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From the New York Times:

The man infected with a dangerous and hard-to-treat form of tuberculosis, who potentially exposed several hundred airline passengers to the disease, is the son-in-law of a microbiologist who studies tuberculosis at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement this afternoon that Mr. Speaker’s father-in-law, Dr. Bob Cooksey, works for the C.D.C. in its division of tuberculosis elimination, where he studies the spread of tuberculosis and other bacteria.

I don’t know if this is irony in the proper sense or in the Morissette sense…

Following on from PZ Meyers, here are answers to the burning questions of the day.

1. Can you show us your coffee cup?

Sure.

2. Can you comment on it? Do you think it reflects on your personality?

Going from left to right, the first is a hand-made mug from Chosin Pottery in Metchosin, British Columbia. It’s my water mug. In the centre is my coffee mug that bears the logo from the Joint Astronomy Centre, where I work. On the right is a free mug from Netcraft that I got for reporting some number of phishing emails via their anti-phishing toolbar. This one’s used only for tea.

I don’t think they say anything about my personality.

3. Do you have any interesting anecdotes resulting from coffee cup commentary?

Can’t think of any anecdotes, interesting or otherwise. Although I can say that the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser works quite well for getting out tea and coffee stains.

4. Can you try to get others to comment on it?

We’ll see if other blogging friends pick up on this meme.

JCMT made it into the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:

There is more to space than meets the eye, a Mauna Kea telescope demonstrated yesterday with the release of a striking image of a normally invisible gas cloud in the Orion Nebula.

The image marks a new era in space observation for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, which until recently needed enormous work to turn radiolike “submillimeter” data into crude pictures.

Now, with two new instruments attached, the Maxwell telescope can produce not only “cameralike” images, but even three-dimensional movies of gas clouds across huge areas of space.

Not bad for an installation that, with its 49-foot dish, looks more like a radar site than a telescope.

Alas, the news story doesn’t have a link to the movie in question, but there’s a really good image of Orion.

A few nit-picks and clarifications:

• The term “Maxwell telescope” grates on the ears. It should be “JCMT” instead.
• These are not “the first clear images of such a large area of space looking at radiation shorter than radio waves”, as numerous other sub-millimeter images have been produced. Take, for example, the centre of the Milky Way. I don’t know if the Orion map is actually bigger than the Galactic Centre map though…
• This sequence of events:
  

  The Maxwell astronomers focused on the frequency given off by carbon monoxide, the same gas found in cigarette smoke and car exhaust.

  Next, the astronomers made more pictures, each in a slightly different wavelength of submillimeter radiation, depending on whether the CO molecules were moving toward or away from the telescope.

  They called each of these pictures a “slice.” Finally the slices were linked together to make an animated “movie” of a flight through the nebula.

  …is misleading, as the instrument in question (HARP-B with the ACSIS backend) actually observes 8192 different frequencies simultaneously at 16 positions in space. What actually happened is that the telescope scanned across Orion, collecting data at 8192 frequencies the whole time, and then the resulting data (called a time-series cube) was turned into a spatial/spectral cube. The “slices” are as they described, sampling a discrete frequency for a given region of space.

I have a bonus animation movie of a different star-formation region, but I don’t know if I’m actually allowed to show it to the public…

It’s a bit of a weak crop for this week, but still, I never saw a Bad Baby Name I couldn’t resist sharing. As with most weeks, the letter Y figured prominently. Zadyn, Kamryn, and Braelyn are all offenders. Particularly bad is Jayden-Makaveli. Seriously folks, these parents need to have their heads slapped.

But the winner shockingly doesn’t have a Y in it, although there was ample opportunity. This week the prize for Baddest Baby Name goes to Keviiann. I imagine that her parents’ names were Kevin and Ann, but damn that’s a bad name. The double-I is unexcusable. Even more unexcusable is not turning those Is into Ys. Come on, Kevyyann would be such a great Bad Baby Name!

As a postscript, I was listening to CBC Radio 3’s podcast yesterday, and one of the artists was a hip-hop artist by the name of Shad, whose actual name is Shadrach Kabango. Tell me that that’s not an awesome name!