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Bruce Sterling
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I went to a discussion by author Bruce Sterling last night, sponsored by the weird alliance of independent tech newsletter NTK and political rag The New Statesman (more precisely, their New Media Awards), with some sort of underwriting from organic chocolatiers Green & Black’s (now rather distressingly owned by Cadbury-Schweppes), supplying lovely samples of Maya…
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Inspiration
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The Oakland Tribune has an article about Marc Davis, a professor at Berkeley. When I was doing research there, I was lucky to have Marc in the office next door: a brilliant astrophysicist who has done as much as anyone of his generation to understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, he is more recently…
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Looking for a Musical Offering
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OK, this post is a bit different: nothing to do with astrophysics, nothing to do with me. Instead, it’s an opportunity for you to do some good in the world. Sorry, I’ve removed the rest of the information in this post for personal reasons!
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UFOs exist…
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…but not aliens. Or so they would have us believe.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Probability
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In his most recent post, Cosmic Variance’s Mark Trodden talks about one of the presentations we both saw at last week’s meeting in Ishcia, where he explains one of the hot new techniques for analyzing cosmological data, the (so-called) Bayesian Evidence. Let’s unpack this term. First, “Bayesian”, named after the Reverend Thomas Bayes. The question…
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Cosmology in the Mediterranean
Like fellow-blogger Mark Trodden , I’ve just spent the week at scientific meetings in Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples. The first half of the week was for the yearly consortium meeting of the Planck Surveyor satellite. Although still endangered by further delays, we expect the satellite to be launched in early or…
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Blake and Newton
Polymath author Peter Ackroyd was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s “Start the Week”, discussing his new biography of Isaac Newton. Ackroyd contrasted Newton to one of his previous biographical subjects, William Blake, who detested Newton and all that he did: I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans I will not Reason…
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Shameless
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By now both of my loyal readers will have noted the subtle addition of a teeny-tiny box over on the right-hand side, courtesy of Google. Yes, folks, advertising. More of an experiment than a money-making scheme for sure, but do feel encouraged to click your way over to the advertisers’ sites. I do note that…
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SALT
The New York Times, recently redesigned (discussed ad nauseum, notably by Slate’s Jack Shafer), has an article about SALT, the South African Large Telescope, now the Southern hemisphere’s largest telescope. This is just one of a series of scientific and technological investements being made in South Africa (by combinations of the South African and “western”…