Posts made in April, 2008

  • As of today, Bang! is officially available in an American edition, published by the good people of Johns Hopkins Press. If you happen to be in and around LA, Brian is signing copies at Book Soup on the 6th May, but everyone else can now pick up a copy via Amazon for less than $20. [...]

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  • My column describing the May night sky is up over at the Times. Please click through if you have a chance. I was genuinely in two minds about what to write about the Eta Aquarid meteor shower; there’s a complete division between those predicting an excellent shower (60-80 ZHR*) and those expecting more normal rates [...]

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  • I’ve now worked my way through the DIUS select committee report (not with a fine toothcomb, though), and there are some extremely interesting conclusions. You can find the whole thing here, or just trust my reading of it.
    The meat starts on p20, which discusses the budget left to STFC from the two councils which [...]

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  • The report by the Science Select committee on funding for STFC is to be released at midnight tonight, BST…more as soon as I’ve had a chance to read it.
    Update : Here’s the press release. While the Times focus on the threat to Keith Mason, the head of the STFC, to my mind the Guardian are [...]

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  • …is the excellent title of this post by someone with the delightful name of Clay Shirky. The nub and, indeed, the crux of it is as follows
    For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time. And what [...]

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  • It’s ironic that I’m posting this here just after writing this over here, but I have to share this with you. I suspect I recognise several of the culprits in this sterling effort but please – can we have a rock (or synthpop) version with fewer white coats, please?
    You need to a flashplayer enabled browser [...]

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  • Hello from Tucson, Arizona, where I’ve arrived on the first Galaxy Zoo observing run. Unlike previous adventures on Hawai’i (which had mixed results), this is my first run on an optical telescope. One with a mirror. That takes pictures. I’ll be blogging the experience here and on the Galaxy Zoo blog, but to get some [...]

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  • Scientific publishing is a confusing place to be these days, and if that’s not the most gripping opening sentence I’ve ever written then bear with me for a second because it is important. Yesterday, we submitted the second of the Galaxy Zoo papers to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the most prominent [...]

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  • After all the funding news and politics of the last few weeks, today is dedicated to only wonderful, hopeful news.
    Firstly, NASA’s lander, Phoenix, has made a near-final course correction, selecting a landing site near the north pole of Mars. Emily has more details.
    Secondly, SCUBA-2, the world’s most advanced sub-mm camera, has arrived at the JCMT [...]

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  • The knowledge economy: it’s our future. It must be so because the Prime Minister says it is
    That was Paxman’s introduction to a report carried on the BBC’s Newsnight on the STFC funding crisis last night; you can watch the latest programme here, at least in the UK. Scroll forward to 32 minutes in to find [...]

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