). This week, Anne kept up her side of the bargain and visited…
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Reasonable Demands for the Caped Crusader
Most of us male academics acknowledge that it’s hard being a female in the male-dominated world of physics, with our own academic sort of testosterone and structural prejudices. Imagine what it’s like as a superhero: [Via Bedazzled, which also points to a campy Batgirl trailer (not to mention an unrelated weird clip of Astrud Gilberto…
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More on Google Sky
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Google Sky has been adding scientifically interesting (and maybe useful) astrophysical data since its introduction a few weeks ago. In particular, Geoff Marcy has added known exoplanets (i.e., planets around other stars) and Joshua Bloom has added support for VOEvents, a data format for distributing information about astrophysical events happening in real time, such as…
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Death of Punk, thirty years later
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A sad note from the other end of the pop-music spectrum: less than a year after the close of his downtown New York club, CBGB, its owner, Hilly Kristal, has died at the un-rock’n’roll age of 75 (but still too soon, of course). Intending to start a very different kind of club (the initials stand…
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Doctor Rock Star, and his younger peers
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Congratulations to Dr Brian May, PhD, for successfully defending his PhD thesis, “Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud”. At the time of his defense, I was up in Durham, lecturing to the mostly younger incoming class of STFC-supported UK grad students. Best of luck to them, too, and let’s hope they can finish before…
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Google Sky
Google has just released a new version of its Google Earth software — one that lets you look up to the sky instead of down to the ground. It’s essentially a consumer-grade Virtual Observatory, like the UK AstroGrid, the US National Virtual Observatory and the Euro-VO project. It’s not so obvious when you fire it…
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Chicagoland: black holes and buffalo
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Greetings from Batavia, Illinois, USA, home of Fermilab, where I’m visiting the Theoretical Astrophysics Center (and where I spent a lot of time as a graduate student back in the early 1990s). Since I got here late last week, I’ve cycled 50 miles up and down the Lake Michigan Lakefront, given a talk on Gravitational…
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Holy Cow
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I would like to think that the passing of one Scooter — Phil Rizzuto, Yankees Shortstop and broadcaster — was of greater cultural significance than the pardonning of the other one (since they didn’t manage to indict the likely mastermind behind the plot before he could resign. Probably not.
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