Feynman

Bill Gates has put up a series of lectures given by Richard Feynman in a website called Project Tuva. This is part of Microsoft Research, so I think they are also trying to sell the idea of adding digital notes to videos (Youtube is already inserting ads in videos).

Fafa

Track this week is by Vieux Farka Touré.

Yosemite judge wanted

The current Yosemite magistrate judge has resigned and the position is now open. Your job: to deal with misdemeanors in the park. Your office: somewhere near the picture on the right. Plus you actually get paid $160,000 a year. Well if you are a lawyer, this is the job for you. Hope they start looking for an in-residence astro type person soon.

Ritmo de la Noche

From Murcia, Spain a nice remake by Klaus & Kinski. And some very silly dancing.

Collider

News seem to indicate that the LHC will be running at 3.5 TeV per beam. Maybe possibility of discovery by the end of 2010.

August

Corridors and streets have thinned out in August. So, this week's tune is by Ghostland Observatory.

Mirrors

Matt Mountain over at Nature has a nice plot about the evolution of telescope mirrors over the past few centuries. Not sure if there is an upper limit somewhere.

Cataloguing

In honor of ongoing work

Present
I catalogue
Preterite
I catalogued
Present continuous
I am cataloguing
Present perfect
I have catalogued
Future
I will catalogue
Future perfect
I will have catalogued
Future continuous
I will be cataloguing

TED 2009

Talks from the latest TED conference have been released. If you are not familiar with the concept, it puts together short talks (10-15 min) about various topics. The catch is that the talk has to be for a general audience and avoid busy viewgraphs. Some are more interesting than others but there might be something to learn there.

The geopolitics of astrophysics

Geopolitics have been floating around this month in different contexts. A weaker opponent challenges a larger one in order to call the attention of the world or the rap industry. A couple of weeks ago, Hao Liu and Ti-Pei Li decided to play the geopolitics of astrophysics by challenging the WMAP results. They claimed that there is a problem with the maps generated by the WMAP team that would alter some cosmological model parameters. So, it's really great that a David (Two Chinese researchers) challenges the results of a much stronger team (WMAP in this case). The problem is that the paper is really thin on the details, so I figure we will likely forget about it soon. The lesson, do challenge scientific results if you think that something is wrong but do it in a way where the readers can understand and reproduce your arguments. Otherwise, you'll basically be ignored by the rest of the world.