Browsing all posts in September, 2007.

Statistics and Sweepstakes

Today I was bad to myself and stopped by McDonald’s on the way into campus and got a soda and fries. (If I’m going to go to campus on a Saturday I feel ok being bad to myself). On the bag they handed me their was a code and a website and an invitation to [...]

The Carnival Returns

I temporarily lost all track of day’s of the week, and thus of the Space Carnival.
Well, today I caught up with the carnival and had a happy  time exploring the neat new articles.
Hopefully, next week I’ll remember to submit my own adventure

Physics Exams as Germ Warfare?

This week all of my physics classes are taking their first exam. Today my two sections of  Science Foundations for elementary education majors had their exam and tomorrow my science and engineering students have their calculas-based have their first exam. My exams are decidedly evil – they are tough and the average student will need [...]

A Single Moment: Was it real?

Yesterday a fascinating press release from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory crossed my inbox. In a re-analysis of 480 hours of data from taken with the 210-foot Parkes radio telescope in Australia, astronomers found a single 5 millisecond burst that resembled nothing anyone has ever seen before. It shifted in frequency from higher radio frequencies [...]

Of Superheros and Conservation of Energy

So it is premier week and my husband’s Window’s Media Center (his, not mine), is jubilantly happy at all the new material it has to record. We just finished watching the first new episode of one of our favorite shows, Heroes (no spoilers ahead), and I have to say that this voice in the back [...]

Mars, Oh Inconstant World

I’ve decided Mars is the taunting red planet. She hangs up there, red and provocative, reveling here poles and captivating us with her canyons. She plays a careful game of peek-a-boo with her here-today, gone-tomorrow sand storms. She spikes our curiosity with gullies that seem to have been made with water, and black streaks that [...]

The Wizards in the Tower

Somewhere, once upon a time, the metaphor of faculty living in a mystical Ivory Tower entered the vernacular. I don’t know the history of this imagery, but it always conjures images of wizards working their spells while the look out over the common people – the little people – from their vantage on high. These [...]

Screaming to the Stars: Quasar Echo’s

It is possible to map a room using sound, the sea using sonar, and to generally just get at the shape of things based on how the absorb and emit waves. This is true both in our Earthly locations (caves, canyons) and also in the centers of galaxies. In the past several days, I’ve seen [...]

Lensing Lenses & Einstein’s Cross

While going through journal articles today, I came across a really neat paper on teh apparent variability of the different images of the famous lensed quasar, Einstein’s Cross (Q2237+0305, in science speak). The light from this distant quasar is blocked from reaching us directly, and is instead bent toward us along 4 different paths by [...]

The Universe tours the solar system

It’s time to leave the Universe behind. The History Channel’s the Universe series is out of new episodes, and their sponsorship is about to drop off this blog and Astronomy Cast. If the Universe was your favorite space series of all time, have no fear, it will be showing in reruns, and you can purchase [...]