codeXgalactic hosts polished technical writeups of the work of Dr. Christine Corbett Moran, as well as musings on productivity. For more work in progress notes, check out https://corbettnotes.com/, and for polished writeups on humanties subjects, check out corbett.medium.com
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 …
Circle of 6 winner of White House's Apps Against Abuse Challenge
I’m proud to have been the developer behind Circle of 6, which has just won the White House’s Apps Against Abuse Challenge. I spent part of this week in a conference call with US Vice President Joe Biden, who is well informed and extremely passionate about bringing a stop to violence against women. He spent 5 minutes speaking about our app, which was surreal and heartfelt. It has been more than worth it to spend some Sundays working on such a meaningful project with a great team; and glad to see our work will be appreciated. Like our Facebook page to stay up to date and join the pledge to end violence against women. The app will launch in January 2012. Read More …
Kliq – What has been intriguing you lately?
I’ve been working for awhile on a way to connect people in a more meaningful manner than via Facebook–under the umbrella of the name Kliq. One thing I’m playing around with is short videos on a focused question–meaningful or irreverent but something that gives more of a connection than static text and a few pictures Read More …
Ada Lovelace Day 2011
Ada Lovelace day: As usual I had a tough time deciding; in my post last year I had three categories, entrepreneur, intellectual, and hacker. I’ll do the same this year. Winners after the break! Read More …