Space, Science, Technology
Hubot is an open source chatbot created by GitHub. It's used by various companies, groups, and other techie types, to control systems, gather information, and put moustaches on things - all via chat interfaces. Hubot can be adapted to work via IM, GTalk, Twitter, IRC, and other platforms. 'Chat Ops' is a growing trends, and because... Continue Reading →
The latest issue of Astronomy & Geophysics includes an article by your truly about the GitHub/.Astronomy Hack Day at the UK's National Astronomy Meeting in Portsmouth earlier this year. The projects resulting from hack days are often prototypes, or proof-of-concept ideas that are meant to grow and expand later. Often they are simply written up... Continue Reading →
Executable papers are a cool idea in research [1]. You take a study, write it up as a paper and bundle together all your code, scripts and analysis in such a way that other people can take the ‘paper’ and run in themselves. This has three main attractive features, as I see it: It provides transparency... Continue Reading →
As the fifth .Astronomy came to a close on Wednesday, I felt as I always do at the end of these meetings: tired, emotional and super-excited. It's hard to explain the energy at these events. There is something almost magical in the air as the participants 'click' (usually about an hour in) and then begin... Continue Reading →
During the Perseid meteor shower, I blogged a video of a bright meteor taken by astrophotographer Mel Gigg. He had shared the image fairly widely and soon others noticed that they had caught the exact same shooting star themselves. In fact four observers had caught the same object as it flew into the atmosphere above... Continue Reading →
We’re running the fifth .Astronomy conference later this year in Boston. .Astronomy is a small (and awesome) conference for astronomers, where you must apply to participate. Although the tone is relaxed, spaces at the event are in short supply (there are only 50 places). You don’t have to talk at .Astronomy, and there are only a... Continue Reading →
We’re very pleased to present the Unproceedings of the Fourth .Astronomy Conference (.Astronomy 4), which was held in Heidelberg, Germany, July 9-11 2012. The goal of the .Astronomy conference series is to bring together astronomers, educators, developers and others interested in using the Internet as a medium for astronomy.Unproceedings of .Astronomy 4
On Saturday, New York astronomy geeks will convene at the offices of bit.ly for the first .Astronomy Hack Day! We do hack days as part of the main .Astronomy events and people have often asked us to do hack days outside of the main conference series. So when August Muench began saying he’d like to... Continue Reading →
In 2008, in the midst of my PhD, I ran a conference called .Astronomy. The idea was to bring together all the other astronomers who were into the web and networks. It might not seem very long ago, but 2008 was before Twitter went mainstream and before everyone’s gran was on Facebook - to use... Continue Reading →
Orbiting Frog 