The Weekend, She Beat Me...

...Unfortunately, I had to work all weekend long. Got to see the sunshine from inside a box. Good bye sunshine, goodbye. Working the entire weekend means that I dont have a day off until next Saturday, which makes it 13 days in a row without a day off. Now that you know that, I have to kill you.

I have been listening to this band MONO lately. They are a Japanese orchestra rock band much in the vein of Mogwai or A Silver Mt. Zion. They are playing tonight at Berbati's Pan with opening band THE TWILIGHT SAD. This will be the third time I have seen THE TWILIGHT SAD and I'm assuming it will be great.

Also tonight is a lecture from a NASA Physicist Ruslan Belikov. His talk is titled "Searching for Other Earth" Is there another Earth out there? Is there life on it? People have been asking these questions for over two thousand years, and we finally stand on the verge of answering them. Since the first discoveries of extrasolar planets (exoplanets) fifteen years ago, the field has exploded and over 400 exoplanets have been discovered to date. However, most of them are large gas giants like Jupiter that are incapable of supporting life as we know it. The race is on to find small and elusive Earth-like worlds, as well as characterize them for possible signs of life. At this Science Pub, find out how astronomers are approaching this problem and what we might learn, focusing especially on the work being done at the NASA Ames Research Center.

Ruslan Belikov, PhD, is an astrophysicist at the NASA Ames Research Center and is the technical lead for the Ames Coronagraph Experiment, a project to develop space telescope technologies capable of imaging extrasolar Earths. His research interests include both the detection techniques and the science of exo-Earths (where he is hoping the real estate markets will be more stable). He holds a BSE degree from Princeton and a PhD from Stanford University.