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How to rid ourselves of the scientist scourge!
Monday night’s edition of Rewind on ABC TV featured the story of Ruby Payne-Scott, the world’s first radio astronomer. Payne-Scott was forced to leave the CSIRO when it was discovered that she was married, as was the rule in the 1950’s with that organisation. This should be an inspiration for creationists (and I’m not one…
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Some time in Sydney’s far south
The [Sutherland] Shire might be far away from work and the CBD, but it does have many advantages. Last weekend B and I had a wonderful picnic lunch at Audley in the Royal National Park, followed by a relaxing row in a dinghy up the Hacking River. It was so beautiful to leave behind the…
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First infection of a PDA by a human virus
I was viewing a web page about tetanus vaccines on my Zaurus C700 Linux PDA when the machine froze. I rebooted it, it hung during the process, tried again, hung again. Tetanus paralysis taking hold. After the next reboot attempt it refused to switch on again, the LED’s just kept blinking. Tried again and again…
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A Scientific Investigation Into the Planet Hoth
Imagine that the ice planet Hoth from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was real. How could life evolve, let alone survive, on a planet entirely covered with snow and ice? Was it always that way, or did some great catastrophe strike the planet and cause it to freeze? I had a lot of fun…
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Single-dish Radio Astronomy
When most people think of radio astronomy, they think of an individual dish antenna, such as the Parkes radio telescope seen in the movie The Dish. However, the radio astronomy world is abuzz with talk of huge projects involving hundreds of individual antennas combined together, with the billion dollar Square Kilometer Array as the ultimate…
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High Velocity Clouds
The nature of the large high velocity clouds of neutral hydrogen gas observed around our galaxy remains as one of the more enigmatic phenomena in our skies. Some have suggested that these "HVCs" are the building blocks of galaxies, while others believe that they are formed by tidal interactions between the Milky Way and the…
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