I got up early this morning to be online and I watched Curiosity land on Mars – live. Take a moment to let it sink in how awesome that is, before you read on. Then, if you haven’t seen them yet, take a look at the pictures on the official NASA website. Now I’m not going to be another blog giving facts you probably have read on the official channels already, but since me and all my astrobuddies were sharing the moment on twitter together, I was reminded of something else I’ve been meaning to show for a while.
Robert Simpson, also known as Zookeeper Rob over at the Zooniverse headquarters, or as @orbitingfrog on twitter (one of the astrobuddies up early too) made a different sort of cloud of my Voorwerp. As he explains on his blog: “We’re always looking for ways to make science easier to understand and to encourage people to read published papers. Word clouds have become a semi-useful way of exploring the content of text. Discovering the characteristic words that dominate a scientific paper seemed like as good a starting point as any for asking questions and understanding what the paper is about.” That and they look cool.
These are the keywords used in our papers on Hanny’s Voorwerp so far. Created by Rob Simpson. (He has more of these on his site).
And ‘making science easier to understand’ is also just what Rob’s been doing together with Zookeeper Chris (Lintott), on their Recycled Electrons podcasts. This morning they were answering questions on their video stream about the Mars expedition, which you could send in live through twitter. If you’ve missed it, you can still hear it back on their site and I can highly recommend following them, as they’re funny too. What a good start to the week! : )
