The US Election, astronomy journals and animated models

There was no Dissertation seminar this week as Miklos was attending a conference - so I returned home late on Tuesday evening and rather surprised myself by deciding to stay up and watch some of the US Election coverage. Flitting between BBC News and Fox News was somewhat eye-opening! I have rarely watched Fox News, but it is an extremely odd experience, far beyond anything the UK is really used to in partisan broadcasting.

I stayed up till around 1:00am, just long enough to have about 12 state ballots close with 10 of them too close to call. This suggested that Obama was well on track to win as McCain really need to win these states by a good margin to have any chance nationally.

And so, after a few hours sleep, it proved to me. The electoral college delivers a resounding victory to Obama. I am very pleased about this, as I'm sure most people outside the USA are. The thought of McCain suffering some mishap and Sarah Palin being in charge is quite horrifying. But also I am hopeful that the Democrats will be more pro-environmental than the Republicans.

The thought also occurs to me as it is reported than Gordon Brown has sent his best wishes: Surely Obama is more of a novice than David Cameron and that GB's argument of a few weeks ago now looks even more foolish. Change overwhelms experience.

I spent the morning in Oxford doing a few odd jobs before settling in the Radcliffe Science Library for a couple of hours copying articles from the Journal for the History of Science. These included pieces on Copernicus and anti-Ptolemaic thought in the early 1500s (via Averroes) and a piece by Gingerich and Voelkel on what they call Tycho Brahe's "Copernican campaign".

They also had a short feature on animations of Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. I couldn't find the actual models referred to in the article, but it was pretty easy to find others on the internet. I have been watching the Ptolemaic Mars model on my PC throughout the afternoon. Not sure if I will mention it to the History of Science seminar, as this might lead George off into another long digression. But we are doing Tycho next week, and there were some Tycho models on the site as well. So maybe I should bring it up. The website is https://people.scs.fsu.edu/~dduke/models

So I now have another couple of hundred pages of articles to have a look at - the danger is always being swamped with possible things to study.