And the Results are in

Its been a successful few days workwise, the allocations from the Gemini TAC (telescope allocation committee) have come in and all three of my proposals for the coming semester have been awarded time. Adding up to a grand total of 72 hours or around 8-10 nights of 8m time its a big success but also comes with big problems, namely getting all the PhaseII work done in time for the deadline in January. Its going to be a busy Christmas.

The three proposals actually break down into two projects, one is continuing our work of using Globular Clusters around galaxies to determine the formation history and Dark Matter content of the galaxies. I'll probably write a big post about this when I finish the papers I'm working on now.

The other is examining the stellar populations of S0 galaxies, these galaxies are an interesting intermediate galaxy type between star forming Spirals and old dead Elliptical galaxies. By looking at their stellar populations we hope to be able to determine how these galaxies formed, with a view toward determining the possible future of our own Milky Way.

Sometimes I Despair

Sometimes it just seems that the world is being over run by a tidal wave of fundamentalist nut jobs.

Check out this BBC story about the creation "museum". Just look at the scene of the kids playing with baby T-Rexs.

The main thing that I take away from this is the 40% of the worlds richest nation are either sheep, brainwashed or just plain idiots. The thought that just one normal person could be convinced by this rubbish is deeply disturbing, perhaps its time we came up with some way to fight back for reason and sense, otherwise all us rational people are going to be caught up when this bunch of religious fundamentalist madmen decide to take on some other bunch.

Personally I'm hoping to move to Mars, at least you can guarantee you won't have to put up with this lunacy there, its fairly unlikely that any of these types that won't read anything but the Bible is going to make it that far.