Be Excellent To Each Other

I wanted my 100th post to be a celebration, but unfortunately I've been doing a lot of thinking the last few days and I've decided to end the blog. As some of you know I'm coming to the end of my PhD and I've been thinking about what to do next.

I'm doing an Astrophysics PhD you see, and thanks to the £80 million deficit that has hit UK astronomy since PPARC merged with the STFC Astronomy in the UK is almost dead in the water.

Combine this with a blossoming commercial exploitation of astronomy that currently in a vibrant upswing and I've inevitably had to leave academia.

But thankfully not science!

Massive datasets are a great commercial asset at present (think google maps), and I've a new job where I'll be using my scientific and computational modelling skills to combine the Sloan digital sky survey with user data, to work out positional vectors between the earth (at a specific time) and the vast numbers of celestial objects in the catalogue, including galaxies, quasars and stars. I'll even be utilising WMAP - the earliest image of the structure of the Universe ever taken.

This will lead to a radical improvement in various fields of predictive science. One I feel I can be at the forefront off. Hence I'll be involved with the launching of the first Astrophysical Prediction Survey service to combine tried and tested astro-psychological research with the massive datasets Astromoners are returning like Sloan and the WMAP survey.




The idea that your nature can be predicted by the motion of 9 planets will look quaint and positively ridiculous once I've finished processing the 200 million celestial objects in the Sloan Catalog.

That and Astrology pays better. But it's contradictory topic to the blog, so I'm afraid i've got to let the blog go.

You can't fool me for a second! This isn't true at all. I know you've been winding a mate up with this for a few days and are jsut trying to push him over the line.

I was has bin sucked in! Oh my robotic monocle face is in my hands.

Haha, nice one.

My degree dissertation projecty thing was on astronomy (specifially on sharpening the seeing of large optical telescopes via the use of adaptive optic systems).

I ended up working in risk management.

Bugger it, I was hoping that Lave could become our official "Stars" person. Like Mystic Meg, but a man.

What, like advising people to "be careful to check that the telescope is properly secured before using it, or you might break it"?

See this is the thing. Jonathan Cainer (the daily mail guy) makes £2 million a year.

And I could totally make money bullshitting about the Sloan Survey and WMAP. Just some shit about adding up the total mass within the region on the sky that each Sign of the Zodiac resides.

Then some bullshit press release about how a "Dr" has found Taurus being the heaviest star sign, and The Super Massive Black Hole in the Milky Way causes Libra's heart ache, would make it in some worthless rag.

And bam charlatan status guaranteed.

HA! Didn't fool me!

By the way, I forgot to say in the other thread, I do love your avatar. And after realising what its from the other month, punched the air with "I've worked it out!" glee. It's from Edvard Munch's 'The Superman Scream' isn't it?

A little while after I finished secondary school, my mother bumped into my Physics teacher, who asked what I was studying in college. She informed her that I was doing an astrology course.

It's astrophysics, Mum.

I've often thought it would be an interesting project to make a program that automatically generated horoscopes. Feed in a few years worth from the papers, press the big read button and watch perfect horoscopes come splurging out, ready to be sold to the papers for 50k a week. It would also then be interesting to see which were rated as being more accurate.

The last time I was in a bar with an extremely drunk girl going round and round in circles.

Urgh.

Heather Mills

Remember those type in "Biorhythm" things you used to get in computer mags in the early/mid eighties? They would calculate your mood etc just from your birthdate.

Utter bollocks of course and the output often seemed almost random. I wonder how the calculated it in a few lines of code.

Have you ever seen those "Love Calculators" they advertise on crappy cable music channels? £2 a text and we'll give you a numerical value on how much you love your boyfriend!! Not based purely on some mashup of the ascii values of your names, honest!

£2? Why that could buy you someones begrudging holding of their tongue for a whole month.

[runs]

Have you ever seen those "Love Calculators" they advertise on crappy cable music channels? £2 a text and we'll give you a numerical value on how much you love your boyfriend!! Not based purely on some mashup of the ascii values of your names, honest!