Changed Targets of Interest

I finally got around to making some long-needed changes to the links visible on the right hand side of this blog.

• Laelaps, Not Exactly Rocket Science, Gene Expression, and the Primate Diaries "in Exile" are back in and/or are now working, finally catching up with all the moves associated with the great scienceblogs Pepsi kerfuffle about a year ago...
• Deltoid, Sandwalk, john hawk's weblog, Bartholomew's notes, Crooked Timber and so finally got added as I read them often enough to make a direct link worthwhile.
• My old non-astro blog got removed as I never update it any more.
• Parasite of the Day, Molecule of the Day, Denialism Blog got removed as they're updated too infrequently. Sad, as they were great.
• Uncertain Principles gets deleted because there isn't enough interesting science to offset his knee-jerk atheist-bashing.
  

Thanks, but I'm not worthy (Research Blogging Awards)

Wow! Somehow this blog got into the finalist list for Research Blogging's best research blog of 2010.

I'm deeply flattered - thank you.

But seriously, my little part-time blog isn't anywhere near the quality of the other blogs on the nominee list.

I voted for Ed Yong's awesome Not Exactly Rocket Science, but if I'd had a second vote I'd also have voted for Eric Johnson's blog The Primate Diaries.

HuffPo lunacy

The Huffington Post has a certain reputation for allowing (perhaps it would be more accurate to say promoting) quacks, vaccine denialists, conspiracy theorists and other superstitious wackery, but the example that follows is impressively moronic even by HuffPo standards.

As Tariq Malik at Space.com reports regarding NASA's LCROSS lunar impact (emphasis mine):

NASA's LCROSS mission will slam a spacecraft and an empty rocket stage into the moon's south pole Friday morning at 7:31 a.m. EDT (1131 GMT) in a search for water ice buried in the perpetual shadows of lunar craters.

Scientists are eagerly awaiting the LCROSS crashes and hope they'll provide a definitive answer on whether lunar water ice could be used to support future astronauts on the moon. But at least one person — novelist and screenwriter Amy Ephron — has spoken out against the $79 million mission on her Huffington Post blog and launched a Twitter campaign ("helpsavethemoon") to save the moon from future onslaught.

"I'm not a big fan of explosions, anyway. In Iraq or Afghanistan or the South Pole of the Moon. But who does have a territorial prerogative there?" Ephron wrote. "Who has jurisdiction? Who has the right to say that it's okay to blow up a crater on the moon?"

Apparently, Mother Nature does. The moon is covered in craters, with new ones like those to be created by the LCROSS probes popping up all the time by meteorites that pummel the lunar surface.

"The image of this impact, what we're doing with the moon, is something that occurs naturally four times a month on the moon, whether we're there or not," LCROSS principal investigator Tony Colaprete told reporters Thursday.

I love Malik and Colaprete's understated but effectively utter refutation of Ephron's deliberately ignorant rant. Keep it up!

Fiddling with the blog layout

Mr Moto is out. Minima Stretch is in, as I prefer the extra width compared to the overly-restrictive fixed width blogger styles. Title, banner and font colors still need some work.

Blog roll changes

NASAWatch out for being, well, non-informative about what is happening in NASA, and being rather anti-science. Rob Knop (of Galaxy Interactions, good luck with the tenure thing btw), Astro Dyke and the Hoofnagles (Denialism Blog) are in.

Sunday morning relaxation...

It is Sunday morning, and I'm sipping my first coffee of the day while trying to relax after the last two weeks of Hubble proposal deadline stress - the deadline is still only less than 36 hours in the past. Outside thick low clouds, almost white, are threatening a few flurries of snow. I'm reading blogs, pharyngula, kos, TPM, all the normal crowd, while waiting for a certain online game still in beta to successfully connect to its servers.


Thanks to Pharyngula, I now know that if I were a Science Fiction writer I'd apparently be like this this guy:

I am: Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs) A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Which is embarrassing, as consider myself widely-read (in SciFi) yet I've never heard of him.

Sudden Futue Singularities: Not what we need with a HST proposal deadline coming up...

Currently I have little time for blogging, having (a) just finished off (and had accepted) my NGC 6810 paper and (b) just started on HST Cycle 16 observing proposal creation, so I've only just noticed that this blog seems to have disappeared from the web (blogspot server problems?).





The shown are NGC 6810, taken from the paper. The image on the left is NGC 6810 as seen in the near-ultraviolet (NUV) and optical (specifically blue is the XMM-Newton Optical monitor UVW1 band, green is a U band filter and red is R band), while the image on the right contrasts the stellar light (optical R band shown in blue) with ionized gas at T~ 10000 K (continuum-subtracted H-alpha + [N II], shown in red) and soft X-ray emission (green, also mainly ionized gas, except now at T ~ 4000000 K).

As a test that its still working here are some interesting things I read about on coffee break this morning:

1. A conference proceedings on arXiv (in General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, cross-posted to Astronomy) discusses the possibility of Sudden Future Singularities (see gr-qc/0701056), which would be bad news for those of us with up-coming proposal deadlines. Time runs faster than I like at the moment. The paper is way over my head, but I get the impression that a SFS is NOT actually a sudden discontinuous jump into the future, despite the cool name (get writing you SciFi authors).
2. Software coding errors, specifically over-writing the wrong memory addresses, may be responsible for the long-serving Mars Global Surveyor's sudden demise last year. Space.com has the story.
3. Rosa Williams makes the news with N19, a superbubble in the Small Magellanic Cloud. And if you name is Sally or You-Hua, I haven't given up on writing up that LMC superbubble data... I'll do it soon. Just after the proposal deadlines and grant reports due in January are done. Honest.
   

Switch over to Beta Blogger

I've switched this blog over to Google's "beta" version of the new blogger service. Some nice drag-and-drop layout options, and of course the labels feature. Expect more cosmetic changes to the blog in the next few days.