salmon sea

look closely!


photo by carl warner, found via dark roasted blend.

and don't forget to have fun!

link

travel bug

ridiculously early tomorrow morning, i'm off to the campania region of italy! time for a little sun and warmth :)

fa = a long, long way to run?

this made me laugh, and hear julie andrews in my head...


you can have it on a t-shirt if you want.

ps. i honestly never understood why or how "fa" was a "long, long way to run"... until i moved to england ;)

aesthetics & astronomy

you can help out with a ~15 minute survey and see some interesting astronomy images at http://astroart.cfa.harvard.edu/.


this is an image they share of the whirlpool galaxy (M51), as seen thru the lenses of many different space telescopes. looks like they've combined images from most of NASA's great obseratories: x-ray from chandra, infrared from spitzer, optical from hubble, and maybe ultraviolet from GALEX (but i'm not sure about the UV).

obama: before and after

i found senator barack obama's speech from the 2004 democratic national convention. this was the first strongly publicized moment in obama's national political career that i remember. it's a 16 minute video where he's ultimately supporting then-candidate john kerry, but he talks for a long time about his life, inspiration, and philosophy - before he started to move toward the center, as candidates unfailingly do.



four years later, we are treated to an intimate view of how the obama's spent election night 2008... from an election night series at flickr.


president- and VP-elect, joe biden.


listening to mccain's gracious concession speech


support


(apparently the above video has a few lines cut out, here's the full speech which is a lot lower resolution)

autumn in nott'm

another ex-door!!!??!?










barrack lane





my office...


full set of images at pbase.

election cookies

this is some dedicated baking as a contribution to the project from 52 to 48 with love! i like that each state is individualized and that texas has a little blue dot in the center marking austin!

secretaries of style

with all the fuss about sarah palin's recent wardrobe costs, i thought i'd mention michelle obama's abominable dress from election night. as a family, the obama's looked lovely together, but i really didnt like her choice of designer dress. its a modified rodriguez narciso dress from the spring 2009 collection (aka. not cheap).


i enjoy that michelle actively makes a statement with her fashion, and generally i like her sophisticated fashion sense. but this dress made my jaw drop, in a negative way. i was unpleasantly distracted by the frock-induced shock that interrupted the smile-glued-to-my-face moment. maybe her point was exactly to be as bold and unmistakable as the moment in history, in which case, she succeeded grandly. but still, i just didnt like it. it felt awkward. so i'd like to officially nominate a dynamic duo for the potential new positions of secretaries of style ;) haha!

george bush is pants!

for most of you, the title of this post probably doesnt make any sense at all! i was quite confused the first time i saw this type of phrase. in fact, i took a picture so i would remember to ask someone about it later:


i sat there on the bus wondering if i read the writing wrong on the back of the bus in front of me. no... "parking is pants." i assumed it implied something negative, because who likes parking? but "pants" in england means "underwear" to me and equating parking to undergarments didnt make sense either. i figured the phrase was popular enough to be printed on the back of a metro bus, so it shouldnt be hard to figure out.

indeed, something that "is pants" is something that sucks. someone told me that a particular person (a comedian?) popularized the phrase, but i cant remember the popularizers name. i'm left with hearing the phrase all over and seeing it a lot!


the challenge is to use the phrase smoothly in conversation, but i'm pretty sure i'll just laugh if i try. we'll see...

electoral aftermath

congratulations Barack Hussein Obama for being elected the 44th president of the USA!

(wow)

i'm pleased. so pleased that i slept in after staying up rather late to watch the results (with a keen eye on ohio). i didnt make it late enough to see the speeches, but thought they were both appropriate and inspirational when i watched them this morning.

looking at ohio's results county by county, i'm still amazed at how distinctly separated the cities and rural areas are. nearly all the blue democrat counties harbor major cities or universities. cleveland went strongly democratic, and i'm pleasantly surprised that cincinnati didnt go republican (or all of ohio, for that matter!).


this seems to represent the majority of the country: urban voters choose democrat while rural areas vote republican.

i was also thoroughly impressed by the accurate results predicted by the fellas at http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/. their statistical methods are/were quite impressive! scientifically motivated statistical analysis - it works, bitches!


now i get to go about being one of the few americans that i know around these parts, so i'm constantly (and pleasantly) bombarded by everyone's opinions and questions about how the complicated US electoral system works. i must say i'm feeling more relieved and positive on this side of the elections!

one question that i dont know the answer to - what is the origin of republican states as red states and democratic states as blue? i thought i'd ask my personal blog-i-verse before reverting to the googlipedia ;) yippee!

blue texas?

this is why we should be very skeptical about "projections"...

don't look directly into the sun

watch steel melt with simple sunlight! they concentrate sunlight with many mirrors by focusing the photons all on one spot. the melting scene is not sped up footage... it's real time! cool!

never take a choice for granted

election haikus

we have stolen much
from future generations
with "freedom" our guise

the world sits in wait
wondering what we will do
let's not disappoint

voted absentee
inconvenience was worth it
time to sit and wait

hope is a good thing
time to think positively
about the future

read election haikus by others here and here.

election eve

is anyone else's stomach all a flutter this election eve? i'm trying to prepare a talk i have to give tomorrow, but i cant stop reading news articles, op-ed's cartoons and general reports of fervor. i voted absentee. nothing left to do but ... wait... and maybe stay up all night tomorrow watching the results come in.

relocating, again

this weekend i'm moving to a new flat right in city center! its raining and cold... no surprise really, but it makes the already tedious task of physically moving even less pleasant. i've managed to accumulate a few more things than i arrived with, but i still dont have that much stuff, happily!

happy halloween

from kawkawpa at flickr

costumes of my past

i tend to dress up more oftern during the year than just halloween. i dont know, i think its fun! here are some of the costumes for which i have pictures to share:




cereal killer




red hot chili pepper








ewok...



i have some pictures of childhood costumes somewhere, but they're not in digital form and maybe not in this country.

we'll see how this year's costume comes together....

dance your phd

at the beginning of this year, i was nervous about getting a job. finally, i received a few offers and was excited to have a choice about my future position! my life would continue after the phd! but then i noticed on the astrophysics job rumor mill webpage, that another postdoc was also hired. i wasnt aware that the position was for two people, and i immediately felt suspicious and self conscious... who was this person?

so, of course, i searched her out online. for some reason my immediate reaction was not to look up her scientific publication record demonstrating her research interests, rather, i went straight to google to search for her public personality profile! the only thing i found was this video, and an introduction to a fabulous project called dance your phd:



i was *so* impressed that i didnt even bother looking up anything else about her. i knew she would be cool because (a) she entered such a great contest, and (b) she finely demonstrated a full understanding of the subtleties of galaxy mergers! when their arms reach together as she passes by him, representing the trailing paths of disturbed gas... tidal tails! bravo!

and as it turns out... we're beer twins. perfect!

spooky skies of halloween

this halloween night, friday october 31st, 2008, be sure to look at the southwestern sky to see a bright venus sitting above the crescent moon. to the lower right of the moon sits the bright star antares and far off to the upper left is a gleaming jupiter.


the following evening, saturday november 1st, the moon shoots 12 degrees to the left in the sky to appear to the left of venus.


sunday night, november 2nd, the moon continues its ascent and produces a lovely alignment. for a night, the moon perches between the bright planets jupiter and venus.


happy halloween!

sounds of the universe

we've seen the images with our eyes, but many scientists are attempting give our ears an understanding of the universe by translating the information received from different astronomical phenomena into sounds! NASA released the sounds of saturn about a year ago, and now we are hearing the sounds of stars (including our sun), music of galaxies, and even the sound of the big bang!

the BBC had an article this week where they share the sounds of stars. astronomers have created these using a technique called "stellar seismology," (which i learned in classes as "asteroseismology"). following this link, you can hear the subtle sounds of several different stars, and our sun.

dr. fiorella terenzi ("a cross between carl sagan and madonna"!) has used radio observations to compose some unique songs. she has recorded many albums and toured for a while giving lectures and playing her music, but i can't find any recent tour information on her website.

a physicist at the university of washington, john c. cramer, attempted to recreate the sound of the big bang! you can listen to the sound of the big bang: HERE. the idea came to him after writing and article in 2001 called, BOOMERanG and the sound of the big bang.

i enjoyed the whole interesting story of creating the sound of the big bang, and wanted to share a little snippet here...

The idea of synthesizing the Big Bang sound fascinated me. It ran around in my head for a day or so, and I had a growing desire to hear just what the Big Bang sounded like. So one Saturday morning, when I should have been doing something else, I sat down and wrote a 16-line Mathematica program that produced the sound and saved it as .wav files. I downloaded the frequency spectrum measured by WMAP and used it as input data for the program. My PC has a good sound card and a substantial sub-woofer, so it reproduced the .wav file well. When I ran the program for the first time and the sound started in my office, our two male Shetland Sheepdogs, Alex and Lance, came running into the room, barking with agitation. After they had looked around and determined that nothing terrible was happening, they lay down on the floor and listened attentively, giving the Sheltie Stare to my sub-woofer.

super-duper!

just stick a "super" in front of it to make it seem more exciting (and/or confusing)!


there are even more examples... too bad "super" doesnt stand for anything consistent between any of those examples!

a dupe, or duper is someone who is easily deceived, while super-duper is an adjective describing something that is extremely good. of course.

comic source: talk like a physicist

a fateful election

with the US election looming on the forefront of my mind, i found what thomas powers had to say in the new york review of books article, a fateful election, very interesting. i cant seem to decrease his message enough to just share highlights, so i'll print the whole thing here.

The big task facing the next president will be cleaning up the mess left by the last president. How big the task may be is not yet fully appreciated. There is the economic mess and there is the mess we call "the war." Included in the larger mess of the war are active military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; a semiclandestine war of increasing intensity in the Pakistani tribal areas; and continuing military tension with Iran that could open a new theater of active warfare more or less at any time.

Who got us into this mess? The answer is the Republicans, and more particularly the Bush Republicans, who had control of both Congress and the White House for six years and did as they pleased. The Bush Republicans have no one else to blame and neither do Barack Obama and the Democrats. You would think that a presidential campaign could be built around this fact but so far it does not appear to have happened. The change Obama seeks remains oddly bloodless, as if the mess were a found object, not something that someone had done.

But the architects of the mess could not be plainer. The credit crisis, like the savings and loan crisis of twenty years ago, was the predictable result of changes in regulation of banking and financial markets. The rollback of regulations was driven by free-market theories put into effect mainly by Republican presidents. More than seven hundred S&L institutions collapsed during the first crisis and it cost the American public more than $120 billion to clean up the mess. The price of cleaning up the current credit crisis is going to be a lot higher than that. For this money, the public gets nothing but the bitter solace that still worse calamities have perhaps been avoided.

In both cases the government bailout undermines the bedrock discipline of markets—mistakes are supposed to hurt. Shoring up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has the effect of insulating mortgage buyers from the consequences of stupid speculations, and encourages future speculators to count on friends in Washington for a soft landing when the next frenzy begins to heat up. The Bush Republicans stuck to free-market theory while their friends were making zillions, then abandoned free-market theory when the whole financial system threatened to collapse. The bailout in itself condemns the policy of deregulation which made the bailout necessary. But who is holding the Bush Republicans to account?

The cost of the ever-growing credit bailout is no longer pocket change, and may equal the cost of the war when it is all totted up. Figures for Iraq have reached the trillion-dollar range; Afghanistan is heading in the same direction. All of this money, like the money for the credit bailout, and the money for the taxpayer rebate stimulus intended to soften the recession triggered by the credit crisis in the first place, is borrowed money. Some of it is borrowed from Americans, some from foreigners, all of it from future generations. What happened to the Republicans of yesteryear who preached a gospel of fiscal responsibility? Many years ago when the Reagan Republicans were setting the stage for the savings and loan crisis, my speechwriting friend Tom Lewis, an astute observer of politics, summed up the ethos of the Republican Party in a single word: more.

But the biggest legacy of the Bush years is not debt. It is the idea that the United States must, and can, control the political landscape of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. The American military is waist-deep in the first two, knee-deep in Pakistan, and threatening to wade right into Iran as well if the Iranians don't accept our demand to dismantle their nuclear program.

John McCain intends to press the attack on all fronts. Barack Obama, if elected, could march us back out of this suckhole but it will not be easy. I fear he would find himself trapped by our national need to appear to succeed in any contest where Americans have shed blood. It somehow fails to matter that we are trying to do what no country can ever do for long—force strange people in distant places to reshape their politics and society more to our liking. The effort passes as nation-building at the outset, but in the long run counterinsurgency always comes down to the same self-defeating strategy—killing locals until they stop trying to make us go away.

In seven years of war, public debate has never managed to get out in front of events, and it is still trailing behind. The thing to keep in mind is that this all can get a lot worse. The American presence in the greater Middle East is large, unwelcome, and disruptive. We have shattered an equilibrium that kept Sunnis and Shiites from each other's throats for centuries. We have conceded to Turkey the right to send its military into Iraq at will. We have disrupted the understanding between the government of Pakistan and its tribal areas; and we have granted ourselves leave to chase after our enemies in Pakistani territory, an intrusion no government can tolerate for long. Over time the number of our enemies in this expanding arena of conflict and the cost of trying to control them will grow until we are half-crazy with frustration, are on the brink of something dangerously like civil war from arguing at home, and have run out of places to borrow money.

Americans have an odd way of arguing about politics. We don't like plain talk about matters that call for harsh judgments or recognition of failure. But some things are too big to hide or explain away, and so in the end I think voters will decide by a whisker for change.

read more contributions: here.

cat's eye view

more animals

life on mars

a romantic portuguese take on an old david bowie song... sung by seu jorge:



(from the movie the life aquatic life steve zissou. thanks sam!)

or maybe a ukulele orchestra rendition is more to your liking...

quickly fading dream

i'm left speechless... by jessica at indexed.

perched peel

a few weeks ago as i was walking thru campus, i witnessed an odd occurence. a guy riding a bike toward me casually tossed something into the trees and rode on. the object caught one of the small branches, pulled the branch down, slung-shot it back up, but finally stuck to its perch. i wasnt sure what it was, but i quickly approached, and sure enough....


a banana!

it's not a london banana so i cant contribute to that project, but i was still amused.

carnival galaxies

this gorgeous image of NGC 7331 comes from the 3.5-meter telescope at the calar alto observatory in southern spain.


click for full resolution image.

something about this image just makes me happy! i love the colors. the details of the NGC 7331 galaxy in the foreground beautifully demonstrate blue regions where stars are forming and dark, cloudy regions where dust blocks the starlight in spiral waves. NGC 7331 sits 50 million light years away from us, while the spiral galaxies that appear to be floating above it are really another ten times farther away!

vincent peris shares a full description of how he processed the data to produce this spectacular image! enjoy!

a day in the life: astrophysicists

see a day in the life of rhaana starling and phil evans: two gamma ray burst hunters at the university of leicester (pronounced "lestah" - why??). not all astronomers have their cell phones announce when cool events happen in space, but its fun when to know some who do!

creating knowledge

this newly available, post-doctoral freedom in research feels as exciting as it does daunting. how does one create new knowledge? the process of becoming a (phd) doctor is to learn how to learn what no one has learned before. a strange goal.

some people create thru determination. johannes kepler certainly had some mathematical skills - he managed an amazing amount of data and repeated his calculations over and over in order to discover the shapes of the orbits in our solar system. persistence and time, trial and error, worked for him. he knew something non-circular was unfolding before him, but it took a while to identify the ellipses... what excitement to slowly see it happening!

others seem to be on a different initial plane of thought: albert einstein, isaac newton, charles darwin. the ones who looked at the questions and investigated the problems from completely new dimensions - literally!

it's rare to see researchers with such continuous insight. most of us plug away at interesting problems using our favorite techniques, hoping for clever insights to creep into our minds every so often. i like to ensure that my projects allow me to travel to mountain tops and use big telescopes, because i find those adventures particularly enjoyable.

but i wonder... what motivates researchers? the potential of discovering dramatic breakthrus? or merely producing publishable results? i guess we hope for the former while working towards the latter - to assure employment! ;)

i genuinely enjoy thinking about the complicated details of galaxy evolution theory, but i admit i get bored with the day to day statistical systematics. i'm not convinced any activity, job or hobby, completely lacks in tedium. i love cooking, but i still have to clean up afterwards. i'm alright with that though - the good things wouldnt be so good if there were no less-than-good things to compare them to.

we all have the potential to create new knowledge, new art, and new insight. in fact, each unique one of us does everyday... its just that we rarely remember to acknowledge it.