Science and productivity by Dr. Christine Corbett Moran
This semester was my first full semester as a PhD student. I got my feet wet with some projects, assisted teaching a course, and advised a student on his Bachelor’s thesis. After a semester of what amounted to preparation, I’m excited to bring both my teaching and projects to the next level this coming semester. Read More …
Phygg featured on MIT Technology Review. Phygg was down for a bit today due to overload, upgrading my hosting and starting to do some analytics. Having your site go down is a tangy bitter shot of success and failure in the same glass. Here’s to steady uptime and a great phygg community to come! Read More …
It may not yet be a widely known fact but computer chips have stopped getting faster. But what if the average user doesn’t need all that performance? If desktop chipmakers are going to stay afloat there’s got to be a huge market for chips which scream. So what’s going to drive the CPU market? Read More …
My Sunday afternoon recover-from-jetlag hack was creating http://www.phygg.com. Phygg is designed to help sort through physics papers and discussion topics related to arXiv.org in the style of digg.com, initially focusing on astrophysics. I’m going to be using phygg to track papers I find interesting, so feel free to follow the rss feed. In addition, I’m hoping to convince a few of my astrophysicist colleagues to join in on the posting and voting, so stay tuned. Read More …
My introduction to QFT was incidentally very similar to http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/so-is-the-universe-made-of-tiny-springs-or-isnt-it/. In the last post I told the story of my own struggles with quantum field theory and what it is supposed to mean. In this post (as promised), I want to let someone much more intelligent and eloquent tell the story of quantum fields. The Read More …
Tim O’Reilly describes it better, but I’ll do my best: Foo Camp is an invite only free event at tech publishing mogul O’Reilly’s corporate headquarters. Being invited meant a great deal to me. My biggest source of inspiration has always come from people, and a new friendship with someone who has an infectious spirit and story to tell can give me fuel–literally–for years. I’ve tried to do my best to give back some of the inspiration I stole from the pool to others while stocking up on protein packed chunks for exciting new projects. Foo was the perfect venue for this. Definitely life changing! Read More …
I’m at a very specialized conference, on structure finding in cosmological simulations, outside of Madrid call haloes going MAD (MAD being the airport code for Madrid). At the end of a cosmological simulation we have a collection of particles, up to trillions these days, and to connect that to the observable universe we need to do some abstraction.
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. I had a really tough time deciding which woman to profile (see my International Women’s Day post for a collection of links about women I admire), so I decided to go for three in the end Read More …
The beginning of this week I spent in sunny Lugano, Switzerland at the High Performance Computing Advisory Council workshop and the kickoff meeting for my PhD project, the “Computational Cosmology on the Petascale” collaboration under the Swiss High Performance and High Productivity Computing initiative. The HPC advisory council workshop, which I unfortunately only got to Read More …
There will be many more posts about my primary research arena (computational astrophysics) over the next years. For a few months, however, I am pursuing a slightly different track, doing a project in pure observational astronomy between finishing my Master’s and beginning my PhD. Actually seeing stars and galaxies on a daily basis has been Read More …