The AstroDyke

June Wedding, anyone?

2008-05-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

I'm still pinching myself, but we won. Strict scrutiny, marriage equality. From an elderly, Republican, cautious California Supreme Court.

Climate Change

2008-05-12T11:22:00.000-07:00

NASA's foremost climate scientist, Jim Hansen (you may remember the Bushies trying to muzzle him), has a new paper on arxiv.org. Here's the abstract:

Paleoclimate data show that climate sensitivity is ~3 deg-C for doubled CO2, including only fast feedback processes. Equilibrium sensitivity, including slower surface albedo feedbacks, is ~6 deg-C for doubled CO2 for the range of climate states between glacial conditions and ice-free Antarctica. Decreasing CO2 was the main cause of a cooling trend that began 50 million years ago, large scale glaciation occurring when CO2 fell to 425 +/- 75 ppm, a level that will be exceeded within decades, barring prompt policy changes. If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm. The largest uncertainty in the target arises from possible changes of non-CO2 forcings. An initial 350 ppm CO2 target may be achievable by phasing out coal use except where CO2 is captured and adopting agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon. If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.

Emphasis added by me. Holy shit, people. The cliff's ahead, and we're blithely driving toward it.

Are you biking to work yet?

Happy Birthday, Hubble Space Telescope!

2008-04-25T10:28:00.000-07:00

Eighteen years ago yesterday, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched on shuttle Discovery.

As other bloggers have noted, most freshman Astro101 students are the same age as Hubble. And were toddlers when astronauts corrected the spherical abberation, finally giving us diffraction--limited views of the distant universe.

Problem with Spitzer Space Telescope - apparently resolved

2008-04-01T08:57:00.001-07:00

The problem is now resolved. This past week, there was a problem with the electronics that control the IRS and MIPS instruments onboard the Spitzer Space Telescope. Normal science operations have resumed.

Description of the problem can be found on the SSC website.

Science Tattoo

2008-03-24T09:05:00.001-07:00

Check out
Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium. Pretty damned cool.

Each comes with a short explanation of what the body art means to the body owner.

More elegant than the Schroedinger's Eqn I passed in the Denver airport security line.

Naked eye-bright GRB at z=0.9

2008-03-20T10:14:00.001-07:00

Yesterday's gamma ray burst GRB 080319B was the brightest yet -- peak optical magnitude of ~5.6. That's visible to the naked eye. (Light curve here). Spectra have been obtained from multiple telescopes; the highest redshift feature is the Mg II doublet at z=0.937.

For other bursts, spectra taken a few hours apart show evolving metastable emission lines, caused by the blast wave cooking the gas in the galaxy. An inside-out probe of the gas. Presumably we'll see papers like that for this burst, too.

Props to Trogon and Bad Astronomy for the news flash.

Women run the Mars rovers

2008-03-10T08:53:00.001-07:00

Cool news story: on Friday Feb 22, the on-duty tactical operations team for the Mars Rovers was an all-women group. It's almost happened accidentally before, as people rotated on and off duty. So with a bit of planning, they decided to swap a few people's schedules to make a 100% women team for a day.

Article courtesy the Planetary Society.

What white people like: graduate school

2008-03-07T09:13:00.000-08:00

Check out the entry "Graduate School", on the pseudo-anthropological
blog "Stuff White People Like". Something of a Hitchhiker's Guide style, it seems.

Excerpt: "It is important to understand that a graduate degree does not make someone smart, so do not feel intimidated.... The best thing you can do is to act impressed when a white person talks about critical theorists. This helps them reaffirm that what they learned in graduate school was important and that they are smarter than you. This makes white people easier to deal with when you get promoted ahead of them."

Poem for a late night writing proposals

2008-03-05T20:05:00.000-08:00

Frederick Douglass
by Robert Hayden from Collected Poems (Liveright).

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

A post-bullshit America

2008-03-04T15:24:00.000-08:00

Go read SharkFu's post, "Pondering a post-bullshit America". Excerpts:

"What we are living in…and some of us are suffering through…is the mess that results from decades of avoiding the issues of race, class and gender by embracing the school of tolerance rather than engaging in the hard work of social justice.

"...Enlightenment isn’t something we can speak into reality anymore than bigotry is something we can simply declare to be history."

100th post, HST proposals, and same-sex marriage

2008-03-04T14:59:00.001-08:00

Three quick things:

1) The California Supreme Court just heard oral arguments about same-sex marriage. At issue: Is our separate-but-equal Domestic Partner registration a sufficient consolation prize, or do the wif & me deserve equal rights? (BTW, if I had a dollar for every time a straight person asked me, "What's a DP?", then I'd have about $25. Equal my ass.)

You can watch the video of oral arguments, or try this alternate video source. That's my plan for the evening, while running S/N calculations, b/c, after all, #2...

2) Hubble Space Telescope proposals are due Friday at 8pm EST. Ack. It never ends.

3) This is my 100th post. Lately I've been reluctant to post new content, out of a fear that blogging might hurt my job prospects. Few things are confidential in academia; academics generally view blogging with suspicion (I remember a young prof in my dept arguing that they shouldn't hire anyone who finds time to blog); and blogging with a minority viewpoint makes the enterprise still more suspicious. Please feel free to talk me out of this mindset.

Now, back to Hubble proposals.

Don't forget tonight's total lunar eclipse!

2008-02-20T14:05:00.000-08:00

Don't forget tonight's total lunar eclipse, my peeps!

As the map at left shows, the eclipse will be visible from Europe, West Africa, and the Americas. (map source and related article, with lots of useful details, at Sky & Telescope.)

You'd think professional astronomers would be vigilant about such natural phenomena, but half the folks in my department didn't know. And I learned about it from my humble local newspaper. I guess our thoughts are focused too narrowly on redshift three.

Marking Political Contributions as Gay Money

2008-01-31T09:40:00.000-08:00

Back in the 1980s, activists rubber-stamped US currency "Gay Money Gay Money" to make a point.

So, I'll ask: How can LGBTQ and allied people mark our political contributions as "Gay Money"?

During Howard Dean's 2004 primary campaign, when grass-roots supporters were sending small contributions, LGBTQ folks were urged to add a specific number of cents to their contributions, to mark them as "Gay Money". (The cents number was the date Governor Dean signed civil unions into law.) Can we adapt that technique? Is there a more effective one? We need a grass-roots, easy-to-do method, with no need for a middle-man bundler.

Learnin' stuff: our solar system.

2008-01-30T17:22:00.000-08:00

First pictures & science results from the new "Messenger" probe to the planet Mercury are coming in. Pretty cool that we're still learning so much about our own solar system.

Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'

2008-01-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

An oldie but goodie: The Onion's article from January 2001, "Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'".

"...For years, I tirelessly preached the message that Clinton must be stopped," conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said. "And yet, in 1996, the American public failed to heed my urgent warnings, re-electing Clinton despite the fact that the nation was prosperous and at peace under his regime. But now, thank God, that's all done with. Once again, we will enjoy mounting debt, jingoism, nuclear paranoia, mass deficit, and a massive military build-up."

"... We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two," Bush said. "Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."

Note the date: January 2001.

Huckabee: God sez amend the Constitution

2008-01-15T18:32:00.000-08:00

"It's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. What we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than trying to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family."

- Mike Huckabee, at a campaign event in Michigan, 14 Jan 08, reported by Salon.

Thank you, icanhascheezburger

2008-01-08T09:13:00.001-08:00

Job Interviews

2007-12-19T10:56:00.000-08:00

This advice on how to interview for jobs at a big--professional society meeting, in this case for historians, is surprisingly relevant to professional astronomers looking to stay employed.

Gifty book recommendation

2007-12-17T10:05:00.000-08:00

Can you peeps recommend a non-technical book that summarizes the last 20 years of Cosmology results? Basically, an update on the current state of our ignorance vis a vis this absurd dark energy, dark matter Universe.

Smoking guns!

2007-12-12T12:02:00.001-08:00

This week's "This Modern World" is particularly brilliant:

At least, for those of us whose mammas gave Ray Bradbury short story collections to their babies for bedtime reading...

(click for the fullsized image.)

Let no one say that Science does not serve mankind

2007-12-10T14:06:00.000-08:00

This is one of the first pictures ever of the long-eared jerboa. (via BBC News.) Cute overload!

Science Fair News

2007-12-10T09:14:00.000-08:00

(Belated) News Flash: Young women swept this year's national high school Science Fair. *

Two high school seniors shared first prize in the team category (cooperation in science, how novel!) for creating a molecule that fights drug-resistant tuberculosis. A 16-year-old senior won first prize in the individual category for studying zebra fish, and another senior took second place for a project on Lou Gehrig's disease. Only shame: there aren't any astronomy projects among the winners, like last year.

* Now named "The Siemens Competition". Formerly Intel. Formerly Westinghouse. We old farts cannot keep up with the heady pace of high school science sponsorship.

On Proposal Season

2007-12-03T21:56:00.000-08:00

"I’m telling you, if a giant asteroid were going to hit the earth in a week, the first question academics would ask would be how to beat out competing proposals for the $50-million “Deflection of Space-Based Objects” initiative at NSF."

From Scott Aaronson, via Angry Physics.

Post-post-doc

2007-12-03T21:44:00.000-08:00

Six years has become the standard duration spent post-doc-ing in Astronomy. Is this too long? Please discuss.

(Comments are moderated due to a recent spate of incivility. Please don't let that keep you from commenting.)

PhD Comics this week features Astronomers

2007-11-19T08:48:00.002-08:00

Click for a larger version.