Comments on: 2005 astronomy in review

By: Blake Stacey

Blake Stacey — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 15:59:03 +0000

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).

By: Dillo

Dillo — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 15:58:42 +0000

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.)

By: Amara

Amara — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 06:17:28 +0000

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).

By: Buzz Parsec

Buzz Parsec — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 05:04:43 +0000

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.

By: Supernova

Supernova — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 04:50:37 +0000

Ah, this is one to be savored. My very first paper was mentioned in the 1998 review. What a thrill!

By: Ed

Ed — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 04:36:45 +0000

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.