August 2007
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Death of Punk, thirty years later
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A sad note from the other end of the pop-music spectrum: less than a year after the close of his downtown New York club, CBGB, its owner, Hilly Kristal, has died at the un-rock’n’roll age of 75 (but still too soon, of course). Intending to start a very different kind of club (the initials stand…
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Doctor Rock Star, and his younger peers
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Congratulations to Dr Brian May, PhD, for successfully defending his PhD thesis, “Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud”. At the time of his defense, I was up in Durham, lecturing to the mostly younger incoming class of STFC-supported UK grad students. Best of luck to them, too, and let’s hope they can finish before…
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Google Sky
Google has just released a new version of its Google Earth software — one that lets you look up to the sky instead of down to the ground. It’s essentially a consumer-grade Virtual Observatory, like the UK AstroGrid, the US National Virtual Observatory and the Euro-VO project. It’s not so obvious when you fire it…
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Chicagoland: black holes and buffalo
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Greetings from Batavia, Illinois, USA, home of Fermilab, where I’m visiting the Theoretical Astrophysics Center (and where I spent a lot of time as a graduate student back in the early 1990s). Since I got here late last week, I’ve cycled 50 miles up and down the Lake Michigan Lakefront, given a talk on Gravitational…
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Holy Cow
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I would like to think that the passing of one Scooter — Phil Rizzuto, Yankees Shortstop and broadcaster — was of greater cultural significance than the pardonning of the other one (since they didn’t manage to indict the likely mastermind behind the plot before he could resign. Probably not.
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Floods: It’s not just the UK
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Flooding cripples New York subway system: Flooding from torrential overnight rains crippled the New York City subway system this morning. Delays of at least 30 minutes were reported on all subway lines, and customers were urged to forgo the subways entirely and take buses if possible. The thunderstorm caused havoc across the region, forcing thousands…
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More rock-star astrophysics
Combining as it does my vocation with my avocation, it’s impossible to resist an easy post about our favorite rock-star PhD student, especially when he’s made the Guardian’s Leader (aka Editorial) page and the front of the BBC News site (complete with a spiffy pic of the rock star with our new head of group).…
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