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# Excursion Set

## Sitemaps

- [XML Sitemap](https://excursionset.com/sitemap.xml): Contains all public & indexable URLs for this website.

## Posts

- [The Moon, In the Middle of the Morning](https://excursionset.com/blog/2026/04/the-moon-in-the-middle-of-the-morning/) - What I love about images from space is that they instantly show us the full three dimensional geometry of our planetary home. Like this gorgeous new image of a crescent Earth peeking over the shoulder of a crescent Moon.
- [Letting the Per Capita Go To Your Head...](https://excursionset.com/blog/2025/07/letting-the-per-capita-go-to-your-head/) - It is worth pausing to recognise the extent to which New Zealand and New Zealanders have achieved something remarkable in space. And I am looking forward to seeing what we – and my students – do next.
- [Electric Avenue](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/07/electric-avenue/) - an electric bike works the way bikes work in our dreams. On an e-bike, hills and headwinds don’t slow us down, and the motor is small enough to make sure it still feels like you are riding a bike.
- [Great Balls of Fire: Saturday Night Science](https://excursionset.com/blog/2026/02/great-balls-of-fire-saturday-night-science/) - Picture this. You're making a quiet start to the weekend when you notice a couple of texts and missed calls. They're from a reporter. The reporter wants to talk about a "fireball". That doesn't sound good. Unless you're an astronomer, in which case you reply, "Which fireball?" Sure enough, a quick look online turns up
- [Red Sky at Noon](https://excursionset.com/blog/2020/01/red-sky-at-noon/) - On New Year’s Day, social media in New Zealand was flooded with images of eerie orange skies above the South Island as the smoke from a continent-scale fire disaster crossed the Tasman Sea.
- [Excursion Set, Wrapped: 2025](https://excursionset.com/blog/2025/12/excursion-set-wrapped-2025/) - Thanks for reading – and even more so for subscribing. And that's Excursion Set wrapped for 2025. Enjoy your holidays.
- [The shape of equations and the texture of maths](https://excursionset.com/blog/2025/05/the-shape-of-equations/) - Working with them every day, equations become almost tactile. Some are as sharp as flints, others as edgeless as a beach pebble worn by waves and sand. In particular, the deepest relationships in nature are often expressed by equations which, at least typographically, are disarmingly smooth.
- [Wax On, Wax Off: Physics and the Hero's Journey](https://excursionset.com/blog/2025/08/wax-on-wax-off-physics-and-the-heros-journey/) - With just a few strokes of chalk, we see that lightning and rainbows are drawn from the same well of knowledge. What’s delightful, from the teacher's perspective, is that this last step is much simpler than the arduous journey it takes to get there, so the proverbial pot of gold turns out to be guarded by a surprisingly amiable dragon.
- [Lost In Space: New Zealand's $30M Participation Trophy](https://excursionset.com/blog/2025/11/lost-in-space-new-zealands-30m-participation-trophy/) - At $30 million dollars, MethaneSAT was easily New Zealand's largest investment in space science. It is also by far our biggest disappointment.
- [New Zealand Mentioned – Seeing Ourselves in the News](https://excursionset.com/blog/2025/09/new-zealand-mentioned-seeing-ourselves-in-the-news/) - Perhaps it is true of all small countries, but New Zealand loves finding the local angle on global news. Earthquake in a distant land – was a New Zealander caught up in the shaking? No? Don't worry, let's find a compatriot who visited earlier in the week. How about two black holes colliding in a
- [Let's Do The Space Warp Again...](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/06/lets-do-the-space-warp-again/) - Just under a year ago the internet cranked out dozens of stories on NASA's efforts to develop "warp drive" technologies. And just under a year ago, dozens of scientists and science bloggers explained that while Einstein's general theory of relativity let's you describe a warp drive, that doesn't mean that the universe will let you build one.
- [No Rose Without a Thorn](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/01/no-rose-without-a-thorn/) - I am still a huge fan of open science, despite the barrage of pay-to-play spam, and would love to live in a world where all scholarly publications were freely available to anyone who wants to see them. But I am beginning to think we need peer review for journals, as much as we need it for the articles within them.
- [Making Waves](https://excursionset.com/blog/2016/02/making-waves/) - Gravitational waves are already the science story of the week but if the rumours hold up they will one of the science stories of the century.
- [Stout Saplings: How To Grow A Space Ecosystem](https://excursionset.com/blog/2025/09/stout-saplings-a-space-ecosystem/) - New Zealand has unique opportunities in space. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post (which turned into a Newsroom piece) that featured a per capita plot of 2025 launches by the few countries that are capable of sending payloads to orbit. Our standing on the global stage is anchored by Rocket Lab, which is
- [Finding Peters: A Trail In and Out of Science](https://excursionset.com/blog/2025/06/finding-peters-a-trail-in-and-out-of-science/) - It is sometimes said that a person is not truly dead until their name is forgotten. If this is true, that one perfect paper has won a thoughtful man a place among the immortals.
- [Measurer, Measure Yourself.](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/01/measurer-measure-yourself/) - The great Russian physicist, Lev Landau used to rank physicists on a scale from 0 to 5. The better you were, the smaller your number. Newton alone was a 0, Einstein scraped in at 0.5, and founders of quantum mechanics like Bohr and Planck were 1s. Landau rated himself a 2.5 which he bumped up to a 2 after winning the Nobel Prize.
- [Done and Dusted?](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/01/done-and-dusted/) - When the news started to unravel, it struck me that the cosmology community was in the same position as someone waking up in an unfamiliar Las Vegas hotel room with a throbbing headache, hazy memories of the night before, and a fresh tattoo reading "r=0.2".
- [What the Spacecraft Saw In The Night...](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/02/what-the-dog-did-in-the-night/) - The next batch of Planck data was released yesterday (very early in the morning here in New Zealand), and this time the big news is that Planck has accurately measured how long it took for the first stars to light up after the Big Bang. The headline story is that the dark ages – the time before stars – lasted roughly 550 million years, 100 million years longer than Planck's previous estimate. (This is a long time, but a fraction of the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang itself.)
- [Fire In The Sky](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/02/fire-in-the-sky/) - Bolides are like lotteries – the chances of you winning the big prize are small, but the chances that someone, somewhere will win are pretty good. So if you missed last night's fireball, you will wait a long time before seeing another one.
- [Thinking Science](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/05/thinking-science/) - Aucklanders were promised that thinkScience would "Blow things up, blow things over and blow your mind!" and we made good on that commitment
- [Destiny's Child](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/09/destinys-child/) - Every so often theoretical physics, gaming, and parenting overlap. Not that often, but it happens
- [Sciencing The Martian](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/10/sciencing-the-martian/) - A Hollywood movie whose most memorable line is "I'm going to have to science the shit out of this" is guaranteed to get a good deal of attention from scientists.
- [In space, no one can hear you scream](https://excursionset.com/blog/2023/06/what-is-good-in-space/) - We should set ourselves the goal of doing things in space that make people here and elsewhere look up and say, “Wow, the Kiwis are doing that? That’s AWESOME!”
- [Spacequake](https://excursionset.com/blog/2016/02/spacequake/) - Just as earthquakes are the release of energy stored in subterranean faults, these gravitational waves were set in motion when two black holes – faults in space itself – became a single, stable object. Call it a spacequake.
- [What's In A Name?](https://excursionset.com/blog/2018/12/seeing-red/) - Showing visitors around the University of Auckland can be a quick lesson in our colonial history. The University is named for the city, which is named for a spectacularly unsuccessful Governor-General of India. Our oldest streets are centred on Queen Street — which is crossed by Victoria Street. The settlers took a belt and braces approach to honouring their young monarch when the city was laid out in 1841.
- [Einstein's Magic Bag](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/05/einsteins-magic-bag/) - In 1915, Berlin was at the centre of an empire locked into a global war. But at least one resident of that city had his mind elsewhere: Albert
- [The Piper At the Gates of Dawn](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/11/the-piper-at-the-gates-of-dawn/) - Books could and probably will be written about this saga (science writers, call your agents): there is ambition, drama, excitement, Nobel fever, science-by-media, a telescope at the South Pole, and astrophysicists so hungry for data that they analysed images lifted from in Powerpoint slides when the originals were unreleased.
- [The Quintessence of Dust?](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/09/the-quintessence-of-dust/) - Unfortunately, once the initial excitement died away, a number of voices asked whether BICEP2's signal had a more humble origin -- dust in our own galaxy. Dust can mimic a gravitational wave signal if it interacts with the galaxy's magnetic field. From a cosmic perspective, anything inside our galaxy is a "foreground" – dirt on the window through which we peer at the microwave background, the fossil light from the big bang coming to us from the furthest reaches of space.
- [A Stitch in Time](https://excursionset.com/blog/2017/04/a-stitch-in-time/) - If you are trying to build a time machine, don't bother: even if we can design them, the universe makes it impossible for us (or anyone) to build them.
- [Winning Bronze](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/11/winning-bronze/) - Sir Robert "Bob" Jones is New Zealand's answer to Donald Trump; a wealthy property investor with a sideline as an internet and old-media troll, albeit with a better barber than The Donald. In yesterday's Herald Jones shares his opinions on which New Zealanders merit a bronze statue, and the list is very short. By Jones's reckoning, the only truly great New Zealander is Sir Edmund Hillary, who conquered Everest, crossed the Antarctic and then devoted his later life to building schools and hospitals in Nepal.
- [Reaction Shot](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/08/reaction-shot/) - As Mark Twain apparently didn't say, a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on. And when that lie is powered by a breakthrough, NASA-approved space drive technology it can get to infinity and beyond, even if the truth is in hot pursuit.
- [Dust to Dust](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/07/stock-photo-soup/) - The equation-filled blackboard is one of the most reliable props of academia, not just in cartoons and movies, but in real life. You know a scientific discussion is taking a turn for the serious when the protagonists head to the board. Walking into a colleague's office, a glance at the scrawled notes on their board gives you a taste of their current research preoccupations and teaching commitments; wobbly chalk drawings along the bottom edge are a pretty good sign that the office's owner has a small child in their life.
- [Schooling Colin Craig](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/06/climate/) - Craig goes far beyond the standard hedging used by politicians who want to put off grappling with climate change ("it's complex", "the jury is still out", "scientists disagree", "I'm not a scientist"), and apparently believes that it is not even possible for human behaviour to significantly modify the climate.
- [He's not a scientist...](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/06/conservative/) - Given the current state of the New Zealand electorate, Craig's party stands a chance of being part of a coalition government. It is worth asking how did the Conservative Party arrive at its positions? Who did it consult? Where does it stand on evidence-based policy-making? Perhaps we should "Ask Colin"?
- [BICEP2; redux redux](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/05/bicep2-one-more-thing/) - When the news of the BICEP2 result broke, the mood was euphoric. There was open speculation about Nobel Prizes, a certain video went viral and cosmologists spoke of a radical transformation in our understanding of the early universe. And all of this may still come to pass. But the wave of doubt blowing through the cosmological community in the last week is growing into a consensus that the BICEP2 team has overstated the case for a discovery.
- [BICEP2: Two Months Later (and the Morning After)](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/05/bicep2-two-months/) - It's possible that the cosmology community is slowly waking up to find itself in an unfamiliar Las Vegas hotel room with a throbbing headache, hazy memories of the night before, and a fresh tattoo reading "r=0.2".
- [BICEP2: A Month Later](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/04/bicep2-a-month-later/) - For theoretical physicists, ambulance chasing involves getting papers out quickly after a major data release. Some ambulance chasers make significant contributions, some are just trying to draw attention to their earlier work, while others are banging out insubstantial papers in the hope that they will be cited by their slower colleagues. But whatever their motives, cosmologists have certainly been busy: the BICEP2 discovery paper has been cited 188 times on the Arxiv, all in "preprints" written within a month of the original announcement. I am pretty sure this is a world record, and you can always check the current tally.
- [Pig Wrestling](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/04/pig-wrestling/) - Young cosmologists learn fairly quickly that engaging with eccentrics and their pet theories is generally not a good use of their time. My own experience is that "independent investigators" are almost always courteous, decent people. However, they appear to enjoy dissent as much as they enjoy grappling with the deep problems of physics. Consequently, they are rarely overtly upset that they cannot change the opinions of mainstream scientists, and will hold on to their positions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The advice I give my students is not to wrestle a pig; you both get muddy, but the pig enjoys it.
- [Science Street Fair...](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/04/science-street-fair/) - Aucklanders, and those in Auckland this Sunday: MoTAT is holding its inaugural Science Street Fair. This will be a fun, informal event with all sorts of science (and scientists) on display. Not to mention a hovercraft, 3D printing and the "Ask a Scientist" tent...
- [Wi-fi: If It's Dangerous, I'll Eat A Tinfoil Hat...](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/03/wi-fi-if-its-dangerous-ill-eat-a-tinfoil-hat/) - As for me, I can see plenty of dangers associated with giving children wireless devices, but they are of the "why don't you get up off the couch / visit a friend / go swimming / throw a ball / practice your instrument / build something / ride your bike / read a book / do what kids did when I was a kid" variety.
- [The Weekly World News](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/03/the-weekly-world-news/) - Whenever you throw a party, there is always someone who double-dips the guacamole. In this case the jerk was Ephraim Hardcastle, a pseudonymous correspondent in the Daily Mail. This nimrod thought the most important thing to say about one of the biggest science stories in 50 years was that two of the experts asked to appear on the BBC news that night were both women of colour. Hardcastle's shtick is similar to that of the old Weekly World News columnist Ed Anger -- with the difference that Anger was a conscious parody.
- [How To Train Your Universe](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/03/under-negative-pressure/) - Cosmologists don't give tips to newbie universe-builders, but we do ask how our universe evolved. It was quickly discovered that a simple Big Bang needed special and apparently arbitrary initial conditions in order to grow into the universe we now inhabit. But In 1980, physicist Alan Guth, then a post-doc at SLAC, realised that a mechanism he dubbed inflation made these "initial conditions problems" manageable, even if it didn't solve them completely.
- [The Smoking Gnu](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/03/the-smoking-gnu/) - When it comes to the details, the stories diverge. Some claim a (relatively) large B-mode that could be hard to square with other datasets, or would imply that the early universe is weirder than we imagine. Other rumours tell of a signal that is consistent with everything else we know, but might permit only a more tentative detection.
- [The Dark Side of the Moon](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/03/the-dark-side-of-the-moon/) - Statistical reasoning is a double-edged tool: it lets scientists sift useful knowledge from the noise of the world, but in other hands it becomes a device for separating the credulous from their cash.
- [Sausagefests...](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/02/sausagefests/) - This week a Sausagefest of a different sort has been bouncing round the science tweetosphere: a big, international quantum chemistry conference with 29 plenary speakers and session chairs, all of whom were men.
- [A Romantic Comedy, as told by Newton](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/11/a-romantic-comedy-as-told-by-newton/) - Over the (southern) summer, I am digging into N-body dynamics as I start work on a couple of new research problems. To warm up, I wrote a simple code which tracks the motion of a handful of particles interacting via their mutual gravitational attraction. Watching the intricate dance the particles made in my simulations, it struck me that I had also inadvertently invented an algorithmic story-generator.
- [The Higgs, The Universe and Everything](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/11/the-higgs-the-universe-and-everything/) - The Particle at the End of the Universe is one of the best. Carroll's account provides an excellent account of what we have learnt about the particle realm, capturing the excitement of the hunt and the grandeur of what has been discovered.
- [Dump the Warp Core...](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/07/dump-the-warp-core/) - So, my take is that even if you can generate a spacewarp in the lab, a quick estimate says its gravitational effects would be billions or trillions of times below the threshold of detectability. The problem is not that warp drives are impossible, but that this description of them does not seem to be self-consistent.
- [Blog-Foo](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/06/blog-foo/) - SciFoo is -- in part -- a celebration of science, but problems within science and problems science has made for the world were key themes of SciFoo, turning it into something more than a mutual admiration session. But scientists like to fix problems, and for me that was the most rewarding aspect of the conference -- after SciFoo, it is easy to believe that the world can be a better place. Thanks.
- [Science Fair - A Call For Ideas and Participation](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/06/science-fair-a-call-for-ideas-and-participation/) - But as we talked, we realized we shouldn't hog the fun for ourselves -- and that we would love to see (for want of a better name) a Science Fair: a chance for everyone to find out who scientists are, what we have discovered, and what we are up to -- and get involved with science themselves.
- [Wrong On The Internet](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/05/weinsteineinstein-hot-spotcold-spot/) - Just when I thought the Weinstein/Einstein kerfuffle had wound down, it seems to have decided to go another round.
- [Wellington, We Have a Problem...](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/04/wellington-we-have-a-problem/) - Incensed by the phrase "homeopathic remedies have failed every randomised, evidence-based scientific study seeking to verify their claims of healing powers" a Tauranga-based homeopathist took a complaint to the Press Council, New Zealand's media watchdog -- as is his right. So far, again, so good.
- [Planck Live Blog](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/03/planck-live-blog/) - Planning to live blog the Planck live blog data release tonight. In the meantime, read Renee Hlozek and Shaun Hotchkiss's blogposts which give good discussions of what is at stake, or watch Ed Copeland giving a quick survey of cosmology.
- [How Two Guys Working for the Telephone Company Discovered the Origin of the Universe](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/03/the-microwave-background-how-two-guys-working-for-the-telephone-company-discovered-the-origin-of-the-universe/) - The story has been told many times. The detector had an annoying and remarkably intransigent "hiss" and Penzias and Wilson knew it was the detector, since the hiss didn't change as they pointed their antenna at different places in the sky. A radio hiss can be converted into a temperature: a red-hot coal has a temperature of a few thousand degrees Celsius but this hiss was microwave-hot, putting it just a few degrees above absolute zero.
- [Open Sesame II](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/03/open-sesame-ii/) - So what gives? So far as I can tell, Elsevier hopes to negotiate blanket deals with science funding agencies and consortia of institutions to cover the cost of these journals. And I suspect many scientists will be apprehensive at the thought of Elsevier inserting themselves even more deeply into the world's scholarly infrastructure.
- [Beatrice's Biography](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/03/beatrices-biography/) - Astrophysicist Beatrice Tinsley (1941-1981) was once a leading candidate for the "Most Important New Zealand Scientist You've Never Heard Of Award", but has been largely eliminated from consideration by a stage play, having a mountain named after her, and a full-length biography.
- [Odd Odds](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/02/odd-odds/) - But if you think about it, you see a huge number of rare events in a single day -- it is just that not all rare events are interesting events.
- [Open Sesame](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/02/open-sesame/) - more importantly, the Archive has reached the point where it threatens to do to traditional journals what MP3s did to record shops, as it represents a radically new model for scientific publishing. In particle physics and astrophysics, the Archive is essentially complete -- I almost never see traditionally published papers that are not also posted to the Archive.
- [Time Capsule](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/02/timecapsule/) - A year ago, my family and I moved home to New Zealand after 15 years in the United States. We'd left New Zealand with suitcases, but returned with a 40-foot shipping container.A year later we are just getting to the bottom of the last of the boxes, where I discovered a 2001 copy of Pulp -- a glossy New Zealand "fashion and lifestyle" magazine -- with me in it.
- [Friends Don't Let Friends Do H](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/01/friends-dont-let-friends-do-h/) - So my resolution for 2015 is this: I am going to go h-free, wherever possible. I won't use it in recommendations I write, I won't cite my own h-index in my annual performance appraisals, and I will discourage comparisons of h-indices when considering candidates for promotions, appointments and prizes.
- [The Sand Reckoner](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/02/the-sand-reckoner/) - Just as scientists can explain the flocking of birds, we can also model the "flocking" of cars, exploring how patterns in traffic arise and dissipate.
- [Big Astro](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/04/big-astro/) - As an astrophysicist, I hope that the TMT will be built – it is an astonishing instrument, big enough to catch the the light from the first generation of stars to be born after the Big Bang, and sharp enough to make images of planets around other suns. However, I also hope that my community can do this without riding roughshod over a people who claim Mauna Kea as their own
- [Out Of Thin Air](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/07/secret-nasa-bs-detector/) - Sadly, it seems that the device NASA really needs is a bullshit detector. And if they built one and shared it with the world's journalists we would really have something to celebrate.
- [Bad Apples](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/10/one-bad-apple/) - Of course, we know how this sort of thing happens – it happens because "everyone knows" who the problems are, but nothing happens to stop them.
- [Something New Under The Sky](https://excursionset.com/blog/2016/06/something-new-under-the-sky/) - This week, the University of Auckland (where I work) announced it is joining the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope collaboration. So what is the LSST, what will it do, and why are we so excited about it?
- [Look West](https://excursionset.com/blog/2016/08/look-west/) - Last Friday, work kept me late at the office. It was a clear and cloudless night and the stars were out as I biked home in the dusk. And as my pedals turned, the night sky wheeled more slowly above me.
- [The Man Who Sold Mars](https://excursionset.com/blog/2016/09/the-man-who-sold-mars/) - Elon Musk knows how to make a splash, and today he outlined his plan to turn humanity into a "multiplanetary species". Musk painted a picture of a future where travel to Mars was downright cheap, with tickets costing as little as $200,000, the median price of an American home. So is this possible? I have no idea, but it makes for a great Fermi question, a problem so fuzzy and incomplete that educated guesswork is the only way forward.
- [A Wonderful Life](https://excursionset.com/blog/2016/10/a-wonderful-life/) - Over the coming week 2016's slate of Nobel Laureates will be announced. These are the Academy Awards of science; it is not the only prize scientists can win but only the Nobel is simply "the Prize".
- [Shaken, Not Stirring](https://excursionset.com/blog/2016/11/shaken-not-stirring/) - On November 17 my alarm went off simultaneously with a call from Radio New Zealand asking me to do an on-air interview about the end of the world. It turned out that it wasn’t the actual end of the world that was making the news.
- [New York State of Mind](https://excursionset.com/blog/2016/12/new-york-state-of-mind/) - One of the commonest questions about the Big Bang is "If the universe is expanding, is everything in it getting bigger? The solar system, the sun, the earth, our bodies and the atoms we are made of?"
- [Your Mileage May Vary](https://excursionset.com/blog/2017/02/your-mileage-may-vary/) - Auckland's 2017 Bike Challenge winds up today; February may be the shortest month, but it is prime cycling season in Auckland, with decent weather and long evenings.
- [Actually, This Is Rocket Science](https://excursionset.com/blog/2017/04/rocket-science/) - But despite being commonplace, spaceflight is still far from routine. In fact, in the six decades since the Soviet Union started the space race, just eleven nations and the European Union have achieved indigenous launch capability, sending a locally developed rocket into orbit.
- [Up, Up and Away...](https://excursionset.com/blog/2017/04/up-up-and-away/) - Balloon science is an often-neglected older cousin of rocket science and NASA's primary goal with this launch is to test a better balloon
- [Pop Science](https://excursionset.com/blog/2017/09/pop-science/) - As you can guess from the title, The First Three Minutes tells the story of the moments following the Big Bang. The early universe sets the stage for the development of the cosmos we observe today, and the Cosmic Microwave Background is a key link between the distant past and the present day.
- [Set The Controls For The Heart of Saturn](https://excursionset.com/blog/2017/09/set-the-controls-for-the-heart-of-saturn/) - NASA has an undoubted ability to sell a story, and it has been making the most of the anthropomorphic appeal of this brave little $3 billion, 5 ton, plutonium-powered spacecraft on its two-decade mission. But the hype is not misplaced: Saturn has a key place in the evolving human understanding of the cosmos.
- [You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet...](https://excursionset.com/blog/2017/10/you-aint-seen-nothing-yet/) - This is the week the Nobel Prizes are announced, and today is the day (at least in New Zealand; first place in the world to see the light, as the tourist people say) the Physics prize is announced. And this year the odds-on favourite will be LIGO and the discovery of gravitational waves.
- [Bike Bridges of Auckland](https://excursionset.com/blog/2017/10/bike-bridges-of-auckland/) - Unlike almost any other form of transport, regular cycling leaves you fitter and healthier than sitting in a car, or a bus or a train. Not only that, Auckland's best cycle paths run through parks and incorporate a series of stunning bridges, so you are likely to arrive at work with a smile on your face.
- [The Unforgivable Curses](https://excursionset.com/blog/2017/10/the-unforgivable-curses/) - Fabrication and plagiarism are the unforgivable curses of science – crimes of no return. If you are caught committing them you will not wind up in an academic Azkaban but you would be hard put to find a new job in a university as a parking warden, much less a research role.
- [How to Talk to Kids With Dreams](https://excursionset.com/blog/2018/06/kids-with-dreams/) - If you're a teacher, what's your ambition? It's got to be better to watch your students chase their dreams than, when they come to tell the story of their success, be remembered as the person who said they couldn't do it.
- [There's A Creationist In the Science Class!](https://excursionset.com/blog/2018/07/theres-a-creationist-in-the-science-class/) - No-one seems to dispute that the video was played, but minimising it as a conversation starter or "just one viewpoint" will not inspire confidence. If this was part of a wider programme to slip creationism into science classes, it speaks to a failure of leadership and, I believe, integrity.
- [Its Dark Materials](https://excursionset.com/blog/2018/12/dark-materials/) - Each galaxy lives within its own three-dimensional halo of dark matter whose gravitational field corrals the stars within it. Without the stars, the halo would still be there, albeit invisible to our eyes; but if the halo vanished, the stars would scatter into the depths of the universe – just as a Christmas tree remains a tree with or without the pretty lights. Whereas without the tree, the lights would merely be a puddle of colour on the snowy ground.
- [We Don't Need No Education?](https://excursionset.com/blog/2019/03/we-dont-need-no-education/) - My mother and father – whose own childhoods took place against the backdrop of the Pacific War and the Blitz, respectively – hoped that their children’s lives would be safer and more comfortable than their own. But parents today should have no such illusions about what our children could face in the anthropocene if climate action does not begin right now.
- [Dark Stars](https://excursionset.com/blog/2019/04/dark-stars/) - These images will show us the environment of the black hole itself, test Einstein’s understanding of gravity, and give unprecedented proof that black holes truly exist in our universe. Because seeing really is believing. Even for scientists.
- [One Small Step](https://excursionset.com/blog/2019/07/one-small-step/) - One of my earliest memories is standing with my father on the balcony of my grandmother’s house in Auckland. “Ma’s House” had a spectacular view northwards, across Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf, and the Moon was visible in the early evening sky. Following my eye, my father pointed and said, “I think there are people there at the moment.”
- [This Is Not  A Test](https://excursionset.com/blog/2020/07/this-is-not-a-test/) - Once upon a time, the “tyranny of distance” defined the Pākehā experience of New Zealand, locating immigrants from Britain 12,000 miles from the country they often referred to as Home. But in the years to come that distance might be the best thing that ever happened to the people of these islands.
- [Do Look Up](https://excursionset.com/blog/2022/01/do-look-up/) - Watching a group of people come together to do something this hard and this unprecedentedly complex – often in the face of administrative inertia – reminds me that it is not only possible to reach for our dreams but that sometimes we manage to take hold of them.
- [A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall](https://excursionset.com/blog/2023/10/singing-in-the-rain/) - There is insight in the stories that numbers can tell, and for some of us that insight offers a sense of calm in turbulent times. Which may be why In the midst of this year’s rains I started making graphs of the accumulated rainfall and how it stacked up against previous years.
- [The Angle of Repose](https://excursionset.com/blog/2014/02/the-angle-of-repose/) - Within the Zen garden, the iconic, Fuji-esque "Moon-Viewing Platform" or Kogetsudai, is a conical mound of sand that stands as high as an adult. Ginkakuji is a World Heritage Site, so the Kogetsudai is almost certainly the world's only UNESCO-listed sandcastle. Unlike a pyramid or a stone temple a sandcastle is an inherently evanescent structure, which must present a challenge to its curators.
- [We Have The Technology](https://excursionset.com/blog/2018/09/we-have-the-technology/) - Imagine living in a world where walking and biking was as safe as flying in space.
- [Follow the Money: The Science of Impact](https://excursionset.com/blog/2024/12/follow-the-money-the-science-of-impact/) - There is a purely pragmatic issue with targeting the Marsden Fund at economic outcomes: it could hurt more than it helps.
- [The Writing Life: An Update on the Blog](https://excursionset.com/blog/2024/12/the-writing-life-an-update-on-the-blog/) - I only write when I have something to say along with the time to say it. That said, the second requirement is a bigger issue than the first and an early New Year's Resolution is to clear a few roadblocks.
- [Keep Looking Up](https://excursionset.com/blog/2024/05/keep-looking-up/) - I chalked up a personal first yesterday; I saw an aurora with my own eyes and it was every bit as remarkable as I could have hoped for. I was not alone in sharing this special moment – anyone outside before midnight without clouds overhead in New Zealand (and, in fact, much of the world
- [Arm The Disruptors](https://excursionset.com/blog/2023/01/the-disruptors/) - Last week, Science Twitter was roiled by claims that “disruptive science” was on the wane. The Nature paper that kicked off this storm in our social media teacup is profusely illustrated with graphs and charts. The problem is that it could also be Exhibit A in a demonstration of how data science can generate buzz while remaining largely disconnected from reality.
- [The Coming of the Comet](https://excursionset.com/blog/2024/10/the-coming-of-the-comet/) - Coming of the Comet Comets are not unusual. Dozens of them are found every year and a handful – such as Halley's Comet – are repeat visitors to our skies. But genuinely bright comets must tread a celestial path that takes them close to both the Sun and the Earth, ensuring that they are simultaneously well-lit and easily seen by humans. These are special events and Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is the brightest we have seen in a decade.
- [X Marks The Spot](https://excursionset.com/blog/2023/10/x-marks-the-spot/) - For now I am taking heart from an adage from Usenet days; that the internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it – new social media sites are popping up aiming to catch the flavour of the old Twitter while perhaps avoiding some of its weaknesses.
- [A Bigger Sky](https://excursionset.com/blog/2023/12/a-bigger-sky/) - Amongst everything else that happened in 2023 a key anniversary for a landmark in our understanding of the Universe passed largely unnoticed – the centenary of the realisation that not only was our Sun one of many stars in the Milky Way galaxy but that our galaxy was one of many galaxies in the Universe.
- [Birthday Boy](https://excursionset.com/blog/2021/08/birthday-boy/) - You know those little cartoon atoms that are a graphical shorthand for “science”? The key idea they express – the central nucleus wrapped by a cloud of electrons – is Rutherford’s. The proton? Discovered by Rutherford and his collaborators. Turning the atom of one element into another, fulfilling the dreams of alchemists? Also Rutherford.
- [A Turning Lane As Lovely As A Tree?](https://excursionset.com/blog/2015/02/modeling-traffic/) - The trees are now festooned with signs, banners and a "yarn bomb", while thousands have joined the Save the Western Springs Pohutukawa group on Facebook and the trees themselves are tweeting. [The Lorax asked who would speak for the trees, but now it seems they can tweet for themselves.]
- [Trainwrecks I Have Seen...](https://excursionset.com/blog/2013/05/trainwrecks-i-have-seen/) - Perhaps Weinstein has been breathing his own fumes for too long, and has managed to persuade du Sautoy that the usual standards of reproducibility, peer-review and the scrutiny of one's colleagues are just for the little people. And here Weinstein really is challenging Einstein: the Swiss-German patent clerk played by the rules.

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