soapbox

There’s an article about Berkeley scientists recruiting people over the internet to look through the 1.5million images they’ve taken of the aerogel from the Stardust mission, looking for captured interstellar particles. This is the interesting part, in that I’m surprised someone would say it in an article (emphasis is mine):

“The call for help is the latest in a long series of scientific projects over the last century in which scientists swamped by Niagaras of new data have called on outside volunteers for assistance. For example, in the 1950s, physicists enlisted large teams of volunteers — especially women, who for whatever reason seemed to have a special knack for the work – to pore through stacks and stacks of images from particle accelerators in search of strange streaks that revealed previously unknown types of subatomic particles.”

The full article is here.

(by the by, the “quixotic” mood is because i feel like i’m attempting the impossible, trying to observe with this damn telescope under a practically full moon)

(1) Excel. ’nuff said. (well, actually I’ll probably end up elaborating and y’all are welcome to do the same, but oh well.)

(2) As John said, WMP is pretty well done. Still has problems, but infinitely better and (gasp!) more stable than RealPlayer. Seriously, that one ranks up there with ICQ as “hmmm, how can I make my PC crash?”

download the “Clear Sky Clock” widget. It actually works pretty well.

I talked to a guy today who just built a fancy spectrograph. He was running into huge problems that the shapes of the mirrors he needed were crazy… off-axis hyperbolics and other weird ass shit.

It turns out that CAD milling is good enough now that you can actually just mill some of these shapes out of billet aluminum. They ended up with the needed shapes with a roughness of something like lambda/10 (at 500nm) which was good enough that they didn’t even have to polish anything. He said there are some fancy new polishing techniques now too to easily get the finish down to like lambda/20 at low cost.

The end result is that they were able to build their spectrograph for an order of magnitude less cost than would have been the case using custom-ground glass mirrors. Apparently construction time was a lot shorter too.

This should make it a little bit easier to play movies. I haven’t tested it yet though.

Windows Media Components for QuickTime

One big problem with the AAS meeting is that you have no idea which posters are being sent out with press releases. The probably aren’t the ones talking about some small college’s attempts to monitor variable stars, but there’s lots of interesting science in a lot of posters and a lot of the time you miss it unless you happen to see exactly the right poster.

Speaking of that, there were 500-600 posters up every day of this conference. That’s really too many because you don’t have time to see all of them, much less ask the presenters questions, and especially not on a day that your poster is up.

Anyway, I missed this poster, but apparently yahoo didn’t. It’s a little bit tricky though. They looked at stars with planets and found that lots of the stars were binaries. The problem that I see is that most of those planets were detected by watching for periodic variations in the motion of the star as the planet orbited. Now, since people didn’t know these stars were binary, the planetary detections assumed that a planet was the only thing causing the movement of the star. However, if the stars are actually binaries, that could be explaining the star’s motion. I wonder how many of these stars will turn out not to have planets after all. It would be horrible if it turned out to be all of them and extrasolar planets turned out to just be a mistake in the calculation.

Worlds With Multiple Suns Abundant
identify

First the uncool part. My reservation was to catch a flight at 9:10 because I wasn’t sure that everything would be done until late tonight. It turns out that everything was done at noon, so I hurried out to the airport to go standby on a 3:45 flight which was going to be basically empty.

Then they canceled it.

Now I have to wait at the airport for about 6 hours (down to only 3.5 or so now). Weeha!

Anyway, here’s the cool thing about this post. I’m working wireless, but not normal wireless. I’m using basically a cell phone in a PC card stuck into the side of my computer. As long as I have a cell signal, I have a connection.

Unfortunately, it’s only about 14.4K… but it’s still cool tech.