Navigation

Archive | Science

December! That means it’s…

By on December 15, 2006 in Science

Open University course results time! I got mine yesterday. Passed the 2 courses I submitted work for. Didn’t pass the one I didn’t submit for. Funny that 🙂 I had to ignore one of the courses due to work stuff taking my time.

I got a pass (91%) in the 10 point course S197: How the Universe Works and a Grade 3 for S250 Science in Context (average 64% for course work). I was happy with the Grade 3 for S250 given that I missed one of the 4 compulsory assignments and only did about half of another one. I did that half whilst in San Francisco at this years Apple WWDC.

Hoping to do the following next year:

S343 Inorganic Chemistry
SXR343 Transition Metal Chemistry
SXM390 Frontiers of Chemistry

Although I have chopped and changed a bit between the courses I was signed up for next year so the OU might tell me to sod off 🙂

Batten down the hatches

By on December 1, 2006 in Science

Yikes. Looks like it might be a bit windy over the British Isles this weekend. The picture below is the Atlantic pressure chart for Sunday 3rd at noon. I love sitting in a nice warm house listening to the wind howling. It’s certainly better than being out in it. I remember being out out fishing in a boat in the Irish Sea off Ardglass Harbour one day in a gale. It was a reasonably big boat. Well made. Sturdy. The waves were bigger than it was. It was weird. When in a trough between waves there was a wall of water for 360o around the boat. All you could see was water, sky and extremely harassed gulls! I think going out that day was probably a mistake.

AtPressure03122006.png

Campaigning for dark skies…

By on November 26, 2006 in Science, Technology

Saw this on Brian May’s Soapbox. New initiative to try and preserve dark skies at night so that people can see and appreciate the stars, nebulae and other celestial objects. At present the amount of light that goes up into the sky from lights is ridiculous. Just take a look at the pictures of cities, or indeed the Earth from space, at night. Or look out the window from a plane when landing in a city at night. Lots of light from street lamps, building lights, etc. goes up into the sky. Surely if nothing else this is a waste of electricity? If street lights had mirrored reflective hoods to project all the light downwards would this not allow a reduction in the amount of energy required to light a location and also reduce the amount of light that was wasted and allowed to escape upwards? Surely in these times of awareness of climate change and the impact of power generation on the CO2 emissions this is the perfect time to address the light pollution issue as well?

New Job!!

By on November 24, 2006 in General, Science, Technology

I’m moving to a new job!! If you look at the side bar it says that I’m employed as an IT Consultant by a UK based IT services company. I live in Belfast, UK, and work mainly in Northern Ireland. Well that’ll soon have to change to something like I’m employed as a Senior Solutions Architect by a UK based IT services company. I live in Belfast, UK, am based there but my work is focused on the education sector in England.

I’m moving sideways in the company I work for into the Managed Services Education section that delivers solutions for the Building Schools for the Future project. The new job will be helping to deliver environments and solutions to the education sector. It involves using technologies to create flexible learning environments, both physical and virtual, so that students can learn at their own pace, access lesson materials when not able to attend lessons (for whatever reason), adopt new technology to enhance learning (podcasts, digital media etc.).

I’m really looking forward to it. It’ll involve finding out how people learn. How the environment they are learning in influences this. How technology can help keep students interested and make them want to learn. Obviously the job will involve more than that, but I’ll learn that as I go along. I’ll transfer to the new role in January. Can’t wait.

Hubble Space Telescope top 100 images

By on November 5, 2006 in Science

Hubble has returned many stunning images in its lifetime. Hopefully now that NASA plan to send another service mission to replace faulty parts and install updated instruments it’ll continue to provide images for a few years more. There is a collection of the top 100 Hubble Space Telescope Images at the spacetelescope.org site.

New book…

By on September 24, 2006 in Science

Brian May (of Queen fame) has a new book coming out in October. It’s Co-authored with Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott. The book is called “Bang – The Complete History of the Universe“. Some of you may know that May was a PhD astronomy student in the early days of Queen. He completed his thesis and a paper on the dust that causes zodiac light in the Solar System was published in Nature. His supervisor (IIRC, it may have been the viva voce board) asked for changes to the thesis. Twice. Queen was just hitting the big time at the time and the result is history.

Interestingly May is now updating the thesis for resubmission under the supervision of his supervisor when he did work on one of the telescopes in Tenerife. Apparently he wrote the riff for Tie Your Mother Down whilst sitting outside the telescope one night. One of my favourite songs.

My copy of the book is on order. Update: you can preview the book here.