For some time now, I’ve been using social bookmarking site delicious to keep track of interesting links, both for my personal use and for sharing with others. My new delicious bookmarks get posted automatically to twitter and into the handy little widget on this blog. Delicous’ parent company, Yahoo, is in the process of laying off 4% of its staff, and it seems like delicious will be closed down as part of this exercise. Not cool! So I’m looking for a new social bookmarking thingy that works well with twitter and WordPress. If you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments or send via twitter. Thanks!
Digging Physics
October 16, 2010 By
Spreading Galaxies Gospel on Facebook
April 11, 2010 By
Galaxy rotation curves: NOT flat (Noordermeer et al, 2007)
Paolo Salucci has a bone to pick with the community. The Trieste-based astronomer is fed up with his colleagues’ misconceptions about galaxy rotation curves and has decided to Do Something About It. In his short paper posted to astro-ph last Friday, he describes the experiment he’s set up to convince the world that galaxy rotation curves are not flat (oh sorry, that’s: NOT flat) – he has set up a Facebook group with plots, background, links and discussion, to orchestrate a change in the hearts and minds of astronomers around the world, to stamp out once and for all the damaging “hoax” of flat galaxy rotation curves.
Rotation curves describe how the rotation velocity in galaxies changes with increasing distance from the galactic centre. For spiral galaxies these curves are useful for learning about the galaxies’ matter distribution and, importantly, the presence of dark matter. But I’m not going to talk about rotation curves – it’s not my field and I’m happy to accept that they’re not flat.
A pretty picture of me
January 7, 2010 By
Ha! No, I’m not giving you an actual pretty picture of me – I may have a blog but I’m not that much of a narcissist. Two of my favourite online toys right now are Wordle and social bookmarking site Delicious, which I started using a couple of months ago as a way of keeping track of links and bookmarks. So far it works well for me and it integrates nicely with other applications I use, like Twitter and FriendFeed. I created a Wordle of my Delicious tags and despite having only used the site for a short while, the tags sum my science-related interests up pretty well (and it looks so attractive!). Click to see a bigger version.
Now apparently I just need to settle on how I want to spell “visualis/zation”!
Connect