Eyjafjallajökull eruption: webcam at midnight

It's midnight in Iceland and nearly midsummer with a volcano erupting, what do you do? Hang out in front of the thermal camera.

astronomical acronym

A cute acronym. It would only be better if the project was one of those requiring exquisite precision in their measurements and error-handling.

Title: The HYPERMUCHFUSS Campaign -- an undiscovered high velocity population
Authors: Alfred Tillich, Stephan Geier, Uli Heber, Heiko Hirsch, Pierre Maxted,
Boris Gaensicke, Tom Marsh, Ralf Napiwotzki, Roy Østensen and Chris
Copperwheat
Categories: astro-ph
Comments: 8 pages, 6 figures, to appear in the Journal of Physics Conference
Proceedings (JPCS) for the 16th European White Dwarf Workshop, Barcelona,
Spain, June 30 - July 11, 2008

We present an overview and a status report of HYPERMUCHFUSS (HYPER velocity
or Massive Unseen Companions of Hot Faint Underluminious Stars Survey) aiming
at the detection of a population of high velocity subluminous B stars and white
dwarfs. The first class of targets consists of hot subdwarf binaries with
massive compact companions, which are expected to show huge radial velocity
variations. The second class is formed by the recently discovered
hyper-velocity stars, which are moving so fast that the dynamical ejection by a
supermassive black hole seems to be the only explanation for their origin.
Until now only one old hyper-velocity star has been found, but we expect a
larger population. We applied an efficient selection technique for hot
subdwarfs and white dwarfs with high galactic restframe velocities from the
SDSS spectral data base, which serve as first epoch observations for our
campaign with the ESO VLT and NTT in Chile, the 3.5 m telescope at DSAZ
observatory (Calar Alto) in Spain and the WHT on La Palma. The survey is
nearing completion and provides us with promising candidates which will be
followed up to measure their RV-curves to uncover massive companions or prove
their nature as HVS.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.1030 , 1617kb)

Deep Time for Dummies

Snark!

"DEEP TIME FOR DUMMIES

History's Shortest Geological Column


The decade-long failure of The Congressional Record to note the 6,000th anniversary of the Earth's Creation (4004 BC-AD 1997) shows the dire need for a Geological Column that junior Senators, Congressional pages and Washington Times editors can easily master in a single session of Sunday School."

Link

Red Shirt Phenomenon

A great way to drive traffic to a site about web site statistics. Don't miss the powerpoint slides.
Analytics according to Captain Kirk

...One of my favorites is an analysis of the Red-Shirt Phenomenon in Star Trek.

What? You don't know about the Red Shirt Phenomenon? Well, as any die-hard Trekkie knows, if you are wearing a red shirt and beam to the planet with Captain Kirk, you're gonna die. That's the common thinking, but I decided to put this to the test. After all, I hadn't seen any definitive proof; it's just what people said. (Remind you of your current web analytics strategy?) So, let's set our phasers on 'stun' and see what we find...

seen via B12 Solipsism

The new cheap subnotebook race

More gadget blogs need this sort of writing. We are using several Eee PCs here as dumb terminals for various headless servers and they work great. In some cases they replaced 15 year old Toshiba laptops that until now had no modern replacements.

A few months ago, a Sony executive, asked what he thought of the success of the Asus Eee bargain sub-notebook, leaned back in his chair, sucked on his cigar and smugly denounced the pursuit of cute, tiny, low-cost laptops as "a race to the bottom." Then, turning dangerous, he leapt like a panther across the desk, tackled his inquisitor and plunged the smoldering ember of his cigar through the vitreous of his interviewer's eye.

Boing Boing Gadgets: Dell Joins Asus, HP In "Race To The Bottom" with Budget Sub-Notebook

1-31-07

Never forget!



1-31-07, the day Boston authorities freaked out over the ATHF Mooninites ads. They had been hanging for two weeks without people freaking out over Aqua Teen Hunger Force characters outlined in LEDs.

I have a video of a still-hanging Mooninite in a Hyde Park Institution(tm).

Season's Greetings

Seen via BABlog.

Uncyclopedia entry on Geologists

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Geologist

Much of this is true.

Seen via Sabine's Garden