CMB
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Science, Blogs, Web III: Science Blogging Conference
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In its continuing bid to take over all aspects of science communication, Nature magazine (or more properly, an alliance between Nature Network and the Royal Institution) will be hosting a European Science Blogging conference in August or September. Right now, however, I’m in Norway. In addition to discussing how we’re going to measure the CMB…
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Mapping the Galaxy from Portugal
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I spent the week before last in Portugal working with the team designing and building the GEM telescope: The Polarized Galactic Emission Mapping Project in Portugal. GEM (aka GEM-P or even P-GEM-P) aims to measure the emission of our Milky Way galaxy using light at a wavelength of 6 cm. Those frequencies are dominated by…
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Scientific Illiteracy
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The Observer featured a lengthy article by Tim Adams bemoaning the generic scientific illiteracy of society today, tracing a line from CP Snow’s “Two Cultures” through Natalie Angier’s new book, The Canon:A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. It concentrates a bit too heavily on uber-agent John Brockman’s somewhat pretentious “Third Culture, a…
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April First (and Second)
We take so much of the web for granted today, we often forget how very contingent it all is. Without the very specific work by Tim Berners-Lee inventing the http protocol, perhaps some sort of hypertext communication standard would have come along, but it’s hard to believe that it would be quite the same. Berners-Lee…
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Nature Network London, still-Outstanding Questions, and new Satellites
Yesterday evening I attended the launch party for Nature Network London, a new site run by Nature magazine, which hopes to be a web home for science and scientists in London. There are articles, blogs, discussion forums and calendars of scientific events. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I ended up meeting lots of people from Imperial — whom…
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Cosmology, Philosophy and Topology in Edinburgh
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I’m just back from a couple of days up in Edinburgh, one of my favorite cities in the UK. London is bigger, more intense, but Edinburgh is more beautiful, dominated by its landscape–London is New York to Edinburgh’s San Francisco. I was up there to give the Edinburgh University Physics “General Interest Seminar”. Mostly, I…
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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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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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Where I’m calling from
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I know that nobody cares about the peregrinations of astrophysicists but there’s not much else to blog about when you’re on the road. So a quick explanation of my absence from the blogosphere: Last week, I was in Taipei for the CoSPA meeting (at which website you can find a copy of my talk on…
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