Category: science

Dr. Eleanor Dobson

TEDxZurich 2011: Ideas worth spreading from Zurich

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I am proud to have been on the organizing team of TEDxZurich 2011. With the help of great sponsors, including the Swiss National Television Network, at which the event was held, amazing speakers and performers, and a full house of 450 attendees, we celebrated and shared “ideas worth spreading”. I was on the speakers committee, moonlighted with a bit of tech help, and the day of was rushing around making sure all the speakers were happy and prepared for their big moment on stage. Here are the videos; it’s extremely hard to pick a favorite, but the speaker I am most proud of and moved by is Dr. Eleanor Dobson who gives us a peek into the belly of CERN and how modern big science is done. Dr. Dobson’s talk was one of the talks I helped curate, in conjunction with the TEDxZurich team, and came about after I heard her passion on the subject and suggested she speak. Don’t stop there though, there are 20 videos from the day and hundreds of ideas ready to run loose. Read More …

Human vs. Vacuum

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While Neil Stephenson laments that we have lost our space faring capabilities and sees it as a harbinger of societal decay as a whole, I am getting waves of future shock just from SpaceX’s vaporware. So I’m more optimistic; the basic conflict human vs. vacuum may yet be won as private companies rightly take interest in the final frontier. Also if the powers that be are listening: sign me up for the first trip to Mars. Read More …

Kliq movie is live

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

I’m amazingly lucky to have only hobbies, even though I work constantly. The Kliq movie is live! I am extremely proud of the work myself, and my cofounder Michael Craig have done thus far and where we are taking it next, making it easier than ever to interact with people, friends, acquaintances, and potential new best friends, business partners, etc. at events you are already RSVPing to. Read More …

pv-astro poster, simulating the Milky Way, and supercomputer lovefest

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

I gave a short presentation Friday about pv-astro at the Swiss National Supercomputer Center’s User’s day. We also got to hear a few talks, including about Lucio Mayer’s recent work on a realistic simulation of a Milky Way type galaxy similar to our own. Finally we got an update about the machines at the center being upgraded in October. Some people like fast cars, motorcycles, and airplanes. Me however, I like big machines, with lots of cores and an obscene amount of RAM. Read More …

So a neutrino runs into a tachyon in a bar….

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

So a neutrino runs into a tachyon in a bar…. HHere’s a collection of interesting twitter snippets from physicists I follow on twitter about today’s neutrino webcast announcing the surprising, and frankly unbelievable, results that the OPERA collaboration observed superluminal neutrinos. I haven’t watched the webcast myself, nor read the paper beyond the abstract yet so can only comment that I believe it must be systematics. That said it would be insanely interesting to be proven otherwise. Finally, the following highlighted tweets are in reverse chronology, because, well… I’ve been here since the day after tomorrow, said the tachyon. What took you so long? Read More …

Galaxy clothing

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

I splurged and bought two galaxy printed items of designer clothing the other week from the lovely http://www.blackmilkclothing.com/. Some colleagues and I couldn’t help but think about possibilities of extending this further: what about layers of astronomy themed clothing each featuring the same image taken in a different wavelength? Interested seamsters and seamstresses or people with an idea how to print high resolution images on fabric, please contact me! Read More …

Fault tolerant computing

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As a first step to writing my own simulation code while attempting to do something useful, a few days ago I started writing a code to explore failure and recovery from failure in a distributed computation. By failure in this case, I mean when one of the computation units goes down. My test system is N harmonic oscillators on N nodes (or processes on a shared memory machine). Read More …

The Intersection of Productivity and Joy (over the past months)

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

Since last we spoke a couple of months ago, I had a hell of a time personally: I moved house, went from one location to another too often, had a major and very stressful financial crisis and had some rough times with friends which rocked the emotional boat. Although there are many things which didn’t Read More …

Probing the dark matter issue in f(R)-gravity via gravitational lensing

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A few days ago in gr-qc  journal club we discussed an interesting paper by a member of our own institute, Probing the dark matter issue in f(R)-gravity via gravitational lensing.1. Background Dark Matter We theoretically expect dark matter to exist based largely on  extensive observations of both dynamics (rotation curves and objects such as the Read More …