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Gung hei fat choi
恭喜发财 — Happy (Chinese) New Year! Congratulations and be prosperous in this coming year of the Golden Pig…
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Planck scanning strategy
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OK, this is going to be very technical. In his comment to my last post, my colleague Ned Wright asks a couple of important questions about the way that the Planck Surveyor satellite is going to observe the sky. In the spirit of Mark Trodden’s question about the use of blogs in the research process,…
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Planck Press
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With only [sic] about a year and a half to go before launch, The Observer has a story on the ESA Planck Surveyor mission that I’ve spending much of my time working on over the last several years. (In fact, I have to spend the day writing a program that will play a very small…
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Science In, On and Around the Media
Neil Tyson of New York’s Museum of Natural History had an excellent appearance on The Daily Show where he reminds us that “Astrophysicists are a simple people“. John Stewart flipped between slack-jawed incomprehension and good jokes. Better science than most of the real news. Speaking of the media and science, I spent Tuesday night boozing…
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Boy knitters, girl scientists
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New Cosmic Variance blogger Julianne Dalcanton draws a brilliant analogy between women in science and men in knitting.
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Yet another PhD
Congratulations to David Dawe, who passed his thesis exam today for his work on “The Dynamics of and Gravitational Radiation from Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei”. His research starts from the premise that most galaxies harbor very massive black holes (each millions or billions times the mass of the sun). We also know that…
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Real Winter
The view out my back window: Now let’s see if I can get into work.
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Après Café Sci
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There was a pretty good turnout a last night’s Café Scientifique in London. Thanks to any and all who showed up to hear my spiel about the cosmos (and, crucially, to talk back). We talked about matter & antimatter, the Cosmic Microwave Background, and even more esoteric topics like the origins of time (about which…
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The Carbon Budget of Cosmology
Antony Lewis over at CosmoCoffee has started a discussion of the environmental impact of scientists’ travel to conferences. Is this excusable, perhaps necessary, behavior, or a profligate waste of carbon? Sure, conferences are fun, especially when they’re in Taipei or Trieste, but I sometimes wonder whether those hours in the conference rooms are worth the…
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The Future of [Experimental Particle] Physics in the Times
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I was impressed (like Mark Trodden) by the lovely pictures, good PR, and even some lyrical prose on CERN‘s coming Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the New York Times. But I was annoyed by this statement: For the past generation, physics has been in something of a rut. There have been plenty of findings from…
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