Walking around town, you occasionally see things that seem a bit funny. This sign, for example, is in the window of a local bar:


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This is an absolutely stunning image: the Curiosity rover spotted while descending to the Martian surface, dangling under its parachute. It took some tremendously careful calculations by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team (and some good luck) to snap this shot of a fast-moving object in the few moments available (they had to aim the camera in ( Read more... )

[Phone rings. I pick it up ( Read more... )

In thinking about The Hobbit today, I've hit a guess as to the proximate reason that Jackson decided he wanted three films. (The studio's reason is clearly "more money".) I think it may be significant that nobody has ever said a word about where Jackson planned to split the story into two films. My guess is that after watching a rough cut of most ( Read more... )

Peter Jackson confirmed today that he will make The Hobbit into three movies, rather than two as formerly planned. To my eye, this is a spectacularly bad idea. Why, you ask?
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Charged particles released after the big solar flare last week have been reaching the Earth all weekend, and there's a good chance of an impressive aurora tonight! (I probably ought to have said something yesterday...) There's a good Aurora Forecast page from the University of Alaska that will show you what to expect where. In fact, if it weren't ( Read more... )

I've finally finished mucking with my poster of the solar system!

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The rumors were true! Both experiments at the LHC that were searching for the Higgs announced discovery-level evidence early this morning. This is a Big Deal, even if we did pretty much expect that the LHC would produce a result like this eventually. There's a lot to say (and lots of good discussions out there at various technical levels), but for ( Read more... )

Wednesday may prove to be a very exciting day in physics: the two LHC teams searching for the Higgs boson are scheduled to give a seminar, and pretty much the entire particle physics community expects their announcement to amount to a discovery (though either experiment on its own may or may not pass the official threshold this time). This is a Big ( Read more... )

When our college president sent out his monthly campus update, I was pleasantly surprised to see my picture: he was happy about the very successful public viewing event that another professor and I arranged for the transit of Venus on June 5. (I'm up for tenure this fall, so the recognition is good!) We got an article on the front page of the ( Read more... )