Archive of Writings
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Scientific Dialogue by Journal Article: Coffee maybe required
Today I had two juxtapositions of journal articles. On one hand I had the photo-ready proofs of a journal article on the Astronomy Cast listener survey I submitted to, and had accepted by CAP. On the other hand I had a bunch of journal articles my student was working...
Seyfert’s Sextet, Stephan’s Quintet, and Compact Groups
This morning I was flipping digitally through the preprints on arXiv, and I stumbled on a rich paper on the evolution of Seyfert's Sextet. In the paper, they discuss Seyfert's Sextet as a more evolved version of Stephan's Quintet. Now, these two compact galaxy groups...
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 participate...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...