Every year, the charmingly weird (some might say eccentric, but I bet she herself would say "weird") astronomer Virginia Trimble and several co-authors assemble the astronomical news from the previous year and publishes it in a journal. The 2005 review is now online.
A lot of it is technical, but it’s still amusing. It’s like Mystery Science Theater 3000 for real science: you won’t get all the jokes, but you’ll probably get enough to make it fun (I’ll admit a lot of them sailed right over me). The humor is good, and the science can be downright interesting.
July 11th, 2006 at 9:36 pm
Wow. A lot of stuff happened in 2005. Didn’t read it all, but I liked the section 5.4, called “Is the Universe full of stuff?” I was disappointed to hear that the number of stuff was 40, not 42.
July 11th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
Ah, this is one to be savored. My very first paper was mentioned in the 1998 review. What a thrill!
July 11th, 2006 at 10:04 pm
Bah! Keep rubbing it in. On page 225, it says “the lists of the longest rivers and largest islands seem to have held up better and are still occassionally useful.” My trivia team lost last fall on “What is the longest river in Europe?” breaking our streak after 3 years. What’s worse, our boss’s team (the school committee) won on a sports question, after having lost 4 years ago on their first question, “Who was the Splendid Splinter?” (They embarrassed us enormously by guessing “Joe DiMaggio.” Not even Dom
) Anyway, all 3 of us said “the Danube” without thinking. We tried to argue that Europe wasn’t really a continent, just a large penninsula at the western end of Asia, and the border was arbitrary and capricious so the question should be thrown out, but the judges weren’t buying. Even attempted bribary failed to sway them.
July 11th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
I call her ‘eccentric’ and a huge inspiration. Virginia Trimble was my mentor at UCI (I took all of her courses) and my biggest supporter in the the later 70s/early 80s for the path in astronomy that I took. Not many can do what I did with my circuitous path, and it was because of the lights of several people like her, illuminating the way for me, that I gained my personal strength and made it through.
Trimble’s summaries are fantastic, and I was waiting for this one. I usually pass them to the PhD students in the groups where I work, in order to help them to be better prepared for their examinations (equivalent of Oral/Comprehensive exams). I like them, myself, to be familiar with the rest of my field, there is nothing else that exists in astronomy that comes close for a good summary of the important work for that year. It’s a huge amount of work for her, and so I feel lucky/extremely fortunate that she continues to do it (and I wonder every year if it will be the last).
July 12th, 2006 at 8:58 am
Yikes! Who has time to read 267 pages? How about a highlights reel? (And then there’s the 100 pages of citations. One wonders how Dr. Trimble and her colleagues found time to sleep while compiling this.)
July 12th, 2006 at 8:59 am
I can fully appreciate this: “Tired of manual and visual inspections of countless features in solar images, tools finally came online that perform automated pattern recognition, which allow us to analyze orders of magnitude more data, while nobody becomes unemployed, since the maintenance of these tools requires additional skilled manpower” (p. 14).