Up, Up and … Home

On January 13, 2005 I joined the American Airlines “AAdvantage” frequent flier program. The podcast I was part of, “Slacker Astronomy,” had taken off, and I had been invited to go to AAS in Washington DC and AAPT in Anchorage, Alaska to give talks 2 weeks apart. This was something...

Universal Education

Here in the USA (or I should say there, since I’m currently in France), education tends to be somewhat nationalistic. It has to be. Teachers are tied to state and federal learning standards and if students don’t learn what is specifically listed in those standards, and specifically tested along those...

Can you help 365 Days of Astronomy get thru to 2012?

Back in 2008, while planning for the International Year of Astronomy, a group of us came up with the idea to do a daily podcast that gives voice to all the people around the world who are passionate about astronomy. This idea became the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, and in 2009 this little show filled every...

Of travel and sleep deprivation

For the past several days I’ve been watching discussions on the AAVSO discussion list about sleep deprivation. Many of these good folks are good observers who try and combine a night time hobby with a day time job. Live lives of of sleep deprivation and broken circadian rhythms. Over the course of a...

Set up an AWS LAMP server connected to a RDS database

Apologies for the lack of astronomy in this post. I just spent 6 hours trying to set up a server, and most of that time was spent fussing needlessly. No one should need to repeat my endeavors, so…. I’m taking what I learned and blogging it to save any poor souls who may be repeating what I do....

AAS, editorial in time ownership

Yesterday I took several pages of notes on the Kepler results (Kepler 10b in particular) and once I have time to chew through those notes I’m going to put together a longer blog post. One thing that occurred to me earlier today is that I’m just not able to write at these meetings the way I used...