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Sepia Astronomers
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When cleaning out an office here in the Astrophysics Group in the Physics Department at Imperial College, we came across this photo: The background is the Mark I telescope at Jodrell Bank, and the man in the middle with the notebook has been identified as either Fred Hoyle or Francis Graham-Smith (which is more likely…
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Distant objects and nearby music
Normally, I would be writing about the discovery of the most distant quasar by Imperial Astronomers using the UKIDSS survey (using excellent Bayesian methods), but Andy and Peter have beaten me to it. To make up for it, I’ll try to get one of the authors of the paper to discuss it here themselves, soon.…
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Copenhagen
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Like my friend and colleague Peter Coles, I am just returned from the fine wine-soaked dinner for the workshop “Cosmology and Astroparticle physics from the LHC to PLANCK” held at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. It is an honor to visit the place where so many discoveries of 20th Century physics were made, and…
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Mekonathon
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As I’ve said repeatedly, the Mekons are my favorite rock ’n’ roll band. Their music has sustained me since about 1990, after I first saw them at Chicago’s Cabaret Metro, already more than a decade into their careers. By then, they had already gone beyond their punk roots, invented alt.country avant la lettre, and skewered…
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More from the Spherical Cows
In a very different way of translating scientific ideas into other forms and media, my friend, colleague and collaborator Lloyd Knox is back with a new series of short video documentaries under the auspices of his Spherical Cow Company. After a hiatus of a few months, they set themselves a challenge of producing three videos…
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Senses working overtime
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I listened over the weekend to a story on the podcast of the radio show Studio 360 about Wanda Diaz-Merced, a blind astronomer. She is working hard at “sonification” — representing astronomical data in sound rather than in graphs. Of course, this works best for certain kinds of data — I gather from the piece…
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Beyond Entropy and Ourselves
Last summer, I helped make a (fake) time machine, an exercise in “creative misinterpretation” (in the words of my architect partner, Shin Egashira). This was part of the Beyond Entropy project organized by the Architecture Association — we showed it then in Venice but now Londoners will get a chance to see the work in…
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Submission
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Today, our Astrophysics Group at Imperial College submitted our first application for a new STFC “Consolidated Grant“. These are intended to cover all of the astrophysics being done in the department for three years at a time, combining aspects of former so-called “standard” and “rolling” grants, both of which it replaces. (If you don’t know…
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Spacetacular!
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What are blogs for, if not self-publicity? In that vein, I’ll be appearing at the Spacetacular! night on April 12, in honor of Yuri’s night: the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first-ever manned space flight. The evening is organized by Londonist editor Matt Brown along with comedian and presenter Helen Keen, hosting a line-up of…
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End of Term
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I’ve just finished another term, in fact the heaviest teaching load I’ve ever had at once: a twenty-six hour lecture course, three hours a week as one of several computer lab “demonstrators”, and another four hours or so per week in first-year student tutorials. For those from outside of the Imperial system: our tutorials are…
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