http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog Gratuitous Ramblings from Rob Knop, a.k.a. Prospero Frobozz, a.k.a. Prospero Linden Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:23:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I noticed on my Sprint cellphone bill that there was an additional $10/month charge for some mobile alert thingy. I believe it's been there for a few months. This happened before, a year or so ago, and it lingered then; a different thing. I called the Sprint service folks ... http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog/?p=164 My wife and I tend to watch TV shows a year after they come out; we rent the DVDs from Netflix and watch them then. We're right now working our way through the third seasons of Heroes. If you've watched even the first season of Heroes, you know ... http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog/?p=159 Howard Barker is a celebrated British playwright. On October 21st, there will be an international celebration of his works entitled 21 for 21. Participating in this celebration will be Avatar Repertory Theater, the virtual theater company of which I am a part. We'll be putting up a ... http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog/?p=151 I'm out in Leiden for the next three days for the AMUSE Workshop. AMUSE is an evolution of MUSE, a software framework for integrating various different modules of stellar modeling together. So-called "N-body models" model the orbits of lots ("N" being a large number) of stars orbiting around ... http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog/?p=146 As I listen to the Hollywood Elite fall all over themselves defending Roman Polanski, saying how awful it is that he's been apprehended for the 30-year-old crime of rape of a 13 year old (perhaps not involving physical force, but certainly involving drugs and coercion), I'm reminded of a term ... http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog/?p=143 I'll be giving a talk in Second Life on Saturday at 10AM SLT (Noon CDT, 17:00 UT). This is part of the regular series Dr. Knop Talks Astronomy. Double and Triple Stars: Solving the 3-Body Problem If you look at the stars in the night sky, you discover that a very ... http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog/?p=130 Many people will consider this post to be in extremely poor taste. But there are things that I think that we really need to keep in mind as we're remembering the lessons that we learned, the tragedies and the horrors of 9/11. (And, this won't be the first time I ... http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog/?p=126 I'll be giving the latest installment of my the regular talk series "Dr. Knop Talks Astronomy" (usually, but not always, given by me) in Second Life tomorrow (Saturday) morning. This time I'll be talking about the stars that make up a galaxy: We now know that most of the mass ... http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog/?p=122 "As presently constituted, it's quite possible that the GRE physics subject test does more harm than good, and we should either fix it, or seriously consider getting rid of it altogether," A quote from Jennifer Siders in this article at aps.org, that really we ought to take seriously. I doubt ... http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog/?p=119 You've probably seen this if you follow the science blogosphere at all. The Smith-Cotton High School in Sedalia, MI has done a forced recall on T-shirts made for their band. Why? Because the T-shirt riffed on the classic "primate turning into human" motif used as a symbol ... http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog/?p=109