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SCIENTIFIC TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES

The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less is a project started by Eric Schulman, a former Jansky Post-Doc at NRAO. When his Universal History Translation Project got under way, I couldn't resist contributing the Irish Version. Eric is heavily involved in the Annals of Improbable Research, and has published a book A Briefer History of Time.

The Astronomical Science Group of Ireland now has a web page. And speaking of Astronomy in Ireland, check out the info on the now restored Leviathan of Parsonstown; this reflecting telescope housed a massive 72-inch (speculum) mirror, which made it the largest telescope in the world for many decades, until the 100-inch Mt. Wilson telescope in California took the title. The third Earl of Rosse used it in the 19^th century to resolve individual stars in M51 (the whirlpool galaxy), among other things.

I was involved in the AstroBrowse effort; during the December 1995 workshop, we managed to get a prototype service up and running, querying several services including a back-end script I wrote (with lots of plagiarism from the others via looking over their shoulders!) for the NVSS Survey. There was a BoF Session held at the ADASS '96 meeting in Charlottesville a few years ago, but this whole effort has now taken on new and far-reaching aspects in the form of the National Virtual Observatory and IVOA...

The Irish Research Scientists' Association used to have a web site, but as of now (November 2007) the irsa.ie domain seems to be gone. This is unfortunate, as there is still a pressing need for the promotion of Science in Ireland.

Astronomy Ireland is a remarkable organisation of Astronomy enthusiasts in Ireland. They have over 3000 members, which makes them the largest per-capita Astronomy organisation worldwide. I didn't have the pleasure of joining their ranks while I lived in Ireland as they didn't exist back in the 1970's (though I was in the Irish Astronomical Society, irishastrosoc.org).

Bet you didn't know that Ansel Adams took some pictures of Radio Telescopes! (See the Wikimedia Commons for more of Adams' work). Speaking of which, if you've not yet seen the GBT, and you can easily get to West Virginia, you owe yourself a visit. That's one big structure. Here are some more pictures courtesy of NRAO's Image Gallery. The GBT is of course the Green Bank Telescope, located at NRAO's facility in Green Bank, West Virginia, and is the world's largest fully steerable Radio Telescope.

Weather goodies from the net and the web. It is probably in need of yet another overhaul, as some of the links (those I rarely use!) probably don't work very well, if at all. But it's still my first stop for weather on the web.

My humble opinion of faces, pyramids, etc. on Mars, in the form of a not-too-small PNG image (PNG = "PNG's Not GIF"). Warning: highly opinionated and subjective! Also a rather large image (600k). For an authoritative and exhaustive analysis, see The "Face on Mars" page.

Work (no longer in progress) to get Astronomical Ph.D. theses online, by Karen Strom. A great idea (IMHO). I wish I could translate those old 8" CP/M wordstar floppies that have my Ph.D. on them... (CP/M-wordstar-to-html filter, anyone? Plus, I need an 8-inch floppy drive that works under Linux and reads the old CP/M format!)