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What I’ve Been Listening To – December 2015

January 1, 2016

It’s that time of month again. It’s just ticked over to 2016 in the uphill scramble away from the winter solstice. I present to you my post Christmas romp through the tunes that have been stuck in my head this month. The Cast of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – It Must Be Believed to...

Using Wintersmith to Make Awesome Static Websites

December 3, 2015

For the last month or so, I’ve been deeply investing my spare time into writing a website for a conference, the UK Exoplanet Community Meeting 2016, or UKEXOM 2016 for short. Early on we decided that the best way to host it would probably be to use Amazon’s pretty nifty S3 service. This comes with...

What I’ve Been Listening To – November 2015

December 1, 2015

And so it’s that time of year again. The nights rapidly draw in after making the exasperated jaunt back from British Summer Time to good ol’ GMT. The fog lies thick over the city as the temperature make it’s downward meander to sub-zero degrees celsius. The feeling of autumn, and indeed shortly after the crisp...

What I’ve Been Listening To – October 2015

November 1, 2015

Yes, I know, I’ve been a little quiet on here lately. To remedy that let’s have a good old fashioned music post. What with now being an office dweller, and occasional observatory dweller too, I’ve had plenty of time to listen to music over the past month. Thanks to Spotify’s excellent discovery features that’s made...

My Top Tips for Preparing for a Physics Degree

August 10, 2015

You’ve just finished your A-levels, you say? Well done, I think you’ve earned a break so go on and enjoy it. However, I wouldn’t mind guessing that at some point in the next couple of months you’re going to get a little bit bored and might even start looking for something to do. If you’re kicking...

Tackling Internal Server Errors When Using Jade-PHP

July 13, 2015

I’m currently taking a break from the glitz and glamour of astrophysics and instead am working on various development projects I promised I’d do for people. My main experience with web development in the past couple years has been using the excellent combo of Node.js + Express + Jade + Stylus. This combo is great...

Rainbow in a Box

June 23, 2015

Yesterday, I helped out at the physics department with a visit for a local sixth form. The basic idea was that in the morning the groups of students got a tour around the building and then in the afternoon they would get involved in a load of experiments. I was assigned the job of looking after...

#InternationalWomensDay

March 8, 2015

You may have noticed that today, Sunday 8th March 2015, is International Womens Day. This sounded like an ideal time to write about some exceptional scientists whom I greatly admire; who just also so happen to be women. Rosalind Franklin The Woman Who Discovered the Structure of DNA The discovery of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) is the...

Modeling Atmospheres with the Unified Model

February 24, 2015

In my last couple of posts I’ve been going through some of the basic principles of fluid mechanics. From some of the basic approximations that make the equation possible to analytically solve in this post, to some more specialised theory in the context of planetary systems in this post. In these posts we’ve been slowly...

Radiative Transfer in Planetary Atmospheres: An Overview

January 1, 2015

A little while ago I got carried away on a little post which discussed a really cool little bit of physics called radiative transfer. As I said then, radiative transfer is a technique that you can use to study how energy, in the form of electromagnetic radiation, moves through material. In that post, which you can...

6EQUJ5 – Decoding the Wow! Signal

December 11, 2014

Nothing quite spikes human interest like a good old fashioned mystery, and the the events at a radio telescope in Delaware, Ohio in 1977 could qualify as just that. The voluntary radio astronomer on duty, Dr. Jerry Ehman, noticed a signal that has gone down in history as one of the great puzzlers of the...

Dust in the Ointment

October 18, 2014

It’s nice every now and then to have a slight reminder why your work is valuable. At the moment I’m part of a research team, working in the astrophysics department at the University of Exeter,  that are studying dust. I know exactly what you’re thinking, how interesting can dust be? The truth is that interstellar...