Bill Hooker is a regular advocate of “open science,” and is currently supporting a new subversive proposal: to make all raw data freely available on some sort of Creative Commons type license. It sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea on the face of it, but I have to say, I’m a little dubious about it… Continue reading You Can’t Cook a Cow: The Problem with Raw Data
Category: Science
The Band Is On the Field!
One of the requirements of the Nobel Prize is that the laureates give a public lecture at some point, and as a result, there is generally a seminar scheduled a little bit before the actual prize ceremony, at which the laureats give lectures about the work for which they’re being honored. These frequently involve props… Continue reading The Band Is On the Field!
Displacing Artie Shaw
A flurry of press releases hit EurekAlert yesterday (one, two, three), indicating the release of a bunch of data from NASA’s Stardust mission. This is the probe that was sent out to fly through the tail of a comet, and catch tiny dust particles in an aerogel matrix, and return them to Earth for analysis.… Continue reading Displacing Artie Shaw
Single Top Quark, Seeking Antiquark. No Freaks.
The physics story of the moment is probably the detection of single top quarks at Fermilab. Top quarks, like most other exotic particles, are usually produced in particle-antiparticle pairs, with some fraction of the kinetic energy of two colliding particles being converted into the mass of the quark-antiquark pair (see this old post). There’s a… Continue reading Single Top Quark, Seeking Antiquark. No Freaks.
Classic Edition: Space Trilogy, Volume 4
Here’s the day’s final repost of an old blog post about space policy. This is yet another post from 2004, with the usual caveats about linkrot and dated numbers and the like. This one is more or less a direct response to comments made in response to the previous post attempting to argue that using… Continue reading Classic Edition: Space Trilogy, Volume 4
Classic Edition: The Moon is a Harsh Wossname
Yet another in today’s series of reposts of articles about space policy. This is another old blog post from 2004, back when the Moon-and-Mars plan was first announced. As with the previous posts, any numbers or links in the post may be badly out of date, and there are some good comments at the original… Continue reading Classic Edition: The Moon is a Harsh Wossname
Classic Edition: The Arrogance of Complexity
This is the second in a series of old posts about space exploration in general, and the Bush Moon-and-Mars plan specifically. This is a repost of an old blog post from 2004, so any numbers or links in the post may be out of date. There were also a few comments to the original article,… Continue reading Classic Edition: The Arrogance of Complexity
Classic Edition: Man vs. Machine in Space
As threatened in passing yesterday, I dug up some old posts on space policy, and will re-post them here. This first one dates from January of 2004, around the time that Bush first floated the idea of the new Moon-and-Mars plan that’s re-shaping NASA. The original post has a ton of links in it, and… Continue reading Classic Edition: Man vs. Machine in Space
Snarkin’ Across the Universe
Monte Davis, of “Thinking Clearly About Space” has another snarky look at overblown space enthusiasm, providing a helpful taxonomy of X-Treme Spacers: Alt.Tech Chemical rockets have let you down: after decades of gritty engineering they remain expensive and trouble-prone. It’s time to start over with a space elevator, deployed by laser launch and magnetic catapult.… Continue reading Snarkin’ Across the Universe
Deism’s Just Alright With Me
Over at Bora’s House of Round-the-Clock Blogging, we find the sensational headline Beaten by Biologists, Creationists Turn Their Sights On Physics. On seeing that, I headed over to the editorial in The American Prospect that it points to, expecting to be scandalized. When I got there, I found this: U.S. creationists have changed tactics. Though… Continue reading Deism’s Just Alright With Me