Those who Know the Crow are well aware of the high regard he has for Facebook (not). In fact he spends as little time dealing with it as possible and encourages the entire world to get an app.net account and stop having our social media-ing serving advertisers (find me on app.net @bobsica). Anyhoo and how, it turns out sometime in late October Fbook changed something with posting to pages, so only posts through purplecrowlidar.tumblr.com were making it to Fbook and not via selective tweets. So it goes. Below is a taste of some of what you missed by not following @purplecrowlidar on twitter.
Of particular note is the sad news I got yesterday about “austerity” (the newest swear word in the language) mercilessly striking the American Geophysical Union.
The Crow
ps I’m dumping all PCL tweets to Fbook now, if it gets to be TMI I’ll try to resolve this somehow.
Wow been just over a week since I left Switzerland after a (hard!) working group meeting on lidar temperature and ozone algorithms (part of the Network for Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change, NDACC, lidar group). The International Space Science Institute was very accommodating to us, the weather was too nice (hard to work indoors through much of the day) and the meeting extremely productive. The group (including NDACC lidar scientists not at this meeting) is working on various issues of our data analysis with the goal of further improving the uniformity of the global data sets available from the NDACC program. During the week we spent considerable time on several details, some of which seem at first to not be important to the problem at hand. For instance, using our temperature measurements in the middle and upper atmosphere to investigate atmospheric change requires a fairly precise knowledge of Earth’s gravity at the surface. So we have to expand our expertise beyond the atmosphere into other areas, which to me is a fun part of being a scientist.
Our working group leader Thierry had us marching along in tight formation all and we obediently followed (for a bunch of scientists).
We worked hard all day but enjoyed dining together in the evening.
And not to worry! I got both a goat bell
and a cowbell (slightly smaller :-)
Pat and I have been happily clanging away all week. Here are a couple more pictures.
Disturbing words from Canada’s Enviroment Minister Peter Kent. This past week he wrote a letter to the Victoria Times-Colonist mis-representing several important facts about the Harper Government’s brutal, targeted cuts on Arctic science. Prof. T. Duck (Dalhousie University) replies to Kent’s misrepresentation of the facts in a letter to iPolitics.ca, concluding:
… point-by-point Kent’s claims about PEARL are factually incorrect. Many other claims in the Times-Colonist letter have been so profoundly discredited that it is no small wonder he had the gall to utter them. This past week, in response to criticism he had “misled Canadians”, Kent told an opposition MP that she should talk to “better informed scientists”. What we really need is a better-informed Minister.
Congratulations to Crow Emily on winning the William H. Wehlau award!
Crow Emily was recently recognized as the top student in the Astronomy graduate program: (via the UWO Physics & Astronomy Blog). She is shown being presented the award by Astronomy Prof. Amelia Wehlau at the Department picnic. We Crows are all so proud of Emily!
