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Solo09: What’s in a blog?

August 29, 2009 By

What is a blog? Why do we write blogs? What do we write about and who do we write them for? Those were some of the questions discussed at Science Online London, on 22 August at the Royal Institution. Some great discussion also took place at the FringeFrivolous Unconference event at the offices of Mendeley the evening before.

It is generally accepted (among bloggers!) that blogging has a role to play in science – but what is it? Within the category of science there are many kinds of blogs out there – blogs written by professional science writers as showcases of their work, science news blogs that report new results, blogs at publishing companies that invite discussion on their publications, personal blogs by professional scientists. Each of these have their own purpose and audience, opportunities and challenges.

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Thanks for Science Online London!

August 28, 2009 By

Last Saturday I attended the Science Online London conference (Solo09) at the Royal Institution in London, an event that brought together a bunch of people involved in science and the web in some shape or form. There were working scientists who blog, like myself, from all areas of science, people working for blogging communities like Scienceblogs.com, representatives from the big publishers in science like Nature, software developers and many more. It was a really fun and interesting meeting and I’m glad that I hopped over the Channel for it.

The evening before I went along to an Unconference hosted by publishing company Mendeley at their office in Clerkenwell. I imagined an Unconference to be something like Fight Club for geeks but in fact it was pretty non-weird – it just means the participants decide the discussion topics on the spot by vote and the format is altogether a little more relaxed. I’m not sure if it’s typical of all Unconferences, but the alcohol a’plenty was also a nice touch. Thanks Mendeley!

I’ve got a couple of posts about the event up my sleeve but I first wanted to post a link to this very useful post on the blog of Martin Fenner, one of the event’s organisers. He’s gathered all the blog posts that have appeared after the conference, including his own thoughts. Go take a look, there’s some excellent stuff there – although there’s so much, I can’t keep up! Lots of good discussion and links in the Science Online FriendFeed room.

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Adventures in ELT Wonderland

August 26, 2009 By

Snazzy artist's rendering of the E-ELT, VLT and the Atomium

Optical and infrared observations are the bread and butter of astronomy. For thousands of years the earliest scientists were inspired by the light coming from the sun and the night sky, the light they could see with the unaided eye. These observations have shaped our vision of the world throughout history. Using modern telescopes we can see far beyond the wavelengths visible to the naked eye, catching the photons from the most distant known objects in the Universe, from radio waves through to the most energetic gamma rays. But it’s optical and infrared images, like those produced by the Hubble Space Telescope, that still prove the most inspiring to many scientists and the public.

For the past 2 years I’ve been involved in the planning of the next generation of optical/IR observatories, the European Extremely Large Telescope or E-ELT. Specifically, I work on the design of a potential instrument for this mammoth of a telescope, whose 42-m primary mirror diameter will be four times larger than the largest optical telescopes in the world today. Previous generations of telescopes have always seen an approximate doubling of mirror size, and this new generation of observatories signal an important departure from this trend – a hugely ambitious endeavour by all accounts.

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LookUP on Twitter

August 26, 2009 By

lookup_twitter

Remember LookUP, the nifty little search tool for astronomical objects I wrote about some time ago? It was written by Stuart, blogger and astronomer at Jodrell Bank observatory in the UK. Fellow astronomer and Astro-2.0 enthusiast Rob has now written a twitter functionality for the service using the XML output.

So if you send a tweet to @lookupastro with the name of an astronomical object, it will tweet you back the details you need to point your telescope at the target and a link to more information.

Stuart has more here – leave comments or suggestions for LookUP on his blog.

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Wired: Best science visualisation videos

August 20, 2009 By

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