Archive of Writings
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Dragon*Con, ASP, and Chaos
This 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. While I generally...
Lunar Eclipse Tues, not friendly for North America
Every 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. For those of you who aren't quite sure what causes a...
Mostly Empty Space
When 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...
Google Sky just made teaching astro easier
My Office My Sky 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...
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...
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...
Of used cars and more used shuttles
I 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)...
Giants and Dwarfs with Barium
I'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...
I’m a space experiment
I'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....
Building Galaxies
I just finished watching the Universe series episode on "Alien Galaxies." I have to admit that their constant use of the word "Alien" forced me to look up the word alien in the dictionary (or at least on dictionary.com). I have to admit that while it is legitimate to...