June 2009
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Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown
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The summertime British music scene is taken over by a series of festivals up and down the country; the biggest and most famous is Glastonbury, but the same weekend London’s Hyde Park holds the somewhat scaled-down (no sleeping over in tents) “Hard Rock Calling“. I arrived too late for the Pretenders, whom I had last…
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Ornette Coleman’s Meltdown
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The annual Meltdown festival took over London’s South Bank Centre this week. I saw Yo La Tengo‘s rock ’n’ roll Q&A, and unfortunately missed a performance by David Murray, one of my favorite saxaphonists. But the highlight was curator Ornette Coleman himself, in an evening dedicated to his “Shape of Jazz to Come”, the record…
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Another launch
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Not all CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) experiments get launched on a rocket. There’s a long history of telescopes flown from balloons — huge mylar balloons floating over 100,000 feet in the air. MAXIMA and BOOMERaNG, the first experiments to map out the microwave sky on the sub-degree scales containing information about the detailed physical conditions…
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Exam nightmares
The students in my cosmology course had their exam last week. There’s no doubt that they found the course tough this year — it was my first time teaching it, and I departed pretty significantly from the previous syllabus. Classically, cosmology was the study of the overall “world model” — the few parameters that describe…
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In the Sky (at Night)
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Despite my almost eight years in Britain as an astronomer, I suppose I have to be embarrassed to admit I’ve never actually watched “The Sky At Night“, apparently the longest-running show on television (possibly in the whole world, not just the UK). But I’m watching this evening’s episode, mostly because I’m on it. I was…
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