codeXgalactic hosts technical writings of the work of Christine Corbett Moran, Ph.D., as well as musings on productivity. For polished write-ups on humanities subjects, check out corbett.medium.com
About the CodeX
Posted on
Scientific Paper Reading, Voxcharta, Excellent Notation
I use the Stay Focused Chrome extension to block Wordpress, Google Reader, Hacker News, Twitter and Facebook at work, beyond 2 minutes of aggregate usage. Read More …
NASA Space Apps Challenge
Directly after coming back from Doha to Zürich, I got a quick 6hrs of sleep and took the train to Lausanne where I was a co-organizer of the NASA Space Apps Challenge sponsored by the Swiss Space Center, among others. We had over 30 people at the event, and 3 distinguished guest speakers and judges (including Dr. Prasenjit Saha from my institute, on crowd sourcing gravitational lensing measurements), and an action packed weekend. Read More …
TEDxSummit in Doha, recap
Last week I spent an incredible week at the TEDxSummit–a TEDx for TEDx organizers in meta TED fashion–in Doha, Qatar. Read More …
Oramics Machine
Daphne Oram was a pioneering British composer and electronic musician, I had the chance to see her Oramics Machine in person at the Science Museum in London when I was recently there, supporting the world premier of composer Vera Stanojevic’s newest piece, “The Tree of Glory”. Read More …
Banking
A few days ago I posted about my banking situation on Facebook–it’s a tad complex. and sounds almost elitist. In reality if I had enough money not to worry about fees, loans, credit cards, and having to run my own businesses to make ends meet I could stick with one bank. Here I’ll detail the Read More …
2011 in blogging
According to the dataviz folks at Wordpress, the concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. My blog was viewed about 9,800 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it. Go here http://cosmicrays.wordpress.com/2011/annual-report/ to see the complete report. Thanks everyone for stopping by and hoping to blog even more in 2012! Happy New Year! Read More …
The Elusive Higgs
The two CERN collaborations, ATLAS and CMS, are trying to independently find the Higgs and confirm each other’s results. Each excludes a standard-model Higgs above 135GeV at above 95% confidence (to about 450 GeV if I recall) and ATLAS finds an excess around 126 GeV consistent with a Higgs at this mass. CMS finds a very slight excess, slightly displaced from (around 124 GeV) though roughly consistent with the ATLAS result. It’s not a detection yet (ATLAS would need more statistical significance on their excess), but it’s tantalizing. They’ll continue running and analyzing data next year, and hopefully we’ll know for sure! Read More …
AFI Top 100 Project, Postmortem
For those of you who are unaware, for the last five years I’ve been doing a project to watch the top 100 American films according to the American Film Institute. And after five years on the project I finally watched them all. Citizen Kane was up top and the last film I watched was the Birth of a Nation. Read More …
NASA now accepting applications to the Astronaut candidate class of 2013
NASA is now accepting applications to the Astronaut candidate class of 2013.
I’m absolutely applying. Although hoping to venture to space in any case via the private sphere, I still think NASA will best SpaceX to the first mission to Mars and as far as riding the wave into the future goes, that is the place to be. Read More …
TEDxZurich 2011: Ideas worth spreading from Zurich
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 …