Speak up, I can’t hear you over the Big Bang

Our corner of the universe is apparently very loud. Who knew? Vestiges of Big Bang Waves Are Reported, from the NY Times Astronomers reported on Tuesday that they had convincingly seen, in the patterns of galaxies scattered across the night sky, the vestiges of sound waves that rumbled through the universe after the Big Bang. Stars and galaxies tended to form along the ripples of the sound waves where matter.. Read More

Wikipedia, tempest in a teapot?

According to this post to the Dig_Ref listserv, there’s been discussion about Wikipedia on the MEDIEV-L listserv. The chain of posts is confusing, but the Dig_Ref post discusses a post made to MEDIEV-L and reposted on NetGold. The most interesting thing to me about the Dig_Ref post is that someone in the thread calls for a boycott of Wikipedia: Certainly if we maintain a strict diet of research and peer.. Read More

Piedmont Ecoregion

Jane and Evelyn and I are working on a grant proposal in collaboration with folks from the Herbarium and the Botanical Garden. In the course of our email conversations about this project, the question came up, What are the boundaries of our local ecoregion? So one of the botanists sent this map around, from The Nature Conservancy. It’s just so cool that I had to include it here. Click image.. Read More