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Brown Dwarf located in London
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Congratulations to my Imperial College Astrophysics colleagues Steve Warren and Dan Mortlock who have been in the news lately for their discovery of the coldest brown dwarf yet found. A brown dwarf is not quite a star, but a ball of gas just too light to force its hydrogen gas into nuclear fusion reactions. Instead…
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Useless boycotts
Once again, my Union, the University and College Union, has sort-of voted to boycott Israeli academics. It’s only “sort of”, because, like last time, the decision comes about from a vote of activists present at the UCU annual conference, not of the membership at large. Indeed, the vote has been opposed by the General Secretary…
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We’re the young generation and we’ve got something to say
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Coming down from a weekend of marking a couple of hundred exam problems, I spent a highbrow night in watching documentaries about Britain’s Coast, its buildings and, by no means least, the Monkees. The Monkees — the 60s manufactured TV band — have always held a fascination for me: not just because of their more…
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Kelvin’s Desk
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I spent a few days this week up in Glasgow (I am beginning to realize I prefer Scottish cities to English ones, except for London itself), helping evaluate the work being done up there as well as in Cardiff and Strathclyde to search for gravitational radiation using experiments like LIGO (in the US) and GEO…
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Technology: help or harm?
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My mobile rang this afternoon, but as usual at work, I missed the call. I didn’t recognize the number (02920368701 in the UK), but on a whim I googled it. Lo and behold, it’s a cold-call mobile spam number. Good thing I didn’t answer it, after all…
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Chicago cosmology ’casts
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I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but “Slacker Astronomy” is featuring a series of podcast interviews with cosmologists from the Kavli Center at the University of Chicago, where I got my PhD. There are interviews with my de facto PhD supervisor, Josh Frieman, my de jure supervisor (long story) Mike Turner, and even…
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LA’s Burning
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A beautiful but frightening picture of the fire burning near the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles. Evidence that we were probably never meant to live in that part of the world? (Photo courtesy Monica Almeida/New York Times)
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I realize that I haven’t posted in nearly two weeks. Between marking exams, gardening, attempting to solve differential equations and calculate integrals with several hundred terms, inspiration has been lacking. Here are some things I may yet get to: The book launch for Universe or Multiverse, edited by QMW Cosmologist Bernard Carr. Entertaining, for sure,…
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Art, Science, Neutrinos
Andreas Gursky, arguably the most famous contemporary photographer (and inarguably the most well-remunerated one, after a recent $3 million sale) has a new show at London’s White Cube Mason’s Yard Gallery. Gursky creates large-scale pictures of various aspects of modern life — apartment buildings, agriculture, shopping. He digitally manipulates and combines individual photos to give…
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Sounds from the Tenement Museum
My favorite small museum is the Tenement Museum down in New York’s Lower East Side. It was built in the late 19th Century, housing a steady stream of immigrants until it was boarded up in the middle of the 20th. Different apartments in the building have been recreated as they might have been during different…