Since September 2008, I'm a research scientist in the Department of Astronomy at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, USA.
From March 2007 through August 2008, I was a lecturer in the General Relativity group in the School of Mathematics at the University of Southampton, located (naturally enough!) in Southampton, England (United Kingdom).
From spring 2001 through February 2007, I was a postdoc in the numerical relativity group at the Albert-Einstein-Institut (Max Planck Institut für Gravitationsphysik), or AEI, located in Potsdam (a suburb of Berlin), Germany. My stay at the AEI was partially funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and partially by AEI.
From fall 1998 through spring 2001 I was a postdoc in the Relativity Group in the Institute for Theoretical Physics (Institute für Theoretische Physik) at the University of Vienna (Universität Wien), in Vienna (Wien), Austria (Österreich).
In 1992 and 1993 was a research associate and postdoc in the Center for Relativity at the University of Texas at Austin.
Short table of contents for my work pages:
sci.physics.research
Usenet Newsgroup archives
Weather for Bloomington, Southampton, Potsdam [Web page in German], Potsdam [US site; uses wierd US units], Leipzig [Web page in German].
Potsdam-area business directory
Deutsch Bahn English-language query page
(gives train/tram/bus connections & timetables anywhere in Europe)
Street maps for anywhere in Germany
Online telephone book for all of Germany
UK National Rail Enquiries
(trip planner for UK rail system)
and
National Express Coaches
(intercity bus system)
London Underground trip planner
Automatic (computerized) language translation:
Exchange Rates for various currencies
How to talk to a human in various (mostly US) companies' irritating voice-menu telephone systems
E-mail:
<jthorn@astro.indiana-zebra.edu>
except that you have to remove the -animal part.
(The obfuscation is to deter
spammer robots
which search through web pages to find E-mail addresses. Sigh...)
Paper-Mail:
Jonathan Thornburg
Dept. of Astronomy
Swain Hall West, Room 319
Indiana University
727 East 3rd Street
Bloomington Indiana 47405-7105
USA
Office:
My office is in room 312.
Code Frameworks and "Libraries of Libraries"
Visualization Programs/Systems
Visualization and GUI Toolkits
I/O Libraries
Beowulf-type Clusters
Bookstores
If you're looking for "black marks on paper" books,
Powells is a pretty good online
bookstore (which also has several "bricks and mortar" stores in Portland,
USA). Unlike Amazon
and some other online bookstores, they haven't tried to patent assorted
obvious ideas as a way of stifiling potential competitors, and they
don't
send spam E-mails.
Their
search page
works moderately well, though I've found titles are sometimes misspelled.
They offer
free shipping worldwide
for orders over US$50, too!
For used books, I have had favorable experiences with BookFinder.com.
In Germany, I have personally had good experiences with buch.de. Their search page seems to be ok. They usually offer free shipping in Germany for orders over 20 Euros. Friends have also spoken highly of buecher.de.
Eric S. Raymond's The Jargon File, a huge compendium of slang and in-group speech used by computer wizards and related people. Lots of fun reading here!
Glen Petitpas's list of true Dumb Or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronyms (DOOFAAs) and William Keel's list of true funny quotes from astronomy papers are both good for some chuckles.
Phil Koopman's
How to Write an Abstract
A very nice short essay on how to write the abstract of a
scientific paper, and why it's so important to do this well.
Robert Geroch's
Suggestions for Giving Talks,
Kenneth Suslick's
Seminar on Seminars
(also available in
PDF format (695KB)),
Heather R. (Scott) Theijsmeijer's
Powerpoint in the Classroom,
and
Gavin Polhemus's
Qualifying Exam for Conference Speakers
The first three of these are short tutorials on various aspects of
how to give a scientific talk, whether to an informal seminar,
or to a wider audience.
The last... is left as an exercise for the reader. :)
Etiquette for the Internet
Every new internet user should be familiar with these guidlines,
which summarize some of the basic "cultural conventions" widely
accepted on the internet.
Two amusing and thought-provoking essays by Thomas Scoville:
a comfort and fluency with text and printed words". Based on this, the author offers an interesting comparison with, and cricism of, NT:
NT left me cold. There was something deeply unsatisfying about it. I had that ineffable feeling (apologies to Gertrude Stein) there was no there there. Granted, I already knew the major themes of system and network administration from my UNIX days, and I will admit that registry hacking did vex me for a few days, but after my short scramble up the learning curve I looked back at UNIX with the feeling I'd been demoted from a backhoe to a leaf-blower. NT just didn't offer room to move. The one-size-fits-all, point-and-click, we've-already-anticipated-all-your-needs world of NT had me yearning for those obscure command-line flags and man -k. I wanted to craft my own solutions from my own toolbox, not have my ideas slammed into the visually homogenous, prepackaged, Soviet world of Microsoft Foundation Classes.
Date Formats
What date does "02/03/04" mean? That depends:
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| And finally, here's a brilliant new keyboard design, specially optimized to support the full functionality of Microsoft's software... |
$Revision: 1.189 $ of $Date: 2009/11/17 00:51:37 $.