Terraforming the Earth

There was an interesting article in the Times today about the possibility of “geoengineering”: In the past few decades, a handful of scientists have come up with big, futuristic ways to fight global warming: Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick […]

Sub-Genius Social Hedonist

My traffic has been down a little in the past couple of weeks, which of course can’t possibly be because I haven’t posted anything really interesting in that time. No, clearly, it must be that I’m not playing the game right. Thus, I have performed an extensive study or high-traffic blogs, to determine what it […]

You Might Be a Scientist If…

An open thread comment over at Making Light triggered a discussion of what words and phrases could serve as reliable markers of SF fandom. (It continues for a good while, but at times is nearly buried in discussion of Japanese knotweed.). This got me to wondering about what phrases would serve as similar markers for […]

Poke, Poke, Poke

Last week’s attempt to shame people into donating to the DonorsChoose fundraiser produced a flurry of donations that brought us up to a respectable $896.02 and third place on the leader board. Which is pretty cool– thanks to all who have donated. The official challenge runs through July 1 (that is, Saturday), and it’d be […]

Shaw Prize in Astronomy

Via Cosmic Variance, news of the Shaw Prize in Astronomy for 2006: Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt are awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2006 in recognition of their leadership roles on the two teams that made the remarkable discovery of an acceleration in the rate of the expansion of the universe. Such […]

Blogroll Update

I’m a very, very lazy blogger, and I’m particularly bad about updating my sidebar links. I finally got around to putting a few months’ worth of new science-y blogs into the sidebar, though, so you might want to check them out, if you don’t already read them: Angry Physics “Presenting the “other” side of academic […]

World Cup Update

It was a lazy Sunday in Chateau Steelypips, what with the party Saturday afternoon, so I watched a fair amount of soccer. I saw nearly all of the England-Ecuador game, and the second half of the Portugal-Netherlands game. This has made something clear to me: The most difficult thing to find in international soccer is […]

Stringamathing

I’ve got a grant proposal to review, and a progress report to write for one of my own grants, so you’re getting short, link-y physics blogging: – The Strings 2006 conference has ended, with the participants apparently deciding to keep up with this “string theory” thing (maybe you’ve heard of it?) for a little while […]

Werewolves!

Some sort of network problem at Verizon cut Chateau Steelypips off from the Intenets yesterday, but that was all right, as we were hosting a party for some friends from work, and had other things to do. The weather, which had been predicted to be lousy, turned out to be fine, and a good time […]