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After a much needed and thoroughly enjoyable jaunt around Brazil, I’m now at the 27th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Rio de Janeiro. The IAU is the organisation that decides, amongst many other things, what is a planet and how we name new objects found in space. Every three years, they organise a huge astronomy jamboree where the community gets together to discuss the latest science and the state of the profession (and have a few drinks).
Welcome to my blog’s new home. I decided to move to my own domain because WordPress’ free hosting, while it’s amazingly efficient and user friendly, is a little more restrictive than the standalone version (e.g. no javascript).
“Grand tour” is really only meant ironically as there is not much difference between this and the old site. But take a look round, grab a beer and play with the cat. Thanks for the visit.
Image: Betsy Malloy (2006)
Dopplr is a social networking site for travellers that helps you keep track of your friends’ whereabouts. If your locations coincide, Dopplr flags it up for you and you can catch up for a drink. I find it a very useful quick-reference for myself to check where I’ll be at a particular time in the future, and my family and friends can import an iCal feed of my trips into their electronic calendars like Google Calendar to get automatic updates of my travel schedule. As well as being a nifty tool for frequent travellers, Dopplr is also a very smart-looking site and I love their design! Very simple, a white background, plain font and simple bock colours.
Earlier this year the Dopplr team made annual travel reports for all its users, and I got mine in my inbox a couple of weeks back. It looks super nice so I thought I’d post it up here. To announce the reports, the Dopplr folks actually did an annual report for Barack Obama – check it out on their Flickr site and spot the swing states. Their calculation of my mileage in 2008 is also remarkably close to my own estimate!
Trivia: Dopplr CTO Matt Biddulph was the first to coin the term Silicon Roundabout for the Old Street area of London, aptly enough on Twitter. Old Street these days is home to a number of hot internet start-ups – other favourites of mine, Last.FM and Moo.com are also based there (as well as one of my favourite sporting venues, but that’s another story!). I love that they’ve found a fun name for such an ugly part of the city and it almost makes me remember Old Street fondly. Almost.
The MIRI engineering model, ready for testing
Today, and for the rest of this week, I’m in the city of Leuven, Belgium. Together with some colleagues from the Catholic University of Leuven and various other institutes in Europe I’m spending a few days working on some aspects of calibration and testing for MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope. The JWST, although offcially its “successor”, will differ from Hubble in that it will be optimised for observations in the infrared, rather than the optical or ultraviolet. Although great science can be done at the shorter wavelengths, achieving top notch image quality is more demanding at shorter wavelengths – with the costs for JWST far exceeding initial estimates as it is, who knows what the budget would have had to be for an optical JWST?
I’m currently reading The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. I have many thoughts about this book, some of them good and others not.
At one point she cites German philospher Friedrich Engels, who claimed that:
“When a woman displays scientific interest, then there is something out of order in her sexuality”.*
I’m going to sit here, at my desk, in a world-renowned astronomy department and be a little bit thankful.
*I’m not sure of the exact source of the quote. Wolf refrences it as cited in Ann Oakley, Housewife: High value/Low cost (London, Penguim Books, 1987), pp. 46-47
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