Sometimes the thrill of uncovering the true nature of the Universe doesn’t quite last all day. Today… well it’s really boring and slow. I tried to work – I really did. I stared at a paper I am writing for at least an hour but nothing came out of my head and into the document. Wait, I lied; there was a spelling correction I think.
What is the best time of day to submit to astro-ph? Do astro-ph and ADS harm publishers? I’ll be trying to answer these questions and others as I discuss the effect of the Internet on scientific papers.
The Cardiff HAlf metre Newise Telescope (CHaNT) officially opens today with a public event. The new, half-metre telescope is big enough to see Andromeda’s companion galaxies, to study the red spot on Jupiter and to see stars which, frankly, I never thought I’d see from Cardiff!
Finally my paper studying the Ophiuchus star-forming region is done and dusted and has been accepted for publication. Today it appeared on the online research paper service, astro-ph and it be published properly by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in (hopefully) the near future.
“Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe and Dr Janaki Wickramasinghe claim Venus’s clouds contain chemicals that are consistent with the presence of micro organisms.”
These two are from Cardiff’s centre for Astrobiology and the elder of the two has singlehandedly given the field a bad name over the past twenty years.
The whole concept of this idea is that life [...]
You may have noticed that I have ‘fallen off the internet’ this week, as a friend of mine recently said in a text message. Well the reason is that I have been attending a meeting about star formation and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
We did a cool experiment last Wednesday about the UV properties of various liquids. It yielded this very cool picture which looks like something from science fiction.
The powers that be have decreed that some ereas of physic are more equal than others. The BBC has a good summary.
A radiation incident has stalled work on SCUBA2, meaning the high-tech submillimetre camera is once again delayed.
Copyright © 2010 Robert J. Simpson. Twitter @orbitingfrog
