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Sponsor me!
More special pleading: I’ll be running in the Cancer Research UK 10K at Blenheim Palace on 1 October. If you’d like to do a little good (and encourage me), please feel free to donate a few of your dollars, pounds, euros, etc., to the cause, at my sponsorship page.
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Gender Bias by the Supposedly Rational
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The National Academies, America’s “honorific society of distinguished scholars” (the equivalent of the UK’s Royal Society) has just published a report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering” (but it will cost you if you want to read the whole thing). The New York Times paraphrases the report:…
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Matter, Dark and Otherwise
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Anyone reading this blog has doubtless heard about the results announced a few weeks ago, observations of the “bullet cluster” claimed (in the title of the paper) to be “A direct empirical proof of the existence of dark matter.” (The basic idea is recounted better, and with prettier pictures, than I can do here by…
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Political Commandments
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Ronald Reagan often talked about the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican” (attributed to California Republican party chairman Gaylord Parkinson during the 1964 California Gubernatorial election). It certainly served Reagan well (for ill rather than good, despite his bizarre posthumous revalorization). The Labour Party could learn a thing or two.…
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More cosmology prizes
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The Balzan prize, worth 1,000,000 Swiss Francs, was just awarded to Andrew Lange and Paolo de Bernardis for their work as the original Principal Investigators of Boomerang, which, in 2000, produced the first high-resolution maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background and allowed a definitive measurement of the curvature of the Universe, in the sense of…
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Job Satisfaction
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Tom Lutz, “The Summer Next Time” – New York Times: On paper, the academic life looks great. As many as 15 weeks off in the summer, four in the winter, one in the spring, and then, usually, only three days a week on campus the rest of the time. Anybody who tells you this wasn’t…
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Xgau
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As predicted a few months ago, American rock ‘n’ roll critic Robert Christgau has been fired from the rapidly-decaying Village Voice. The Voice was the first of the “Alternative Newsweeklies”, with a strong lefty political stance mixed with arts coverage from the Beats to the hippies and the punks. Nowadays, the Voice is owned by…
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Quick update
Sorry I’ve been silent… here’s a quick update: I’m in Pasadena, California, working at JPL and Caltech on various tasks related to the Planck Surveyor Cosmic Microwave Background satellite, to be launched in a couple of years (which means “soon” in this game). I’m sure you’re waiting breathlessly to hear my commentary on such crucial…
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The Size of Planets, the Age of the Universe, the Ignorance of the Masses
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[This post is a bit long and diffuse… I may hack it up into bite-sized pieces later…] Just because my job has ‘astro’ in the title, doesn’t mean I know enough to comment on whether or not Pluto is a planet. And there’s plenty of other science-in-the-news… The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has decided that…
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Foo
So apparently this weekend Google, Nature, and O’Reilly Media are hosting a ‘Science Foo Camp‘ at Google’s Silicon Valley HQ. O’Reilly has held a few tech-oriented Foo Camps over the last few years, and apparently the list of invitees has always provoked some debate — if you’re not invited, you’re either not important enough, or…
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