Planck

Nature on PhD Overproduction

by Planck April 25, 2011
Thumbnail image for Nature on PhD Overproduction

The  journal Nature’s latest issue features The Future of the PhD as the provocative cover story. The Future of PhD special topic its own contents page, where you can see all of the articles in the series. Thankfully, few of these stories are behind the Nature paywall so they are all viewable online. They discuss [...]

{ 11 comments }

Category: Career Tags: , , ,

Read more →

A Tale of Two Budgets

by Planck February 17, 2011

I’m going to write a bit about science funding, both in the President’s FY 2012 budget and in the yet-to-be-passed FY 2011 budget. But before I go into that, let me preface this piece with my honest opinion on the much bigger budget picture: President Obama has made a tactical mistake in the budget cutting [...]

{ 1 comment }

Category: policy Tags: , , , , , ,

Read more →

The Mac App Store and You

by Planck January 20, 2011

The new Mac App Store debuted a few weeks ago as Apple’s new centralized location for finding, purchasing, and installing Macintosh applications. (Don’t forget, we have a centralized list of useful Mac apps on the AstroBetter wiki.) It is modeled on the very successful iOS App Store, and works as its own, new, application that is [...]

{ 3 comments }

Category: applications, OS X Tags: , ,

Read more →

Macworld on the Mac of the Future

by Planck December 6, 2010

Macworld has published an interesting series of stories on the future of the Mac. Anand Lal Shimpi (of Anandtech fame) writes about the Mac of the future: the CPU. One aspect I found interesting was Apple’s desire for powerful Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), which they are using not just for games and 3D graphics, but for more [...]

{ 0 comments }

Category: OS X

Read more →

Java and Mac OS X

by Planck October 25, 2010

Apple Outsider has a good piece on Java on Mac OS X. If you haven’t heard, Apple has announced that the current version of Java has been deprecated. This means that Apple is not going to keep creating their own Java VM for OS X. Apple is relying on Oracle/Sun to make a VM for [...]

{ 13 comments }

Category: Links, OS X Tags: , ,

Read more →

Safari 5 Extensions

by Planck August 23, 2010

Three years ago, I asked why do Mac users use Firefox?  The answer was very clear – extensions. And having used Firefox for a while now having been forced to use Windows at work, I do see the merit of this sort of flexibility.  (Well, mainly to block Flash). With the release of Safari 5.01 [...]

{ 4 comments }

Category: applications Tags: , , , , ,

Read more →

America COMPETES Passes on a Two Strike Count

by Planck June 7, 2010

I was going to title this “Third Times the charm for America COMPETES Act” but that’s the title Science Insider used so I had to rename it.  From their story: By a vote of 262 to 150, legislators authorized $84 billion for research, education, and innovation programs over the next 5 years at the National [...]

{ 0 comments }

Category: policy Tags: ,

Read more →

Macsingularity archive now hosted at Astrobetter

by Planck April 13, 2010

Thanks to Kelle, despite my leaving astronomy for the glorious world of public policy, and shutting down my web host account, the archives of Macsingularity live on.  We’re not 100% sure what to do with the home page, the IRAF installers (which are out of date), and other things, but for now pretty much all [...]

{ 4 comments }

Category: about Tags: , ,

Read more →