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| Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 | | 12:24 am |
Two Thanksgivings
Well, Thanksgiving was nice. Or rather, Thanksgivings, plural! I cheated this year and effectively celebrated the holiday twice - once with friends and once with family. My father was in Europe on business travel until Friday evening anyway, so if a family Thanksgiving dinner were to happen the soonest it could happen would be that night. As a result, I decided to just stay a few extra days in Berkeley, and save some money by flying over during the holiday weekend itself to arrive in the airport at the same time for a late Thanksgiving dinner with the family. So in the meantime, on Thursday itself I remained in Berkeley. This turned out quite well - a friend invited me over for Thanksgiving at her place for a full-fledged Thanksgiving dinner there (with turkey and brussels sprouts and other awesome things); I brought over a few small things and spent the evening relaxing there before eventually heading back to the house - and then flying out the next afternoon. Then, back with family, it was time to do it all over again! But other than that, Thanksgiving was a pretty quiet affair in general, mostly spent around the house working or relaxing - there wasn't really an opportunity to get out of town, and with a rainy winter storm hovering over town there wasn't much of a reason to get outside much either. Hopefully, though, Christmas should be much more active! That's in three weeks - in the meantime, it's back to California to finish off the year (and hopefully a couple projects)! | | Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 | | 4:05 am |
Quiet November
And the current month proceeds much like the last one did - quiet and uneventful, uninterrupted so far by travel or other new developments (aside from short interludes like Halloween, which was characteristically awesome). This is not so bad, fortunately. Being in town every weekend has allowed me to interact socially with friends and classmates on a more regular basis than I have lately been used to, and it has been nice to be able to work nearly undistracted on a single project. In spite of that (and in spite of said undistracted work being 12+ hours every weekday), this project remains sadly unfinished! As always, what was conceived as a quick and rapid-fire analysis (there were once delusions of belting it out in "one week") has turned into a massive undertaking, involving collating data from eight different telescopes, re-reducing most of it, investigating for a half dozen different phenomena... etc. On the plus side, I'm vastly more efficient at each step of the process than I used to be (all the methodology is exceedingly similar to what I did for my first two papers) and so in spite of that I really am now closing in on the finish line after "only" two months. The first draft of the paper should be finished in a day or two. I hope. And after that I will, hopefully, have some free time over Thanksgiving. I'll be flying back to New Mexico, as usual, though not until the day after Thanksgiving (for weird reasons that will be explained later.) For those of you having the holiday on time, have a good one! | | Sunday, November 1st, 2009 | | 4:07 am |
Discoveries
The Buster Sword makes a surprisingly effective dance prop. | | Monday, October 19th, 2009 | | 3:03 am |
Quiet October
Well, I see I've been quite embarrassingly delinquent at updating this recently! I suppose it's time to remedy that. Largely, this is due to a lack of real news: after spending a week in New Mexico following the conference, an almost entirely uneventful October has unfolded. No travel, no fantastic new gamma-ray bursts, no extravagant social events or department news. Nothing! Which is OK, as with my attention torn in ten different places over the summer I've been rather longing for a chance to just remain around town and focus on a single thing. So I've spent the past couple weeks whipping together a quick paper on some old data that's been sitting on the shelf for a while, trying to finally get that out so I can go back to my own work. Despite a lack of immediate pressure, this has been a fairly all-consuming effort: 12 hours a day, six days a week, partially because I want it done this month, but largely just because I've been enjoying the chance to focus and to work on something a little bit different (since this is a small side project, rather than anything directly related to my thesis...) Before that, the week in New Mexico was nice. Following my friend's wedding I mostly just hung out in Socorro, catching up with work and e-mail (and sleep... and green chile) during the waning days of summer before it was time to fly back to California, where calmness has reigned ever since. The next few weeks should be a little busier, though: while I still have no travel scheduled through Thanksgiving, the next couple weekends should offer events to keep things mixed up - hiking, parties, Halloween! And with some luck the new paper will be done this week. Here's to autumn! | | Saturday, September 19th, 2009 | | 8:30 am |
Venice
And I'm back from Italy! "Back" in a relative way, at any rate - I'll be in New Mexico for a few days for an extended stopover after rushing back to catch a friend's wedding. Anyway, a brief account:  | | Small bridge over a canal |
I headed out on Friday morning, beginning with a nonstop flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt, where it was Saturday morning by the time I landed. As it turned out, my chosen itinerary involved a six and a half hour layover, so I took advantage of the extra time to quickly visit the city. Unfortunately due to the craziness of the previous week I hadn't had sufficient time to research any tourist itineraries on my own, but I got some good advice from a German postdoc in the department and headed down to the historic district, which was only a quick train ride away from the airport. Unfortunately the huge cathedral appeared to be closed for renovation, but I had an extended lunch and spent some time wandering around the riverfront and shopping districts before heading back to the airport. It was a short hop from there to the Venice airport. I took a criminally expensive taxi ride to a small hotel in Miestre, where I would be staying the first night, and after a long sleep got up on Sunday to explore the city (along with the postdoc I was staying with there.) So, Venice is pretty cool. We arrived that morning by bus under clear skies and warm temperatures, and after buying the $75 all-week water shuttle pass headed down the Grand Canal to San Marco Plaza and began walking around. We toured the two mandatory stops: Basilica, with its massive gold-plated domes and centuries old artwork and relics, followed by the Doge's Palace, the government center during Venice's period as the large regional power. Still, probably the most impressive parts of the day were the water shuttle ride through the canal just wandering around the streets, admiring the breathtaking insanity of a city built on water a thousand years ago. After a few hours it was time to head to San Servolo island, where the conference was being held, for the reception and to check in to our room there. (The conference itself was not held in the proper city of Venice but on a small island about a mile offshore in the lagoon, which also has guest facilities where we stayed for the rest of the week.) The conference itself, this year's big gamma-ray burst meeting, then started for real on Monday. I'd say that it was actually quite productive and useful - the new GRB satellite (Fermi) has now been operating for a year and has a ton of new results that I wasn't too familiar with, so I learned a great deal from that. There were also large segments on host galaxies (which I'll be doing for my thesis) and on short gamma-ray bursts. My own talk was on Wednesday and by most accounts was quite successful - no problems going over (or under) the allotted time, and plenty of interest afterwards in the form of questions and follow-up. This was a relief, since the last two talks I gave I can't say were huge successes, at least from my point of view (if not exactly failures either.) Unfortunately, although the afternoon after my talk was supposed to be a free day, we lost most of the afternoon to a very Venice-like problem: the hotel room flooded! There was a freakish rainstorm that morning, and somehow the balcony drain clogged and dumped water into the room, leaving a standing puddle at least 1-2 cm deep. And unfortunately, swapping rooms turned out to be an ordeal... let us just say that customer service is not a very Italian trait. Eventually with the help of the conference organizers we were moved to a different room... which had not even been cleaned by room service since the last people inhabited it, but we just dealt with it and slept there anyway. I headed out on Friday. Although there were talks all day, a high-school friend of mine unfortunately had inconveniently scheduled his wedding that evening - and so I was up at 4:45 to take a 100-euro water taxi through the lagoon and to the airport to fly back to Frankfurt and on to LAX and then Albuquerque - just in time to miss the wedding (which was expected) but make the reception afterwards. And that was the trip! I'll be in New Mexico for a few more days, and then it's back again to California. | | Thursday, September 10th, 2009 | | 10:37 pm |
Proposals and Preparation
And in the usual back-and-forth nature that I've long since become accustomed to, the slow days of August have given way to a ferociously busy September. Numerous proposal deadlines and an upcoming conference all during the same week have conspired to produce a list of large deadlines that have seen >12 hour days since the middle of last week, including over the long weekend. And last night I got no sleep at all, trying to finish the Keck proposals by tomorrow's deadline. Due to the complete rejection of last semester's proposal by the time allocation committee this has been a huge and rather stressful task---which, at last, is now finally done, allowing one more night's sleep before I pack up and am off... to Italy! Or more specifically, Venice, where a large gamma-ray burst conference is being held next week. This'll be only my second trip to Europe, so even though I still have to finish cleaning up my scientific talk for Wednesday I'm quite excited. There will, of course, be more on that later. The other piece of news, which I'd be remiss not to mention (even though it is now weeks old) is that I did at last purchase a new laptop, putting in the order just before my hiking trip (it could not be delayed any longer: the old Dell was routinely spontaneously shutting down in normal operation). I ultimately made the perhaps Solomonesque decision to echew both the Windows and Mac worlds and go 100% Linux all the time. Still, the full report on this, too, will have to be delayed for a future entry: while there are both ups and downs of the transition (and plenty of the latter), I'm determined to give the new machine a full shake. In a few weeks, when I return from travel. Ciao! | | Monday, August 31st, 2009 | | 5:39 pm |
27
Well, another year gone by: the age counter increments again. I am back in California now, the big chain of outdoors trips complete for a while (with a big conference in Italy coming up soon, there won't be any of that for a little while.) Even so, I wasn't going to be content to spend this weekend sitting around doing nothing. For most of the past ten years, birthdays have been a little bit underwhelming - of course, for most of childhood, they were intrinsically fun just because you were getting older (a good thing), and then on top of that you get presents and cake. But of course starting with college they became a little more ordinarily; maybe if lucky someone would realize this and pay for dinner at a restaurant, but that's about it, and August 31st would drift away unremarkably. So recently birthdays sort of have become to seem more like missed opportunities than anything else. However! This year I determined this was Not Going To Happen. And about the only way that it would Not Happen would be to forget any reluctance over the idea of self-celebration, and instead to seize the initiative and plan something myself. Which I did yesterday, and which turned out awesome - after a hike and a visit to a local brew pub we had a party at my house with plenty of attendance. This turned out great, and even was able to help break down some social barriers that have artificially restricted me for years, so all in all it turned out great! Maybe the act can be repeated next year. Until then! | | Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 | | 1:48 pm |
Wind and Earth
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Cirque of the Towers
The main event of this trip, though, was to backpack in the Wind River Range, a remote spur of the Rockies rising out of the empty Wyoming highlands over about a 100-mile length in the west-central part of the state. I have never been there before. The plan was to hike a 40-mile loop over four days, starting and at Big Sandy Campground. We reached the trailhead at 10 AM on Thursday and started hiking shortly thereafter. The first few hours along the Big Sandy River were mostly flat and gentle with the sky-scraping heights of the Divide only barely visible along the horizon, but after only a few hours we were ascending a steep trail up and over the pass, then down in to the magnificent Cirque of the Towers. Perhaps the most famous location in the Winds, this is a small basin, only two or three miles across, ringed with enormous rocky peaks - granite towers and needles and walls that rise up in every direction except the east, each with its own jagged and characterisic profile.
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Lizard Head Peak
After camping at the edge of a grassy meadow, the next day we ascended a pass over the high (11800') slopes of Windy Mountain, a high, tilted slope of grass and boulders way above the treeline. After catching a few final views of the Cirque on the way up the views changed northward to other jagged summits to the north and west. After traversing the ridge for several miles we descended past several lakes, crossing the south fork of the Little Wind River to camp at the shore of Grave Lake on the other side. This site was even more beautiful than the Cirque. The water was crystal-blue, and the lake stretched along the valley for two miles beneath talus slopes and cliffs. Beyond its far end were more incomparable rock faces, including the dominating cliff face of Mt. Hooker, so sheer and straight as to be rivaled only by El Capitan in Yosemite.
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Grave Lake
On the third day we walked past the lake (no small feat thanks to a vast boulder-field to scramble over!) and - ahead of schedule - ditched the packs for two hours for a quick trip along a spur to Baptiste Lake - another large lake, this one above the treeline in a large cirque of impassible mountains. After that we climbed over the tortuosly steep Hailey Pass and finally left the rugged country behind for the gentler forested slopes of the Bridger Wilderness. After passing several lakes we camped at a rocky overlook above the island-filled Dads Lake. The next morning the skies were overcast, and the weather held just long enough to reach the car. Ten minutes later, after four days of warm, sunny weather, it began to rain. The rain followed us most of the way down to New Mexico, a drive which took the next two days along remote highways in Wyoming, Utah, and western Colorado and New Mexico. We stopped briefly at one more national park along the way - along the deep, dark Black Canyon of the Gunnison on Monday morning before pulling into Socorro Monday night.
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Twin Lakes
Truly, a magnificent trip! Nowhere outside Yosemite have I seen so much vertical rock, and nowhere so concentrated along such a narrow, rugged belt. Glaciers, meadows, hundreds of clear lakes, and all of it in designated wilderness protected from roads and cars and trampling tourists. Beautiful country. Colorado's Weminuche will always be my sentimental favorite, but the views of the Winds are incomparable. Hopefully, I will return someday. For now, I have one day to relax in New Mexico and sort through my photos before it's back to California. | | Monday, August 24th, 2009 | | 11:12 pm |
Fire and Water
I'm "back" (visiting the family in Socorro) after an incredible week visiting some of the most spectacular natural splendor in the world. What a trip! The main goal of the journey was a backpacking trip in the magnificent Wind River Range in Wyoming, where I spent the past four days with my father hiking beneath enormous granite towers and past over a dozen sparkling alpine lakes.  | | Norris Geyser Basin |
But I'll wax poetic about the marvels of that area tomorrow. Fortuitously, the most convenient way to secure this trip was to join my father on his return segment of his road trip between New Mexico and British Columbia. The plan was to join up in Spokane on Tuesday and then drive down to Wyoming to begin the backpacking trip. But one look at the map revealed the opportunity to add a second and equally awesome destination as part of the trip: Yellowstone. Yellowstone! Talk about my original Favorite Place on Earth - after the first time I visited, when I was about seven year old, I was running around obsessing over geysers for weeks and weeks. I visited once again when I was perhaps 11 years old, but since then have not been back, distracted by the more accessible natural wonders of southern Colorado and the Sierra Nevada. But... if ever there was a magical place to be found on Earth, it is here. Where boiling water erupts from the ground in fountains, fills iridescent pools and runs in streams sparkling every color of the rainbow - and add to that vast clear lakes and waterfalls and forests. When I was young (and even now!) the place seemed almost like a fantasyland, a natural theme park sculped by the forces of nature, of magma just below the surface interacting with subsurface water to create phenomena observable (almost) nowhere else on the planet. With the park almost on the way between Spokane and the Winds, of course we had to stop and visit. Alas, we had only one day. So after waking up early after a stay in Livingston, Montana we drove past as many highlights as I could squeeze in along the route while time lasted: Mammoth Hot Springs, Norris Geyser Basin, Yellowstone Falls, Yellowstone Lake, and finally the Upper Geyser Basin of the Firehole River, marveling anew at the almost-too-weird-to-be-real thermal features along the route. I was hoping to catch the other Firehole geyser basins, but it was still a significant drive to the Winds, and some final planning and packing was still to be done - so after hitting the still-respectable list of attractions above we drove south (past the Grand Tetons, alas without stopping) to reach Pinedale, the jumping-off point for the primary objective of the trip. To be continued tomorrow... | | Monday, August 17th, 2009 | | 10:01 pm |
Sequoia and Alta
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Another beautiful Sierra lake vista
Another weekend in the high Sierra! This time we were off to Sequoia National Park, a few hours south of here, for the yearly department camping trip ("Sierra Conference"). It was a small crowd this year (10), especially since some last-minute crises kept a few of my friends from going, but it was still an excellent weekend. The highlight of the trip was clearly a hike up Alta Peak, which I (somehow!) convinced two thirds of the attendees to join me with on Saturday morning. After an early start just after daybreak, we climbed 4000 vertical feet over seven miles to reach the summit, a rocky outcrop high above the treeline offering spectacular view of the Great Western Divide and even a view of distant Mt. Whitney to the east. The only downside is that the Fresno haze and, perhaps, smoke from wildfires once again clouded the western views and collected in the valleys. Oh well. Sunday was a more relaxed affair, with a trip to Crystal Cave (after Carlsbad I have concluded that caves are awesome, though this one was obviously much, much smaller) and a short hike to a "remote" (2 miles from the campsite) redwood grove. And on Monday it was back to the Bay Area. But not for long – tomorrow morning it's off to Spokane and from there to Wyoming for an even bigger trip in Wyoming's Wind River Range. I'll be back in a little over a week! | | Sunday, August 9th, 2009 | | 11:24 pm |
Back to the Eastern Sierra
The last two weeks have been, generally, uneventful. Work during the day, followed by re-unlocking hidden elements and redoing challenges in Super Smash Brothers: Brawl in the evening (since the old records disappeared with my old roommate's Wii.)
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Summit Lake
Thus far the summer has been quite notably lacking in camping trips. And so finally this weekend I had the opportunity to remedy that with a trip up to the Eastern Sierra, which is fast-becoming one of my new favorite places in the world. This time we camped at Trumbull Lake, a very high (9800') site in a valley filled with a chain of alpine lakes. The drive was long (6 hours) but we arrived Friday evening and got an early departure Saturday morning for a beautiful hike up to the nearby ridge and back down with plenty of time to relax in camp before dinner. After checking out the tufa deposits at Mono Lake we drove back today over Tioga Pass, with plenty of stops at the usual Yosemite highlights. So that's one trip down this summer and three more to go, as I try to cram about as much outdoors activity as I can get away with in the few weeks remaining. This Friday I leave again for Sequoia National Park, and from that trip it's immediately off to Wyoming. And I'll try to update this in the interim, but we'll see. In other news, after more or less resuscitating itself completely over the summer from the crisis back in April, my laptop has once again started to show signs of senescence – this time in the form of extreme slowdown and occasional spontaneous resetting. So unfortunately I think I'm going to have to hold my nose and order a replacement – probably a Linux laptop because I really don't have time to set up all the scientific software I need on a dual-boot Windows or a Mac. But we'll see. I could also delay the purchase until after the long upcoming outdoors trip, but not any longer than that – the current machine is clearly no longer work-functional and only barely tolerable for general tasks. | | Monday, July 27th, 2009 | | 3:06 am |
Mt. Tallac
This summer has, thus far, been sorely lacking in visits to the mountains. The high country is free from snow starting in June, but in between the summer school, AAS, observing and last weekend's wedding, there hasn't been time to plan and execute an interesting trip.
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Lake Tahoe from the summit
So this weekend it was time to change that! Starting off small, this weekend's goal was a relatively short and straightforward day hike, up from by the shore of Lake Tahoe to the summit of 9750' Mt. Tallac, a well-trodden mountain that's famous for having the best view of the lake bar none. We did it as a day trip, and not even a particularly demanding one: left town at 10 AM, at the trailhead by 1 PM, then back down by 7 PM and back home (with a dinner stop) a little past 11. So that was a good start. But this is only the first step of what will hopefully be an epic summer. So far the schedule looks like: August 7-9: Eastern Sierra? August 14-16: Kings Canyon August 18-23: Wind River Range / Bridger Wilderness (Wyoming) September 20-25: Southwestern Weminuche (Colorado)? Hopefully something on Labor Day, too. The Wind River trip in particular should be epic – flying to Spokane and then driving through Yellowstone. Summer is short, but I hope to make the most of it! | | Sunday, July 19th, 2009 | | 9:48 pm |
Florida
This weekend saw my third trip to the East Coast in two months, as I left home after one hour of sleep before dawn to catch an early flight to Tampa Bay to attend a cousin's wedding. It was a short endeavor: I crashed immediately after dinner that night, and then the next morning had only time for a quick museum visit before the wedding ceremony and reception. Then early this morning it was off again to head back to California. (I had, for a while, considered trying to merge this trip with a quick drop in at Otakon up in Baltimore which was being held the same weekend, but unfortunately most of the plans to have a big contingent from the RI forums petered out, so not this year. Maybe next year.) Visiting my mother's side of the family is always a bit of a strange experience. My mother has nine siblings and so I have at least twenty cousins – the vast majority of which I have met once or twice at most and do not recognize. The two Florida cousins (the bride and her sister), the only other ones besides my brother and me not to grow up in Maryland, are probably the only ones I know at all well – based on a grand total of three visits to that side of the family between middle school and my first year of college (plus a chance to bond at the last cousin-wedding four years ago over our mutual lack of knowledge of the rest of the family.) Partly that was one reason I actually agreed to attend this wedding (instead of innumerable other cousin-weddings), that I actually knew the bride (well, that and my parents offered to pay for the ticket). Still, as I probably should have guessed, it didn't quite work out that way – given that both cousins were abundantly distracted by other things I had almost no time to talk to them, and instead was mostly left with the somewhat awkward and embarrassing experience of meeting other relatives I barely recognize or don't at all (frequently it took me most of the day to put the pieces together to figure out who they were, by which time it was too late). Still, it was a chance to catch up with my more immediate family, if nothing else. Oh, and they had an open bar, which I put to good use... This, however, is the end of my pre-planned summer air travel for a while and certainly for trips to the eastern US. Thankfully! Because in the meantime summer hiking and camping has been woefully, pitifully neglected, and I am desperately craving a trip to the mountains. There is planning to be done. | | Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | | 1:59 am |
Not Moving
Since getting back from Pasadena, one additional and rather unwanted distraction I've been having to deal with is the task of finding replacement roommates for half the house. One roommate (another astronomy student and a good friend of mine) got married two months ago and has, unsurprisingly, opted to move out and into a new apartment with his wife, and at the same time our other upstairs roommate (himself a replacement for an earlier roommate who moved to Japan) decided to bolt as well. For a while I pondered whether I should pack up myself – it might be nice after all to be closer to campus, or in a smaller group to regain some independence, or on the flip side, do something a little crazy like move in with a group of furs out of town. However, moving is a huge pain... and even though I mainly moved in at the behest of the other astronomy student (who is now leaving), as it has turned out by far the most entertaining roommate has been the physics student and part-time professional poker player (who is a neverending source of crazy plans and trips), and he has no plans to leave. So I decided that I'm in it for a while longer – and probably for the long haul until I leave grad school. Unfortunately, with all the travel recently I had less than two weeks to find two roommates. And the last time I was on the roommate hunt it took five weeks to find one roommate, so I was decidedly non-thrilled about this prospect. Fortunately it ended up being much easier than expected – whereas last time I think a total of ten people visited before one actually decided to move in with me, this time the first two people to come by the house offered to take it within 24 hours. I must admit I am a bit baffled by this, given that I kept my apartment back then far cleaner than my roommates have kept this house, but it certainly was a relief not to have to be scheduling constant meetings and interviews. At the same time, I worry a little that I might have screwed it up somewhat by rushing to fill the occupied rooms as quickly as possible with whoever responded to the Craigslist ad, etc. rather than waiting for word to spread to friends of friends, etc. and look for the best possible "match". So in the end, we've ended up with a biophysics graduate student and, more randomly, a somewhat eccentric Bangladeshi engineering dropout and hardware clerk, each of whom will be moving in about a week from now. We'll see how it goes, I guess. | | Monday, July 6th, 2009 | | 11:31 pm |
Anthrocon 2009!
I'm back from Anthrocon! As usual, I stayed with the FFO furry crew, flying out Thursday night and returning tonight (Monday). And as usual, the con was filled with awesome and win: meeting up and hanging with them and other online friends, collecting new art, and just having the pleasure of a stress-free vacation of ignoring all work-related e-mails for a few days. We also got a little more adventurous with dining this year, venturing well into the seedy-yet-ritzy Strip District for dinner one night, and across the river for family-style Italian the other night. The July 4th weekend lended an extra air of celebration and extra relaxation to the weekend, and the weather cooperated marvelously, with warm-but-not-hot temperatures and only a few short rain bursts the first day followed by clear skies. On the final day, Monday, I had an unusually late flight out (decided to go for the nonstop), allowing me to actually check out Pittsburgh for once. Wandering the streets of a new big city is always fun, even if I didn't find too much to write home about (the Carnegie Science Museum wasn't all that impressive, and the Andy Warhol museum was closed.) I think I have completed the full transition from wide-eyed con newbie to a true late-type "veteran" attendee. Worrying about events and panels seemed like too much of a hassle this year so I basically didn't bother (and AC's events tend to, um, suck) – I can count the number of actually scheduled events I bothered to attend on one paw. I skipped the Masquerade in favor of dinner, and 2's Rant in favor of fireworks. Instead, I just spent the time hanging out with friends, wandering the streets to new dinner options, and in general just taking it easy and enjoying things while they lasted (which, as always, seems far, far too short...!) ( Brawl digression )Similarly, the novelty aspect of things has more or less worn off – which of course is fully expected after twelve conventions, and I should add immediately that the awesomeness aspect surely hasn't. Still, running into foxes chasing each other around in the halls, or getting a new conbadge, or introducing myself as my character name, don't have *quite* the same crazy thrill that they did four years ago: now.... it's all normal. :) A glorious, beautiful normal of course! (If only this could be similarly "normal" the other 355 days a year. Um... maybe.) However, it is surely the case that with twelve conventions now behind me, things have to be kicked up to the next level in future cons! Which shouldn't be too hard, but is likely to take a little more planning. Planning that shall begin... now. Who's in for FC'10? | | Monday, June 29th, 2009 | | 1:47 am |
Aloha and Ahuiho
Fortunately, even though we mysteriously fell out of the good graces of the the Keck time allocation committee for the fall semester, we still had one more night lined up for the spring, and so I had one more chance to make the journey out to the Big Island before the long drought of telescope time begins. And luckily enough, it was one of the best. Things started fortuitously: the flight was oversold, and even though I was not bold enough to volunteer for denied boarding (I could get into deep water for this if it the schedule change led to any hiccups down the line...) when I went to scan my boarding pass at the gate, mysteriously the machine beeped a number of times and my ticket wasn't returned to me. For a moment I thought I might be in trouble somehow, but no – instead, a moment later out popped a first-class ticket stub, and so somewhat amused I wandered up to the first-class cabin for my unrequested upgrade. (Even if, actually, to tell the truth, I probably would have been happier back in coach – it was a bulkhead seat so I couldn't have my bag with me, I ended up declining the free alcohol anyway, and felt somewhat out of place with and general confusion (and my DS out at least half the time the flight attendant came to check on me). Still, at the same time, I felt privileged, and the seat was nice and comfortable, heh. The other advantage was that, for once, I had finished all the preparations ahead of time, and instead of stressing out over last-minute run prep I had a little bit of time to wander, so for my six hours of open daylight on Tuesday I drove over to Hilo and checked out the city there – the botanical gardens and the waterfront park – before driving back over the saddle road at sundown to return to the observing facility in Waimea. The real highlight, though, was surely the atmospheric conditions. In the past we've been lucky enough not to be suffering through cloud cover, but on many occasions we've instead been stricken with "bad" seeing: 1.0 arcsecond or worse. This time, though, things started at a spectacular 0.5 arcsecond seeing and only slightly degraded to 0.7 arcseconds over the course of the night, which is about as good as I've ever seen it. The instrument had been upgraded since the last run in February, and while some of the results are actually downgrade, there were quite a few new capabilities to experiment with. Things remained clear until sunrise, and after sleeping until the afternoon there was time to squeeze in one final visit to Kona before boarding the redeye back to San Francisco. And, so ends the Keck visits for a while – potentially (though hopefully not!) forever if remote observing truly becomes the standard between now and next year. But I can't really complain - this was my 15th trip, and I've already (even just doing short half-day trips each time) exhausted most of what the Big Island really has to offer in terms of things to see and do. In the meantime, I guess, time to focus on data, and papers. ... and, uh, conventions! Heading out to Pittsburgh on Thursday, and looking forward to seeing everyone there! | | Monday, June 15th, 2009 | | 8:11 pm |
Phonage
To begin with, I suppose I should update the laptop situation. Puzzlingly, the four-year-old Dell appears to be back essentially to full health. Even the random slowdowns that had been plaguing since February seem to have vanished now, with the only residual problem the fact that the fan is a little louder than it used to be. I don't understand but I can't complain. I still really ought to replace the machine this summer, but the stress over choosing sides in the OS wars leads me to procrastinate. :P A perhaps less unpleasant task, however, is another imminent electronics replacement: getting a new phone. My current phone is also four years old and sucks pretty significantly compared to what is now out there. So it's time to dump it, preferably for a fully web-enabled smart phone, as the utility of these things is undeniable. The obvious choices are the iPhone or the G1 (android), though I gather there's a lot of other stuff on the market these days. I pretty much know all about the iPhone by this point (and am certainly considering it, the only real drawback being the lack of genuine keyboard), but I'm curious about the other devices, for anyone out there who might own one: are they decent? Do all the major networks get comparable service these days? (I remember T-Mobile's coverage being sort of poor four years ago, but have to imagine that's been remedied by now.) | | Sunday, June 14th, 2009 | | 6:43 pm |
Damned Lies
and lest anyone become overly confused by the appearance of a hostile title...I'm back in Berkeley at last after finally completing my double conference run. So before that fades away completely a quick rundown of the past few weeks. I was attending the Summer School for Astrostatistics, a one-week workshop put on by the Penn State astronomy and statistics departments to try to teach basic statistics (and scratch the surface of a few more advanced topics particularly useful to astronomers) to astronomy grad students and postdocs . It was, actually, pretty good. I have long felt that at least for observational astronomy (but I suspect also much of theory, specifically simulation) the mismatch between the universally required undergraduate physics curriculum and the real practical demands of doing research is quite large. The first and probably biggest gulf is in training with computer programming and scripting, which is typically not required at all for graduate school begin research despite its extreme relevance in just about every application in modern science. Fortunately, having self-taught myself C++ in high school as part of my science fair project goals that's never been so much of a problem for me. But the second, personally much bigger deficiency is the essentially total lack of any statistical training at any point in my career (except for a very small amount incorporated into other courses here and there), when it really is critical for almost every step of observational data analysis – one lives or dies within one's statistical uncertainties! I've sort of been hobbling along with the rudimentary knowledge I do have (which is basically what everyone in astronomy does, since scientists just don't get this training) up to this point, but even if it was just a. More importantly, my advisor was willing to pay the costs. : ) So, I spent a week attending all-day class (which was sort of a blast from the past in and of itself, since it's been years since I've taken classes and even more years since I've done so outside of Berkeley) with typically morning lectures (starting at 8 AM!) and afternoon lab sessions. Quality was a bit mixed but mostly good, and the curriculum was quite practical and the usefulness of much of what we were doing was clear. Of course, one week is barely enough time to scratch the surface of a whole subject like this, but at the very least I feel more able to be able to self-educate myself on any statistical topic I will need to pursue in more detail if it comes up in research, and certainly better versed to interpret results in the literature. So, that all went well, and in the end was quite worth the week spent afield. Then it was off (after a brief stopover in Berkeley for one night) to Pasadena for the summer American Astronomial Society meeting – a much smaller event than the winter meeting I always attend, but structured the same way. The highlight was of course the press conference, but my poster was up for all of three days and there were always talks and panels to attend (though unfortunately not much directly relevant to my own research.) The bad news about non-acceptance of the latest Keck proposal (which, ironically, came on the day of the press conference itself, the only large Keck result at the whole meeting...) soured things a little bit and is a bit disheartening in general, but it should be easy enough to deal with the silly feedback we got and bounce back next semester... though given the seasonal-dependent nature of objects in the sky sadly this means that I won't really have a complete thesis result until 2011. I guess it's fortunate that I'm on the 7-year-plan already! Anyway. Enough ranting about work and travel. It's back to business as usual for one more week, before things gear up for summer travel, phase two. | | Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | | 5:56 pm |
And now for the bad news
NO time on Keck for the fall semester? Seriously? Apparently the TAC doesn't like it when we actually have results. So after this month it'll no more trips to Hawaii until 2010 at the earliest... | | Monday, June 8th, 2009 | | 3:14 pm |
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