A few years ago I blogged a little bit about (Sir) Fred Hoyle and the tendency of some scientists to turn into cranks in the later life ("Fred Hoyle and the Venusian Pox").

Via John Hawks Weblog I came across an interesting article by Robin McKee on whether Hoyle's prickly nature or later lunacy (astronomy joke, sorry, I couldn't resist) cost him the Nobel Prize (his long time collabor Willy Fowler got the Nobel for work that Hoyle and he had done). It is worth reading if you find Hoyle interesting.

Seen from this perspective, Hoyle was the victim of his own intemperate nature, while the Nobel prize committee was guilty of a petty lack of objectivity. But there are other ways of looking at the issue, says British scientist Sir Harry Kroto, winner of the 1996 Nobel prize for chemistry. A Nobel is not just an award for a piece of work but is a recognition of a scientist's overall reputation, he believes . And by that definition, Hoyle – who died in 2001, never having recanted his belief in the steady state theory even when it was clearly demonstrated to be wrong – was unworthy of a prize [emphasis mine].

Rendering equations on the web: MathJax

Previously I've mentioned codecog's online equation editor, which is pretty useful for generating images of LaTeX-rendered equations for use in web pages and powerpoint presentations.

Thanks to the latest version of doxygen, I've just discovered something even more useful: MathJax. It is an open source javascript display engine for math than works in all modern browsers, supports LaTeX and MathML, and allows copy and paste into LaTeX, Word, Mathematic. Wikipedia etc. Pretty amazing.

NAS's Astro2010 Decacal Survey recommendations

The National Academies of Sciences has released its Astro2010 decadal survey report and recommendations. A PDF of the release presentation is also available on that site. The panel's recommendations influence what programs NASA, NSF and DOE pursue and fund in astronomy and astrophysics for the next decade, so this is a big deal.

So far I've only read the presentation, and looked at Steinn Sigurdsson's comments on his blog [1, 2], so what follows is by no means a complete and final assessment.

My personal take is that its a mix of the good and the bad.

Whats good (from my perspective at least):

• A strong endorsement and emphasis on revitalizing the Explorer class mission program. This had suffered badly under O'Keefe and Griffin.
• A strong recognition of the importance of feedback, and flows of matter and energy into and out of galaxies (the 8th, 9th, and 10th points on slide 9 of the PDF copy of presensation).

Whats bad:

• IXO ranks 4th, behind some wide field IR telescope focussed on Dark Energy (yawn, a couple of billion bucks to get one not-very-interesting number) and LISA. IXO will only get $180m in the next decade, so basically that pushes it back to ~2030? And probably kills its chances in the ESA mission rankings too. Given that Constellation-X (IXO's forerunner prior to the merger with ESA) came 2nd (after JWST) in the previous decadal and IXO thought it had a good chance of coming 1st this time the current ranking is a real blow.
• LISA is somehow ranked as lower risk (and cheaper) than IXO! Seriously?
• Funding for astrophysics doesn't look like it going to get better.
• Unless you're an optical/IR astronomer, or the three gravitational wave astronomers, you're in for a bad decade and a half. X-ray astronomy, UV astronomy, and radio seem to be in trouble.
• From my perspective there is a disconnect between the science priorities for the next decade and the missions endorsed. Feedback and the galaxy/IGM interconnection isn't going to be answered by JWST, WFIRST, LISA or any Explorer mission

Still alive

I'm still alive, just rather busy settling into the new job and the added commuting. When I have time I'll get back to posting. In the mean time:

• Space.com has a short article with more images of IKAROS's solar sail (mentioned previously here).
• NASA and NOAA engineers have got GOES-P's Solar X-ray Imager working again (see also a Space.com article). Hooray X-rays!