Paul Sutton

science

In the night sky : Orion Completed

I have finally, after months of going back and forth to this, partly due to other study and things to do. Completed the 24 hour OU / OpenLearn Course. I was just doing this casually anyway.

Note: This is a Level 1 Open University course.

After studying this course, you should be able to:

* Understand facts, concepts, principles, theories, classifications and language used in astronomy * Understand the range of sizes, distances and motions of objects in the night sky * Understand the structure, evolution and the main processes operating in stars * Understand the properties of planets in our Solar System and exoplanetary systems * Understand the history of the universe.

Really interesting course, lots to think about and learn just from doing some of the research for the questions posed during the course.

Astronomy uses the greek alphabet for star names for example so this post may help.

#course #openlearn #openuniversity #science #space #astronomy #cosmology #physics #astrophysics #chemistry #biology #OU #greek

SpaceX Docking

Following yesterdays successful SpaceX launch, the Dragon Module is due to dock with the ISS later on today at about 14:30 GMT (15:30 BST).

#science, #spacex, #ISS, #dragon, #space, #travel

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I can be contacted on Mastodon here. You can get a free account on the http://qoto.org instance by following this link.

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Get a free Repl.it online IDE account here Get an Overleaf account here, Online collaborative LaTeX Editor

Collaboration with Overleaf

I attended the Overleaf Effective Collaboration webinar on Wednesday 20th May. This proved, once again to be very informative, useful and complements the other webinars nicely.

This webinar, specifically covered the features available to the different users of the system, the main difference with the free accounts includes the number of user who can collaborate and version history tracking.

I recently came across an excellent Overleaf curated article / report from 2017 on The Connected Culture of Collaboration Report

The document (pdf) can be downloaded free from the website and there is a citation guide too, if this is needed for your own articles or papers.

The webinar will be available on demand in due course.

References

#LaTeX, #overleaf, #collaboration, #report, #digital, #science,#writing,#publishing

Malaria Treatment

Even though we are in a global Covid 19 pandemic, it does not mean other important discoveries are not being made.

The BBC reported on May 4th that a microbe has been found that can block Malaria [1]. This is an important discovery, as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) article [2] suggests that Malaria killed 405,000 people i 2018.

Discoveries such as this, surely give the world hope that a treatment for Covid-19 will eventually be found. It also highlights the importance of research and proper funding for research.

  1. BBC Malaria article
  2. CDC Malaria Statistics and information

#Malaria, #treatment, #Disease, #funding, #covid19, #research, #progress, #STEM, #bbc, #science, #news

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As I have signed up to various science based courses, mostly with OpenLearn at the moment. I have signed up to the ScienceForums website.

This is a free message forum where you can discuss a wide range of science topics, ask questions, help others. It is quite advanced in places but this suits me fine. You can learn by just reading the questions and answers from different users.

As I am also on IRC then I have joined both physics and chemistry channels on Freenode. This is in order to ask questions or clarification. The physics channel is more useful for the astronomy and astrophysics based courses.

You can join the IRC community via the Freenode Webchat tool.

These websites can really complement e-learning and they provide a way to chat to people who share a real interest in these subjects.

These sites should also be able to complement the e-learning forum that I posted about yesterday.

#science, #forums, #help, #support, #homework

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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I am working on a series of $\LaTeX$ flashcards to help people learn the basics.

I am not creating a fully comprehensive set of these. LaTeX has far too many features for this.

What I want to do, is create a set, that just covers the basics:

  • Setting up a preamble
  • Document types
  • Sections
  • Table Of Contents (TOC)
  • Cross referencing
  • Bibliographies
  • Citations
  • Plus a few examples of Maths and Science typesetting.

Hopefully enough for people to get started or for myself to support the teaching of the system.

I feel confident enough to actually try and tech LaTeX, so another reason for these cards would be to help me with this, should I get the opportunity to do so. It is a good idea to prepare for this sort of eventuality.

As LaTeX is aimed at academia, once you have the basics, you can keep going and learn more depending on your usage case. There is a lot of help available too.

Despite it being aimed at academic applications, it can produce very professional looking letters, CVs / Resumes and a whole range of other documents too.

#typesetting, #LaTeX, #Document, #preparation, #help, #teaching, #support, #maths, #science, #formulae, #equations.

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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Chemistry Help

I came across this website on the Fediverse as part of a thread on science. I had a look and it appears to be something could really help anyone studying Chemistry

A discussion that mentioned Atomic Orbitals led me to this page on the above website. This site has some nice simulations of topics that are included in the A'level Chemistry Syllabus.

There is also a website with a nice forum on science that I found too. This has a section on Chemistry and then sub forums for Organic, Inorganic and Physical chemistry.

$\LaTeX$ may also be of interest to Chemistry students as you can type set Chemical Formulae etc.

In a sort of related topic, I found a useful site that gives tips on technical writing, I am familiar with some of the ideas presented here, well mostly Constructivism by Jerome Bruner from studying the Supporting Learning in Primary Schools course with the Open University.

I am trying to follow some of this idea when writing instructional blog posts. Provide information on how I do things but put quite a lot of emphasis on the reader actually going away and researching topics. Everyone's system and circumstances are different.

#science, #chemistry, #study, #alevel, #help, #support, #websites, #forum, #simulation.

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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#KSTARS – ASTRONOMY PACKAGE

KSTARS is a Linux based astronomy package. For a free software package it has a lot of features and downloadable catalogues of stellar objects.

When you first load up the package you may want to view the constellation lines. I worked out how to do this, but am including some info below to help users change the line colour from the default light grey as it may be easier for people to see the lines.

If you click on Settings (menu) —> configure —> guides

You should get the following

constellation lines

I have checked the boxes to constellation:-

  • lines
  • boundaries.
  • names

If you then click on the colours tab at the side

constellation colours

I have set the colour to yellow. This does stand out, probably a little too much. However you can set it to the colour of your choosing or leave as the default grey.

colour picker

The end result of this is (download):

Hope this helps

#software, #astronomy, #science, #kde, #linux, #freesoftware, #setup, #configuration, #constellation, #linecolor, #boundaries, #names.

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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Greek Alphabet

As I am going to be writing posts that fall within the sciences, specifically Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry and related fields. I have decided to post here, the Greek and Hebrew Alphabet, which is used extensively in some of these fields.

I am using “a quick guide to $\LaTeX$” for this.

$\alpha$ – alpha $\beta$ – beta $\chi$ – chi $\delta$ – delta $\epsilon$ – epsilon $\varepsilon$ – varepsilon $\eta$ – eta $\gamma$ – gamma $\iota$ – iota $\kappa$ – kappa $\lambda$ – lambda $\mu$ – mu $\nu$ – nu $\omega$ – omega $\phi$ – phi $\varphi$ – varphi $\pi$ – pi $\psi$ – psi $\rho$ – rho $\sigma$ – sigma $\tau$ – tau $\theta$ – theta $\upsilon$ – upsilon $\xi$ – xi $\zeta$ – zeta $\Delta$ – Delta $\Gamma$ – Gamma $\Lambda$ – Lamda $\Omega$ – Omega $\Phi$ – Phi $\Pi$ – Pi $\Psi$ – Psi $\Sigma$ – Sigma $\Theta$ – Theta $\Upsilon$ – Upsilon $\Xi$ – Xi $\aleph$ – aleph $\beth$ – beth $\daleth$ – daleth $\gimel$ – gimel

Information source : A quick guide to $\LaTeX$ Dave Richson, Dickinson College http://divisbyzero.com

#science, #alphabet, #greek, #letters, #hebrew

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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I have just completed another OU / OpenLearn course, this time on The Evolving Universe. Despite its rather complex subject matter it was very interesting and expanded a little further on the 'How the universe works' course I undertook a few years ago.

The course looked at the early universe, the big bang, how particles, energy, time and temperature all changed over time and how all these are inter-related. How the matter we know today formed and why the universe is mostly matter and not antimatter. The fact there was more matter and what would have happened if the amount of antimatter and matter had been equal. Plus other interesting topics.

How sub-atomic particles such as Bosons, Leptons, Quarks etc interact. How research finds new particles and the huge energy levels required for this to take place.

This is a level 1 introductory course, and like the more formal course mentioned. The course also asks other questions which gets the reader thinking about different scenarios that could have occurred.

References

#OpenUniversity, #OU, #OpenLearn, #science, #EvolvingUniverse, #Space, #astronomy, #astrophysics,

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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