Dr. Pamela L. Gay
Other Projects
 | |||||
| Subscribe | |||||
| |||||
|
Archives
Blogroll
Comics
Podcasts
Science
Archive for August, 2007
Aug 28th, 2007
Comments(3) Second Life SillinessI’m just posting a quick post this evening as I try and recover from yesterdays chaos. As some of you read, I’ve been attempting to play in Second Life. After much help from Anthony Crider of Elon University, I don’t feel as lost or confused or ugly (that’s my avatar ), but I still […] Read more...
Aug 28th, 2007
Comments(7) Dragon*Con, ASP, and ChaosThis is turning into one of those weeks. I’m in the midst of frantically trying to get ready to attend the ASP’s EPO Conference next week, and I’m trying to look forward to going to Dragon*Con this weekend, but life just keeps getting into the way.
Aug 25th, 2007
Comments(19) Lunar Eclipse Tues, not friendly for North AmericaEvery 6 months-ish there is a lunar eclipse visible somewhere on the planet Earth. While newspapers like to call these things rare, they just aren’t. What is rare is a nicely timed for prime time lunar eclipse.
Aug 23rd, 2007
Comments(5) Mostly Empty SpaceWhen we look at the cosmic microwave background we see both overly warm and overly cold spots. The warm spots grew into places with a lot of stuff; namely our modern galaxies. The cold spots grew into places without a lot of stuff; these are cosmic voids. While we have known for a long time […] Read more...
Aug 22nd, 2007
Comments(15) Google Sky just made teaching astro easier
My Office Oh, what a wonderful Google world we live in. Today, Google unveiled a new feature in Google Earth, the Sky. That’s right, along side your house, your office, and that mutant strange thing you created in Google Sketchup, you can also look at the stars, galaxies, and planets in Google Earth. In […] Read more...
Aug 20th, 2007
Comments(5) What is science?As a science prof, I hear lots of people in lots of different scenarios trying to define what is the act of doing science. I’ve heard people define science as the act of doing experiments that involve carefully controlling one variable while varying only one other thing. (Um, we can’t do that in astronomy). I’ve […] Read more...
Aug 19th, 2007
Comments(9) Einstein was not wrong.I’ve reached a stage in my career in which I have started to get letters addressed directly to my from people who state Einstein was wrong and then typically provide 3 to a lot of pages describing, typically with no math, why Einstein was wrong and why their new theory is right.
Aug 17th, 2007
Comments(6) Of used cars and more used shuttlesI have a 1997 Jeep Wrangler. It is a good car that rarely gets driven because it guzzles gas. Sometimes though, when the weather is clear and I have no care for the status of my hair, my Jeep and I hit the road at high speeds. He (my jeep is a male named Sebastian) […] Read more...
Aug 16th, 2007
Comments(1) Giants and Dwarfs with BariumI’m beginning to think that a large fraction of the astronomical community is in pre-semester stars chaos. The number of press releases has radically slowed, and the journal articles just don’t seem to be flying as fast and furious as normal. Admittedly, this is a personal impression, and while I have data to support the […] Read more...
Aug 14th, 2007
Comments(5) I’m a space experimentI’m not sure how I so totally missed this mission. Today I was flipping through the pre-print server and came across a paper titled: Launch of the Space experiment PAMELA. This is a “we launched and are functioning” paper about a 2006 mission to measure cosmic rays. (mission homepage) My first thought was, wow, […] Read more... |