Category: science

Bridging the Great Stagnation: Why Taking an Extra Decade to Master the Fundamentals Matters

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In the 1800s, educated elites were expected to be proficient in Latin, Greek, classical literature, religious knowledge, moral philosophy, public speaking, writing, basic arithmetic, geometry, natural philosophy (covering fundamental physics, astronomy, and biology), music, art, poetry, classical and national history, geography, French, and social graces. Physical activities like horseback riding, rowing, and fencing were also Read More …

Machine Learning and Satellite Imagery

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

Back in the spring, I had some fun doing experimentation around machine learning models for labelling satellite imagery with atmospheric conditions and various classes of land cover/land. You can check out my work in an open source Kaggle notebook. For this I trained on the data provided in the Planet Kaggle competition, Understanding the Amazon Read More …

When Antarctica Just Isn't Cold Enough: South Pole Telescope (SPT) Fridge Cycle

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As you might have heard on my website, my newsletter, my Twitter, or, if we’re colleagues at Caltech, at work, I am currently working on the South Pole Telescope (SPT) onsite at the South Pole in Antarctica for January-November 2016 (I am employed by the University of Chicago). I have taken a sabbatical from my NSF Astronomy Read More …

Finding earth like planets from the comfort of our own planet

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Gravitational lensing results from the fact that General Relativity describes our universe: mass bends light and can function in effect like a lens, bending light in ways that can be used to infer the mass distribution itself. Gravitational microlensing is due to this same effect, but refers to the detection of objects which are of Read More …

The Game of Life-simple rules, complex behavior

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Here’s a video introduction to the Game of Life Historically, one of the pioneers of computer science John von Neumann was interested in finding machines which could reproduce themselves. He developed an abstraction allowing him to mathematically model his work on a computational grid. A mathematician John Conway took up and simplified his work publishing Read More …

M82 depicting recombining hydrogen outflows

Cold dark matter heats up – a review of a review

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This is a review of the recent paper, to be published in Nature, by Andrew Potzen and Fabio Governato Cold dark matter heats up. The paper is itself a review, containing information published in previous studies. I gave a presentation about it at our weekly Astrophysics journal club. The figure in the header is M82, Read More …