Raw notes:
You go in and sit down in front of a computer and do stuff on it. Maybe you write something down in a notebook. Has students and postdocs doing most of the practical stuff. Spend time designing a program, send it to someone, they implement it and send the data back to him. Not so much time doing astronomy these days. Writing things for journals.
100s of page in journals. Write grants for $100 – $150 per page which goes to the journal, not the writer. Electronic publishing is changing this some by making things cheaper. Physics Pre-print Server, which isn’t a publication of record, but a place to archive these things. 10 – 20 new articles go up every day. It’s totally public and free.
If you’re looking for story ideas, this is a great place to go. For instance:
Power spectra of fossil biodiversity time series: a connection to Galactic dynamics? Its the idea that extinction events might be related to passing through a galactic arms.
This is where physicists put up their papers while waiting for acceptance to a journal. In the old days, they’d print up 100 copies and send them out to people on their mailing list.
Mike pointed us to the Astronomy Picture of the day. As he says, surfing through the archives provides amazing ideas for astronomy or space based stories. Make sure you check out the square nebula.
He also recommends Bad Astronomy. Phil Plait blogs through Discover magazine.
Wheatgrass juice serves as a good example for how people believe story over facts. Science shows that wheatgrass doesn’t have any effect, but people tell each other stories about how they feel better or have positive results. Phil does a good job of debunking claims but also at pointing out really spectacular things.
