Another last minute post

Nothing interesting today. Well, almost nothing. I have a couple of course presentations coming up, one as part of a course on laser physics and one for a course on atmospheric science. I intend to talk about "Astronomical Masers" for the laser physics course. If you don't know what astronomical masers are, they're microwave lasers that come from the stars. Literally. They were discovered in the second half of the 19th century and are mostly found near new stars or star-forming regions. And unlike conventional lasers, as is obvious, these are single pass i.e in a laser cavity, the laser light bounces back and forth between the mirrors on either sides multiple times before coming out, therefore multi-pass. There are a couple more interesting facts about them. I will not get into them now, I shall post a small report and a post next month, once i'm done with my presentation. Coming to the atmospheric science course, I intend to present on the exotic atmospheric conditions that are observed in the solar system. Specifically, the green house effect on Venus, the low escape velocity for gases on the moon, the super storm on Jupiter, the weirdly beautiful north pole of Saturn and coming back to earth, the black ice on the arctic ice cover. Again, I'll write a detailed summary of my presentation with a report and a ppt file eventually, on Nov 15th. Until then...

23:47:52 - 00:06:38

Popular posts from this blog

Animation using GNUPlot

Image
Animation using GNUPlot I've been trying to create an animation depicting a quasar spectrum moving across the 5 SDSS pass bands with respect to redshift. It is important to visualise what emission lines are moving in and out of bands to be able to understand the color-redshift plots and the changes in it. I've tried doing this using the animate function in matplotlib, python but i wasn't able to make it work - meaning i worked on it for a couple of days and then i gave up, not having found solutions for my problems on the internet. And then i came across this site, where the gunn-peterson trough and the lyman alpha forest have been depicted - in a beautiful manner. And this got me interested in using js and d3 to do the animations and make it dynamic - using sliders etc. In the meanwhile, i thought i'd look up and see if there was a way to create animations in gnuplot and whoopdedoo, what do i find but nirvana! In the image, you see 5 static curv
Read more

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these
Read more

Thoughts on the National Deep Tech Startup Policy

The Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India published a draft policy to support and nurtue the unique requirements of Deep Tech startups in India. I just finished reading it and put together a few comments in a FOSS United forum thread . I will probably read it again a week or so later and try to update my comments on the thread with any new insights/thoughts I have.
Read more