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The Tweeting Astronomer September 2, 2010

Posted by sarah in: astro 2.0 . 3comments

Twitter has been one of the big game changers in social media on the web in recent years.  Those who know me are aware that I’m an active tweeter. In fact, those of you who know me through this blog are very likely to have found me through Twitter. I have statistics to tell me that, it’s rather neat.

So much has been written about the pros, cons and dangers of Twitter in general or in the context of science specifically, I feel this post is moot – but I’ve promised several times to write about Twitter and astronomy,  and it’s about time I delivered on that. I should start off by saying that most of the things I like about Twitter are not related to astronomy per se – I’m sure non-astronomers have a very similar experience. I’ll also concentrate on the person-tweeter, rather than the institute-tweeter or telescope-tweeter – those are whole other topics. So here’s what I think.

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A taste of morality August 28, 2010

Posted by sarah in: science . Add a comment

Something radically new is in the air: new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking about thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions. A realistic biology of the mind, advances in evolutionary biology, physics, information technology, genetics, neurobiology, psychology, engineering, the chemistry of materials: all are questions of critical importance with respect to what it means to be human. For the first time, we have the tools and the will to undertake the scientific study of human nature. — Edge.org

In late July, Edge organised a conference on the science of morality, gathering together a number of scientists, philosophers, psychologists, to talk about the new ways that we’re studying human morality, and the questions we face in this difficult but important discipline.

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Optics cheat sheet for iPhone August 25, 2010

Posted by sarah in: astro 2.0, reviews . Add a comment

SPIE, the somewhat bizarrely acronymed International Society for Optical Engineering, is a household name for astronomy instrumentalists. Organiser of the biggest global conference on telescopes and instruments, SPIE publish a number of decent journals and some very useful books. I’m a particular fan of their Field Guide series, which are small spiral-bound quick-reference booklets on topics like adaptive optics,  spectroscopy or optical testing. I recently saw that SPIE have now released a free iPhone app for their Field Guide to Geometrical Optics, by John Greivenkamp.

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The Culture of Science (Thoughts on the Decadal Survey) August 16, 2010

Posted by sarah in: astronomy, science . 4comments

The global astronomy community is buzzing this week after the publication at last of the Decadal Survey for Astronomy & Astrophysics by the US National Academy of Sciences, which will serve as a roadmap for US astronomy for the coming decade. Following a flurry of tweets and live blogs during the presentation of the report by the Chair of the review, Prof Roger Blandford, which was broadcast live on the web, I’m sure the report will be read, chewed over, and discussed at length online in the weeks to come (see e.g. here, here, here, here); if you’re interested, the report is publicly available here, all 225 pages of it – happy reading.

It’s also worth noting that the European astronomy community produced a similar document, the Astronet roadmap, in 2008. The report, equally beefy, is available from the Astronet website.

I just finished reading In Bluebeard’s Castle, a collection of lectures by George Steiner from 1971, presented as  “Notes towards a Redefinition of Culture”. Steiner is a fascinating writer, he displays an huge breadth of knowledge in his writing. When commenting on a concept as broad as that of “culture”, this allows him to create connections between the many aspects that it encompasses in original and exciting ways. The World Wars and the Holocaust feature heavily in his writing, and indeed WWII serves as a pivotal point in his discussion.

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Massive star formation not so different after all? August 2, 2010

Posted by sarah in: new astronomy . 6comments

Reconstructed image from near-IR interferometric observations of IRAS 13481-6124 using VLTI/AMBER

ResearchBlogging.orgIn my previous post on the Zooniverse Project IX I’m involved in, I talked about the importance of star formation in the Universe and some of the difficulties we face in studying it. Some big unanswered question particularly remain in our understanding of how massive stars form. Fittingly, the latest edition of Nature has a paper on a nice result in the study of massive star formation: a detection by direct imaging of an accretion disk around a massive young star.

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