The Chocolate Fish

So Long, So Long, So Long...

2009-01-14T17:55:00.000-08:00

...And thanks for all the fish. No really, my big trip around the world starts tomorrow (!!!) and for the trip I'm moving to new blogging headquarters at Where Is Yvette? for a few reasons, all relating to me wanting to geek out a little with Blog 2.0 (there's a map! and you can sign up for email updates with the link underneath the map! and a pony, and...). So please update your bookmarks accordingly for the next six months at least, and let me know if you've any suggestions.

Ok, see ya! Catch you all on the flipside.

Hmmm...

2009-01-08T10:33:00.000-08:00

I am filling out my grad school applications while watching Megastructures and Seconds from Disaster on YouTube. I guess this might concern some, until you realize every single application asks for the same information so far as your contact info/ former employers/ whatever, so if you're not on autopilot after a point you probably shouldn't be applying to do astrophysics. (Though to be fair I review these apps before turning them in and pause the shows when working on the essays.) Frankly, it makes me wonder why the astronomy/physics community can't bother to standardize applying to grad school. They all ask for the same information and it's not like there's no system in place already- where would the undergraduate application process be in this country without the Common Application?

Or at least standardize the letters. Some schools still require paper ones only for letters so my writers can check off boxes indicating if I'm in the "top 1% but not top 5%, top 5% but not top 10%, etc" in various categories, and I can't imagine what schools get out of it. I know the letter writers don't like them much either.

(Will get Telluride pictures up soon, just posting this as an explanation of where I've been. That and working on my trip in various capacities, which I leave for in a week!)

Snow Days

2008-12-30T16:22:00.000-08:00

The weather has calmed in Telluride, and the past few days have been filled with warm "spring skiing." Gorgeous views all around all the way to Utah; I will have great fun sorting through my pictures once I'm at home...

One odd thing this year about skiing by the way is how much greater the avalanche worries are compared to years past around the American West because of how quickly most of the snow has fallen in most areas. Usually this is something you usually hear about only in the backcountry and not actual ski resorts, but within the past week one skier was killed at Jackson Hole and another at Squaw Valley (Tahoe), prompting many "good thing we didn't go there this year!" comments from us. (Only second to the "good thing we didn't go to Whistler!" comments on the chairlift thanks to their recent gondola accident.) Telluride hasn't been immune either- our first day here a skier got buried up to his chest in a small avalanche!

Turns out avalanches are really bad for ski resort PR, so as a result this has mainly effected us by how slow some parts of the mountain have been to open its brand new area, Revelation Bowl, because it's above the treeline so the snow has a nasty habit to "slip." After days of hearing charges explode the area finally opened yesterday, which promptly became mogoled (ie bumpy) within hours because everyone wanted their chance at the Bowl. So goes the skier's life, but it beats getting buried!

Alright, that's all I have for now. Except excitingly enough, I saw a porcupine in the middle of a trail today. He looked like my brother when he hasn't bothered combing his hair.

Little Town in the Box Canyon

2008-12-27T11:56:00.000-08:00

Because the family that skis together stays together, my family is spending our Christmas holiday in Telluride, Colorado. We're here because Telluride is our favorite ever since we came here four years ago- it's in remote southwestern CO so there are never any lift lines, the mountain has great varied terrain, and the town is exactly what you'd expect out of one in the West where a large fraction of people are still trying to eck out a living. And seeing as this is our 20th year of skiing as a family (we first visited Vail when I was 3, during my dad's spring break in his professor days) trust me, when we say we have a favorite there's experience to back it up!

Today I took an off day to work on graduate school applications due to the cold (1 degree Farenheit when I woke up, aka -17C!), but the weather's looking promising from here on out- particularly fine as our first few days here consisted of snowstorms, as Telluride has gotten ~50" of snow in the past two weeks.

Promise to be back here to post pictures later as the one above is cheating- it's actually from four years ago, but I figure the scenery doesn't change right? (Apologies for the sizing, as the public library here in town doesn't seem to agree with blogging.)

Done

2008-12-21T14:15:00.000-08:00

Two days ago, after one last flurry of final exams and get-togethers, my brother and I packed up my stuff and I left Case for the last time as an undergraduate. The degree is promised to arrive at some point next month in the mail, though I was unsuccessful in my petition of having it converted into radians.

I confess leaving my university and home for the past 4.5 years has been difficult- even now it feels like I'll just be heading back soon after winter break, and my sister assures me I'll feel the same right up to next fall when I realize I'm heading somewhere else. We'll see what that new place will be like, once I learn just where it is, but all I know is it will be very difficult to find another place where it's natural to be on first-name terms with all your professors, where even the dean and department chair show up for your parties, and the university president knows who you are. Being personable never hurt but still, I worked my way quite nicely into that community and feel a bit left out already for leaving it.

But there we are. As a final note, I am happy to say that I got all As for the first time ever (as in, I think a B always slipped in even in elementary school) except this time there were things like upper-level English classes and graduate-level physics ones, so we can argue just how much sense this makes. But to quote my research adviser, "Congratulations. You've achieved perfection just in time to move on."

I was always impressed by how that guy can see through everything I've been working on to say what I should do next, all in an instant. Time to move on. I'll let you guys know where I end up.

E&M Haiku

2008-12-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

Written on my final today-

Maxwell's Equations
Brighten the universe, but
Are there monopoles?

(Don't worry, I wrote other things too, they're just not as exciting to share!)

The Last Column Ever

2008-12-04T22:39:00.000-08:00

Of "Quarked," at least. Someday I hope to do another, but that will have to wait. For now, though, you have to forgive me my sentimentality because I loved writing my column so dearly I nearly cried sending in the last one.

Anyway, this week's column. I focused on a favorite topic of mine as a writer, favorite words, because most people seem to have at least one or two of them. (Survey of friends revealed words like "brownie," "squeegy," and "cockatoo.") If anyone wants to mention a few of their favorites I'm all ears; here's what I came up with-

You are now reading the last "Quarked" column that will ever appear in The Observer.

I know. I can barely handle the suspense either. But instead of launching into thoughts about graduating, something that would only serve to bore you and depress me, I'd like to talk about words instead. I like them. I spend a lot of time thinking about them. And I have yet to meet a single writer who did not have words they particularly liked or disliked.

As a final column, it seems fitting to introduce a few of my personal favorites.

Phantasmagorical - This is my absolute favorite word, due to both its sound and meaning. In fact, when I was first starting this column I was very close to naming it "Phantasmagorical Pandemonium," after my first idea ("Perpendicular Thoughts from a Parallel Universe") was shot down due to length constraints. In hindsight, I probably chose the right one.

Succinct - Cool. Enough said.

Feminism - Of all the words that are improperly perceived and used, this is the one I most want to rein in. I will never forget the day in one of my introductory history classes when the professor asked who in the room was a feminist, and my roommate and I were the only ones who raised our hands out of a hundred people.

All feminism is defined in the dictionary as a belief in the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes. This means a freedom that covers both my mother's choice to stay at home and raise my siblings and me and my ambition to be an astrophysicist. And there is nothing radical about that.

Smile - I don't know why people don't do this more often. You are, for all intents and purposes, among the wealthiest and best-educated people in human history. Two weeks from now you'll be on winter break. George W. Bush will never be president again. There's plenty to smile about, and people will wonder what you're up to.

Lambda-bar - This is how you pronounce, which is a physics term used when you combine relativity and electromagnetism. The reason I like it is because it sounds like a delicious kind of chocolate, preferably very dark with crème filling. If I ever start a candy company, the first product will surely be called Lambda-Bar and have Maxwell's Equations on the wrapper, followed closely by black-coated Graviton Gobstoppers and Gluon Toffee guaranteed to stick your teeth together.

Yes - Of all the words I list here, I think this one is the most important. It is the one that makes things happen. Life is too short to be afraid of living it, and having an experience is better than no experience at all.

So say yes. Say yes when someone asks you out even if you're not sure what you think of them yet. Say yes when you're offered a job even if you doubt yourself and your capabilities. And definitely say yes when you send in a rant to The Observer and are offered a regular columnist position.

It has been my great privilege and joy to share my words with you these past few years. Thank you.

How to get a Bailout

2008-12-03T20:35:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of my brother, click to view. Also viewable here-

Three Thoughts

2008-11-25T21:56:00.000-08:00

One month from now will be Christmas, and I will have a physics degree.

Two months from now will be my 23rd birthday, and I will be in Kyoto, Japan.

Three months from now I can't tell you where I'll be, short of somewhere in South East Asia.

What an extraordinary thing, this life I get to lead.

Quarked: Campus Mysteries

2008-11-25T21:38:00.000-08:00

Here is the most recent installment of Quarked, which covers a variety of things I have noticed around campus that I never quite figured out and figure I probably won't by this point. I'm not sure how entertaining some of the things are to those who don't know my university, but I write for a campus newspaper and figured I should cover a few more 'local' things as well.

Entertainingly enough, this column is not without controversey, due to the following passage-

Inscription plaque in Rockefeller - Our physics building was built in 1906,
but if you actually look at the dedication plaque, (between the two sets of
doors as you're coming in from the Quad) the dedication date for the building is
written as "MDCCCCVI." This is, of course, not the way you write Roman numerals
- you use subtraction notation, meaning you can only have three of anything in a
row and 1906 should actually be written "MCMVI."
I don't know what is more disturbing, the fact that the physics department doesn't know how to count, or the fact that I am the first person in over 100 years who has noticed this.

As it turns out, there is some controversey as to when exactly Roman numerals were "standardized" as we use them today- the Romans liked to use "IIII" for 4 instead of "IV" like we do due to superstition, but were fine with "IX" for example. Long story short, I now know more about this than I cared to know.

I mention this because it turns out some people writing to point out errors are not as nice as others, and one went as far as saying "the physics department is owed an apology by the snarky columnist." I always thought I was more curmudgeonly myself... Anyway, this led me to wonder who exactly I'd apologize to should anyone care. Myself? My friends, my professors, or my friends who are professors? The department chair who has shown up to my parties?

This is why letters to the editor are funny, by the way. They can take one person's opinion and totally blow it out of proportion so you'll remember it a long time even when everyone else has long forgotten the incident at hand.

Across the Universe

2008-11-16T22:55:00.000-08:00

Sitting here doing physics homework, watching the snow fall and listening to The Beatles. Which leads to an interesting question in my mind- how many people have ever fallen under this description of activity? Many of the material physics classes you take haven't changed much in recent years- or at least since the 1960s- and the decades in between cover millions of physics students, Beatles listeners, and snow watchers respectively. Surely these categories of people overlap to at least a decent several thousand.

It's funny how united in experience we can be, even if we never stop to think about it.

New Toy

2008-11-13T14:18:00.000-08:00

In the fashion of college students everywhere, my computer these past few years was a graduation present upon finishing high school four years ago. Said computer, a Dell laptop, has performed admirably for the most part, but in recent months it's started to get slow and cranky as computers do after a few years (particularly one that has been used and abused as much as mine). There were even a few worrisome moments where the darn thing refused to turn on for several minutes- quite worrisome, to say the least- and I decided I would feel better if I got a new computer to supplement the old workhorse. I've been eyeing a Mac (yeah I know, shut up) but galavanting the world makes one hesitant about carrying around an expensive thing, and combined with the weight factor I decided to pick something else.

Final result- the computer shown above, which arrived yesterday, an Eee PC 901. Weighing just around a kilo (a hair over two pounds), this little guy has six hours battery life, 20G storage space and, here's the entertaining bit, runs Linux. Which is totally exciting, if only because it turns out there's a game in Linux that's essentially Mr. Potato Head but you have the option of decorating a penguin if you desire. It's what my stuffed kiwi is so engaged with in the above photograph, actually...

(At this point I would like to kindly reassure my geeky readership that I do know my way around several versions of Linux, and I know it has more going for it than just this. But you gotta admit, the Mr. Potato Head game is a definite bonus!)

Anyway, in case you can't tell it turns out the Eee PC is tiny- check out the following picture, with my graphing calculator for scale-
This means I am no longer worried about portability in any sense of the word, but I am spending a little time trying to get used to the condensed keyboard. My main issue is I tend to use the right-handed "Shift" key but the up arrow is currently where I usually strike, so I'm down a few words a minute for now until I get used to things.

Other notes- I am now in the market for an external harddrive to carry music/movies while I'm on the road (no DVD player, as there's just no space), and I suppose I need iTunes on said external as well since my main gripe with Linux is it's not compatible with my iPod. It hopefully won't be too impossible to work around, but if this is my only gripe with an ultraportable $400 laptop I figure life isn't too bad at all! (You can run XP on these, but in the interest of conserving space I'm sticking with Linux for now.)

So to conclude this initial review, if you want to travel the world and not do much more with your computer than update your blog, play with your photos, and play an occasional movie then you should consider one of these guys. Particularly if you don't have chubby fingers.

And with that you'll have to excuse me- I'm still playing around with the preloaded software, and it turns out there's a "sky over your location for any given time/place" program! Must investigate this further...

VOTE

2008-11-03T21:19:00.000-08:00

I am not one to beg you to go vote only to get pissed if you don't vote for the person I want to win. I just want you to vote, as it is your duty and privilege to do so.

If you want brownie points check your local state's League of Women Voters page and get informed on the other things also on your state ballot. There's usually some other important stuff in there worth your attention!

And finally, for fun, as a few of you know I was an election official (aka poll worker) in the 2004 election. Cuyahoga County still did punch card ballots in 2004- we do paper ballots that look like the bubble sheets you use for standardized tests now- but it was one of the more unique experiences I've ever had. No time to do it this year again, unfortunately, I wrote a summary that I have dug up in honor of this anniversary:

Well the first thing to note about being a poll worker is it's rather
tiring or at least it was this time around. In my precinct we had all
told 466 votes cast whereas four years ago the same precinct saw 188
voters! Yep, we were one of the ones that had a line outside an hour
before the polls even opened and didn't let down from utter
pandamonium for about four hours after opening (here meaning a long
line that made voting maybe a half hour affair). We were relatively
uneventful compared to other precints in the ward however: some of the
other precints had a few dead people show up to vote! Which later led
to an animated discussion on just what we'd say if a dead person
showed, I was for "oh, you must not be feeling well, why don't you go
back home and lie down for awhile" but we never had to actually do
anything.

I was by far the youngest poll worker which means to start off with I
was in charge of tearing stubbs off the punch cards and putting
ballots in the ballot box etc to make sure that didn't get messed up.
I was also, as the only non-Democrat in the place being of "no party,"
the automatic Republican who had to be the second witness whenever
someone needed help in reading the ballot and such.

Later on in the day I got to keep the books and I was deemed "good at
it" (when my mom heard this she laughed- apparently on her father's
side there's a long line of bookkeepers) so I had to make sure the
signatures equalled the number of ballots cast etc etc. Rather
irritating when you realize you are ten off after counting all those
signatures and the only way to check is count them all again!

But I gotta admit, it was incredibly exciting last night to realize
that Ohio was going to decide the fate of the nation! And it made me
proud to realize that as far as Cuyahoga County 9-N goes there's no
grey area between what "should have" happened and what actually did.
Don't know how this election will go down in the books but I have the
feeling that down the line the fact that I was an Ohio poll worker for
Election 2004 will be a story for the grandkids.

Tape, X-Rays, and Why Physics Is Awesome

2008-11-03T20:35:00.000-08:00

Check this out-

We saw this in one of my classes earlier today and I haven't gotten over it. What you're basically seeing is doing something very simple in unrolling tape and releasing ~50keV of energy in x-rays. That is a lot of energy in there, and no one knows how or why it would be so concentrated.

And this is why I love physics. Because there is always something new and fascinating that shows up no matter how much you think you have things figured out.

Quarked: Trip Around the World

2008-11-03T19:56:00.000-08:00

My column this week was devoted to my trip around the world to address a few details about the whole thing and discuss the concept of crazy dreams in general. Because it's fun to talk about crazy dreams, isn't it?

Ballet Class Has Ruined Everything

2008-10-29T10:32:00.000-07:00

Why is it I'm incapable of watching the first snowfall of the year without getting "Waltz of the Snowflakes" from The Nutcracker stuck in my head? Not even the melody, mind, but rather "one-two-three, two-two-three, three-two-three, PORT DE BRAS!"

Some stuff just never leaves you.

Pumpkin Carving Festivus 3

2008-10-27T21:29:00.000-07:00

This past weekend was our third annual Pumpkin Carving Festivus. This is the hands-down favorite party amongst me and my friends, to the point where several people who graduated last year traveled several hundred miles just to make it this year. How we have fallen in love with taking giant gourds and carving intricate patterns into them above all our other activities I don't know, but when people come in from Chicago or Syracuse to do it you'd better show up!

And of course it was great fun again. I have an established reputation as "the artsy one" when it comes to pumpkin carving, which I blame my uncle for because he bought us a book of pumpkin carving patterns and tools when everyone else in our area was still stuck on doing plain jack-o'-lanterns. As I am never considered exceptionally artsy in anything else because my drawing ability plateued around age ten this means I spend a decent amount of thought on how to do a good pumpkin...
I decided a ghost rising from his grave would be a good starter. After a bit of work, here's the final product-Of course, later on a friend of mine busted my bubble by looking at this photo and saying "did you carve a turtle on your pumpkin?" Sigh... Perhaps I don't get to call myself artsy after all.
My gravestone+ghost pumpkin when illuminated. I think it turned out nicely.
Partway through work for Pumpkin #2, which is wolves howling at the moon (for full disclosure, this was partly inspired from a pattern). The main problem here was my little pumpkin carving tool decided to break not too far into things- some of the guys had been pretty rough in using them- so I was suddenly faced with using a tiny saw blade with duct tape wrapped around the end in order to get the fine details. Which I did eventually, but I probably spent nearly an hour carving everything out as it was so painstakingly slow...
Wolves howling. I'm satisfied, though I should note that my favorite pumpkin of the night was a joint project from several people. Ever wonder what happens when a pumpkin drinks too much pumpkin ale?
Even better, a few of his pumpkin buddies looked downright concerned about his condition-
Unfortunately, later this night marked the first and only time my pumpkins got destroyed by pumpkin smashers. (Except the vandals left drunken pumpkin and his friends. Who would have guessed the sort of person who would smash pumpkins on a Saturday night would identify with such a state?) Quite understandably, this makes me sad. Stupid cretins.

All is not lost however- today one of my suitemates recieved a Pumpkin Lite-Brite set in a care package from her mother. You either recall why this is brilliant from your childhood or you don't. It cheered me up at least, hopefully enough to last until Pumpkin Carving Festivus next year.

Fall Break

2008-10-22T20:04:00.000-07:00

I'm going to come out right now and say my fall break was too short- that dratted Physics GRE exam was scheduled for 830am Saturday morning (a great way to kick off your vacation, I assure you!), and honestly it's amazing how much a difference one night makes when you only have four to work with. But a few hours after I hopped on a plane-
(The view over Western PA was just awesome...)

...And ended up for a few days in New Hampshire. Where the most beautiful foliage on the planet was in full swing, of course, so this was the best Fall Break activity one could concieve of doing.
Gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous... Though to be fair, I was probably a week late for foliage because it had clearly peaked on the mountainsides (if this sounds odd as Ohio hasn't yet, keep in mind it's already snowing up there meaning it's a fair bit colder!). Luckily the lakeside keeps things a few precious degrees warmer, meaning the area was ripe for canoeing about to see the leaves. And what a stereotypically pretty activity it was too- this time of year most of the cottages are vacant on weekdays, not to be visited until next summer in most cases, so while there were one or two motorboats on Sunday I saw or heard none at all on Monday/Tuesday. Absolutely silent, and the only ripples were the ones from paddling.
Another pretty foliage shot from the lake. The odd structure to the right is actually a hundred-year-old boat house, built by a wealthy Bostonian who used to own the whole lake shore in this area back then. His daughter had a steam-powered yacht with a tall mast (click here for a picture), thus the odd boat house was constructed to accommodate it.
This little guy was what got me most excited about going past the boat house that day- believe it or not, it's a loon! Loons are very iconic for their gorgeous summertime plumage on lakes in northern North America, of course, but this guy is busily changing into his winter duds. If you look at a close-up of the picture you'll see his beak is still primarily black and he still has some semblance of a checkered back, but overall he looks a totally different bird.

And because I've always liked loons ever since I did my "bird report" in 5th grade on them and I'd never seen one ready for winter before, trust me, this was very exciting. Unfortunately the loon decided this was fall so he didn't need to stick around for photo ops anymore, so he dived under for a long time and we never really saw him again.
The reddest tree I have ever seen in my life, even if you might not be able to tell in the picture. You could spot this tree as standing out even though it was on the opposite shore from us.
This picture was taken on Tuesday, when it was cloudy so the leaves didn't look half as impressive, but I was nonetheless a fan of the orange tree and thought I would post this in the name of tree foliage diversity.

Tuesday was also noteworthy in canoeing because I went out alone, and it was dead calm again so I set off for the opposite shore. Except it turned out on the opposite shore it wasn't calm at all and in fact quite breezy, and believe you me when the wind picks up canoes just go. And this wind will always blow in the exact opposite direction of the way you want to head! To make a long story short, there was a fair bit of frantic paddling while kneeling in the middle of the canoe to overcome the wind (as opposed to the seat in the back- more awkward, but more stable), and my jeans got a bit wet. Not complaining though, as the story of paddling small craft over troubled waters is way better than whatever I would have been doing at school.
And I will now finish my fall break post by posting a picture of my Halloween gingerbread man from the local grocery, as he was just that awesome. Almost too cool to eat, until I remembered the only thing cooler than looking at a Halloween gingerbread man is cannibalizing him. The poor guy's disguise was no match for the hungry canoer.

Prelude to Winter

2008-10-16T22:08:00.000-07:00

I take a lot of pictures that never make it to this blog (usually because I don't get them off my camera until their timeliness is questionable) but I noticed this set in my archives and they look lovely enough to share-
Date: March 5, 2008. We'd had a spate of freezing rain the night before, so despite the fact that it was practically springtime every single thing on campus was covered in a coating of ice, as if it was being prepared for display in a museum. For further proof, here's what the traffic light looked like on my usual route-
One of the funny things about winter, I think, is how I look at these pictures now and am utterly amazed by them but back when I took them no one even thought it was extraordinary at all. You consider the concept of shorts and t-shirts extraordinary, in contrast to how you can't imagine life in summertime without. All in all it says a good deal about human adaptability.

(Posted because today was the first day I needed to wear my winter hat with the giant pouf ball and my gloves, as the wind chill whilst bicycling required it, but two days ago I was still in shorts. Which made me start thinking about how it's probably the end of any warm weather I will see in Cleveland, which is a somewhat disturbing thought...)

In Which Yvette Attempts to Explain the Economic Crisis

2008-10-12T17:47:00.000-07:00

Yep, this was my column this week. It was inspired by the fact that I realized most students didn't particularly understand what's going on, nor understand how big a number the $700 billion from the federal bailout really is. Plus it let me write fun little things like this-

Let's start first by trying to grasp the scale of the numbers. Imagine I gave you access to a gigantic bank vault filled with nothing but one dollar bills, and said you could keep every bill you counted. How long would it take you to reach $700 billion if you counted one dollar bill per second without stopping?
As it turns out, if you were to count a dollar every second it would take you just under 17 minutes to earn your first thousand. You could count on being a millionaire after eleven and a half days, but it would take 115 days to count $10 million and over three years for $100 million. You could take pride in passing the one billion dollar mark at 31.7 years, but it would take you just under two thousand years to pass Warren Buffett as the world's wealthiest person. And it would take you no less than 22,182 years to reach $700 billion, the maximum amount authorized in the federal bailout.
For some perspective, 22,182 years ago you could still find glaciers in the Cleveland area and Neanderthals in Europe. And I guarantee none of your ancestors have the foggiest idea as to why you care so much about green pieces of paper in the first place.

The rest of the column can be found here (linked this week in particular because our newspaper has a new website and it looks snazzy). Special thanks to my dad and brother who read it over to ensure that no economics professors write angry letters because I got facts wrong.

Booked!

2008-10-06T18:00:00.000-07:00

My favoritest YouTube video ever-

Shared because I finally purchased the first legs for my round the world trip today, set to begin on January 20 with a flight to Tokyo (and continue for six months through Southeast Asia, Europe, and Southern Africa). Psych!

More on this once my brain fully wraps around the implications of what I just did, but until then I will leave you with the translation of the song in the video above, which was sung in Bengali-

Stream of Life
by Rabindranath Tagore

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

From The Sandbox

2008-10-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

I have a friend Dave (but who I call Norm- long story) who graduated last year from Cornell University in Physics and Astronomy. As Norm joined the ROTC while in college because military service is something he believes in, one thing led to another and he's been deployed in Iraq since early summer. There's really not much I can say that you can't already imagine, so I won't.

Anyway, Norm is kind enough to keep his own blog on his observations which I realized I never linked to and really ought, as he does a marvelous job. So go read it. His tour is up in a few weeks anyway, after which you'll need to find somewhere else to read war dispatches from and I can't guarantee their insights will be nearly as good.

On the Physics GRE

2008-10-05T10:50:00.000-07:00

Most of my spare time lately is being spent studying for the Physics GRE- that insidious test required for admission to most American astronomy/physics graduate schools. The reason it's insidious (beyond the silliness of reducing physics to multiple choice) is the grading curve is so heavily skewed towards international students, mainly coming from countries like China where they spend several years essentially studying for the Physics GRE. Us domestics make up for this with things like good lab experience, but you still have to try your best of course even if the percentile you're hoping for is probably 50% lower.

There are two GRE Physics exams in the fall (and the general GRE, of course, but no one cares excessively about that) and the first one is two weekends from now- conveniently right at the end of my midterms and the first day of Fall Break. Beyond the obviousness of doing practice questions and tests, I also have about 200 flashcards with various physics equations on them, because when you only have a minute or so a question you need to know the stuff like the charecteristic frequency of an LHC circuit or the van der Waal equation of states like that. I find this silly because I guarantee none of my professors could tell you most of these without looking them up, but no matter.

On the bright side, I realized I got a lot better at all this when I started treating my stack of flashcards like a violin concerto, and progress has gotten better. Each concept is like a measure, ten are a phrase so you have to go back and review, twice that you need to go back again to reinforce it... and then once your "problem spots" are out of the way (everyone's got them, in my case it's stat mech and some of the quantum) and you can waltz through the cards however they're sorted you find a few questions and see if you can do that. A musician's dicipline comes into life in odd ways...

So that's what I've been doing. (Yay?) I could rant about this topic a little more but think I'll abstain for now on the grounds that topic irritates me, except for one last observation- if I end up not getting into graduate school, remind me to go work for the GRE people. It's costing me $140 a pop to take this test, and they must make a killing.

The 2008 Presidential Debate Drinking Game

2008-09-25T21:38:00.001-07:00

Yes, this is my column this time around. I only needed to have a debate with the editor twice over this, the first time because it turns out some may not think this is appropriate material for a university newspaper, and again when McCain decided a few hours before our layout to perhaps not show up to Friday's debate. The editor appears to have extracted revenge, however, because the online version of the article is significantly shorter than the one I wrote. I'm not going to lie- I am really pissed at my editor right now because a. she cut out half the material and didn't tell me, b. it's not like we don't have the space, evidenced by c. they've run several longer columns than the space this one would have taken in full. Grrr...

Anyway, because this is my blog and I can do what I want here is the entirety of what was supposed to run in The Observer this week. As a disclaimer to anyone who's worried that people actually think I'm serious with my columns (not mentioning names, but you know who you are), I think it's safe to say that by this point I have a reputation. Trust me.

Enjoy!

The 2008 Presidential Debate Drinking Game

by Yvette Cendes

Any time a candidate says…

- Change- 1 drink

- Expounds on the need for change without any specifics about how said change will work or be implemented- switch from beer to hard liquor, we are going to need it

- “Ready to lead”- 1 drink

- Gun control- 1 shot

- A word that doesn’t exist- 1 drink

- God, or any euphemism for God- 1 four horsemen

- Afghani… you know, it’s been so long that this been mentioned that I’ve forgotten how to spell it- 2 drinks

- Someone speaks Spanish in an effort to court the Hispanic vote- 1 tequila shot

- Terrorist- 1 car bomb

- Ethanol- do I really need to spell it out for you?

Whenever McCain…

- Addresses the audience as “my friends”- 1 drink

- A member of the audience jumps up shouting “shut up McCain! You’re not my friend! It’s not like you call me asking if we can hang out on the weekend or would lend me twenty bucks!”- 2 drinks

- Recommends increasing troop protections by issuing +1 armor- 3 drinks

- Makes a joke about being old and/or references his mother- 1 gin and tonic

- Tries to market himself as a unique maverick in vain hope that people won’t remember he’s from the same party as George W. Bush- 1 drink

- Mentions he was a POW- 1 drink

- The moderator says “wait, you were a POW? I didn’t know that!”- 2 drinks

- Is questioned on how exactly being a POW prepares him to be president- 3 drinks

Whenever Obama…

- Says “folks”- 1 drink

- Mentions Indonesia, Hawaii, or Kenya- 1 drink

- Is referred to as “Osama” by McCain or the moderator- 2 drinks and a kick in the shins

- Tells an anecdote about a middle-class woman who can’t get by- 1 drink

- Says something so socialist that he could be quoting a communist leader- 1 vodka shot

- He is quoting a communist leader- 2 shots

- A communist leader makes a guest appearance- 3 shots

Vice-Presidential Bonus Round! Guys ‘n Gals Edition

- Biden mentions Scranton (and it’s not a reference to The Office)- 1 drink

- “That” SNL skit is mentioned in an attempt to connect with pop culture- 1 drink

- Palin mentions Alaska- 1 drink

- Biden and Palin get into a “small state smackdown” arguing over the merits of Delaware compared to Alaska- 2 drinks

- Palin mentions her extensive executive experience, moose hunting, why abstinence-only education is best, how close she is to Russia, etc- disqualified due to worries of alcohol poisoning

Things we won’t see, but would like to…

- Someone walking onto the stage stroking a white cat- vodka martini, shaken not stirred

- A candidate responding with “you know, I was mistaken on that point. I’m sorry about that.”- time to stop drinking

- A debate resembling a rational, honest discussion of ideas instead of a never-ending slew of catchphrases and attacks that bring us nowhere closer to addressing the serious issues facing our country- put down the drink and start making a fire, hell has frozen over!

Cendes is a fifth year physics major, meaning she is old enough to remember the 2004 Vice-Presidential Debate held at Case. She still has the pictures from sneaking into the debate room with her roommate the day prior, where they pretended to be Cheney and Edwards until Secret Service threats forced them out.

For Those Keeping Track...

2008-09-24T19:07:00.000-07:00

I just turned in my form declaring my intention to graduate in January 2009 with a Physics B.S. and a minor in history. Awesome.

In other news, don't wait until the last possible week to declare your history minor and then go to the history luncheon later in the day just because you want the food. Most of the conversations steer towards Karl Marx regardless of whether he is relevant or not to the discussion, and that gets really boring after awhile.

Baby Black Holes

2008-09-16T17:37:00.000-07:00

Shamelessly copied from my friend and suitemate Megan's blog where she was (of course) expounding about the LHC-

This historic event reminds me of the two concepts that first really got me interested in physics - gravitons and black holes. Seriously, how awesome would it be to have a pet baby black hole? Never need another trash can, if you’re ever attacked nothing to worry about just sic Wilbur the Baby Black Hole on the guy...

I, for one, have absolutely no idea how I went through life never thinking of this. Only problem I can see is you couldn't pet it, unless you were ok with never using your hand again.

Griffiths Was Here!

2008-09-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

We had a huge bit of excitement yesterday as our weekly colloquium speaker was someone we were all very eager to meet- Dr. David Griffiths. Every physics student the world over knows Griffiths because he has written the standard textbook used in upper-level electromagnetism courses, as well as dominantly used quantum mechanics and nuclear particle texts. Clearly we had to invite him, and clearly by "we" I mean "I" in this setting because this was a student-inspired idea and I always get tapped to do these things.

As a secondary note, because I did the inviting this meant I also got to do the hosting, so I hosted my first colloquium speaker. Probably a first time a student ever did such a thing at our institution (I don't know why, it's really fun and you get a nice dinner!), but I like to see how far I can get away with things...

Anyway, comments about Griffiths' visit-

1) David is, it turns out, really really awesome. As in we had a pizza lunch in the undergrad lounge with him for the students, and most of the 1+ hour was spent with ~30 physics students staring at him in rapt attention while he talked about various topics.

2) If you think it's awesome to be on a first-name basis with David Griffiths, and moreover hang out with people who are jealous of you for the fact, you might be a nerd. Just maybe.

3) He was nice enough to sign our books. Was not even perturbed when asked to sign international editions of books that some students had, on the grounds that the publishing industry is such a racket in the US.

4) Because everyone wants to know I'm sure, the quantum book cover with the live cat on the front, dead cat on the back was his publisher's idea and not his. The funny thing about the cat, apparently, is David noticed it was visibly plagiarized off a Scientific American cover a few months prior. Upon writing his publisher urgently saying something needed to be done, he received the cryptic response of "don't worry about it" so the cover has stayed the same since.

5) About once every three or four months, someone emails Griffiths outraged over the mere image of the dead cat. He thus far just responds by saying the cat might just be sleeping, but I suggested he write back saying the cat was killed by the act of looking at it just to see what happens.

6) One last note about the quantum book: the fact that the last word in the whole thing is "gullible" is deliberate.

7) The E&M book and quantum book in particular were written from class notes from classes David taught where the students hated the book (the nuclear particle one was written mainly while at SLAC on sabbatical). There are notes for perhaps one more book, on general relativity, but he says he likes the book he uses for GR so the motivation really isn't there.

8) I asked him if he'd ever considered wirting a thermodynamics book because I hate Kittel & Kromer so much. He said no, because he didn't think he understood thermo or that most anyone really does. Fair enough...

9) The colloquium itself- ie the technical excuse we used to drag him all the way to Cleveland to speak- was really neat. It has the distinct honor of being a theory talk I actually followed most of since you could if you had a general quantum background, about what happens to an electron orbiting a +q charge when a -q charge approaches it (originally worked by Fermi, but not to much precision). It involved a few really nifty and elegant explanations involving a 1/x-squared potential and left both theorists and experimentalists in the audience alike in good spirits, so I'm glad that worked out!

10) I think my favorite thing about the talk though was how, for lack of better explanation, it was exactly the sort of thing I imagined David Griffiths would give. He lectures very well and speaks in a manner very similar to how he writes, so combined with using the exact same font used in the books for the equations I was captivated. The man must give wicked lectures!

On Too Much Stuff

2008-09-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

Ok, whether I have too many or too few things compared to the average person can be debated- I'm told I don't have much for a college student even- but every once in awhile what I do have annoys me to the point where I half-think I want to travel the world next semester just to cut down on my material posessions. This thought hit me harder than usual earlier this week when I was supposed to write my fortnightly column but was still working hard on organizing my room, so the following article resulted-

Senior contemplates need for accumulated possessions

Yvette Cendes, Columnist

Last weekend I went home for the first time in months to pick up my stuff. I realize this is a few weeks later than most people furnish their dorm room with a beanbag chair and a couple posters, but my situation was complicated since I arrived on campus straight from my summer job in California. And while my time on the West Coast did not do things like leave me with a mystical urge to expand my mind – I do physics, my mind is weird enough – it did reduce me to two bags worth of possessions until just a few days ago.

Now let me say this: I have way too much stuff. I realize this is an odd statement to make when your worldly possessions can fit into the back of your parents' minivan, but my mind can't help but notice how I survived several months without missing most of it. I'm not quite certain yet why a lot of this junk is here anyway, except to stand in front of whatever I happen to be urgently looking for.

What sort of things am I talking about? For starters, let's take my bookshelf. I didn't really need it for all these months, but I needed to bring it now to shelve the books and DVDs I also brought (which, of course, were living quietly undisturbed lives in the basement until I brought them to live quietly undisturbed lives on the bookshelf). I brought back a large quantity of pillows for my bed as well. These serve no discernable purpose except as projectile missiles whenever my suitemates annoy me, but I like them for inexplicable reasons so I hold onto them.

A lot of my trepidation, I freely admit, is from all the moving around I have done since my freshman year. You move a lot in college – this last one was my 12th – and you pick up pretty quickly that the less stuff you have, the less you need to pack. Put it this way; there is a reason a miniature legion of people are on hand to assist freshman to move in while most everyone else just corrals their own resources.

To be honest though, I very much appreciate the items that stuck around this long. Few material possessions will ever delight me as much as my set of colored pens, for example, and I'd be embarrassed to publicly admit how little time needs to pass before I miss my computer. Further, once an item of clothing gets in my wardrobe it doesn't leave very easily, to the great annoyance of my mother. This results in her passive-aggressively taking my favorite shirts out of my laundry hamper whenever I visit, to which I retaliate by finding the shirts behind the dryer and putting them back where they belong. I figure if this is as big as our mother-daughter strife is, I should just leave it be.

And now you'll have to excuse me, because my suitemate just came into my room to tell me she ate the last of the ice cream. Doggone it, where are those pillows when you need them?

Cendes is a fifth year physics major. In her spare time, she plans for what she politely calls "galactic domination."

The LHC Poetry Slam

2008-09-10T22:06:00.000-07:00

Sorry everyone, been busy with the start of the semester... lots of random things popping up, such as the LHC party I was invited to last night (aka Large Hadron Collider, aka the big particle smasher that was tested today in Europe). Also known as "Geekfest 2008," I was invited by a bunch of physics grad students to stay up until 4am to celebrate the turning-on of the largest experiment ever conducted by humankind. As the next generation particle accelerator won't be seen for several decades, of course I had to accept.

Anyway, somewhere during the course of the night the LHC Rap was shown to those who had not seen it for some reason yet, and I expressed my sentiment that I really don't like it. A guy challenged me on my reasons, and beyond explaining the cheesy nature I broke down and said "not trying to sound pretentious, but I think I could write something better." Clearly I wasn't going to be allowed to get away with such a statement and was handed a pencil and paper and told to get to work.

So what follows was my result after a half hour or so of work- what does everyone think? Considering it was 2am and I was nursing a beer while writing, I hope I will be forgiven for the lack of proper pantameter-

The LHC Ode
by Yvette Cendes

It was mid-September and the leaves were flying
The grass turning brown and the wind a-crying
The physicists were gathering late at night
To witness what could only be an incredible sight-
It was the LHC! In the entire world
It would throw particles faster than they'd ever been hurled
The truth behind theories earlier fabled
Would finally be pinned down and properly nailed,
It would find the Higgs, and possibly see
An answer to baryonic asymmetry!
Oh how marvelous! Oh how grand!
All the things we would finally understand!

So the physicists chatted while they lay in wait
Not knowing they'd taken the universe's bait,
For when the switch went "on," that exciting goal,
They accidentally created... a black hole.
Yes, that's right, the nuts had held the truth
(Even if they'd seemed silly and rather uncouth)
And the black hole was there, it grew and grew
As black holes accreting mass are known to do,
It ate all in its path, and before the dawn
The planet called Earth was forever gone.

Now people will say it's an unlikely case-
On par with creating an elephant in space-
But if there are infinite universes, as some like to say,
Eventually it would happen and we'd all die away
So it's unlikely, it's true, but just for some fun,
Ask yourself this- what if THIS is the one?

Quarked Returns!

2008-08-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

Who remembers my really awesome column from last year? Well this week was the first week of class, meaning the first edition of The Observer came out today, meaning the first installment of "Quarked" ran this week. This semester I get to write every other week and actually get paid too (just enough to cover the expenses should I go to the coffeeshop to write, basically) so things are looking up.

The first one is available here, covering my observations on what it's like to be a fifth year student. Exerpt-

Being a fifth-year student is rather odd, because you have passed the traditional framework of college progression. This means you find yourself doing things like arranging your schedule to include naptime and telling stories to underlings whether they want to hear them or not. As an example, just a short while ago I found myself talking to a freshman – you can tell by their small size and tendency to travel in packs – and the poor thing asked what the winter was like around here.
"Oh, they're not so bad nowadays," I said with the air of an aged veteran. "But back when I was a freshman, shovels hadn't been invented yet, so we had to use our hands to dig to class! And there was more deuterium in the water back then, so the snow was heavier…"
Ah, memories. It seems like only yesterday that I made them up...

The Future Cometh

2008-08-29T12:14:00.000-07:00

I just learned a few minutes ago that the USA will either have a woman vice-president or a black president come November. Now I don't like talking politics on the Internet much, but policies aside this makes me proud of our country.

It also reminds me of a joke John Stewart gave at the Oscars this year. Something along the lines of how Hollywood was worried about there potentially being either a woman or a black man in the White House- "How will we know it's the future?!?"

Lounging Around

2008-08-18T14:04:00.001-07:00

After a hectic goodbye from California, I am taking a break this week in New Hampshire before the semester starts next week. And clearly I am spending it well- as everyone knows, no vacation is perfect without reading old paperback novels while lounging on the back of a giant inflatable killer whale...

I found the killer whale (promptly dubbed "Willy," of course) two summers back when he washed up on our shore after a big storm. No one came around to claim him after a few days, at which point informal lake rules decreed him as ours and I realized how much my life was missing in the pre-whale days. Ah, this life of busily doing nothing is a good one.

Wrapping Up

2008-08-12T17:30:00.000-07:00

It's my last week working at the SETI Institute, meaning I am spending time banging my head over code with greater urgency. Presentation on Friday, gotta catch the redeye back to the East Coast that night...

Until then, here is a hilariously staged photo taken at the Allen Telescope Array a few weeks back sort of explaining what I'm trying to finish up. In short, there's a lot of radio frequency interference (RFI for short) that is detected at the ATA, and I have the job of cataloging it- or, primarily right now, the clock frequencies from all the processors in the control room. I'm holding a spectrum analyzer here- which we didn't end up using much, but has a great dual use as a ray gun-looking device- detecting the evil RFI (shown here as Billy, one of the telescope operators at the array).

If you look really closely, you'll notice by the way that there is a gremlin used to depict RFI here, which is out of a really bad movie that used to scare me when I was little. This is because, as Billy put it, RFI is like the gremlin in radio astronomy because it causes all sorts of problems. That or we were just really bored and looking for an excuse to take silly pictures, conclude what you will.

Ok, until I sort out my code, I will leave you with this other shot of Science In Action (or, depending on your take, Science Inaction). Be very, very afraid of the girl with the spectrum analyzer...

Testing Physics

2008-08-05T11:44:00.000-07:00

Um, yeah. There's really no way to display this picture without giving away that I went skydiving this past weekend, is there?

Basically, this is something that I've wanted to do even back in New Zealand, but we just never got around to it. A few other students here in the program were keen on going, though, so we joined up and finally did it halfway towards Sacramento from the Bay Area. Mind it was $100 for a tandem jump from 13,000 feet, which is a relative steal as far as these things go...
Our motley crew, waiting for the plane to take us up. Mind I didn't notice at the time that I was the only one of us with a purple harness; this was only pointed out to me later...

It should also be noted that it turns out that the sort of people who decide to be professional skydivers are really the sort to get excited upon the word that they're ferrying a bunch of students working at the SETI Institute. As in they get very much into the joke of which one of them we've come to take away, and appreciate responses like "sorry, we're only looking for intelligent life..." and "I could tell you the truth [about aliens], but then I'd have to kill you."

Which raised the obvious question in my mind of why exactly people who professionally do SETI and people who professionally skydive are probably considered mildly crazy (probably in slightly different ways, but not much), and why at the same time you would trust someone society at large considers a bit crazy to jump out of an airplane with you and make sure you land safely. But I digress...
On the ride up- the guy sitting in front of me was the guy who took all the pictures you see here (I ordered them, seems kind of silly to go skydiving and not have pictures!) and the guy behind is the guy who operated the parachute and all that... This plane btw was a little one, just big enough to hold 15-20 people, and we were sitting crammed in on two benches by the window like they do in WWII movies.

And because it's inevitable to be asked, no, I really wasn't scared at all- there might have been a bit of a "huh, I'm actually going to do this" thought when the plane was taking off but I never gave it another thought since.

To be honest, I am almost worried sometimes about my inability to get scared about things a lot of people get really freaked out about. This started when I was in New Zealand last year, where I never thought I could do bungy jumping but ended up realizing that rationally there's nothing to be scared of. You know the physics and how it works, you know the statistics of something happening, so why be afraid?

Skydiving is, to me, the same idea- you are about twenty times more likely to die in a car accident than jumping out of a plane and you know the physics works, so what is there to be afraid of? Just a simple kinematic equation is all.

(Yes, I realize I'm essentially saying something along the lines of learning physics helped me master my fears. I don't think that was the intended consequence, but it's definitely a nice one.)
So for anyone who is curious, in my experience it is a lot easier to skydive versus bungy jump. This is because first of all you don't have much time to think in skydiving- they open the door and everyone hops out in pretty quick succession- and because unlike bungy jumping the ground is really, really far away so that instinct of "maybe this isn't the best idea" doesn't cut in as much. Even better, in skydiving once you hit ~50 mph (terminal velocity is 120 mph when you're on your tummy) the wind resistance makes you feel like you have some weight, meaning after about a second you don't even feel like you're falling. You're just... floating, I guess, which was so great that I spent the entire time alternating between laughing and grinning like an idiot.

One cool thing I really liked about all this by the way is how we did some sort of backflip on the way out, meaning I spent the first few seconds watching the plane go away. Per my frame of reference, however, it felt like I wasn't moving, so I watched the plane go up and away at an odd angle all the while thinking "huh, that's mighty interesting!" And then I got even more excited, as it was by far the best demonstration of relative reference frames I have ever experienced and physics has destroyed any chance I have of thinking normal things even when falling out of an airplane at a hundred twenty miles an hour.
Falling. It was the most absolutely lovely sensation. In fact, he photographer spent some time towards the end trying to get me to do a thumbs up or some other gesture for photographic purposes, but honestly I was only vaguely wondering who the hell this guy was and what he wanted because I wasn't even bothering to pay attention to anything more than the moment. There's just too much to process... Now I'm told if you go skydiving again it's a lot easier to figure out what's going on the second time, but we're going to ignore that line of thought because my mom still has yet to progress beyond saying "I'm glad you survived."
Parachute deployed! This is a rather abrupt stop- taking you from 120 mph to a less splattering descent is guaranteed to be- and I was frankly amazed that it was over that quickly. I was told that free fall lasts about a minute, but it definitely seemed much shorter.

And here's something that I only remembered later, on the ground, while rethinking everything. Somewhere along the way, probably right before the instructor deployed the parachute, he shouted in my ear, "do aliens exist, yes or no? I'm not pulling until you answer!!!" Such wonderful senses of humor, those skydivers... And fyi no, I didn't answer, as a. I wasn't processing what he was saying, b. it's not like he would've heard an answer due to the wind, and c. I was too busy smiling and laughing at the awesomeness known as skydiving.
Gliding through the sky, ho-hum. Still very awesome though, it lasts maybe three or four minutes and I got to steer the parachute. Pretty simple, you have two ropes, and you pull the one on the right to go right and the one on the left to go left. If you pull one of them really, really hard you go into this nice looping spiral, which is similar to the scale of a looping decent on a tall roller coaster. The only problem I had with the parachute part is your weight is essentially held entirely in check by the straps on your legs, which isn't the most comfortable thing in the world but is obviously necessary and doesn't last long so we'll let it slide.
Coming in for landing on the landing field. Landing is so gentle that we ended up standing (slight winds and you might end up sitting instead) and you're unsteady for a second or two on your feet until you remember how to deal with real ground again.

So that is skydiving, or at least the best description I can possibly give of it. I must say explicitly though, in case it wasn't clear, that skydiving is wonderful and you all should most definitely go do it when you have the chance. Trust me on this. After all, you'd trust the astrophysics student who searches for aliens and goes skydiving on the weekends, wouldn't you?

Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair

2008-08-04T18:37:00.000-07:00

I'm sure most of you have had this cross your mind by this point, but there's a huge international city just an hour's drive north of me that I haven't written about. And it's probably high time I changed that, so without further ado...

Jill and I came back from the array last week very late on a Friday night- so late that the train back to Mountain View was really not feasible, so I ended up spending the night at her house in Berkeley. This worked out rather well, honestly, because I had to go through San Francisco anyway to get back to Mountain View. Even better, the Fisherman's Wharf Hostel had a bunk and breakfast for under $30 for Saturday night- quite a steal in a metropolis like this- so I nabbed it. And with that, I had a whole weekend in San Francisco.
First stop, cable car! I just happened to come out of the subway to find a cable car waiting with no tourists swarming around it, which I found fascinating in itself because the lines for the Fisherman's Warf- Union Square cable car often wrap around the block due to sheer tourist numbers. But as it turns out, cable cars in San Francisco are a lot less crowded on the other routes, and as an additional benefit this one ran all the way to Van Ness, the first street I needed to get to the hostel. Really not a difficult decision...

Also unlike the heavily touristed line, here there was plenty of room to either sit down or stand, but I was warned in advance that standing was more fun. And I agree with that...
Once I made it to the hostel, it was immediately obvious that it was the right decision to make. The Fisherman's Wharf Hostel is actually one of the more famous ones in the world with good reason- it's located in the park that stretches all the way from Fisherman's Wharf to the Golden Gate Bridge, specifically in an old barracks building of Fort Mason. And I mean, damn. The next time you stay in one of the biggest cities in the world in a gorgeous park with a view like this right outside the window and the rest of the city within walking distance, all for just a few dollars, let me know.
Now perhaps you noticed in the Golden Gate Bridge picture that there were a lot of sailboats. And there's actually good reason for that- I just happened to catch the Sailing Festival happening in the bay that weekend. The best part of it, though, were these two old vessels (shown while crossing in front of Alcatraz- whose touristic intrigue I never quite understood but whatever). When I first spotted them I thought they were just having a nice romp around the bay, but pretty soon some loud booming noises made me pay more attention. If you looked really closely you could see that one boat was flying a US flag and another the Jolly Roger- and there were wisps of smoke originating from the deck, meaning they were firing at each other. Sweet!

They carried out their mock battle for quite awhile, but I don't know who won. For whatever reason, I don't think they wanted to sink one of the ships.
After unwinding by watching the sailboats in the harbor, it was time for a walk. (Which is, it should be mentioned, what I did most of the weekend. Hills be dammed, I walked through most of the city of San Francisco.) After a quick jaunt to and away from Fisherman's Wharf to say I'd been I sort of walked with vague direction that happens when you know the geography of a city but are too lazy to have a map, admiring the views. This isn't the most advisable of methods, of course, because then you'll do something like walk up Lombard Street just because you'll think it's fun to walk down it.
The iconic view of Lombard Street, complete with the perpetual cloud of tourists taking pictures. Mind, I walked up the other, steeper side of the hill where the cars were backed up a fair bit just so they could come down this windy stretch- and it should be noted that here the cars park in the street perpendicularly to the curb rather than parallel, and EVERYONE'S wheels point into the curb. Anything less would be just plain silly.
A house on Lombard Street which I liked just because, well, look at how the guy's car is parked in the driveway. I'm pretty sure most places having your car parked on a tilt like that would result in some concern, but here the guy's just happy that he gets to get a great view in one of the prettiest cities in the world.

I've decided, by the way, that if I had a choice I would live on top of Lombard Street- the view can't be beat, and you would definitely always be in good shape. I might have to wait a little on that though, as even a tiny slip of a house here goes for millions of dollars.
What I happen to think is one of the best street names in the world. It was in Little Italy. I went there for dinner and happened to choose a place where they put a little free dish of little European vanilla-flavored tea cookies for desert. I consumed said little cookies in copious quantities as a child, so they did not go unappreciated.

After that it was getting dark, meaning time to head back to the hostel because wandering around in the dark in a strange city isn't the smartest of moves. I was fine with it though as spending the entire day walking does get you tired, and everyone knows it's fun to talk to fellow travelers in a hostel. (In case anyone is curious, it should be noted that the Germans were the dominant crowd I came across at least. I'm thinking they're fans of the current exchange rate.)

The next morning, after discovering with delight that the free breakfast included waffles, I poked my head outside. Definitely typical San Francisco weather, but not as nice as yesterday-
Guess the sailboats didn't mind, as they were still out, but fog doesn't exactly leave you brimming with an urge to sit and watch. And because the bus stop was nearby and I'd already walked most of the way the day prior, I caught the bus towards Union Square instead.
The bus, of course, went through Chinatown (which I hit up the evening prior but was a lot more vibrant in the morning), which bustles with markets on Sunday morning and has nary an English word in sight. I even noticed at one point that I was the only non-Chinese person sitting on the bus, which absolutely delighted me because it was like unexpectedly stumbling into another country.
Union Square, which had a free art exhibit going on that I thoroughly checked out. I'm pretty sure you're supposed to wander around Union Square to check out the shopping, but that activity was never my forte so after awhile I just wandered into a Thai restaurant for lunch and, later, a bookstore. After that, I wandered out to the CalTrain station to get back to Mountain View.

So all in all, I was rather happy with how this weekend turned out- it's difficult to not like San Francisco, of course, and dipping a toe in the international hosteling world again was fun. Plus it's always nice to find yourself in an unexpected mini-vacation over the weekend, even if you have to go to work the next day.

Lick Observatory

2008-08-04T17:56:00.000-07:00

The problem with having lots of adventures is then you have to catch up on them. Let's see how far I get...

My program takes little "field trips" on occasion to Interesting and Important places in the area, and a little while back there was an organized outing to visit Lick Observatory for a day trip. Lick happens to be the first astronomical observatory built on a mountaintop, Mount Hamilton, which happens to be visible from most of Silicon Valley, so it was cool to get up there. The fact that Frank Drake was taking us and the nerd bragging rights associated with saying Frank Drake took you to see Lick Observatory never hurt either.
Anyway, this is the view from the top of Mount Hamilton. See that road curving down the mountainside? That's the one we drove up on. I'm told there are 365 turns on it, as back in the day you couldn't have too steep a grade for mules and buggies. It's a fun drive.
This is the first building of Lick Observatory, constructed between 1876 and 1877. It and the ten telescopes on the mountain today are owned by the University of California system, but the money originally came from James Lick who made most of his fortune buying real estate during the California gold rush and essentially built the observatory as a memorial to himself. He's buried under the telescope...
And this, my friends, is the telescope James Lick is buried under, also known as the 36" refracting telescope which was the largest in the world at the time. (We've come a long way!) Upon first looking at this telescope I confess I felt like it was incredibly familiar to me- the mounting, the labeling for the RA and Dec wheels, the way I instinctively wanted to shout to the tour guide pushing the telescope around "you need to move it in RA in order to get over the pedestal..."

Then I saw a plaque on the base of the telescope which read "Warner & Swasey Co., Cleveland OH." But of course. It's the very same company that built the 9.5" refracting telescope built over a hundred years ago and presently used by the students of Case Western Reserve University, meaning the telescope I've had the most experience with is just a small-scale version of the Lick Observatory telescope. There are even ship's wheels incorporated into the steering design, as Warner & Swasey is the only telescope-building company I am aware of that realized just how satisfying it is to steer telescopes via ship's wheel.
This is obviously a bit more modern a telescope- it's the 3m reflector! Now the reason this one is exciting, boys and girls, is because it is the very same instrument used by the world's best extrasolar planet-finding team, led by Geoffrey Marcy at UC-Berkeley. Forty-nine of the fifty first extrasolar planets were discovered here (which is a fancy way of saying Marcy's team didn't find the first- they didn't have enough computing power unfortunately to be the very first), and over 200 of the extrasolar planets. Truly a powerhouse...

It's also worth noting that in order to deal with the light pollution from Silicon Valley the telescope operates primarily towards the infrared part of the spectrum. Infrared parts of the spectrum are determined not by optical pollution but rather by your latitude- the closer you are to the equator the brighter the atmosphere is in infrared- and since Lick Observatory is relatively high in latitude for an astronomical observatory they have an advantage.
As a final thing, this has nothing to do with astronomy whatsoever but I still thought it was exciting. You know how California is known for earthquakes? Well I've always rather been fascinated by them- I confess my first reaction upon hearing of a big shake is "cool!" rather than "oh, those poor people"- and while I have yet to live out the goal of being in one I always thought I could settle temporarily for seeing a seismometer needle twitch as I was watching.

So this is the seismometer on top of Mount Hamilton, which obviously sees a lot more then one in Cleveland or Pittsburgh (where nothing happens, of course, but you're rather waiting to see a really big tremble from somewhere far away). And see that little bump in the picture recently created by the needle? I saw that happen!!!

I am such a geek. I know. It's awesome.

Physics Explained

2008-07-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

I'm at the Array right now, waiting for the last of the data to finish up so we can drive back tonight. Until then, I just wanted to share an entertaining list explaining physical theories as women. You know, like how Newtonian mechanics is like a high school girlfriend as she's your first encounter with physics and hence amazing...

For whatever reason, it reminds me of the time I went through and decided to write accurate descriptions of the physics undergraduate course catalog. Don't think I ever shared it here, so I'm hoping everyone will enjoy it as getting a post ready gives me something to do while waiting for the all-clear to head out.

Undergraduate Course Listing- Physics

Physics 101- Introductory Physics I

Required by all majors where people are required to think, such as engineering, math, astronomy, and of course physics. You will spend a lot of time learning elementary kinematics, a version of physics that has been disproved from being completely true but is nonetheless confusing enough on its own.
Prerequisites: Grade 12 mathematics

Physics 110- Physics for Pre-Meds
This is the course taken by all the people who are required to take a physics class for their major (biology, chemistry, etc.) but have nightmares over words like 'calculus' or 'integral.' This course also fills the 'charitable benefit to humankind' requirement for the department, as its curve ensures that no one completely stupid will ever get into medical school.
Prerequisites: Grade 8 mathematics

Physics 120- Physics for Poets
(cross-registered with 'Rocks for Jocks' and 'Computers for the Clueless')
This is a blatant attempt on behalf of the department to increase the number of enrolled students in physics. If all the other departments get to do it, why not us?
The professor currently listed is either someone looking for paid early retirement or someone not to be trusted with the actual physics majors. Topics include discerning between 'up' and 'down,' listing the colors in a rainbow in proper order, and a bunch of historical anecdotes that have nothing do with actual physics.
Corequisites: Firing neurons, a pulse

Physics 150: Introductory Physics II
This course is designed as the place where your dreams go to die: that's right, the weed-out course for everyone who survived the first semester of Introductory Physics! We will be covering the topic of electromagnetism, which requires intimate knowledge of the vector calculus you're not learning until next semester.
Prerequisites: Physics 101

Physics 200: Modern Physics
We will introduce and explore the revolutionary ideas and experiments during the last hundred years without explaining any of the maths which would allow you to do something with this knowledge. This is kind of nice for the professor who has a smoke-screen to hide behind whenever he's not entirely certain of what's going on but doesn't want to admit to it.
Prerequisites: Acceptance that everything you learned in Physics 101 is not really true

Physics 300: Mechanics
On the first day of class, the professor will ask anyone expecting to learn about car maintenance to leave, which will thin the crowd down to approximately ten people. Those ten students will then proceed to learn enough about missile trajectory to take over the universe.
Prerequisites: Physics 101

Physics 310: Thermodynamics and Sadistical Mechanics
Have you ever looked at the nothingness in the room and found yourself thinking 'gee, I wonder what quantum and statistical mechanics have to say about the movements of 1,000,000,000,000 gas molecules in a confined space? And have a really crappy textbook which references future material during explanations of key issues?' Well look no further, because this is the course for you!
Prerequisites: Physics 101, Math 666

Physics 320: Quantum Mechanics
This is the class where we finally teach you everything we couldn't teach you properly in Physics 200 because you had no knowledge of linear algebra or partial differential equations. You still don't, but we think anyone who's made it this far should be able to absorb all that during the first week of the semester.
Prerequisites: Physics 200, any math class you can get

Physics 350: Senior Thesis
Despite your paid laboratory assistantship during summer months and the previous school year(s), we are going to start making you pay us for the privilege of doing so by making this a required class. In this way, we hope to sufficiently strap you for cash so as to simulate the graduate student lifestyle for those of you still idealistic enough to consider further education in physics.
Prerequisites: three years of undergraduate laboratory experience
Course fee: your soul

Rediscovering California

2008-07-21T21:13:00.001-07:00

Confession time: I have very mixed feelings when it comes to the topic of living in California. A lot of it has to do with being in Silicon Valley- most of it was built within the past 20 years, meaning it's incredibly generic so you could be anywhere, and you need to drive most everywhere, and I'm really not a fan of either point. I really don't think you will catch me going out of my way to live in Silicon Valley in the future.

On the other hand, the rest of California I get along with because it's some of the most gorgeous scenery to be found anywhere and some very unique towns and cities (read: not Silicon Valley). As a result, I've been spending the past few days restoring my faith in California, which involved heading to some great towns to the south of here. The first of these was Santa Cruz on Thursday afternoon- my roommate attends UC-Santa Cruz and had a few errands to attend to, so a few of us tagged along. I still have no idea where the roller coaster is located (the first thing everyone's asked), but I've learned a few important things. Like how, for example, when visiting UCSC, you need to watch where you're going-
That's right, tree protesters. UCSC is built on a hill overlooking the surrounding countryside (resulting in a view that makes one ponder why one went to school in Ohio exactly) and it's built on an old ranch purchased with agreements that you cannot build on over 30% of the land or have buildings taller than the trees. As a result the entire campus is gorgeous and it's like going to school in a giant forest- yielding many more "why Ohio?" ponderings from me- but they want to cut a few down around the science parking lot to build a new building and some people don't like this. As a result, they snuck into the trees a few months back and have stayed up there ever since.
The best shot of the tree protesters I got- if you look carefully, you can see their blue tarps covering their platform and their sign hung between the trees. I was advised to not get closer for a better picture, however, because there's a likely chance of them throwing stuff at you...

By the way, I also learned that these are professional tree protesters. Apparently mere amateurs are not good enough to protest in trees... Though I wonder now what kind of person ends up as a professional tree protester. Someone who really had a thing for tree houses as a kid perhaps?
A shot taken of me in a store in downtown Santa Cruz modeling a really colorful hat. I always wondered where hippies get their gear, and the answer is if you go to places like Santa Cruz there are whole stores devoted to the hippie "look" under the guise of being a store carrying stuff from all over the world or some such. This particular store was of that variety to an actually entertaining degree- they even had Maori jade necklaces right down to the same symbol I have, but my stone is obviously much prettier. I'm sure everyone in New Zealand will be happy to hear that they're hippies according to the stores in Santa Cruz.

Another note: the Santa Cruz bookstore is now close to the top of my list of favoritest bookstores ever, which is really saying something. One could probably devote a whole day there easily, and my roommate was telling me how whenever her dad comes to visit her going to the bookstore is always the first thing he wants to do. Not surprised, really...

But anyway, with that I will shift an hour's drive south on the coast to the town of Monterey, which I hit up this past weekend. Nice little spot though it was crawling with brumbling motorcycles (apparently there was a big race there this weekend) and the weather was a bit chilly and foggy as it is prone on the California coast. As is an indication to how perpetually sunny it always in my part of California, however, I actually loved the fact that it was cloudy all the time since it was different.

When going to Monterey there are a few things it is obligatory to check out, such as the world-famous aquarium and Cannery Row, but my favorite attraction hands-down were the sea lions. They (and the otters, though to a lesser degree) are quite ubiquitous in the water and on the shores around and they're really cool to watch-
A beach covered in sea lions. We only noticed them the second time walking this way, actually, since they almost looked like a bunch of rocks, but of course it's just a bunch of lazy sea lions. So cool, so cute...
My favorite sea lion, who can be seen in the water in the lower left of the previous shot. As it turns out, while sea lions are very agile in the water they really aren't on the land, meaning they move a little with their front flippers but mainly by wriggling their front bodies and slowly bouncing forward. This probably isn't the most fun thing to do and this guy was apparently too lazy to attempt it, as the tide was coming in but he was staying put. As a result, with every wave all he'd do is raise his tail up high so he wouldn't get completely wet, and continue on with his lounging. Silly lazy sea lions.

So in short, I rather like California but on a selective basis (which would make sense, as we're talking about a rather big region here). Will have to pick something new to explore for the rest of them I think... oooh, or I could go to the Santa Cruz Bookstore again...

Come on out, boy, it's WINDY!

2008-07-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

So the other day I came upon the realization that I need to be a little more aware of my surroundings sometimes. Why? Because I often seem to overlook things that are painfully obvious- for example, did you know that the very same base I've called home the past several weeks is also home to the world's largest wind tunnel?
I mean, you think I would've picked up on this. It's huge! To be fair though, I'd only ventured to this part of the base once before (it's in a gated research area) and I'd only been there once, ahem, late at night, when I wasn't on a mission to learn the trivia of the area. But there was a tour of said wind tunnel a few days ago advertised to all the science interns associated with NASA Ames, so it made sense to check it out.

By the way, it goes without saying that they still test some military stuff here so you aren't allowed in if you were a forgein national. But then this is a bit loose, as I saw a pack of German guys get let in and they had no problems with pictures getting posted on the Internet-
So this is what the world's largest wind tunnel looks like inside. How big? Well wind tunnels are referred to by their dimensions in the industry and this is the "80 by 120", meaning it's 80 feet by 120 feet (sorry I can't recollect how long). No word as to why the industry doesn't use metric.

A bit of perspective in this picture: it was taken from the very front near an air grate in the front, and there were two side vents where the air comes in from. As the end result here, the top wind speeds in the tunnel of 300 knots. In fact, when originally built the air flow heading out was hurling rocks and boulders towards a nearby gate, so they needed to change the design. They ended up just directing the air upwards- sure, a plane caught in the draft would immediately crash, but they can call up the FAA when doing a test so no worries (and this is also why, by the way, I live in a nationally restricted airspace!).
While we were visiting, the test set up to occur right after us was an important test for the next generation Mars rovers. Currently the method of choice to land on Mars involves a parachute landing (see video), and the place to do it is here. In fact, there was a great Nova episode awhile back on building the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity- they came to the 80x120 to test them, only to discover frightfully close to the launch window that they didn't work and would result in a rover smashed on the surface. Oops... luckily the mistake was figured out, and here's a picture of it deployed in the tunnel courtesy NASA-
This time around they showed up with plenty of time to spare and the first tests went off without a hitch from what I hear (launch is September 2009). One interesting detail though: whereby the Mars rovers were, say, a golf cart in area, the next Mars rovers are going to be the size of a minivan. Here's a picture just because I happen to have one-
To take into account the large mass, of course, you need a bigger parachute. The current parachute diameter is a whopping 60 feet across, meaning there's only ten feet of clearance on either side. Really not that much... and, of course, this means Mars missions after this one will need to think up a new landing method if we keep doing rovers. I'm pretty sure your method is deemed unmanageable when the world's largest wind tunnel can no longer accommodate your size.

As you can imagine, though, a lot of stuff has been tested here over the years. In fact, outside is a miniature park of old airplane models tested in the wind tunnel- a lot look like they were headed to the junk heap but no one could be bothered to take them, but this one caught my eye-
They tested the Space Shuttle here! Ok, to be fair this is a mere model of the Shuttle a third of the size and made of wood, but it's still pretty.

Anyway, I just wanted to share all this because it really was a pleasant surprise to find such a national treasure in my backyard, and it's always fun to have a connection to the NASA missions. You get loads more nerd bragging rights that way.

Invading New Zealand

2008-07-15T11:54:00.000-07:00

A lot of people lately have been asking me lately why this blog is called "The Chocolate Fish." Answer: they are a type of candy in New Zealand (chocolate covered in marshmallow, in fish shape), where I studied abroad from February-June 2007, and for which I originally started this blog. Proof that they exist-
But anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about today. No, what I wanted to talk about is how I heard today of a new campaign in Australia to forcibly annex the nation of New Zealand. It has gotten to the point where they are running TV ads to build support for the New Zealand invasion, such as this example-

Well, I'm sold! In case you're not yet, here's another ad from the initiative, and the full clip from the show that originated the idea. Cheers!

I Found the Higgs!

2008-07-10T18:04:00.000-07:00

Ok, it was actually my friend Alison who directed me towards The Particle Zoo, but I've decided to be nice and share it with you guys too-

I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or buy a cuddly dark matter particle for my friends who search for them.

One point I'm confused on though- how do they know what these particles look like anyway? Unlike plush microbes it's not like you have a clue, though props to the entrepreneurs for details like taking mass into account and giving the antiparticles faces on the opposite sides.

Bernie Falls

2008-07-01T00:26:00.000-07:00

One last set of pictures from the night before I turn in, this set from Bernie Falls. It was well over 90F last Friday, a hot enough temperature that gets most people thinking about swimming prospects, so as there was little else to do on late Friday afternoon a small handful of us headed over to the local state park for some swimming. We'd heard there was a waterfall, of course, but nothing prepared us for this beauty-
All in all, a 150ft waterfall cascading down a cliff with rivulets of water all around it. The secondary waterfalls came straight out of the ground, as they were essentially snowmelt (meaning the water temperature was about 45F). Here's the view from the bottom-

Getting to the bottom was also refreshing because it was about 20 degrees colder than it was at the top of the waterfall. Hooray for natural air conditioning!

Because our group was so enamored by this waterfall (which is one of the prettiest I've seen, and that means something from a girl who toured New Zealand), we ended up spending a lot of time here, primarily occupied by staring at the falls and trying to see how wet we dare get in the freezing water from the tiny side waterfalls. Here's a good example of them-
Basically, if you stood on the edge you could still get into the freezing stream and get your hair wet or whatever, but the water was just too cold for swimming. So we ended up going to the state park's lake for a more respectable venue, which was also cold but actually swimmable.

Friday was alas our last day up at Hat Creek, meaning we headed back here to Mountain View on Saturday. The most eventful thing on Saturday by far happened just a few hours back to here in a story I want to share now lest I forget it...

The setup: there were 19 people on this REU trip, so in order to get around we rented two 12 passenger vans for the week, one driven by Jill Tarter and the other driven by an older student. Jill was going a bit over the speed limit on the way back, which isn't a big deal in California until a cop notices you, which this one did... and he was not happy. When he came up to our van to talk things over, no one doubted for a second that she was going to get a ticket.

Then the cop went back to talk to the passengers in the second van and we waited. And waited. Upon looking back, we noticed that everyone in the second van was laughing, including the cop, and after a five minute discussion he came back all smiles and let us off with a warning. We were on a cell phone within moments of him leaving with the second van in an attempt to find out what had happened.

Apparently what happened was this- the cop had asked who our group was and where we were from, and the student driver told him we were from the SETI Institute. Upon hearing this the cop got really excited, even mentioning something about an acquaintance of his in Texas who had seen a UFO- something that made Jill visibly cringe in the telling. She needn't have, however, because the student driver had been quick to retort "oh, well we look for real aliens!" which was enough to send everyone bursting into laughter for what seemed an eternity.

So all in all, the cop let us go because we were SETI. I didn't realize this summer job had an element of celebrity when I started, but it's definitely given us a story to joke about for the rest of the summer!

Hiking in Lassen

2008-07-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Our second day in Lassen National Park promised to be longer and a bit more work than the first one, as we were spending it hiking through the backcountry to look at the more interesting geothermal areas in the park. Unfortunately backcountry means it's a bit more difficult to get to the start than what it usually takes, meaning we had to head out at 730am from Hat Creek. I remedied this early start by sleeping most of the way in the morning in the van, on the grounds that I was making up for the time I would've spent in bed anyway.
A sign that you see posted everywhere in Lassen (and I can't remember seeing in Yellowstone- they must use a different sign company). Basically the sign is imploring you to not be an idiot.
A look over an area we hiked to called Devil's Kitchen, filled with steam vents and geothermal activity. What was also impressive to me was how even the streams were dangerous- they'd have a pH of 3 (aka acidic) and be above 60C, meaning you tried your best not to step into them of course. Further, every stream would have its own range of microorganisms that called it home, which is arguably an even more impressive thing.
My favorite odd thing of the trip- a lake made entirely of battery acid! One of the biggest in the world! Yay! We hiked a loop around the lake (from safe distance) and what was particularly neat about the whole thing was just how alien the landscape looked. Nothing grew on the edge of the lake of course (though there are things that live in it) and the surface was all red from iron oxide rust, leading us to joke that we were on Mars. There was also a bit of boiling mud and steam vents on the edges of the lake and the lake itself was bubbling a more-or-less constant amount of carbon dioxide- we were assured it wasn't methane bubbling as the lake had never caught on fire before...
My shot of the documentary crew. This pair of guys were interesting because they basically followed us around for a week or, rather, followed my boss Jill around and we just happened to be there too. The documentary is supposed to follow projects that will take a very long time to complete, meaning SETI is in that category next to people like the guy who wants to build a vertical city in the Arizona desert.

I wasn't sure what to make of the documentary guys- on the one hand, they ran me over once or twice in an effort to get the perfect shot, but on the other hand I spent some time talking to the cameraman and it was really cool listening to all the projects he'd worked on over the years. Perhaps if they suddenly decide to give me tickets to their premier I'll cut them some slack.

And while I don't have pictures of the activity itself, it should be noted that we spent most of this day hiking (between 5 and 8 miles, depending on who you asked). This was really enjoyable to me, but there was a fair bit of volcanic ash around so you could end up nice and dirty regardless of original intentions. When I was taking off my hiking boots, for example, I noticed there was a thin but dark line of volcanic ash around my socks that was a pain to wash off later. So it goes.

In the Candystore (Mount Lassen)

2008-06-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

Lassen Volcanic National Park is just a few miles away from Hat Creek Radio Observatory, so it seemed inevitable that we would go explore it. I was also excited because Lassen was my third national park in the past month (the others being Badlands National Park and Yellowstone), which is an unprecedented record for me and one that has been great to follow through on.

Lassen's claim to fame, of course, is blowing its top about a century ago and being essentially Yellowstone National Park's little brother ever since in the sense that there's some decent amounts of geothermal activity still in the area. It's also a lovely spot with air quality typically used as the standard against which to measure the other national parks, but unfortunately the nearby wildfires meant we didn't get to see that part. It was still pretty though...

The clearest view of Mount Lassen I got all week, taken from the region known as "The Devastated Area," which was, well, completely destroyed by lahar the last time the volcano blew its top. As this was nearly a century ago, most of the area is now covered in a lovely pine forest, though there are still tall boulders liberally sprinkled throughout the forest which were carried down from the summit in the mudslide.

I will say though, one of the more entertaining things to me was not as much the geology itself but watching the geology students. This is because while I have a healthy respect for rocks and have taken geophysics I am not a rock person, nor had I seen a bunch of them out in the field. Letting them loose in Lassen, by contrast, was like watching a bunch of kids in a candy store, and there was much earnest examination of boulders and tiny magnifying lenses used to examine crystals and what not. I rather liked it just because it's always fun to watch people who are passionate about what they're doing, particularly when they're more than happy to talk your ear off so you might learn a thing or two you wouldn't otherwise.
Isn't this a cool plant? If I were filming a movie on an alien world I'd order a bunch and fill the set with them... Alas these guys have a bit more normal an origin, and are known as snow plants. They make their appearance in the late spring/early summer when the snow melts, and live off the resulting moisture. Some years the forest is said to be covered with them, but as it's a bit dry this year (obviously, or the fire issue wouldn't be an issue would it?) we have to make do with a few scattered throughout the forest.
Snow! Yay! The road we were on wound just above 9,000 feet, meaning there was still plenty of snow for snowball fights this time of year. This was also where the biologists took the place of the geologists in the "kids in a candystore" role, as there was snow algae growing on the snow. It makes the snow look red (despite paradoxically being known as green algae- not to be confused with later green-looking algae on the trip that was red algae), and is apparently not well understood because it's rather difficult to cultivate in a lab setting.
An obligatory shot of steam rising from an area known as the Sulfur Works. This particular feature was a boiling mud pot that was pretty neat, actually, both in its nature in itself and the fact that it was right next to the road. There was a nice sturdy fence to keep the tourists away from getting too close, but we were nonetheless right next to it for all intents and purposes so that was neat.
An obligatory "look, the national park is pretty!" picture. Taken exactly across the street from the bubbling mud pool, where the geologists and biologists had happily realized they were both in a candy store at the same time and were running occasionally intersecting discussions regarding the geophysics involved and the extremophiles. Hooray!

We ended the day by splitting up into two groups, one which would be camping in Lassen for two nights and another which would be heading back to the relative civilization of Hat Creek. I confess I was in the latter group- it had been a bit chilly the night I slept out in the telescope array field, and if I knew anything about altitudes it was that it would be even colder in the campground. Turns out I was right, so that was a good decision...

Hat Creek Week

2008-06-30T21:32:00.001-07:00

I'll come right out with it- I liked my week at Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO). This might have had something to do with the miniature fleet of observatory bicycles, the awesome milkshakes at the local place down the road... Or we could all just admit it was because of the pretty radio telescopes and wonderful company and get on with the pictures already.
This is the sunset from the first night at HCRO. All the sunsets were absolutely stunning while we were there but the reason wasn't so pretty- California is currently battling a bout of wildfires, and while there's nothing unusual in that what is unusual is the fact that the fires started so early in the summer. We spent most of the week following updates on the local fires, some of which were 10 miles away and would shut down the local roads, but luckily we lost nothing short of a few views.

So what you see in the above picture, by the way, is part of the 42 telescope array, which will be phased up to 360 telescopes once the kinks are worked out and the money flows in. It's pretty impressive stuff, but what's also impressive is what it takes to run this stuff in the control room to process the signals-
I offered various telescope operators five bucks to pull out random wires and replug them in the wrong places, but for some reason none of them would go for it.
A bunch of us students and Garrett, the telescope operator. Perhaps it's an indication of just how much there is to do in the area, but at night we'd have 'observing parties' in the control room and play with the Allen Telescope Array (you might have not been able to see stars some nights due to smoke, but for radio waves this luckily isn't a problem). Definitely cool stuff, though we could have done without the blizzard of various bugs that would inevitably find their way into the control room.

Anyway, I should move on from this because a lot happened this past week that I need to get to and I am spending the rest of my summer working on the Array. Continuing on...

At The Array (ATA!)

2008-06-23T19:29:00.000-07:00

All the REU students are at the Allen Telescope Array this week, but I can't pretend the view right now is like the one above. Why? Because there are currently about 800 wildfires in California, about 100 of them close enough to count as "local," and as we're in the valley there's a bit of haze and you can just barely make ou the mountains. They're perhaps a bit too close for comfort- the closest wildfire is about ten miles away and the road we took to come here yesterday is now closed. Everyone's crossing their fingers that we won't be forced to leave before the end of the week, but this isn't something you mess with obviously and everyone's been advised to keep their belongings close just in case we need to leave suddenly.

But there is one good effect- the wildfires made for a lovely sunset last night (pics later), and a bunch of us slept out last night under the stars in the Array field (to the left of the picture above). Lovely skies, even with some smoke, but a bit on the chilly side as it cools down quickly around here. Still, saying you slept in a radio telescope field has bragging rights that go with it, so I'm glad to have taken advantage of the opportunity.

Ok, more at some point later when I have things sorted out a little better. Cheers!

Crazy Times down on Costello Music

2008-06-19T17:30:00.000-07:00

Last night I decided that for better or worse I will never, ever be able to utter bad things about San Francisco. Why? Because within the past few days it has dawned on me that famous bands actually come to San Francisco at concerts one can actually go to. Specifically, I discovered by chance this past weekend that The Fratellis- a band I've mentioned here more than once- were going to be in town Wednesday (yesterday). In what was even more exciting, I found myself with a reasonably priced ticket to a sold-out concert surprisingly easily, so I got to go to their concert last night!

The concert was at The Fillmore which it turns out, in that way I end up in interesting places without realizing it beforehand, is a pretty famous concert venue. Back in the 1960s it was the focal point for the music side of counterculture- aka hippies- and everyone has played here. (Speaking of which, remember the hippie VW Bus in the movie Cars called Fillmore? I now know where his name comes from!) There are posters all over the walls of the bar areas and it's hard to think of a band name I didn't see from the past few decades I didn't see, from Jimi Hendrix and The Who to Matchbox 20 and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Here's an image off their site to give you an idea-
The Fratellis, of course, had their own poster for the night, and further it is tradition at The Fillmore everyone got one while leaving the venue (thus undoubtedly the primary decor in several Bay Area dorm rooms). Bit of a weird one though-
But anyway, the concert! It was absolutely fabulous of course- they just came out with a new CD this past week so lots of new tunes, but they had the sense to play their old hits as well so everyone was happy (they also have one of the most intense drummers I've ever heard- huge drum set, and his shirt was drenched through after just a few songs). Further, The Fratellis have music that has quite a bit of energy in it, meaning it's very, very easy to dance to, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who wasn't doing just that. I even did a few turns with a colorful San Franciscan or two, on the grounds that it's more fun that way and who knows when I'll have the chance to do it again, and it definitely ranked high up there in terms of concerts I've been to.
(Picture from The Fratellis website, as I didn't take my camera.)

I'd describe more, but suspect concerts are primarily exciting to go to and not to read about. Honestly, I suppose this post is an elaborate way of me saying I am quite enamored with San Francisco's music scene right now. After all, there are only so many cities in the world where you can show up one week and discover one of your favorite bands is playing there the next, and San Franciscans definitely have had enough experience in how to do good concerts. Must investigate this further...

All in a Day's Work

2008-06-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

So here is, in short, what I am doing this summer. I am going into the logbook for the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) and making a database for component failures- as in, when stuff goes wrong- and then hopefully seeing correlations in what goes wrong and how it can be prevented. This will be good because I get to learn a lot about database structure and the ATA benefits by getting a good framework for their still-developing structure.

This is what the ATA looks like, by the way. There are currently 42 telescopes but there will be ~400 when it's all said and done, which is a fancy way of saying whenever a check comes in to build the rest of it. (On that note, anyone want to build a radio telescope? Only costs $120k, which is a relative bargain in this field.) Anyway, picture:

Close-up on one of the dishes-
In actuality, though, my job gets pretty interesting. First of all my mentor is Jill Tarter, the director of the SETI Institute, inspiration for the Ellie Arroway character in Contact and all around fascinating woman, and jobs are always more fun when your boss has pictures of her posing with Jodie Foster in her office and stuff like that. Second, the first week I was too busy to write because I got to go visit places like Berkeley (the ATA is being built in conjunction with the Berkeley Astronomy Department) and the engineering company where the Array is being built.

The best day by far to this point, though, was the day I got to go to Hat Creek Radio Observatory in northern California where the ATA is located. It's a 5.5 hour drive away from here, but it turns out Jill's husband (who is also a radio astronomer, at Berkeley) has a plane, and Berkeley allows you to use grant money towards fuel costs. Turns out that way it only takes about 2 hours to get to the Array from the Palo Alto airport, as a fellow student and I (and two astronomers, but they already knew this) found out...
Picture of the little Cessna, which technically sits six people but it seems cramped enough with four if you ask me. A few people were asking me apprehensively about the bumpiness of small planes (and I confess I didn't eat much breakfast that morning, just in case), but the weather in California is remarkably stable at this time of year so this wasn't much of an issue. It was only bumpy once when going over a ridge, but I confess the slight turbulence right then was enough to make me realize why small planes seem to crash so often- in non-perfect weather, it must really suck.
Typical "this is what California looks like from the air" picture. (It's all yellow, of course, because it hasn't rained in months so these are the famous golden hills of California.) There are huge patches of farmland too, of course, but I know everyone's seen enough of those from airplanes and it's not too exciting, so let's move on.
San Francisco and the Golden Gate bridge from 10,000 feet (zoom in for a better look). The haze you see isn't haze at all of course, but rather the fog coming in for the night...

The fog is really impressive by the way, even if you wouldn't nessecarily think so. It doesn't get foggy down here, but when I went into the city last weekend on the train the fog was rolling over the mountains in such a dense, stealthy way that I would've guessed it was straight out of a horror movie if I didn't know any better.
When it flat-out doesn't rain for months, you inevitably get wildfires. This one was interesting because we hadn't seen it at all when flying up in the morning, but by the time we were flying back it was going full-steam and sending smoke thousands of feet into the air. Had to divert our course around it, actually...
An areal view of Lassen Volcanic National Park, easily viewable from the ground at the ATA. Most people don't realize this, but Mount Lassen was the second most recent volcano in the Cascades to erupt, in 1915 (the most recent, of course, being Mount St. Helens), in which it was described as having devastated the surrounding area. When I inquired at the Array site if this was indicative of a great place to build a multi-million dollar telescope array, this concerned was shrugged off. "It's either that or earthquakes" it was explained in a way only Californians can get away with.

I'd go on about Mount Lassen and the ATA, but excitingly I will be there next week again! The REU program does a weeklong field trip to Hat Creek/ Lassen for all the students every summer, which we're all very much looking forward to. Trust me, it's a gorgeous country up there, even if you never hear about it much for whatever reason.

Defined By Stuff

2008-06-16T11:06:00.001-07:00

I was going to write something about what exactly I'm doing in California, but in the interest of keeping things at least slightly exciting I will instead focus on all the things I currently keep in my pockets. This is because explaining what most of the stuff is doing there requires me to explain a few things anyway-

~ key ring and card holder- This is the one I carry around at uni, actually, but important because it has my bike lock key and SETI entry card inside it. NASA Ames research center, where I live, is a mile or so away from the SETI Institute, meaning we all got bikes for the summer because it doesn't rain here in the summer. (Really- it just doesn't, and hasn't since springtime.) My current bike is a cruiser- I couldn't help myself- except unlike my Cleveland one this is probably from the original generation of when all bikes were like cruisers. So it goes.

As for the entry card, beyond getting into the building this is important because the SETI Institute shares the building with Symantec on the second floor, aka the people who gave you Norton antivirus software. This means you need a special SETI card obviously, but the building has an odd layout so you're forever going from the "common" areas to the shared and back (even on simple things like going to the kitchen or to my boss' office). Alas, this is also problematic for a few of my fellow students who are busily trying to figure out how to pull a prank on Symantec, as apparently they're not total fans of their software...

~ key ring for room key- NASA Ames used to be in part Moffet Federal Airfield, an active military base until 1994, so the student housing (for several programs) is in the old army barracks. Think a cross between a hotel and a dorm really.

I rather like the base, by the way. First of all it has Hangar One, possibly one of the most iconic things in the greater area, there's a branch of Carnegie-Mellon University here for robotics to make me feel like I'm back in Pittsburgh, and word on the street says Mythbusters has filmed a decent number of shows here. Oh, and when I had to do my laundry last week it involved going through an abandoned barracks area to a bunker that had an asbestos warning on the door, a journey which at night reminds one of the set of a scary movie. ("They were there to discover alien life... but then the aliens found them!!!) Defintely a place with character.

~ NASA ID badge- I got one of these the first day to get on and off the base, and it has proven annoying for several reasons. First, it is slightly larger than a wallet size, meaning you can't fit it into anything. Second, you need to show it every time you need to get in. Third and most annoying, it doesn't count as a valid form of ID in itself, so you need to show a government-issued ID (aka driver's license) every time you enter as well, thus rendering this badge completely worthless. As I've already established when I forgot the special ID, you're allowed onto the base with just your driver's license, thus proving this is just a layer of bureaucracy someone likes to keep around (probably the guy who takes the crappy pictures).

~ Wallet- Important for the money that one goes through quickly in California, BART card (aka light rail/subway in the San Francisco area), and for the driver's license which is the actual important piece of identification.

~ Cell phone- I often "forget" my cell phone in my room back at Case because I am not a total fan of them (to the point of not really having one at all in New Zealand on study abroad), but that's not exactly an option here. This is because there has been quite a bit of travel already on the job, and calling people, and stuff like that, so cell phones are sorta important...

Of course, I realize I haven't described what exactly I'm doing yet, but that deserves its own post so I'll explain later.

So all in all, too many things to keep track of. See, I realized soon enough that my problem here is this is one or two objects to many for the "in pockets" category for me because I'm forever forgetting one or two things and spending a few minutes before work every day looking for the missing item. This is usually the NASA ID in which case I don't shed too many tears, but this morning it was the bike key/ SETI card, and that was a hassle to poke around for... Am working on increasing the efficiency of combining items still, so my goal is to know where everything is without a search within a few weeks.

And that, ladies and gents, is my brief description of the day-to-day in California. As promised earlier, I will give a description of work itself a little later.

Utah Salt Flats

2008-06-08T22:46:00.000-07:00

One last update before Road Trip USA is over...

We drove from Yellowstone to Salt Lake City on Friday afternoon (last week), admiring the potato fields and mountains, and set off Saturday across the lonely stretches of Utah and Nevada. Utah in particular was surprisingly fascinating, thanks to the Bonneville Salt Flats. They look, more or less, like this-
The reason this was exciting was because of the reflection you can see there. For a long while we weren't certain what the reflection was, exactly, but soon enough we realized it was a thin layer of water a few inches thick. Naturally we had to pull over and check it out...

For those who are wondering, the water was pretty warm and we washed our feet off afterwards as the water was really, really salty upon taste sampling. Oh, and the place we're standing is a few miles in front of the track where they set the world speed records every year. The water evaporates evenly, meaning the remaining salt is perfectly smooth for miles and miles around.
Another shot of the salt flat lakes. Really lovely.
As a last photo, here is a very odd sculpture spotted on the side of the road in the middle of the salt flats. Internet searching revealed it to be called Metaphor: The Tree of Utah, and is primarily interesting to me because it's the only landmark in the miles and miles of desolation.

After the Salt Flats there was nothing much except Nevada, which is more remoteness and not particularly exciting. We spent the night in Reno, Nevada, which is depressing in itself because I have had statistics drilled into me enough to find casinos silly and the people who throw away their money tragic...

Anyway, I've been on my SETI job for a few days now but have been super-duper busy so I'm behind. Don't worry, I'll catch up soon enough, but the long and short of it is this is the last post of Road Trip USA. And I must say, it really is fun to drive across America and see what it's like. This country varies an incredible amount, meaning there's always something new to see, and my family gets along pretty well so the company was good too!

Alrighty, it's getting late even here on the West Coast so I'll write about California later. Cheers!

Yellowstone Wildlife

2008-06-06T22:54:00.000-07:00

My absolute favorite thing about visiting Yellowstone is, hands down, the wildlife. First of all, it's so abundant- you can hardly go a few miles without seeing something you'd pay good money at a zoo to see- and second of all it's really exciting, and third of all it's just cool. If you don't think so, you're just jealous because you haven't gotten to the point in your life yet where you think "oh, another buffalo herd, not worth stopping for..."
First of all, a buffalo. The most prevalent in the park. I really like them because it's difficult to think of an animal more iconic of the American West than a buffalo, and they're everywhere, so this made me happy.
A baby buffalo, also affectionately known as a "red dog." These guys are born weighing 70-80 pounds, which sounds like a lot until you realize their dads weigh about one ton...
An elk. Also everywhere, particularly around Mammoth lodge where they're smart enough to graze on the well-mown grass. We also saw one with a beautiful set of horns, but no picture I'm afraid.
A white-tailed deer spotted on our hike. Now listen, I know these guys aren't too exotic- they've been tearing up my mom's garden longer than I can remember- but I'm keeping track of wildlife species seen alright? Alright.
A moose, cooling down in the water.
A beautiful shot of a butterfly who obligingly posed on our hike.
And last but not least, a black bear! Spotting these guys is a big deal in the park and we did it twice- once when he was waaaaay off in the distance so that you'd never notice if there wasn't a ranger and a crowd of people around to point out the black speck on the nearby hillside to you, and once when the cars slowed down on the side of the road and we discovered he was only a few yards away. (A sure hint of good wildlife in Yellowstone is an unexpected traffic jam.) This guy was pretty little and he was foraging on the side of the road, wondering what all the huge commotion was about but not at all deterred by it-
I loved him, not only because he was cute but because, well... ok, he was really cute. I'd so want one, if I didn't know they can kill people and all those messy details.

Also seen but not shown here, due to either lack of photograph or my ability-
~ ground squirrel
~ jackrabbit
~ bighorn sheep
~ lots and lots of birds
~ grizzly bear (Ok, this one is very suspect. However, the first afternoon we were in the park there were a bunch of cars parked with telescopes looking in a direction, and for a second while I looked in that direction it looked exactly like a grizzly bear. No one else saw this though, and I don't fully trust it myself, but still it would be cool to say I saw one!)

Yellowstone: Day 3

2008-06-06T22:33:00.000-07:00

What is wrong with this picture? If you responded "it is June 6th and it is friggin' snowing!!!" then you are absolutely correct. We woke up this morning to discover fresh snow on the ground (not to be confused with the piles of snow left over from prior falls that just hadn't melted) and more of the white stuff coming down fast. It turns out this is rare even for Yellowstone- it hasn't snowed here in June in six years- but it was nonetheless great. The only problem is I kept feeling like we were about to go skiing like my family is apt to do when traveling out West, except I kept recalling with disappointment that we wouldn't be doing that for a few months yet.

I will say though, the snow was a nice touch to the scenery. It saves me the trouble of coming back in wintertime to see what the park looks like then!

This is a shot of what most of the park looks like by the way. If you're old enough, remember the Yellowstone Fires of 1988? If not, it turns out over 60% of the park's forest was devastated that summer by wildfire, and in most places it shows. The forest is busy growing back, but the charred remains of the old trees still poke up to remind you of this chapter of history.
This odd scene was shot at Midway Geyser Basin, which is famous for the surreal hues the water and surrounding region get from the thermal vents (aka lots of minerals and extremeophile bacteria make the pretty colors). There are a few famous shots of this but alas that wasn't meant for me and my camera- too much steam!
My obligatory shot of Old Faithful, the world's most famous geyser. I'll come right out with it: Old Faithful is pretty overblown in the "famous tourist attractions" scene of things, particularly when you realize just how much other incredible stuff there is to see in the park. Don't get me wrong, it's kind of cool to see a bunch of water shooting up, but it looks suspiciously similar to any large public fountain you've seen in your lifetime. Yawn.

Ok, to make up for this, I'll do one more cool Yellowstone post before going to bed. Because it turns out what lives in Yellowstone, not what's at it, is the most exciting part of all...

Yellowstone: Day 2

2008-06-06T21:53:00.000-07:00

Yellowstone is, as my mom observed at one point, a true American park. The reason is there are roads in the park going to all the "major" attractions, so it really seems like most tourists just drive around, waddle a few hundred yards to see said attraction, then go back and drive on. We obviously couldn't be typical Americans, so chose a nice, long hike on Thursday to enjoy a bit of the park most people never see.

And trust me, it was great. We did a trail called the Beaver Ponds Loop which was, obviously, a several-mile loop around old beaver ponds. Except since this is Yellowstone, we kept running into views like this-

Ah, so lovely! (That's the "town" in Yellowstone called Mammoth in the valley.) Soon enough the trail started winding through a bunch of aspen groves, which were framed by the background views quite beautifully-
Another pretty shot, towards Mammoth Terraces-
Overall, I'd say that what was most surprising about the trail to me was how, well, Swiss the whole thing felt. I went to Switzerland once, when I was about eight years old, and what little I remember of hiking around there was strikingly similar to this corner of Yellowstone. No cows like there are everywhere in Switzerland, of course, but these comparisons only go so far...
Another pretty shot of the trail...
A shot of the old Gardiner trail, which is the old wagon trail used over a century ago when the park was first founded. It still winds all over the park, and it's frankly amazing to see some of the steep slopes the old wagons went over because they're so incredibly steep.
An obligatory beaver pond picture, as I said this was a trail to go past them at some point.
An obligatory wildflower picture. Why do I say obligatory? Because my mom loves flowers, so we stopped at every single new type of flower on the trail we saw to admire it. By my guesses there were ~15 types of wildflower (pretty impressive seeing as it was the equivalent of early spring at this altitude) including some lovely ones like lupines, columbines, and shooting stars... These ones here are balsamroots, pictured here because they are by far the most common wildflowers in Wyoming at this time of year and are quite lovely.
As a final bonus of the trek, after our hike we detoured to see the Mammoth Terraces in Yellowstone, formed by limestone deposits from the hotsprings. Apparently these change very rapidly in nature, meaning if you visit in a few years you will not find anything that looks like this picture, and I think that's kind of neat.

After this, of course, we were all sufficiently dead tired from all the walking. We had our best wildlife sightings of the entire trip afterwards, though, which I will detail later...

Yellowstone: Day 1

2008-06-06T21:27:00.000-07:00

Yellowstone National Park is one of those places where, upon reaching it, you immediately feel bad for having spent all those years of your life without visiting it earlier. It really is a wonderful place- sort of like New Zealand but with scenery a bit more large and wild, and buffalo wandering around instead of sheep. In short, totally awesome.

We spent most of Tuesday driving through Bighorn National Forest (which was stunning, but my camera was out of juice so it's for our memories alone) to Cody, Wyoming where we spent the night. I have visited Wyoming once before when we skied in Jackson Hole when I was in 9th grade or so, and always insisted Wyoming was my favorite skiing locale since and was happy to see the rest of the state lived up to it. Wyoming is just so lovely, so wild...

Anyway, before I wax poetic I will get to the pictures because I'm sure that's why most of you are here, so these are all from Wednesday-

This is the view over Yellowstone Lake from Steamboat Point, which is the highest altitude large lake in the USA. There are two things striking here to the average person- the steam rising up from a vent, and the ice on the lake in early June- but Yellowstone is an incredible sort of place whereby within a few days both of these seems totally normal. You'll see what I mean...
Patrick posing in front of the old-school tourist bus from the 1930s. You can actually do tours on these, which we did for a few hours the first afternoon to get our bearings, and they're pretty cute if I may say so.
A mud volcano. Apparently it irregularly explodes on occasion, which would be alarming until you realize Yellowstone is the world's largest caldera and might be overdue for an eruption that would throw ash over much of the American West, so it's all relative right?
The Lower Falls in the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. It's twice as tall as Niagara, impressively enough, but it's all the more impressive when you take a look at the rest of the canyon-
The view of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone in the other direction. The rocks are particularly incredible here: there is red from the rust, of course, but also yellow from all the wonderful-smelling sulfur from all the thermal activity in the park. All in all, a stunning sight!

Anyway, that night we had an interesting bit of adventure actually. It was the last (*sob*) night of the Stanley Cup finals which we obviously had to go watch because of the Pittsburgh Penguins, but televisions are understandably a bit difficult to come by. We ended up asking around (which was a touch embarrassing- "hi, we're amidst all this splendor, but can you tell us where we can find a TV?") and learned the one television in the park was in a place called Mammoth, an hours drive away. So we drove there for dinner, naturally, only to learn that they didn't get NBC in the Park (what?) but a helpful guy at the bar told us and the other Pittsburghers who had shown up by this point to head over to nearby Gardner, Montana just outside the park.

So let the record show, Montana is my 30th state or so, and my experience with the state consists of going to a lovely cowboy saloon called The Rusty Rail to watch a hockey game. It was nice, though, because even though the Penguins didn't do too well all the locals were incredibly cheering for our team, and there are good microbreweries in Montana, so I view the state with favorable light!

Mount Rushmore

2008-06-06T21:13:00.000-07:00

Visiting Mount Rushmore has got to be one of the most stereotypical American touristic things to do. I mention this because it's a bit of a drive to get to from, well, anywhere, but is nonetheless incredibly iconic. As once you're in Rapid City, South Dakota it makes sense to see if Mount Rushmore lives up to the hype, we drove out on a drizzly Tuesday morn to check it out for ourselves.

My impression: Mount Rushmore, unlike perhaps a few other stereotypical tourist haunts, is really kind of cool. First of all the sculptures are huge, and second of all the detail is done wonderfully (right down to the glint in the eyes), so it's very easy to admire for the work of art it is.
Here's a view from the loop trail because it's an angle of Mount Rushmore you usually don't see. The huge stone pile below the sculptures is actually from the extensive amount of blasting done to create the sculpture, which was done for the 150th anniversary of the United States (do the math!). About 90% of the work was done via blasting, incredibly enough, and the overall work was supposed to be much larger but the Feds cut the funds so we were left with what we see today. It happens...

Of course, Mount Rushmore was also noteworthy on this trip because it was here where our largest amount of drama occurred. After contemplatively admiring the mountainside, doing the little loop trail, and checking out the CNN cameras on site (this was the day of the South Dakota primary- aka the last Democratic primary, and my 4th state I've visited in recent months to have a primary!) my dad realized the keys to the car were no longer in his pocket. What?! There is a certain amount of anxiety that results when you realize you have lost the keys to the car somewhere within Mount Rushmore National Park, particularly when you are a bit stranded and it's an isolated spot to boot, so there was an understandable amount of worrying for a few minutes. Luckily however some Good Samaritan spotted the keys on the loop trail and turned them in to the Ranger Station after a few minutes so we were free to head on to Wyoming, forever doomed to make jokes about the car keys for the duration of the trip.

And this is good, by the way, because I think Wyoming is one of my favorite States in the Union. But I get ahead of myself...

Greetings From South Dakota!

2008-06-02T21:40:00.000-07:00

Today was a long driving day- over 700 miles- and most was not particularly photogenic so here are a few notes for the first bits:

Wisconsin- Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. It actually got kinda nice-looking by the end with little hills and pine forests and a sprinkling of obligatory cows.

Minnesota- Drived through nonstop with an exception to buy gas, and pretty much only farmland except for the brief excitement of the bluffs surrounding the Mississippi River right at the border with Wisconsin. This continued on for several hundred miles, with the farmland punctuated by trees only around houses and other buildings. It should also be noted that Minnesota has the most cruddy roads of any state thus far, perhaps giving Pennsylvania a run for its money...

South Dakota- It was rather interesting to cross the border into here because firstly the speed limit is an excitingly speedy 75mph and secondly a huge crop of billboards sprung up on the roadside to mix things up a bit (I suppose the law is different here). The billboards would advertise attractions several hundred miles away (~400 in the case of Wall Drug) and were the only thing left once SD turned from the polite farms/ some trees of Minnesota to arid grassland. What started off as novel became annoying rather quickly, so around mile 400 I would've refused to stop in Wall on principle for all those stupid signs. Take that, persuasive advertising!

But anyway, there were two interesting things in South Dakota, and the first happened at a gas station. I looked into the neighboring field (bordered by the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site for an odd bit of historical perspective) and what should be there but a prairie dog colony-
They were rather cute, but ducked under the second you got close, with the exception of one who would keep watch and yell at you until you left. This culminated about two minutes after the gas station, however, because of a roadside attraction we just had to have a picture with-
You're just jealous because you never got to pose with a giant prairie dog in the Middle of Nowhere, South Dakota. And because your Facebook profile picture is nowhere near as cool as mine now...

Also, if you squint, the thing between me and Patrick on the ground is Wally the (stuffed animal) Wombat. I'm not sure if I can completely explain his presence on this trip except to say he's Patrick's and is our unofficial mascot of the trip.

Anyway, just a few miles down the road the land abruptly shifted and we found ourselves inside Badlands National Park!
This was just a quick drive-through of the park, which was unfortunate as it is a spectacular spot. The Badlands started forming half a million years ago or so when the prairie rock started eroding from the river, and the formations still erode an inch a year on average. I realized one problem I had with the Badlands pretty quickly though- I happened to choose a brown shirt to wear today, making me naturally camouflaged and not at my photogenic best.
More Badlands, this view from Pinnacles Overlook. So lovely...
These are bighorn sheep, and there are ~100 of them in the park. They were also nice enough to graze at one of the roadside overlooks and later scurried over the peaks very deftly, which was neat to watch.
So here's my last South Dakota story for the day as once we got into Rapid City we sat down to watch the awesome Pens-Red Wings game of course... It turned out the last leg of our drive took us through the edge of some very dark, threatening clouds that were incredibly low- the sort which you instinctively scan the sky for tornadoes for even if you've never seen one. I still haven't (alas?), but per the local news I happened to catch a twister was spotted in western South Dakota. Scanning the skies for tornadoes was not one aspect of prairie life I was planning on experiencing on this trip, but there you are.

Alright that's it for now- tomorrow we will see Mount Rushmore, then head west until Cody, Wyoming deep in cowboy country. Talk to you all later.

Go Cubs Go!

2008-06-01T22:55:00.000-07:00

When it was decided that our first stop on our roadtrip was going to be Chicago, Patrick immediately suggested we attend a game at Wrigley Field. For the non-baseball people out there, Wrigley Field is home of the Chicago Cubs and was first opened in 1914. So we went to the Sunday afternoon game against the Colorado Rockies, and I'm honestly glad we did because it was a cool place.
This was the view from our nosebleed seats, which I actually enjoyed a lot because you could see the whole park. Unlike in Pittsburgh, where the poor Pirates really aren't good enough to have people pay much attention, the venue was sold out and filled with rabid Cubs fans. It was great. The fact that the Cubs won 5-3 didn't hurt either.

Here's another view of the field, from a sunnier spot since it was actually a little chilly at times in the shade-
Really, a great field. I got a total kick out of the scoreboard too-
Now the reason I liked the scoreboard so much, see, is because it's obviously an old-fashioned one, and this means someone physically has to change the numbers to update the standings. This means there's a guy who lives in the scoreboard during the game, looking out through a little window at the action, and updates as needed.

So I suppose it's not as much the scoreboard I like as much as the guy who lives inside the scoreboard. He fascinates me. If were a huge Cubs fan I am certain it would be my life's goal to have his job.
As a last shot, this is my favorite thing about the venue, though it's not part of the stadium itself- the rooftop seating! Wrigley Field is so small and old that the surrounding houses can see in, meaning the local establishments put in more bleachers. They're so neat. Next time I am in town and want to go to a game I definitely want a spot across the street.

Ok, that's it for now because it is late and tomorrow we must continue driving across the rest of Wisconsin, all of Minnesota, and most of South Dakota to boot (the middle's boring). Cheers!

Stop 1: Chicago

2008-06-01T22:16:00.000-07:00

Greetings from, hmmm where are we... Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. There's really nothing much here beyond the place we're spending the night, so how about I talk about our two days in Chicago instead-

We got into Chicago Friday evening, just enough time to grab some food and wander around, and then Saturday morn our first stop was the Chicago Institute of Art (aka the world-famous art museum). When I was in Chicago a few weeks ago the line for the art museum stretched around the block so I didn't get to go inside, but this weekend that wasn't a problem so we got to admire the artwork-
This is, I swear, the only Ferris Bueller picture that will be displayed here, though not for lack of any other homages we did to the movie. Anyway...
So one of the things I was looking forward to most in Chicago was meeting up for a few hours with my friend Lauren. Lauren is my alter ego in many ways- we're both physics majors and history minors, for example- and we've known each other for several years. The trick here, though, is we still talk to each other several times a week online despite the fact that we have always lived several hundred miles apart and have only met a small handful of times in the flesh (the first of these was during astronomy camp), but we still manage to meet up for a few hours every few years just to sort of prove something or another. Lauren (and her boyfriend Lane) happens to be working at Argonne National Labs this summer so we hung out for the afternoon for the first time in three years, and it was good.

This picture shows, from right to left, me, my brother Patrick, Lauren, and Lane, standing in front of "The Bean" at Millenium Park. The Bean is a large reflective metal surface that is surprisingly impressive really, particularly if you stand under it-
The view from under The Bean. If you zoom in, can you find the image of the person holding the camera straight up? (Honestly, I haven't tried to find myself yet, so if you do let me know.)
The apartment building near Millennium Park which, if you ask geeky enough people, looks like a computer chip.
The concert venue at the Park, which I was very impressed with as the entire top is covered with a speaker system. It goes without saying that the thing was designed by Frank Gehry, of course.

Anyway, after Lar and I caught up for a few hours and bid goodbye for another few years (really, we have a wonderful but odd friendship), my family headed to the top of the Hancock Tower for dinner. I'd been to the top of the Hancock Tower before, when my friends and I snuck up there for a free view, but going on a trip with your parents has the advantage of a nice dinners-
Plus unlike before I could enjoy the view at leisure, which I was all too happy to do of course...
See, I have decided that when it's all said and done and we look at what the United States has given the rest of the world, skyscrapers will make that list (after the idea of democracy, but before how it often works in practice). And if you want to study skyscrapers, Chicago has got to be the best place I've ever been to do it because there are so many in such variety and- here's something you don't see in a place like New York City- they all stand well by themselves and you can look at each individually. It really is wonderful.
Another shot from the Hancock Tower, except I rather like this one because of that teeny tiny tower you can barely make out on the bottom. That is the Chicago Water Tower from ~350m up, which was the tallest building in the city after the Great Chicago Fire that burned down most of the city in 1871. So odd to put things in that perspective...
The Water Tower from below, as it really is a lovely building.

Anyway, after dinner we did such important things like watch the Pittsburgh Penguins lose Game 4 in the Stanley Cup (not looking good for us, unfortunately...) and the morning after was spent at the Field Museum, which will be skipped in the interest of time and the fact that I've already covered it extensively once. Plus honestly, the highlight of today was what happened in the afternoon at the ballgame...

Manifest Destiny

2008-05-29T21:01:00.000-07:00

What happens when you wander in to the local AAA office and say "I'm doing a trip to Chicago, Rapid City, Yellowstone, and San Francisco, got anything to help me out?" Answer- you leave with a bagful of this stuff. I like the one on the top the best: it's a little booklet detailing every single direction we need to take, complete with individual maps and information about which stretches are most scenic.

I'm totally excited about starting tomorrow and should probably work on packing, but have one final thought I'd like to share. Last night, while reading through a few old favorite books from when I was a kid, I realized when they didn't involve tesseracts or Tripods or they were inevitably historical fiction. (You know those American Girl dolls? I had one, but freely admit I chose the one I did because I wanted the books, to the great consternation of my sister who accused me of "abandoning" the doll.) And in all those books people are inevitably homesteading or braving the Oregon Trail or having run-ins with the local Indian tribe- also known as things much more exciting than my childhood in suburban Pittsburgh- and if Little House on the Prairie taught me anything it's that going West is one of those things all Americans should do at some point. And while I might be over a century late, the sentiment is still there.

Call my feelings a sense of adventure combined with a grandly misplaced case of Manifest Destiny. This is gonna be great.

A Few Links

2008-05-27T20:28:00.000-07:00

Got the wisdom teeth out today- was knocked out at 8am, have vauge recollections of going out to the car/into bed at some point after, and slept until 1pm. Spent the rest of the day taking it easy and with pain that was manegable with only two Advils, though to be honest the back of my jaw had ached for awhile now so perhaps being used to it helps. But hey, not complaining...

Until the cross-country stuff starts coming in in a few short days, here are a few links for the procrastinators out there. First, here is one to The Fratellis' newest single, Mistress Mabel. I've loved them ever since New Zealand where I first heard them, and their new CD is coming out next week so you should look into it.

And, because it is late, I just finished watching The Colbert Report and Brian Greene was just on to promote the World Science Festival in New York City next week (and have Colbert make fun of string theory and discuss the Large Hadron Collider), which is the sort of event that makes you wish your road trip went in the opposite direction. I'd link to the specific video but it's not up on the official site just yet, but heartily encourage you to wander over and check it out.

Road Trip USA

2008-05-23T07:55:00.001-07:00

A week from today my family and I are going to do something very few people who live in the United States ever do- namely, drive across it. It's sort of unthinkable to be in California without a car and an awful lot of interesting spots in the 2,000+ miles between here and there, so a combination of these two means we should devote a few days doing the drive justice.

So for the next few weeks, here's what my schedule looks like:

Tuesday, May 27- get wisdom teeth extracted (turns out mine are coming in sideways or something... whimper)
Thursday/Friday- drive to Chicago (7.5 hours)
Saturday- Chicago
Sunday, June 1- leave Chicago, begin ~13 hour drive to Rapid City, South Dakota
Monday- arrive in Rapid City, go see Badlands/ Mount Rushmore
Tuesday- go see whichever wasn't seen the day prior, drive to Yellowstone National Park
Wednesday- Yellowstone NP
Thursday- Yellowstone NP
Friday- drive to Salt Lake City, Utah
Saturday- drive across Nevada and such
Sunday, June 8- arrive at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, where I'll be living this summer, sometime in the afternoon
Monday- begin work at the SETI Institute
Wednesday- family flies back to Pittsburgh

Of course, this is all subject to change except for the "start work" dates, but it gives you the rough idea of where we'll be and, hopefully, what sort of cool pictures will be arriving at this blog soon now that it's a travelogue again. If anyone has any suggestions or tips regarding these places or something we're fools to miss let me know.

Gaudeamus Igitur

2008-05-20T17:55:00.001-07:00

My mom likes to joke that me and my twin brother, Patrick, were always good because even when we were babies we knew not to start walking at the same time. This grace carries on because I obviously didn't graduate last Sunday with the rest of my classmates (though I hear I was mentioned by the university president in her speech for my science journalism!), so there was nothing stopping the family from going down to Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina for the weekend graduation ceremony.

First and foremost, a picture of the smiling graduate-
My brother, who graduated with a Finance B.S. and will go off to work at a bank giving loans to small businesses in a few weeks. Needless to say, I'm very proud of him!
A nice shot of Wait Chapel on the campus of Wake Forest University. It must be said that all of WFU is wonderfully lovely and feels like it's planned out because it is: RJ Reynolds, the tobacco magnate, donated land from his plantation to the university so they built a new one in the 1950s and moved. I always joke that it's the university tobacco built and they are still incredibly smoker-friendly when compared to my own university where the smokers are banned from all but five spots on campus...
Me in the Reynolds garden which was rather lovely, all dolled up because that's what one naturally does at a graduation. These are all the pictures I'm going to post from this as graduations are rather non-exciting for all but a select few involved (namely, I think, the graduate and his/her parents), but that doesn't stop one from giving lavish congratulations of course. I figure anyone really interested can go check out the Facebook album I just created anyway.

Packing Up

2008-05-16T11:07:00.001-07:00

Whenever someone visits my room for the first time (or even a second, or third...) they immediately become distracted by my wall decorations. This is because every decent-sized surface is covered by an odd collection of maps and postcards-
The reason the US and World maps are interesting is because I use them to mark my Ham radio contacts. It's a hobby of mine that it turns out I'm very good at (if you're ever bored, check what comes up under "Ham radio operator" on Wikipedia), meaning throughout college I have affixed several hundred little star stickers for the various stations I've contacted throughout the world. The US one is particularly impressive, I think, because it's gotten to the point where the various geographical centers of the country are strikingly notable.
The world map, not as filled because further away radio contact is a touch more difficult. The station I use on campus is pretty good though if the markers in southern Africa aren't a tipoff... I didn't take a picture of the rest of the map though, because I haven't made contacts in the regions not shown. I think this has less to do with the capabilities of the station than the fact that I have never have a desire to wake up during the prime operating hours for Asia/Oceania (their evening, which is early morning for us).
I told you the postcards are cool- this wall is covered with about 200 of them from all seven continents. I get then from a few sources, mainly Postcrossing, radio, picking them up myself, or bugging friends...
A close-up of the postcard wall. This one was in our common room this year and my suitemates and I had a bit of a party sticking them up... I finally took them down last night, and it really was sad. There's nothing like taking down several hundred postcards to make you realize you're moving on from your home to a totally new one.

So now I've moved away from Cleveland for the summer, the bad news of which is I had to say goodbye to all my graduating friends but the good news of which is this blog will start up as a travelogue again. I'm in Pittsburgh now, but within hours will be on the road to my brother's college graduation in North Carolina for a few days. And in just a few short weeks I will be driving across the United States to my summer job in California- an adventure I am truly looking forward to, and will undoubtedly be a great source of postcards for next year's display. Stay tuned!

Dear Professor

2008-05-09T17:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the awards ceremony and dinner for the senior undergraduate physics majors, and while I'm not graduating until December I went as this is my class and all that. As part of the ceremonies all us students had to read a cute poem from the compilation Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum? by Nin Andrews, which are assembled from emails students wrote to a physics professor. They were all great, but I saw one I immediately knew I needed to read-

Dear Professor,
I heard the Brian Greene talk
on string theory. He even showed pictures
of these stringy things.
Like vibes. That explains everything.
And I had really good vibes about Brian Greene.
Do you know if he's single?

Another one I quite related with in the book, while we're at it:

When I was in your office
and you showed me the problem
about the weight lifter and the dumbbells,
I kept smiling and saying yes,
but I didn't really understand a word you were saying.
I tried, but it's like you were speaking
a different language.
I think new professors do that.
They get lost in translation.
So I thought maybe I should tell you
that when a student smiles and nods and says yes
a lot,
what she really means is she has no idea
what you're talking about.

It should also be noted, here at the bottom so I can be discreet, that there were politics afoot recently in that it turned out several professors wanted to nominate me for one of the departmental awards, but the university refused on the grounds that I'm not yet graduating. They decided this would be "no fun," so the powers that be created a one-time-only award for me, for my "exemplary services to the department of physics."

I was so overwhelmed by this gesture of kindness that I nearly cried. This department will be hard to leave.

Thought for the Day

2008-05-09T16:30:00.000-07:00

"You know, there's probably a better plan for getting into graduate school than deciding while in Middle Earth that you need to get your academic act together, come back and start getting more or less straight As, thus landing you on the dean's list repeatedly. But honestly now, doesn't this make a better story?"

(My experiment to turn things around is working. Take that, bitches.)

My Talk

2008-04-30T10:00:00.001-07:00

Me giving my first "real" physics talk to a room of about 20 physicists (aka my senior project presentation). It was well-recieved, which is always good, and I've discovered that I have a tendancy to crack jokes when nervous. I'm certain this surprises absolutely no one...

Be back in this space when exams are done. Cheers!

My Modest Proposal

2008-04-24T21:17:00.000-07:00

Today is the last publication of the year for The Observer, meaning I am out of a writing job for about four months. I am sure this will be a very sad thing once I'm done with my finals and have time to reflect on it, but that's a week and some days off just yet.

So as my last hurrah of the year, I wrote a piece titled "A Modest Proposal for a New Alma Mater." The modest proposal bit is, of course, a tip of the hat to Jonathan Swift and an indication that it shouldn't be taken too seriously, but it turns out the adviser to The Observer is uncultured and didn't get that. There was some arguing over a certian stanza- I'm sure you can guess which one- but once I reminded my editor it's the last issue so she doesn't have to worry about printing letters anymore we ran it as is. Hooray! Column in full-

One thing I never quite understood about commencement at any institution is the singing of the alma mater. The alma mater is, of course, the official school anthem which you might have heard once four years ago during orientation, except you don't remember it because you were too busy checking out new classmates to see if any were cute. In hindsight, you feel kind of silly that you fell for that blockhead idiot whereas it might have been avoided had you paid attention to the alma mater in the first place, so during convocation you will try your best to sing along from the sheet to cover up this prior transgression.

Let's all admit it together: it's a farce. No student knows the words or the tune to this song, and there's no reason for our relatives to magically know them either. (In fact, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't know the CWRU alma mater is Shine On, Case Western Reserve, written by a student who graduated in the early 1990s, unless I told you.) So why do the organizers of convocation feel obliged to put it in the program each year? You're not going to suddenly start feeling nostalgic for your time at university thanks to a song you never heard while attending. It strikes me very much as one of those traditions in convocation we have because it feels like we should have because all the other universities do, even if our alma mater was written fairly recently and no one knows the words or tune.

Personally, if this were up to me we would sing a song – I'm the sort always looking for a socially acceptable excuse to sing in public – but the song would be revamped. Something to properly evoke nostalgia for my college years, which would go something like this:

Dear Case Western Reserve, that great fountain of knowledge,
Where we hung out and did our four years of college,
Our time would be incomplete unless we do acknowledge
The things that shaped us to who we are today.

There were those humid stifling nights and horrid winter squalls,
The doors that locked behind you in the residence halls,
And there were those obligatory late night homework calls
To see if anyone knew how to do number three…

There were the sporting events that we never attended,
The pranks which, in hindsight, should have got us suspended,
And those labs which dragged on and never ended
But were pretty damn sweet nonetheless.

And of course the friendships forged which were truly incredible
While pondering if Leutner's food was actually edible,
How the "Macarena" in the jukebox was truly regrettable,
And cool, they have brownies today!

And there was the guy over 21 who bought us our liquor,
And those shots we took down quick, and then quicker,
To that subsequent morning where we couldn't feel sicker,
(Because hey, this was college after all…)

Soon we'll scatter, each toward a separate vocation,
But fear not: regardless of your means or location
You'll soon get letters asking for an alumnus donation
To our dear school, Case Western Reserve!

Anyone who finds him or herself singing the above words at convocation will receive my utmost respect and adoration, if not necessarily a diploma. Either way, thanks for a great year everybody! It's been fun, it's been grand, and we'll see you next fall.

Garfield Minus Garfield

2008-04-23T18:54:00.000-07:00

I came across a website today called Garfield Minus Garfield. Basically some insightful soul went through a bunch of old Garfield comics and deleted Garfield himself from all the scenes, thus leaving Jon as the only one to carry the show. As someone who is deeply saddened that Garfield went downhill in recent years (and I checked the older collections- it's not just me growing up, they were funnier), it was good to laugh at a few strips even if they were sort of missing the main guy in the show.

(By the way, I am vaguely aware that in recent years Jon and Liz are now dating and, yes, this means Jon actually has a girlfriend. What?)

(Second comic courtesy xkcd, of course.)

On Star Trek

2008-04-22T17:06:00.000-07:00

The semester is winding down, and I devoted my second to last column of the year to Star Trek, and how I've never seen it. In my particular line of study this stands out as a rather odd state of things, you see, and I've gotten quite a few interesting reactions!

I hate the headline though- I forgot to make one up again so one was made for me. Even if I learn nothing else from writing Quarked this year it should be that you should always take a second to think up a good headline, as there's no reason for the layout editor to be clever in your stead.

My First PR Shot

2008-04-13T17:47:00.000-07:00

Remember how I went to Boston several weeks ago to the AAAS conference because I won that snazzy science journalism award? Well when that happened the chair of my physics department decided to tip off the university public relations people in charge of writing press releases and what not for around here, and they came and interviewed me and took a few shots of me standing by the setup of the Michelson-Morley Experiment in the basement of the physics department (my favorite of which is on the left, though they chose another for the article itself). Then for about two months nothing happened as the university has a several month backlog on press releases, so I'd forgotten about the whole thing.

Then last Thursday while I was taking a break from my GRE Physics exam studying (I took it on Saturday) someone in the hall told me "hey, saw you in the Case Daily!" The Case Daily is the university's email newsletter where they print various articles regarding what's going on on campus, the university in the news, and, of course, the latest batch of press releases. I go to check it out, and promptly laughed upon reading the first line. The main headline for the day was "Now reporting from the American Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting in Boston... senior Yvette Cendes," and the article begins as follows:

Case Western Reserve University physicist Lawrence Krauss—a writer of popular science books—may have some future competition for the bestsellers' list. Recently the National Science Writers Association (NASW) chose senior physics major Yvette Cendes as one of 10 undergraduates to participate in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston...

Full text of the article can be found here. Or you can go to the main website of CWRU, aka www.case.edu, and click on the link there as my name's on the main page, which is neat.

So now I have PR shots, which will surely come in handy when I need something for the dust jacket of all those bestsellers I'm apparently going to write soon.

Oh, and because I forgot to mention it then, this is actually my second PR thing as of late. The first was me being one of the March staff members of the month for the Journal of Young Investigators- quite nice of them seeing as I hardly ever find time to write for them anymore- and you can see that press release here. And before I forget something else, my picture is also in the March issue of QST, the largest Ham radio magazine in circulation, because a picture of me doing ham radio is in their files and they like to pull it up periodically for random articles...

Alright, this will end now because while it's always nice to have your accomplishments noted the limelight gets embarrassing. That and your thesaurus starts running out of different things to say when every conversation with passing acquaintances you have is on the lines of "hey, I saw you in the Case Daily..."

All The News That's Fit to Print

2008-04-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

A few people who know me know that I often like to set things in motion that end up being a big deal even though I am no longer associated with it. Usually I keep these end results to myself because I tend to think I'm more important than I really am, but when The New York Times gets involved I feel like perhaps it merits a mention.

These past few weeks, see, we've been having a few letters and guest columns that appeared as the result of my column a few weeks ago about women in science. This was written well over a month ago, but it has sparked the longest running dialogue this year in our campus newspaper's editorial pages, including a letter from the dean, a guest column, a letter saying this was an overreaction, and yet another letter from the women's studies center saying it wasn't. The guest column was particularly noteworthy- it was written as a secondary response to my original piece, and detailed an incident in the writer's engineering class where a lecturer showed an image of a topless woman when discussing a new advertising technique.

I won't go into details about the classroom incident because the actual seriousness varies depending on who you ask. (Though I am no longer on speaking terms with the physics major who told me it was an overreaction by stating "It was silly for that girl [who wrote the column] to be upset. She's not attractive at all so no one's looking at her like she's a piece of meat anyway.") Further, this extended dialog happens quite often in university newspapers- it's one of their charms honestly- and when done right the person who had the first say fades out pretty early on. My name stopped getting mention in the third week or so, which I was perfectly okay with to be honest because I have enough else to do than get heavily involved. Only a very narcissistic person would think their initial column should be the focal point several weeks into the future anyway, as this implies your work was too weak to allow the debate to evolve beyond it to the issues themselves.

Then, of course, The New York Times showed up and decided to do an article about the advertising technique from the engineering class, which is a rather silly effort to place bar codes around campus. Because the human element is always nice, sure enough our dialogue and the sexist incident in particular worked its way in there. (And they quoted my friend, the lovely news editor and physics major Ms. Alison Dietz. Yay!) As I've already said, how much this has something to do with me is arguable, as this was not the primary focus of the article, but it amuses me nonetheless that a newspaper of international repute has reported on our campus exchange. A columnist above all likes to get people talking, and I think it's fair to say that I've achieved that.

And as a final postscript to those interested, I have now learned more about sexism at my university than I ever cared to know. The stories are not mine to share so I'm not repeating them here, but any decent person would be upset at some of them and we definitely still have a long way to go on this issue.

From the Evolution Debate

2008-04-03T20:13:00.000-07:00

"I would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a man who ridicules serious scientific discussion." -Thomas Huxley

I'm writing a paper for my history of science class about Darwin, and came across this. It's from a famous debate about evolution at Oxford in 1860 against a man named Wilberforce, and the above was apparently the pinnacle of the debate. Several people gasped, and one woman fainted outright.

God I love history. Even if I have to feel a little sad because I've never been to a scientific debate so intense that people fainted.

Chicago, Chicago...

2008-04-01T17:27:00.001-07:00

Whenever I mention it, a lot of people have had a hard time believing I'd never been to Chicago. It's right there, just a few hours drive away from Cleveland, and apparently if you've been to four continents it's assumed you've already hit up the major cities near you. Dunno why, but that's the way it is, and fact of the matter is I never got around to visiting Chicago until last weekend.

I will say though, now that I've been I'm very happy I have. It really is a lovely city, filled with wide streets and impressive skyscrapers combined with one of the nicest waterfronts you're likely to find anywhere. If you get the chance to spend some time there, you really should.

But anyway, we spent our day starting off at the waterfront of Lake Michigan, admiring the clear skies and skyline. Our first stop was at the Art Institute of Chicago, but there was a line literally wrapping around the block for tickets so we just admired the outside briefly-
And then, realizing there's only so much to do on the outside of a museum, we wandered over to the world-famous Field Museum of Natural History a bit further down the lakefront. As we were all geeks anyway, this was not a problem, but I don't think even non-geeks would have an issue with the Field Museum as it's a magnificent place.
The entrance hall to the Field Museum, originally built for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (yes, the same one in Devil in theWhite City). It's impressively large even today.

This dinosaur is Sue the Tyrannasorous Rex, who lives in the main entrance hall. Sue is the most complete T-Rex skeleton in the world (~90% has been found), and she really is a lovely old gal... We spent most of our time wandering around the plant section, resulting in many "oh, so that's what tea looks like when you grow it!" moments (ok I won't lie, we were most interested in the section on hallucinogenic plants), but what impressed me most was the exhibit covering 4.5 billion years of life on Earth. They redid it just a few years ago, combining the world-class fossils the museum has with some new graphics, and it has to be the most impressive such display I've seen anywhere.
Basically, the display starts you off with the origins of life- nothing too exciting, just single-celled organisms, except this is the Field Museum so if you pay attention you'll notice they have the oldest rock with amino acids on display and the first fossils showing multicellular growth. Sweet! Then life evolves, and you get treated to a view of what the pre-Cambrian ocean would have been like (shown above) along with the fossils laid out below so you can match pictures with fossils and really get a sense of things. Whenever you're done you just walk on, and as the display is linear you eventually reach other eras, ranging from dinos to the first mammals to the first humans... you get the idea. You pass through the extinction zones too, which are rather interesting in their own way because it gives you perspective on how things fall into place.
An example of one of many wonderful fossils they have at the Field Museum. This thing is perhaps six feet tall and tell me, have you ever seen a perfectly preserved palm frond with fish randomly added in anywhere else in the world?
A giant sloth that's part of the exhibit. I never really thought I could find something scary that's stupid enough to grab its own arms thinking they're tree branches and fall to death (no really, they do that!), but this guy would scare the hell out of me...
The last Field Museum picture, coincidentally also the last from the evolution display, which is a montage of images around Charles Darwin's famous quote, "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." That sums it up wonderfully...

Anyway, we left the Field Museum and headed towards Michigan Avenue, slowly making our way north toward the John Hancock Center...
If you ever want to study skyscraper architecture, by the way, Chicago's got to be the best place in the world to do it. Skyscrapers really are, for the most part, an American thing and if you go to a place like New York City they're not as well spread out to be admired (as Manhattan's only got a set amount of space to work with), but in Chicago everything is a clear and glittering work of steel and glass. They're still building gigantic ones too, like the new Trump Tower, which is impressive in itself as most cities in the USA haven't done such a thing in several years.
If you ever plan to go to the West, take the highway, that's my way, that's the best...

For some odd reason, I have a mild fascination with Route 66- I think it has to do with the romantic idea of the road, coupled by the fact that everyone I know from outside the US thinks it's a big deal whereas everyone from the US knows it's been decommissioned years ago as an actual highway (and that no one within the US really bothers now that the Interstate exists, including Okies). So there was a disproportionate amount of happiness on my part to discover that Historic Route 66 begins just across from the Art Institute on a side street if you're walking up Michigan Avenue, to the point that it merits mention here.
Another stop was in Millennium Park, which is a bunch of outdoor art done at the turn of the millenium. This picture is of "the bean," a giant shiny stainless steel sculpture which reflects the Chicago skyline and the numerous tourists around it. Unfortunately this is the best picture I got, as my camera started getting rather finicky and stopped taking pictures for a few hours, but you get the idea.
Anyway, we wandered north on Michigan Avenue, stopping to sample some famous Chicago-style deep-dish pizza (verdict: it's awesome if you're ravenously hungry, which we were), heading towards the John Hancock Center. The Hancock Center is the second largest building in Chicago after the famous Sears Tower of course, and we heard that firstly the view is better from up there and secondly it's a lot cheaper. As it turns out, the Hancock Center has a lounge area on the 96th floor, so you can go up for free (as opposed to paying $11 for the observation deck) and have a drink instead, which we figured would work out cheaper and better so that's what we did. It ended up that we spent so much time admiring the view from various parts of the floor (there are several different sides, the one in the picture above is facing north) that we decided to leave without said drink and we got to admire the skyline for free!
The John Hancock Center from below. I consider it to be a modern marvel in itself that I took this picture and the one preceding it no less than five minutes apart!

And after that, as it was getting late and we were still driving back to Cleveland that night, we headed out on the El to our car and began the long ride home (and it should be noted that I've now been to more than half the states even by the most frugal estimates, as we passed through Indiana as well). Chicago really is a fun place to poke around, and I'm glad I got the chance! Perhaps I'll pass through it again in a few months if I end up driving out to San Francisco.

Fermilab!

2008-04-01T16:14:00.000-07:00

There's a famous story amongst physicists about Robert Wilson, the first director of Fermilab who played a huge role in the development and construction of the facility. Once, when pressed by a US Senator on whether Fermilab would do for national security, Wilson retorted by saying "it has nothing to do with the defense of our nation, except to make it worth defending."

I was thinking a lot about this this weekend because our Physics and Astronomy Club got the wonderful opportunity to visit Fermilab, and let the record show that Wilson is absolutely right. It really is a great place, filled with world-class research that is downright exciting to see for yourself!
This is the main building at Fermilab, which was our first stop of the day after waking up really early in the morning to drive the ~6 hours from Cleveland to Batavia, Illinois. We were supposed to meet at 6 but I didn't wake up until my friend called me at 6:25 asking where I was, which prompted a loud "why the [censored] did my alarm not go off?!?" followed by frantic scurrying out the door. Our car was actually on the road by 6:35 though, so no problem getting there (and I confess I don't remember much of the drive, as I spent most of it napping in the back seat there and back).

But anyway, if you ever go and tour Fermilab you'll probably be taken to the top story of the building above, which is a museum of sorts for the facility and has a great view-

This picture is looking out from the main enterance. Don't be fooled by the decorative-looking ponds, they're actually there to drain in case the giant Tevatron accelerator's superconducting magnets stop doing their job correctly.... Fermilab for the most part doesn't look that impressive from above for the simple reason that most particle experiments are done underground, but they've creatively made up for this by making the place the biggest restorative prairie in the state of Illinois. There's even a herd of buffalo wandering around the place.
This is another view from the 15th story, this one looking towards part of the Tevatron (the entire ring is four miles in circumference or so, so I couldn't even begin to see all of it, let alone get a decent picture). Essentially the point of the Tevatron is to speed up ionized hydrogen gas so it travels just a tiny fraction under the speed of light, then smash together the particles and see what we see. It's sort of like if you had a clock and smashed it to have all the parts fly apart and tried to reassemble the clock based on what you find. Doesn't sound very effective in a sense, but this is really what particle physicists do except for atoms and for Fermilab this proved to be quite effective- the top quark and bottom quark were discovered here.
We couldn't go into the Tevatron itself but there was a mockup with mirrors so you could step in and sort of get a feel for what it's like. Currently the Tevatron is the most powerful operational particle accelerator in the world until the Large Hadron Collider turns on later this year, after which the Tevatron will be shut down (as the LHC will be several times more powerful). We also learned that the Tevatron gets an electric bill of approximately a million dollars a month, making me conclude that the local electric company really hit the jackpot when Batavia won the rights to build it.
We did get to take a look at the control room for the Tevatron, which is pictured above. I must say the operators had a great sense of humor about it- there's a large glass panel all the tours stop at, so they put up a "do not feed the operators" sign on the door for good measure. Further, at one point one of the operators abruptly turned us and snapped a picture of us with his own camera as retaliation for all the ones we were taking, and I thought that was hilarious.

We also checked out one of the smaller experiments on site, known as MiniBooNE. This one tests for neutrino mass via neutrino oscillations, and they specially built a tunnel 300 feet below ground to do it (so ~30 stories). It's a pretty long elevator ride!
Here's what the tunnel looked like underground. I think I prefer looking at the sky.
This large box is part of an experiment in the tunnel trying to find dark matter. Basically there's a bit of water inside and a particle passing through leaves a bubble trail, so you're looking for a bubble trail that would be left over from a dark matter candidate... Of course, you get noise from things like cosmic rays that find their way in even down here and radioactive decay from the glass holding the water and all sorts of things most people would never think of, so no dark matter yet. You can hear the machine go "ping" once a minute or so thanks to all the false positives.

And this is in no way a critical judgment against my friends who are dedicating their lives to the dark matter search, but I decided within five minutes this is not exactly my sort of project. This is, of course, the amount of time the novelty of being 30 stories underground wears off on you, and don't know if I could spend years obsessing over if my glass is radioactive and what not. Different strokes for different folks...
This is the origin of the neutrinos in miniBooNE, which are generated here on the order of a billion neutrinos pulsed every 2.5 seconds (so standing in front of it means you're in the most concentrated beam of neutrinos on the planet- luckily they pass right through you harmlessly!). The neutrinos then tunnel underground to another detector in a mine in Soudan, Minnesota several hundred miles away- leading physicists to joke that they're using Wisconsin as a drift space- and they vary the type of neutrinos produced so they can see if there are any differences between the pulses upon detection.

Explaining how exactly you make a neutrino beam takes a fair amount of time and I don't want to make this much longer than it already is/ will be, so if you're interested take a gander over here.
Finally, our group underground (there were actually 20 or so students on this trip, but only so many of us could be underground at a given time). Now that I look at this picture, all I can say is I'm the one who really stands out compared to all the dark colors everyone else was apparently wearing!

As one last entertaining postscript, we went to the visitor center while waiting for the last group to finish touring, which is filled with cute little science displays you usually find at science centers to entertain little kids. Needless to say we had a blast, but I was particularly enamored with this one-
I really can't pretend to know why it was there, but in short it's a scintillator panel cosmic ray detector, which is something I'm using in my own senior project setup! So if I don't get mine to work, think they'll let me hang out in the Fermilab visitor center and collect data?

But anyway, that was the end of our time at Fermilab as we were off to a swanky restaurant to hang out with some members of the Case Alumni Association who were kind enough to foot our trip bill. I spent a lot of time talking to Cyrus Taylor, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and speaker for the night, and we spent a great deal of time discussing things like women in science, string theory, and Dean Taylor's crazy backpacking trip through Tanzania after he got his PhD which involved an economic meltdown and him getting sick with malaria for three weeks. You know, normal physicist talk!

And last but not least we were all exhausted having gotten up so early, so we went back to the hotel to crash. Because after all there was a big day ahead of us, with the city of Chicago looming nearby...

Playing with Physics

2008-04-01T16:08:00.000-07:00

Who is this crab, and why is he hanging out on the roof of a building on campus? The answer can be found in this week's "Quarked," where I discuss the interesting phenomenon whereby physics is one grand excuse to play with toys.

By the way, there are four crabs and we named them officially today. Their names are Sebastian, Pinchy, Cake, and Turtle... That's the second thing physicists do a lot of, of course- naming things that wouldn't be named normally in an attempt to be clever.

Overheard in the Study Room

2008-03-23T16:51:00.000-07:00

Two students doing a problem for classical mechanics, arguing over a pulley system. One argues his point by saying to the other, "it's an ideal world, right?"

I love this line because you hear something like that uttered so rarely, and it's even more rare to hear someone reply immediately by saying yes. (For non-physicists, an "ideal" system is one where cumbersome things like friction and air resistance do not exist.) For better or worse, physicists are a bunch of Don Quixotes.

RIP Arthur C. Clarke

2008-03-19T22:47:00.000-07:00

The "favorite science fiction authors to die within the past year" trifecta has come to pass with the passing of Arthur C. Clarke yesterday (the first two were, of course, Kurt Vonnegut and Madeline L'Engle). Clarke is of course best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey but was also a prolific writer of short stories, and was the guy who thought up the concept of geostationary orbit for a satellite.

Clarke is tied with Ray Bradbury as my favorite science fiction writer not as much for the 2001 series but rather because of the short stories. I discovered them in high school and happily spent weeks working through the telephone-book thickness of The Collected Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. I loved the originality and complexity conveyed in just a few short pages for each miniature masterpiece, but most of all the hope and fancifulness of science fiction really made it all a lot more fun. I mean hey, we were going to find obelisks on the Moon and life on Jupiter V and survive the sun going nova on us and all sorts of things! No wonder space travel in actuality came as a disappointment.

I confess one thing though: I might have read every single thing he read, but with the notable exception of Rama (and the subsequent trilogy) I never fell in love with Clarke's longer works. He lost direction easily, and towards the end of the 2001 series he started just explaining things away by saying "well there were new advances in physics in the future that makes this freaky levitation possible! yay!" and what not. I will also further confess that I never actually did see all of 2001 the movie- I was in elementary school when my dad rented it once, but decided it was boring about 10 minutes in and never got a chance to watch it again. I'll have to get on that.

So if you've a moment, get yourself a drink and page through a few of the old stories. A master writer does not leave this Earth without leaving a long-reaching record behind.

"He was now master of the world, and he was not sure what to do next. But he would think of something..."

California, Here We Come

2008-03-14T15:54:00.000-07:00

Summer is upon us, and so is the exciting time of year when everyone finally hears back from their summer jobs and the like. As I am not planning on graduating until December 2008 (unlike most everyone else wrapping things up in May from my year) I fall into the interesting position of still qualifying for undergraduate funding for summer programs. Combined with the fact that I also hold more research experience than most anyone else applying to such programs- not many juniors out there completing a senior project!- I submitted my application to a few choice REUs (Research Experience for Undergraduates- a US summer program at various Interesting and Exciting Locations) to see what would happen.

Result: I will be spending my summer working for Dr. Jill Tarter in Mountain View, California, on the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). Hooray! The ATA is a new radio telescope array being built in northern California (~5 hour drive from San Francisco) jointly between UC-Berkeley and the SETI Institute. Right now there are 40-odd dishes but the array will involve several hundred when completed, and will have an unprecedented field of view and simultaneous frequency range in radio astronomy. My job, more or less, will be to look at the current breakdowns the radio telescopes are cropping up with and database them and see if there are correlations in that etc. In short, a great project to get my hands dirty when it comes to learning about radio astronomy, as this is something I have wanted to do for a very long time.

Oh, and incidentally, yes, I will be working at the SETI Institute but will be doing good science so it evens out, and Jill Tarter is a rather impressive radio astronomer who I'm very excited to be working with (as far as the "notability" test goes, she does have a page on Wikipedia which is kinda nifty). And for those who don't know, Mountain View (yes, where Google is headquartered) is about an hour south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley, and because Auckland reminded me of what little I remembered of San Francisco last time I was there it should be sweet. At the very least, I am looking forward to redwoods, a vibrant city, and learning about radio astronomy!

Here's to summer. Looking at the things I need to do in the next few weeks (finish senior project, take the Physics GRE, regular classwork...) I am kind of wishing I can fast forward to then, but at least this way I'll relish it all the more when it comes.

Women in Science

2008-03-14T15:49:00.000-07:00

I've been bad at the blogging thing lately, so really quickly before I forget here is a column I wrote a few weeks ago on the exciting topic of women in science. Due to a reference to a particular incident about a year ago referenced the article generated quite a bit of discussion, most of which was very supportive and I loved hearing so many people's takes on the issue (and before anyone asks, yes, I'm fine, and no, this was a rather isolated incident so far as my experience within the physics department).

And that's really all I have to say on this issue because I'm kind of tired of discussing it and have more pressing things to do (senior project, Physics GRE, and classes come to mind). This isn't to say I don't find the lack of females in fields like physics upsetting, it just means I'm in school to study physics and not any sociological ramifications! Hope that makes sense.

Fun in the Snow

2008-02-28T01:17:00.000-08:00

We had another snowstorm yesterday here in Cleveland, but what made this one interesting was how the temperature was very near freezing, making the snow ideal packing snow. So while we got several inches the snow sculptors have been out, and some of the results are really great! So last night, after a physics department mixer in a nearby coffeehouse, me, my friend Nick, and Dan Akerib, a friend and incidentally chair of the department, took a few minutes after the caffeinated chatting to take a look around.
First stop: an igloo! I'd never seen one in person before and here it was, in the part of the field usually reserved for volleyball in warmer seasons, and it was pretty darn sturdy (Dan's in the picture for scale). The only question that remained was if we could actually fit inside as the builders were nowhere to be seen...
Answer: yep, the three of us could fit quite nicely.

Nick: (after the fact) You realize we were just in an igloo with the chair of the physics department?
Me: That sounds like some sort of code for something.

Nick also mentioned to me that last year when I was in New Zealand some enterprising students built an igloo that could sleep seven: five on the ground floor and two on the first floor (naturally they tested it one night). Last year they got a LOT more snow though.

Near the igloo there was this nice chap sitting on a bench, so Nick decided to keep him company. There was also another similar gent sitting on a bench closer to the main pathway, but unfortunately some vandals had gone in and smashed him up...
Last but not least, the snow dragon! Ah! He really was a marvel, and one of the art students spent a good amount of time working on him. I'm hoping the student later went back to add a hump or two but haven't gone to check.

There are a few other sculptures that popped up today but I didn't have my camera on me. The campus is a bit more unique, though, which I think is great because winter gets pretty unbearable otherwise this time of year.

Small World

2008-02-17T06:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I met up with my mentor, Mike Lemonick, who is a wonderful writer and is great fun to follow around and ask random questions from. Everyone stops to talk with him, or at least say hi, and he's teaching a science journalism grad class at NYU this semester so I went out to lunch with them.

The most entertaining thing out of all this, though, was how last night during the science writers party at Fenway Park he mentioned that his brother was from Pittsburgh, and did I know Shady Side Academy because his nephew and niece went there. "What year?" I asked.

"The nephew's a senior in college right now and his sister is two years younger," was the answer, and I promptly felt like an idiot for not thinking about Mike's last name more.

"Your nephew is best friends with my brother," I explained, "and he was over at my house nearly every day in high school. And I still see him, a bunch of us went to Penn House Brewery over winter break."

This of course resulted in a prompt comparison of notes on every angle of the subject, including the conclusion that we both knew Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire very well as Mike had worked on Three Mile Island several summers ago. Which isn't surprising at all, because I knew his brother had met his wife there and my brother's friend did as well... I will note though I did feel a bit better at all this, because when I first saw Mike he looked strikingly familiar and I couldn't figure out why!

Oh, and if we're keeping track of the "does Yvette like scientists or science writers more" tally, score one for the science writers last night as their party at Fenway was just awesome. They had a plethora chocolate covered strawberries, free drinks, and a great band and dancing, and I can't say the scientists have ever really done any of those.

Pwned!

2008-02-15T09:55:00.001-08:00

I went to my first press conference today in the scientific sense, which was a summary for the Mars Rovers by the people in charge of it (Steve Squyres from Cornell who's the lead guy, Charles Elachi who's in charge of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Richard Cook, and Andrew Knoll from Harvard). It was to announce the discovery that Mars was very, very salty per recent data to the point where it would've been detrimental to real life, and it's kind of cool to get all this embargoed information before others have it. (Except it's not embargoed anymore, so here's the press release.)

The best part was towards the end when Andrew Knoll, a huge bigwig in this sort of thing, said that evidence of life on Mars was probably best during its very early age so that's what they'll be focusing on. I raised my eyebrow but no one blinked, and they started taking questions from people working at The Guardian, The Daily Mail, MSNBC, slate.com, and all these people were asking arguably silly questions. The guys were very clearly happy to answer questions they could easily handle (no, the Bush plan for space doesn't really effect the Mars rovers, there really isn't any controversy over the discoveries of the Viking missions in the 70s, etc), so I decided to throw my hat in the ring and got the last question.

"Yvette Cendes, Journal of Young Investigators, this question is for Andrew Knoll. You were saying that the best odds of life on Mars are probably going to be during the very early age of the planet, but we know that was a period of very heavy bombardment [aka lots of asteroids hitting all the time] in the Solar System. How do you reconcile this with your hypothesis?"

"That's a good question," Dr. Knoll flustered, and proceeded to talk about things not relating to the actual question for a little while. He then aknowledged that according to current theory life on Earth only would have survived this period of bombardment by deep ocean vents, which you didn't exactly have on Mars, and that reconciling how/where life would survive on Mars where such environments don't exist is "a serious problem." Pwned! My fellow student journalists sure got a kick out of that, and Steve Squyres ran away from me afterwards when I wanted to say hi for some odd reason.

So I've realized I'd be a good science journalist if I want to do it because I can burn the head of the Mars missions should I want to. This is kind of fun.

Blogging From Boston

2008-02-14T19:56:00.000-08:00

So just so no one hears any wild rumors... I won a national science journalism award to attend the AAAS conference in Boston this weekend. More specifically, it's through the National Association of Science Writers and consists of a travel stipend to Boston and attending the program and following around a science writer for the day (who, in my case, happens to be a senior science writer for TIME magazine), and the AAAS is the biggest general science conference in America. More as this unfolds, but in short right now I'm typing down in the hotel lobby right next to the convention center feeling rather pleased and excited about things.

Quick notes as I think of them, in roughly the order they happened-

~ Registering for the convention and all that was thankfully not a problem: as some of you might recall there was a flurry of activity upon me realizing I had no journalism professor to vouch for me legitimately getting press credentials, but luckily there was so much activity going on I didn't need to dig out my press clippings to prove this point. I subsequently got a cool badge with "press" written on it and a new canvas satchel stuffed with detailed schedules, itineraries, goodies, and a free puppy like all these conferences give out. Except this one doesn't have Maxwell's Equations or the Force equation stitched out on it, of course, so if anyone wants an AAAS canvas satchel let me know lest it end up in the back of my closet upon return home.

~ I met L.K. and his wife in the airport as they were going on the same flight as me. Turns out his wife is a wonderfully kind woman whose acquaintance I was pleased to meet, so that was interesting. L.K. also noted that coming to AAAS as your first conference is similar to getting your first car and it's a Hummer (ie it's huge and you don't know what to do with it), so we'll see how this goes.

~ Also interestingly, I lucked out and have my hotel room to myself (because there's an odd number of guys and girls in my group and I sent in my travel info last- let this be a lesson to you!). I soon realized this is the first time ever that I have a hotel room all on my own which is odd considering how much I travel: it's just usually my family is there or my friends or I'm in a hostel or what have you. Kind of interesting but I keep out of the room because it's eerily quiet, which is just as well I think!

~ Because it was such a gorgeous day in Boston, I wandered several blocks down Newbury Street primarily all the way to the Hancock Building for lunch at a place that sold great panini. I also kept my eyes peeled as I have a two-week-old Little Cousin who I'm going to visit while in Boston and I needed to get her something nice and cute. Because my cousins have a Labrador retriever, I ended up settling for a plush Spot toy with accompanying little cardboard-backed book for babies. Some of you will surely argue that I am premature in giving a newborn infant a book, but you've gotta start 'em young in my opinion. (Plus hey keep it in perspective, that book will so come in handy in just a few months!)

~ A bunch of us science journalist students through the program I'm in got together for dinner today, and as I'm sure you'd guess they're all wonderful people with a great geek twist. Of the seven I've met (there are 10 total) roughly half are journalism majors, and I'm the only physics/astronomy person as the most focus on biology (because that's what happens in these things). Because I was the only one who knew how to get around Boston at all we went to Newbury Street and wandered looking at the restaurants until settling for a nice Tapas place. We shared our dishes and decided on a rule that we should all try something new, be it portabello mushrooms or non-peeled shrimp the "squid cooked in its own ink" (which no one tried, hmmm), so I chose rabbit. It was pretty good!

~ Needless to say I like everyone pretty well. A few things I learned through everyone sharing stories and information:

1) I am a grossly underpaid writer. As in, no one could believe that I write regular columns and feature-length science articles and not get any compensation for it whatsoever because that sort of thing just doesn't happen at most other student newspapers. When I asked what the going rate was, the general consensus was between $20 an article and $12 an hour, which is a decent range but nonetheless something rather than nothing. Hmmm.

2) Despite being underpaid, I still have probably the most prolific streak of anyone when it comes to quantity (save some journalism majors whose lives revolve around the paper). For example, there was one guy who thought he was pretty cool for writing for an actual paper, instead of just a school one like most everyone else, but then he got to mentioning that he wrote an article a week but they were "only" paying him for 20 hours/week even though he probably worked twice as many hours.

"How long are the articles?" I asked, rather impressed.

"Pretty long," he said, "about 600-800 words. I refuse to turn them in until they're perfect."

I stared. You can argue what you want about the quality of my work, but I can't imagine spending what is essentially the same amount of time you'd spend working at a full-time job writing one brief (by my standards) article, even if it was a topic on which I was completely unfamiliar before. Perhaps my opinion is just what happens when you frankly don't have the time to play around with your work because that's not your primary focus?

3) Further in the "Yvette totally does not understand how the world works" category is the interesting fact that apparently my science journalism award thingy is up there in prestige. In a "70 kids applied for 10 spots" sense, which I totally wasn't expecting.

4) Tomorrow the Ig Nobel prizewinners are giving a lecture, and we all agreed to be going. It will be quite fun!

~ Ok, that's it for now as the brunt of the conference begins tomorrow and I must be going to bed. Will report on more later!

Brrrrr

2008-02-10T13:37:00.000-08:00

The mercury is currently at 8F (-13C) with windchill at -15F (-26C), and the sun just set so we're looking at even colder temperatures tonight. Wouldn't be quite so terrible but the wind is blowing, and whenever the wind blows in Cleveland it starts snowing, so it's windy and snowy and all in all this makes me wonder why I was silly enough to not go to school someplace like Arizona.

The good thing about bad weather though is it forces you to stay inside and study, which I'm doing a decent amount of because I'm going to my first-ever scientific conference later this week in Boston (more on this later). And I just checked, it's about 30 degrees warmer in Boston and they don't get lake effect snow (obviously) so while there's something wrong with thinking you'll go to Boston to thaw out that's the truth this time around!

Quarked: Seeing the World Beyond Your Major

2008-02-07T21:25:00.001-08:00

This week's "Quarked" was inspired by a discussion I had this weekend with a friend and focuses on the odd fact that Case students like to take a supercilious position when it comes to how much work they have. I've no idea how prevalent it is at other schools but suspect ours is a bit more excessive than the average. Article text in full-

One thing that fascinates me most about Case student culture is the masochistic tendency to compare workloads with others to see whose is the most difficult. "You're only taking 24 credit hours and didn't sign up for differential sadistical mechanics this semester?" I heard one friend ask another on the quad just recently.
"Not exactly," the friend bragged in a loud voice, lest anyone mistake his academic valor. "After all, I'm playing first tuba now for four music ensembles that I'm not counting as credits, and I'm pass-failing Advanced Sanskrit so it evens out." At this the friend gave a nod and proceeded to point out why his schedule was more difficult, and the pair continued down this line in a tone typically reserved for gardeners discussing prize orchids.

While there's certainly nothing wrong with a little work ethic, sometimes things can get a little out of hand. For example, earlier this week I was talking to a fellow physics major and the conversation turned to what he wanted to do later in life. I thought his plans to go into nuclear engineering sounded pretty cool, but upon hearing that sentiment he was a touch surprised.

"Lots of other physics majors call me a 'sell-out' for not wanting to do physics after graduation," he explained, and I gave an incredulous glance. The last I checked, being a nuclear engineer is quite impressive and respectable, and due to the versatile nature of a physics degree, only one in 20 students who graduate with one end up becoming physicists in the "sit in Rockefeller and discuss angular momentum" sort of way. Calling someone a sell-out for deciding against the traditional physicist path, particularly when the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of you doing the same thing someday, does not make much sense.

Things can get even worse if two people engaged in the bragging-about-workload duel have different majors because, as everyone knows, all majors which are not your own are "easy." This rule applies to humanities majors in particular, who are thought by many to have slacker tendencies that will undoubtedly result in their landing a job at a place like Wackadon'ts after graduation.

I confess I've committed a fair amount of ribbing in this general area myself, and my old English major roommate probably got bored with the What Do You Do With a B.A. in English? song around the 32nd time I played it. But silly songs aside I do have a sizeable amount of respect for English majors: they know what dangling modifiers are, can figure out how to get paid for writing stuff, and know well enough not do a major where the class average can be 50% on an exam.

Case students can approach their classes with an incredibly admirable amount of passion, and it's easy to use this passion to convince yourself of your own superiority. But what would happen if we were all passionate about the same thing? That's right, it would be boring! So what if a humanities major doesn't have to as many problem sets as an engineer, or if someone's dream calls them down a path different from your own? It is these differences that make others the wonderful individuals they are, and make the world beyond our own horizons a fascinating place to explore.

And as a final note to everyone, I recommend knocking off the bragging or at least taking a break from it on occasion to see what will happen. I promise, people will be a lot more impressed by your accomplishments and passions if they hear about them from someone else instead of you.

Behind Blue Eyes

2008-02-06T14:25:00.000-08:00

I found this article in the newspaper today and think it's the coolest thing I've read recently:

Researchers in Denmark have found that every person with blue eyes descends from just one "founder," an ancestor whose genes mutated 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Before then, everyone had brown eyes...
Eiberg's team tested 155 blue-eyed people from Scandinavia, Turkey, Jordan and India, looking to see whether they had similar DNA sequences... To their amazement, they found that each individual had identical DNA sequences in that region of that gene, an indication that the original mutation happened recently enough that it hasn't had time to change.

For those of you who don't know, getting blue eyes comes from inheriting two recessive genes that determine the amount of melanin in your genes. That is to say, if you get the gene you're born with brown eyes (the default), but if you get the recessive gene from both parents then you get blue ones (if you have green it means you only have some melanin, but not enough for brown). According to the study, what ended up happening was two people in the Black Sea area a few thousand years ago had the gene through random mutations and had the first blue-eyed baby, and those genes ended up propagating to the estimated 300 million people who have blue eyes today.

Speaking as someone who has very deep blue eyes, I think this is pretty sweet because I now know I am related to Frank Sinatra, Jodie Foster, and a whole bunch of Scandinavians. (Anyone else?) It's always nice to know a little bit more about where you came from.

Persepolis

2008-02-04T16:17:00.000-08:00

Saw the movie Persepolis over the weekend and it was just wonderful-

For those of you who haven't heard of it, which is pretty likely due to its limited release, Persepolis is a French-made movie chronicling a girl's life who grew up during the Iranian revolution and beyond. It's based off the biography of a woman who originally told her story through graphic novel form, and as a result it's animated in black and white (and, of course, subtitled!). It is truly a masterfully well-done movie, and you should all go see it.

And because I lead a life capable of covering the entire spectrum of culture in one weekend, I will note that like most of America I was quite estatic during the last ten minutes of the Super Bowl last night (because cheering for the Patriots is sort of like cheering for the Evil Empire). Oh, and my favorite commercial was the Doritos one with the mouse.

Paging Through the History of Science

2008-01-31T12:03:00.000-08:00

A lot of my physics friends don't particularly understand my minor obsession with taking history classes because they don't understand just how it could be at all interesting. This semester, though, I'm taking "A History of Science in Western Thought," so I'm hoping that this post will clear a few things up as to why history can be such a great subject to devote spare credit hours to.

Last Friday, see, my history class took a visit to the rare books collection at the university library. It's a lovely spot filled with beautiful treasures from centuries past, and has such a friendly staff I feel bad that I hadn't visited them before... Anyway, we were looking at old science books mainly due to the nature of the class, and some of them were just gorgeous. Here are a few of my favorites-
This page is from a gigantic codex printed in 1493 known as the Nuremberg Chronicle. Back then, Nuremberg was a very wealthy city, so in order to commemorate their anniversary they decided to commission a history of the world up until that point. The drawings here are wood-cuts, and the color ink was added later.
This is a page from the Chronicle illustrating the city of Salzburg at the time. There are several such cities depicted in the book as you page through it (which, trust me, I did quite a bit of even if my Latin's too rusty to read it), but paradoxically the illustrations of the cities are only loosely based off of what they actually looked like- an artist would sort of work off of travelers' descriptions and the like. The same applies to all illustrations of people except that was an even less exact art, as they'd often reuse pictures and the like. I suppose such details did not matter quite so much over 500 years ago.
This is the last page in the book, and is a map of the world up until then (or at least the parts that mattered to Nurembergians). Kinda nifty.

By the way, I will point out that there were an estimated 1400-1500 Latin and 700-1000 German copies published in 1493, and an estimated 400 Latin and 300 German copies still survive. So if you don't feel a bit of excitement at the chance to flip through one of these, well, you're clearly not nerdy enough.
Change in books, this one being an illustration from Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica ("On the Fabric of the Human Body"), regarded as the world's first anatomy book. For those of you who perhaps haven't heard of him, Vesalius was a contemporary of Copernicus who was the first to say anatomy should be done in a systematic way instead of just relying on what the book said. This book was published in 1543 (and this copy is from that year as well), and it really is cool to page through because it's filled with skeletons and people with only muscles and the like idling in the Tuscan countryside.
Now this is exciting- it's the Dialogues! Also known as Dialogo Sopra I Due Massimi Sistemi Del Mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems) and written by Galileo Galilei in 1632, the book was basically a conversation between a person who believed in the Aristotelian model of the universe and one who believed the Copernical model. It was written in Italian so the ordinary person could understand it, and was the book that made the Church go after Galileo and get it placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. This particular version of the book dates to 1699.

Personally I like the Dialogues because it is, in essence, the first "popular science" book ever published that I can really think of, meaning Galileo was the sort of Carl Sagan of his era. Also, interestingly enough, I have a friend who did the astronomy summer school last year run by the Vatican, and she says that if you go through the Vatican's library they have first editions of everything (of course) and they were supposed to black out the "objectionable" parts, but some kind soul either missed that memo or just never did. Hooray for science!
Not to sound odd, but I know a good number of people who would feel more reverence looking at this one than they would looking at a copy of the Bible. It is a copy of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, first published in 1687 (though this one is from 1739). It is from this book that Newton worked out his famous laws that laid the groundwork for classical mechanics and his theory of gravitation, and promptly doomed several centuries of university students to drawing free-body diagrams.
And if Principia isn't good enough for you, few can resist the allure of Optiks, first published in 1704 (this here being a second edition from 1717). You know how Newton split light with a prism to reveal a rainbow? Well that's in this book.

Of course, my favorite optical experiment Newton conducted (in a "my God this guy was something" sort of way) is that he once stuck a darning needle into his eye in an attempt to prove that color was the result of pressure on your eye, sticking it all the way through. Clearly the experiment didn't work as he'd imagined, but luckily he didn't lose his vision.
This last picture here is from one of the figures added in at the back of the book (as that's where all the figures were in this age- you folded them out). You can see Newton detailing how light split from the prism and how you could use geometry to figure out your prism's properties and what not.

I could go on as I have many, many more books to share (such as first editions from philosophers Henry More and John Locke), but this is getting long enough so I think I'll end things here. Isn't it cool to see and learn about old stuff?

Light Skiing: Brandywine and Seven Springs

2008-01-31T11:08:00.000-08:00

I've said before that I don't really like the Ohio winter because it's cold and dreary and you can't bike everywhere. To be fair though, all this would be forgiven in my mind if there was one decent-sized hill anywhere in the area because then you could at least go skiing or sledding or commit other friction-defying acts of winter mayhem, but there really aren't so we have to make do with what we have. So it goes.

Anyway, last week we had off for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day so to celebrate our free day a few of us decided to go skiing. My friend, Alison, lives about 40 minutes outside Cleveland near the tiny ski area called Brandywine, and has connections that let us get free ski tickets. Hooray! As you can't beat free, a few of us headed out to Brandywine to spend an afternoon of skiing. It was a fair bit below freezing (in case you haven't detected a general trend in this observation) but the sun was out and blazing, and that can make all the difference.

So how tiny is Brandywine anyway? Well here's the view from the top-
Ok to be fair, that doesn't really tell you much, so here's the view from the bottom-
Realize at this point that the first picture includes the top part of the second picture, and there you have the entire vertical (which I think is about 250 feet, compared to nearly ten times that at a place like Wildcat, NH). What you're looking at here is the "black diamond" run of the resort that probably has the same inclination as a more difficult intermediate trail nearly anywhere else, and would be decent if it wasn't over in 15 seconds. I kept running an experiment to see if I could go down the whole thing without turning once, and would've succeeded except I was on rental skis and wasn't sure if I could trust them to abruptly stop as quickly as my own skis do.

Anyway, in our group three of the five were beginning skiers so luckily that only left two of us to commiserate about the lack of difficulty. We ended up doing the terrain park of sorts several times, except paradoxically you didn't have enough hill to do more than perhaps one jump of the five or six so you just coasted over the man-made ridges to make things interesting after your one jump. Somehow, this left something to be desired, but we still had fun hanging out and since it's not like I had to pay for the privilege of my lift ticket I suppose I should stop complaining. After all, it's not Ohio's fault that it's not, say, Colorado.

The interesting thing about skiing last week, by the way, is I actually went twice in one week! Yay! This doesn't happen too often due to a combination of work and geography, but I went home to Pittsburgh this past weekend and convinced my mom and dad it would be a great idea if we spent Sunday at Seven Springs (about an hour to the east of Pittsburgh). Seven Springs isn't exactly a giant mountain either if we're looking at vertical, but at 750 feet it's got Brandywine beat by a decent shot so it was fun. It was actually around the freezing point, and snowing-
It was fun to ski at Seven Springs because I used to go there several times every season right until I left for uni (I started skiing when I was 5 years old), so this was my first time skiing there in four years. The only annoying part about the whole thing was there were quite a few snowboarders who didn't know what they were doing- I don't mind snowboarders who are actually in control and are not idiots (no, really! I swear!) but there's something about boarders who go on trails too difficult for their skill level and scrape off all the good snow that really annoys me. (Such as the lack of good snow that there wasn't much of to begin with.) Now it really is kind of comical to be heading down a difficult run only to have snowboarders falling to the right and left of you, but this starts to become a lot less funny when one of them runs into you.

Yes, you read that last bit right. I was heading down my very last run when there was a Snowboarder Dude who was out of control and barreling down the slope, and boarded right across the top of my skis. Luckily I'm good enough at this to regain my balance and not fall when someone does something so asinine as run into me because he literally can't control his own actions, but Snowboarder Dude paid for this by falling head over heels a fair fraction of the slope before stopping. After noting to myself that he was all right I went past him without stopping, because to be fair I don't want to socialize with anyone who just hit me. I noticed later that he scratched up the top of my skis pretty well, too, so it's probably best I wasn't near him when I discovered that detail.

But anyway, to finish off I will note that I brought my skis and ski stuff back to Cleveland so anyone who wants to make a foray to one of the little places around here should let me know! And as my joke of the day, here's something my high school physics teacher used to tell me whenever I mentioned skiing while he was around-

Q: Why are skiers like crack addicts?
A: Because it's all they think about, all they talk about, all they do on weekends, they're obsessed with white powder, and it's going to kill them eventually.

Ski Gunstock! (and Killington)

2008-01-31T10:10:00.000-08:00

As some people know, I have a minor obsession about skiing that runs in the family. It's just so much fun to slide down a mountain in the fresh air! This year my family spent a few days skiing in New Hampshire and Vermont before driving back home from my cousin's wedding, so here's the second batch of pictures from that occasion.

The second place we skied was Gunstock, a nice little mountain that has got to have the best view of any ski resort anywhere. This is because it's right on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee, the very large lake my family loves to visit, and here's a picture of it from our place-
(By the way, in this picture the water is actually frozen ice that happened to freeze like that, and that little dot is one of the first ice fishermen of the season!)

As a result of that, the awesome thing about skiing on Gunstock is all you do the entire way down is drink in the view-
My pictures don't quite capture it (it was still pretty cold, and my camera doesn't like functioning well in subzero temperatures) but trust me, it was gorgeous. Interestingly, this picture looks back to the spot where I took the first picture from toward the left and back from that large-ish island (Bear Island), as one of those littlish islands is the one I am forever taking pictures of in front of our house.
Here's my brother, Patrick, standing at the top of Gunstock. Before I forget to mention, the other interesting thing about this resort is all the runs have ammunition-related names, such as Trigger, Pistol, and Six Shooter. (And at Wildcat, detailed in an earlier post, everything is named after kitties.) I suppose the Second Amendment is alive and well at this place.

Anyway, for our very last day we decided to leave early and drive to Killington, Vermont and spending the night somewhere after the day of skiing there. Killington is the biggest ski resort on the East Coast and I'd only skied there once before, so I was really excited to see what it would be like, but unfortunately I was a bit disappointed. See, we'd been spoiled on days prior by incredible snow in New Hampshire, as there had been a large snowstorm just a few days beforehand, but Killington apparently didn't get a lot of that snow and was very icy as a result. Combine that with the blustery weather, people saying it wasn't icy at all for Killington (you mean you normally need ice skates?), and very expensive ski tickets (I think it was $70 per person, whereas the little NH resorts were maybe $25 max) mean I'm probably not going to go out of my way to go there again when there are so many other great places in the area. (To be fair, it's not like I paid for my own lift ticket as I was there with my family, but this is something to keep in mind should I end up as a poor graduate student in New England.)

One thing I really liked about Killington though was the fact that the wind had turned all the trees into "powdered sugar" as my family calls it- you know, when the pine trees are so coated in snow that it looks like they're made of candy. Absolutely gorgeous! So here's me acting a bit macho on the edge of a precipice with a grove of powdered sugar pine trees in the background.

We're Back

2008-01-31T09:45:00.000-08:00

Clearly, I've been out of it. Sorry about that, it's been a busy and hectic beginning-of-spring-semester. Of course I am using the term "spring" lightly, as yesterday it was at least -10C on my walk to school with the wind making it feel a good several degrees less than that, so what little of my face showed felt either painful or numb (I have a rule about not biking when it never gets above freezing during the day). Can't say I like the Ohio winter very much...

Anyway, been keeping busy with summer applications, turning 22 (and we went to see Avenue Q!), skiing (more on this later), class, and things of that nature. There is also a new Quarked column titled "Form Letter for Presidential Candidates" to read through... And with that, I will upload my large backlog of pictures and try to get some order in them so I can share them with you all. Cheers!

Last Days of Break

2008-01-11T10:50:00.000-08:00

So much to talk about, but being lazy takes up so much time...

Until I stop being a bum enjoying my last few free days of leisure reading and crossword puzzles, take a look at the JYI "Science Year of 2007 in Review" article series (also known as the "no one wanted to write a huge article in December so we combined forces" series). It's pretty well done, and I have a contribution if you keep an eye out for it.

See you in a bit once I'm back in the snowfields of Cleveland and have nothing better to do!

Baby, It's Cold Outside

2008-01-03T13:53:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! As of right now it is COLD in NH: the mercury is set at 8F last I checked (about 3pm), meaning today we took a break from skiing as no one was really gung-ho about skiing when it'd be 10 degrees colder than that. Yesterday was fun though: it was a balmy 15F at the base of Wildcat Mountain where we went, so here is my brother, sister, and me with Mount Washington in the background. My sister's the one in white, I'm the one in light blue, and my brother's the one in red. Gorgeous day and lots of great snow, even if it was on the nippy side, hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Best part of skiing yesterday: skiing with the several inches of fresh powder on the ground, which is great because this part of the country usually just has icy crud. Worst part: my brother was cutting across a trail to another one, going past a tiny chute called "The Elevator Shaft" correctly but deciding to cut down later on what must be known as "The Elevator Shaft That Never Passed Building Code Regulations." Must've been an old hiking trail it was that narrow... anyway, as it turns out, you can successfully go down a narrow black-diamond-steep chute if you strategically ram yourself into snowbanks that grew up around trees in an "I've skied 15 years so I know what I'm doing" manner. The things I check out so you don't have to...
Anyway, I'll leave you with this picture of the island in front of my family's NH place as it looked earlier today: most of the lake is frozen (though I wouldn't walk out too far yet) but it doesn't really freeze much here due to an underground spring. Give the ice another few weeks, though, and it will be covered in little fishing huts, some of which take the word 'little' to amazingly large places, and ice sailboats that go as fast as a car on the highway. New Hampshire is a fun place in the wintertime, even if it's a bit nippy out.

Two Stories

2007-12-27T15:32:00.000-08:00

1) Yesterday I went ice skating for the first time in a year with my best friend from high school. I used to do this a LOT, but stopped going as frequently in high school for a variety of reasons so it was interesting. I was rather uneasy on the ice, and my brain immediately thought "wow, that looks really cold and hard!" to which my stomach thought "hey, let me see!" I then remembered that I never really liked ice skating very much, but it does provide the good opportunity to chat with an old friend so we stuck with it awhile longer. In the end I was nicely humbled by all the little kids speed-skating in circles around us and have some really impressive bruises on my kneecaps for my effort.

2) Tomorrow the Cendes family will climb into our car for the exciting 12-hour drive to New Hampshire. We tend to avoid NH at this time of year (because the low next week will be 8F, the high will be 12F and the like), but I have a cousin getting married in a huge multi-day weddings this weekend in Portsmouth, NH, so away we go. It'll hopefully be fun- I have a pretty fuchsia dress, my cousins are a fun group to hang out with, and odds are there will be one or two entertaining incidents we'll all talk about for years to come. Hooray!

If we don't freeze to death, we will also try and get a few ski runs in the week after the wedding. Unlike ice skating, I have no qualms with barreling down a hillside as fast as a car so I'm really looking forward to this! Hopefully there will be pictures assuming I find my camera charger between now and tomorrow...

Happy Christmas

2007-12-24T09:15:00.000-08:00

My sister has returned from Australia, and she has introduced me to the fun of Australian Christmas carols. The current favorite is the one above, telling the story about how Santa goes through Australia with six white kangaroos instead of reindeer (it's summer there, after all) and how they helped a joey find his mummy. How exactly a sleigh is pulled through the snowless Australian outback confuses me a little, but I suppose if the Aussies are ok with it than I'll just accept what they say.

Merry Christmas everyone!

A Few Links

2007-12-20T21:13:00.000-08:00

Done with finals but I'm still reveling in my newfound ability to waste time. There are a lot of YouTube clips to catch up on for starters- for example, the trailers for the next season of LOST are looking interesting, and Leonard Nimoy's Ballad of Bilbo Baggins has to be one of the most disturbing bouts of desperate-for-money-in-the-seventies psychedelic things I've ever seen. And at this time of year there are a lot of "best of the year" lists to peruse of course, like the best astronomy pictures and the best unanswered questions...

Oh, and Text Twist. Lots and lots of Text Twist. Hooray for winter break!

The Night Before Finals

2007-12-06T21:05:00.001-08:00

This week's "Quarked" marked the first occasion where my editor actually cursed at me. Luckily her "good Lord, Yvette!" was followed by a "thanks for making my day," so I guess I still get to write my column next semester.

The reason for the curse was because I decided to get into the holiday spirit a bit and write a poem commemorating the most important event in December- final exams! And because I am proud of the result and suspect I won't be writing anything new here for awhile, here is the unabridged version of a poem I've titled "The Night Before Finals." [Note for those not from Case: "SIs" are "Student Instructors," aka undergraduate TAs.] Enjoy!

The Night Before Finals
By Yvette Cendes

T’was the night before finals
And all through the dorm
Crazed cramming and panic
Was quite the norm.

The students were restless
And none touched their beds
While theorems and formulas
Danced in their heads.

With textbook in hand
And a bright pink highlighter
I had settled down
For another all-nighter.

Then outside my room
There arose a great clatter,
I raced to the door
To see what was the matter.

And who do you think
Appeared before my eyes
But a wizened old Prof
And a bunch of SIs!

From his terrible wardrobe
And long, unkept beard
I knew right away
This was gonna be weird.

“I’m the Prof of Tests Future!”
He said with a shout,
“I’m the one who writes finals
You’re so scared about!

“On English! On Physics!
On Psychology!
On O-Chem! On German!
On Astronomy!

“I choose from the topics
You’ve learned of all fall,
And mark away, mark away,
Mark away, mark away all!”

I stared at the Prof
With incomprehension
And thought a few things
Which here I won’t mention.

“You’re from the wrong story!”
I said with a wail,
“Isn’t this from Dickens’
A Christmas Tale?

“Besides which, dear sir,
Though try as I might,
I don’t know why you’re here
So late, late at night.”

Said he, “I showed up
To give some advice.
Listen closely now
So I don’t give it twice:

“Though you might want to fret
And get all stressed out
That’s not what exams
Should be all about.

“So don’t be a wreck!
Don’t get over-stressed!
Study hard as always
And just do your best!”

I looked at the Prof
And then looked at my text,
If I slept a few hours
I’d be much less perplexed…

Plus I’ve advice of my own
That I have to admit:
When you start to see visions
Then it’s time to quit.

So I waved to the Prof
And then closed the door
I ducked under covers
And started to snore.

And I heard someone say
As I started my rest:
“Happy finals to all,
And to all a good test!”