Jocelyn has also won her fair share of other (not as prestigious) prizes. Almost ten years ago, she gave the "Jansky lecture" awarded annually by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to someone who has made outstanding contributions to the advancement of astronomy. I agree with Scott -- the majority of astronomers that I talked to before her talk told us that she had been unfairly treated by the Nobel committee. I think that the astronomical community has done their best to try and right this wrong.
As an aside, most of the Jansky lectures that I attended were awful. Jocelyn's was the first that I saw, and hers was outstanding.
If so, I can see this being cited sometime down the road by a politician as a bad use of tax funds, a la studying the effects of cow emissions on global warming.
Personally, I'd still rather see my tax dollars go to perfecting stone skipping instead of some congressman's son's highway construction company.
Sorry -- I should have been more explicit. I wasn't trying to imply that the space program produced MRI, but that MRI was a spinoff of basic science research that wasn't searching for an application.
I may have this wrong too, but it is accepted lore with most astronomers that I know. Correct me if I'm still wrong.
Believe me, astronomers do think about this -- why do we do what we do? What benefit do we give society? I will give some of the standard answers.
The first (that others have covered) is spinoff technology. Digital cameras contain technology (CCDs) that astronomers have been using for 20 years or so now. X-ray machines at airports, MRIs, etc. came from astronomy/physics. Some other types of medical imaging use similar techniques (and software) that radio astronomers use.
The second is that humans have this insatiable curiosity about the universe around us. We spend money on these explorations because the public wants to know! Astronomy stories make the cover of the NY Times, CNN, and your local news outlet not because the average person derives any benefit out of knowing the value of Hubble's constant, but because people are happy to know that someone, somewhere is trying to find out where we all came from and why we are here.
Personally, I and some of my colleagues feel that it is important to use the appeal of astronomy to generate an interest in science in general. You suck people in by showing them pictures of planetary nebulae, and when they are awed by the pretty colors, you slip in some teaching about electromagnetism.
NASA spends 1 - 2% of their budget on education and outreach efforts (small fraction, large amount of real dollars). They use the power that astronomy has to generate interest with people who normally don't care about science to try and impress on them that science and technology are good. So you can argue that the success of NASA missions is indirectly responsible for keeping the federal funding for *all* sciences at a reasonable level. Now you just have to decide if you think federal funding of any science is worthwhile.
This is somewhat offtopic (apologies in advance), but I've heard that some museums / science centers are going to be building realistic Mars terrain models, and replica rovers are going to travel the country. Interactive exhibits are planned where visitors can control the replica as it moves across the fake Mars terrain.
Download maestro now to practice!
Check out this link. A guy at the Exploratorium (the sysadmin?) wrote this page. You plug in how big you want the Sun to be (e.g., 1 inch diameter), and it gives you the scale of the sizes/orbital radii for the planets, the size of a light year, speed of light, and others.
I used it in a talk I gave. If you make the Sun the size of a golf ball, Pluto is a grain of sand at the other end of an (American) football field, and the nearest star is another golfball 450+ miles away!
I'm going to get myself in trouble for not looking this up, but I seem to remember reading that Apple did *not* give them *any* discount -- that is, I thought VT just agreed to buy 1100 off the shelf Macs directly through the Apple Store at full price.
I think any "discount" VT received was in the form of technical assistance in setting things up and being promised to get their G5s early before they started filling single user orders.
These days the educational discount that single users get is not too steep, more like $100 - $300 or so.
This is always attributed to the famously cranky astronomer Fritz Zwicky.
He called someone a spherical bastard, because no matter how you look at him he's still a bastard.
ditto.
I put my name on an EFF or MoveOn.org (I forget which) letter about the FCC consolidation, and got a condescending letter back from Senator Santorum's office about why his position was so vastly superior to my own.
Yet another reason why I approve of Dan Savage's new use of the word
Santorum.
Well, as a former SL2 owner and a current L300 owner, I disagree. I personally know a friend who walked away from his Saturn rolling multiple times after hitting a patch of black ice. Parents of another friend survived a horrific accident in their Saturn -- they sustained serious injuries, but they were told that the Saturn safety features saved their lives. Personally I had a great experience with my SL2 and felt safe driving it.
Saturns generate as much controversy as Apple computers, and I'm sure this thread can evolve into a typical they're great/they suck war, but I couldn't help putting in a good word...
Egad.
The article says "There's a disturbing article over at C|Net suggesting Apple may only be offering security fixes for the latest version of its Mac OS X operating system" (Tech Report) and "Apple apparently doesn't intend to fix the flaws in previous versions of the software" (C|Net).
Notice the words "suggesting" and "apparently". To most people those are dead giveaways that the authors are speculating and do not have hard evidence that this is the case. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. My guess is that the amount of negative publicity this move is already generating will probably push them into patching 10.2.8 even if they weren't originally intending to, but now I am speculating, like the authors of the two articles linked in the story.
There are already a bazillion comments about Apple "EOLing" Jaguar -- is there any proof that this is their intent? Before ranting, why don't we give them a few days to clear this up?
I gave up completely on CR after reading their reviews of Saturn cars. Now I know Saturns aren't for everyone, but they have some good qualities that most people don't dispute (their safety record, for one).
Anyway, after looking at CR's table of parameters that ranked the Saturn I was interested in above average in almost every category, I read the few paragraphs of text which went on to make the car out to be one of the worst models ever tested. The disconnect between the measurables and the opinion basically told me that the review was worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
Jocelyn has also won her fair share of other (not as prestigious) prizes. Almost ten years ago, she gave the "Jansky lecture" awarded annually by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to someone who has made outstanding contributions to the advancement of astronomy. I agree with Scott -- the majority of astronomers that I talked to before her talk told us that she had been unfairly treated by the Nobel committee. I think that the astronomical community has done their best to try and right this wrong. As an aside, most of the Jansky lectures that I attended were awful. Jocelyn's was the first that I saw, and hers was outstanding.
If so, I can see this being cited sometime down the road by a politician as a bad use of tax funds, a la studying the effects of cow emissions on global warming. Personally, I'd still rather see my tax dollars go to perfecting stone skipping instead of some congressman's son's highway construction company.
Sorry -- I should have been more explicit. I wasn't trying to imply that the space program produced MRI, but that MRI was a spinoff of basic science research that wasn't searching for an application. I may have this wrong too, but it is accepted lore with most astronomers that I know. Correct me if I'm still wrong.
Believe me, astronomers do think about this -- why do we do what we do? What benefit do we give society? I will give some of the standard answers. The first (that others have covered) is spinoff technology. Digital cameras contain technology (CCDs) that astronomers have been using for 20 years or so now. X-ray machines at airports, MRIs, etc. came from astronomy/physics. Some other types of medical imaging use similar techniques (and software) that radio astronomers use. The second is that humans have this insatiable curiosity about the universe around us. We spend money on these explorations because the public wants to know! Astronomy stories make the cover of the NY Times, CNN, and your local news outlet not because the average person derives any benefit out of knowing the value of Hubble's constant, but because people are happy to know that someone, somewhere is trying to find out where we all came from and why we are here. Personally, I and some of my colleagues feel that it is important to use the appeal of astronomy to generate an interest in science in general. You suck people in by showing them pictures of planetary nebulae, and when they are awed by the pretty colors, you slip in some teaching about electromagnetism. NASA spends 1 - 2% of their budget on education and outreach efforts (small fraction, large amount of real dollars). They use the power that astronomy has to generate interest with people who normally don't care about science to try and impress on them that science and technology are good. So you can argue that the success of NASA missions is indirectly responsible for keeping the federal funding for *all* sciences at a reasonable level. Now you just have to decide if you think federal funding of any science is worthwhile.
This is somewhat offtopic (apologies in advance), but I've heard that some museums / science centers are going to be building realistic Mars terrain models, and replica rovers are going to travel the country. Interactive exhibits are planned where visitors can control the replica as it moves across the fake Mars terrain. Download maestro now to practice!
Check out this link. A guy at the Exploratorium (the sysadmin?) wrote this page. You plug in how big you want the Sun to be (e.g., 1 inch diameter), and it gives you the scale of the sizes/orbital radii for the planets, the size of a light year, speed of light, and others. I used it in a talk I gave. If you make the Sun the size of a golf ball, Pluto is a grain of sand at the other end of an (American) football field, and the nearest star is another golfball 450+ miles away!
I'm going to get myself in trouble for not looking this up, but I seem to remember reading that Apple did *not* give them *any* discount -- that is, I thought VT just agreed to buy 1100 off the shelf Macs directly through the Apple Store at full price. I think any "discount" VT received was in the form of technical assistance in setting things up and being promised to get their G5s early before they started filling single user orders. These days the educational discount that single users get is not too steep, more like $100 - $300 or so.
This is always attributed to the famously cranky astronomer Fritz Zwicky. He called someone a spherical bastard, because no matter how you look at him he's still a bastard.
ditto. I put my name on an EFF or MoveOn.org (I forget which) letter about the FCC consolidation, and got a condescending letter back from Senator Santorum's office about why his position was so vastly superior to my own. Yet another reason why I approve of Dan Savage's new use of the word Santorum.
Or, alternatively, listen to Terry Gross interview Bill O'Reilly. Boy is that guy insecure.
Well, as a former SL2 owner and a current L300 owner, I disagree. I personally know a friend who walked away from his Saturn rolling multiple times after hitting a patch of black ice. Parents of another friend survived a horrific accident in their Saturn -- they sustained serious injuries, but they were told that the Saturn safety features saved their lives. Personally I had a great experience with my SL2 and felt safe driving it. Saturns generate as much controversy as Apple computers, and I'm sure this thread can evolve into a typical they're great/they suck war, but I couldn't help putting in a good word...
Egad. The article says "There's a disturbing article over at C|Net suggesting Apple may only be offering security fixes for the latest version of its Mac OS X operating system" (Tech Report) and "Apple apparently doesn't intend to fix the flaws in previous versions of the software" (C|Net). Notice the words "suggesting" and "apparently". To most people those are dead giveaways that the authors are speculating and do not have hard evidence that this is the case. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. My guess is that the amount of negative publicity this move is already generating will probably push them into patching 10.2.8 even if they weren't originally intending to, but now I am speculating, like the authors of the two articles linked in the story. There are already a bazillion comments about Apple "EOLing" Jaguar -- is there any proof that this is their intent? Before ranting, why don't we give them a few days to clear this up?
I gave up completely on CR after reading their reviews of Saturn cars. Now I know Saturns aren't for everyone, but they have some good qualities that most people don't dispute (their safety record, for one). Anyway, after looking at CR's table of parameters that ranked the Saturn I was interested in above average in almost every category, I read the few paragraphs of text which went on to make the car out to be one of the worst models ever tested. The disconnect between the measurables and the opinion basically told me that the review was worthless.