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Cox's Wonders Of The Universe (4 parts, first part was on BBC HD yesterday and is on BBC 2 in England tomorrow) : C/D ?
(I'll probably just order the blu-ray if they make one)

if you can deal with the brian cox and the top gear test report style "CINEMATOGRAPHY" then everything he says is pretty solid, i think.

Although he got to it eventually he got my back up by saying there was no physical law that prevented a glacier from reconstituting itself. Nothing in classical mechanics says it can't happen by thermodynamics certainly has something to say on the matter. Are these not physical laws or are they devalued because us engineers came up with them?

hey caek i cant find your email--do you want to give an official comment on this

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/22/us-venezuela-chavez-mars-idUSTRE72L61D20110322?

"chavez otm"

haha that is an amazing article

"Careful! Here on planet Earth where hundreds of years ago or less there were great forests, now there are deserts. Where there were rivers, there are deserts," Chavez said, sipping from a glass of water.

haha i wish you had been around last night, i wanted to quote you in my post on the subject

"Chavez OTM," said an astrophysicist familiar with the history of class struggle on Mars.

the best part about the article is the reuters editor going "hmm, this isnt long enough... can we bring in a couple paragraphs about mars missions?"

haha if you can do a follow up i would be literally thrilled to be quoted on this! seriously, my parents would be so happy.

next time i have a good article about economics on other planets ill solicit a quote

i actually read the article last night and tried to think of a comment, but i was really drunk on 241 beer and couldn't make any sense of it. i missed my chance! THANKS jjj and goole.

your one shot at fame

i added you on facebook so you can reach me quickly for future leftists/planetary issues

wait did you dudes go to the t rock?

yes! our server had a face tattoo and i drunk surly! it was a magical mpls adventure.

saw the tat face lady at 241s last night. forgot how crowded that place gets when the weather's nice.

caek,

what was your favorite part about mpls? when are you moving here? what neighborhood will you live in? rent in NE is v cheap iirc, but it as almost as isolated and barren as w st paul.

-gbx

(j/k jj wsp is dope as heck)

my favourite thing about mpls was mpls. i really liked it! some highlights were the birchwood cafe (fell in love with pretty much every waitress there) and also the fancy pants bar bit of "cafe and bar lurcat". the airport had a good vibe too, which is a useful litmus test for a town too ime.

re: when am i moving there? "it's complicated". i will know either way in a couple of weeks!

whoa

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/texasfire042011/s_t01_00000001.jpg

The Texas Forest Service undertook controlled burns on Sunday, April 17, 2011 to get rid of fuel on the mountains around McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas. Here, Black Mountain is burning. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope dome is at right. (Frank Cianciolo/McDonald Observatory)

ey up caek, this sounds important and impressive and so on? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13462926

yeah that's good work

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ljgouzxixQ1qidrloo1_500.png

the smaller photo here is ngc891, which is the archetypal example of the kind of galaxy i did my phd on: edge-on galaxies with central bulges that are kind of boxy. these dude's know what's up.

caek is this what it looks like when you're on the grind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFpeM3fxJoQ

pretty much, but my observing gets done mostly in way less extreme locations, e.g. west texas

http://i.min.us/iwGYU.jpg

excelsior

^^ pictures of people who seem to have figured out how to live imo

nice vid too dayo

all hail west texas :D

that observatory is the only place on UT land where you are allowed to drink alcohol without campus police present

all hail west texas :D

beat me to it

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/fun-with-fysiks

aw yeah

In the United States, the job market for people with doctorates in physics collapsed around 1970, as the huge post-Sputnik expansion of American university hiring and military spending came to an abrupt halt. By the mid-1980s, things hadn’t improved much, and it seemed likely that my recent Ph.D. in theoretical physics would be of little use in finding conventional permanent academic employment. One possible career path that came to mind was to try to follow the example of a sizable group of physicists who lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1970s. They appeared to have managed to pursue scientific research by dropping out of academia and adopting a countercultural lifestyle that included soaking in hot tubs at Big Sur, engaging in Tantric sex, hanging out at North Beach cafes and taking psychedelic drugs. Some of them had gotten rich writing books that mixed physics with various kinds of mysticism. I wasn’t very interested in the mysticism part, but I figured I could handle the rest.

For better or worse, I did end up moving to the Bay Area for a year, but as a respectable post-doc in mathematics I saw little or no evidence of the continued existence of these countercultural physicists, and I wondered what had happened to them. David Kaiser’s entertaining new book, How the Hippies Saved Physics, does a wonderful job of recounting the twists and turns of the story of how the members of this group came together, interacted with one another and with the more conventional physics community, and then dispersed to various fates.

my observing run in australia started a couple of hours ago.

weather looks doooope

http://i.min.us/idHbYm.jpg

Wait... you're IN aus? or just controlling a 'scope, or?

my colleagues are there driving the telescope and i am chiming in via email for the first night. i would love to have gone but it is only four nights. bit of a trek.

♥ clear skies ♥

Technology is so cool <3

which is your favorite star

betelgeuse because of the movie they made about it

but seriously, it's this beauty http://snfactory.lbl.gov/snf/spstds/EG131

oh nice http://appropriations.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=250023

> >This is not the last word.  The House Appropriations Subcommittee
> >will consider this bill tomorrow.  And the Senate will also have a
> >separate bill on NASA funding. However, in the present climate this
> >step puts the centerpiece of astronomy's future at great risk.
> >
> >JWST and Astrophysics has entered a very dangerous zone.
> >
> >The impacts are numerous if JWST is terminated:
> >
> >1)  termination is very damaging for future astronomy and
> >astrophysics scientific productivity and for the pre-eminence of US
> >science;
> >
> >2)  termination would result in no observatory-class mission to carry
> >out broadly-based research when the current Great Observatories reach
> >end-of-life;
> >
> >3)  termination undercuts the Decadal Survey process since it was the
> >top ranked program in the prior 2000 Decadal Survey, and it is
> >identified numerous times in the 2010 Decadal Survey as a
> >foundational program for future astrophysics research;
> >
> >4)  termination of JWST, as the natural successor to Hubble, would
> >result in the loss, once Hubble fails, of a very large part of the
> >remarkable public interest that astronomy has enjoyed;
> >
> >5)  termination would eliminate a major source of inspirational
> >science education and outreach results, particularly for the interest
> >in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) that comes from
> >the high profile HST and JWST science results;
> >
> >6)  termination would reduce the strength and visibility world-wide
> >of the US science program, not just astrophysics;
> >
> >7)  termination would reduce US credibility as an international
> >partner given the Canadian and European partnership on JWST and their
> >substantial contributions to the program;
> >
> >8)  termination of JWST, following on from the termination of the SSC
> >(Superconducting Super Collider), would send the message that the US
> >is relinquishing leadership in major science projects -- it will be
> >very difficult to start any other major science project or mission;
> >
> >9)  termination would eliminate the broadly-based research funding
> >for the community that results from the Great Observatory-class
> >missions if none are operating, and greatly reduces opportunities for
> >undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate education;
> >
> >It is essential that we make our voices heard.

sorry this belongs here: NASA: "We're going back to the moon!"

Yeah the Cyclotron here in Melb has also been hit with "sorry no money guys" govy issues recently that threatens to close it. Sucks.

http://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/images/blog/Mrkos.jpg

oh yeah, I saw this last month and thought of this thread but then forgot to post it. This is one of those small innocent discoveries that could just as well have massive implications for our understanding of everything:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/06/x-ray-penetration-of-earliest-galaxies-reveals-massive-black-holes-in-existence.html

yeah i know those guys. not necessarily a surprising discovery, but a very impressive observation!

http://i.min.us/ibKx5O.jpeg

behold the face of god!