Busy busy

We're well into the fall semester here and with so much travel right before the semester started and then the usual interruptions and myriad other details to take care of, I've rather neglected this little blog, along with my sewing and knitting and pretty much every other "fun" thing I'm supposed to find time for. Except reading. I guess I've been reading in my bits of spare time because it requires no moving whatever, especially on a kindle where only a tiny pressure from the thumb will turn the "page".

I know this sounds terribly lazy, but I've been exhausted lately. One thing I did find the time for was to go get a new cell phone. I finally dumped AT&T and their lack of customer service or recognition of brand loyalty or any of the other niceties you might expect from a company you've given hundreds of dollars to (probably a few thousand at this point since I've been with them since 2000). And finally got rid of my Ohio phone number, which was a few states back in the saga of my residences. I've joined the year 2011 with my technology, and am now the proud owner of a Droid Incredible 2 (ok, not the newest smartphone on the market, but it was only $50 at Costco!).

Isn't it snazzy? I'm looking forward to having google at my fingertips no matter where I am, and being able to use the odd moment usually spent waiting for the train or whatever to check my email if I like and have one less thing to do at home or the office.

I know that I will probably drastically underutilize the capabilities of this phone, but whatever. I can figure out how to do the most complex remote login tunneling session later if I want to. It only took me a few hours yesterday to get the basics down and customize everything, so for now, that's good enough for me.

I plan to try to finish that dress today, you know, the one I posted about a month ago or whenever that was. I don't have that much to do, just finish the neck, armscyes, and hem the bottom. Honestly, I haven't even had the energy for that lately. But I've decided today is the day. We'll see. Pictures soon, hopefully.

Off to Oxford

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I'm just about to leave for the airport and a red-eye flight to London. This time I'm off to a conference at University of Oxford. I'm hoping for some good weather while I'm there so I can take some great pictures.

As much as I'm looking forward to this trip and the conference, I'm not looking forward to the flights and the exhaustion. Here's hoping I can get some sleep on this flight!

More Copenhagen

It's been two weeks since I got back to the US from my trip to Denmark, but I've been so busy I haven't had time to go through my pictures and post the ones I took during the second half of my visit until today.


I managed to weasel my way into a sightseeing cruise that was planned for a small conference going on at the Center at the same time as my visit. Well, by "weasel" I mean I said "yes" when asked if I would like to go too. :P Here I am enjoying myself immensely in the sunshine after a hard day of work.

Behind the boats and buildings in this shot, you can see the steeple of "my" church in the background.

And here's the Little Mermaid from a different vantage point than my earlier photos.

The picturesque Copenhagen Opera House.

I love these classic fishing boats with the wooden cabins!

And this yacht, the Vive La Vie, was just too ostentatious to pass up. That bronze statue to the left is apparently a replica of the David. Both in front of a converted warehouse in the Copenhagen harbor. What a strange mishmash!

You can see the shadow of my friend, Marianne, in this pic. Copenhagen is so colorful, and the architecture is eye candy, especially for us poor Americans.

I think the dreamy background of this pic is kind of fun. Yes, it seems sunny and I'm wearing my trench coat, but the weather was so fickle during my trip that I had to be prepared for rain, wind, lightning, and hail (!) in addition to sunshine, so the trench coat was probably one of my best investments this spring because it proved to be very useful on this trip.

Marianne and I visited Tivoli after work one evening. I didn't remember the video function on my camera until later, otherwise I would have grabbed some videos of the pantomime. I wasn't quite sure what was going on -- either a mail-order wife business, a matchmaker, or a man blatantly selling women to prospective customers. I decided to giggle at the players rather than spend too much time trying to figure out the plot and being offended. The costumes were fun and some of the actors/dancers were really fun to watch because they were so exaggerated in their emotions and movements.

The flowers were blooming and the bright colors of the rides made it a pleasure just to walk around and look at everything.

There was even a bit of wildlife at Tivoli. I didn't even notice that I'd caught a chipmunk in this shot with the peacock until today!

Even the restaurants were photogenic.

We made sure to visit in the evening so we could enjoy the lights. I spent a bit of time trying to figure out the best setting on my camera (it's still fairly new), but managed to get some good shots.

Where else but an amusement park can you go from the Middle East to China by walking a few hundred feet?

I really enjoyed my trip to Copenhagen. I got some useful work done and was able to spend some time catching up with some dear friends and collaborators, while exploring a beautiful city with a fascinating history. I'm already making plans to go back!

Big Questions: Interesting perspective from Roger Ebert

Apparently this will be a column that pops up here when the occasion warrants...

Over the weekend, I ran across a blog entry by Roger Ebert (yes, that Roger Ebert, the one who reviews films). Unexpectedly, he was writing about his perspective on the universe and the place of humans within it. I think this blog entry really caught my attention because one of my students, who happens to be a Religious Studies major, had turned in an essay on Friday for an extra credit event and had also been talking about his own perspective on these big topics. Both my student and Roger will never be experts in astrophysics, but they have both obviously thought deeply on these subjects.

Just as I don't agree with all his movie reviews, I also don't agree with everything Roger Ebert writes in his blog post, but it really is a fascinating look into another person's attempt to find his place in this vast universe. I hope it inspires you to think about these big questions, as it did me.

Click here to read it.

Milan, Italy

Apparently it's been a while since I've posted. I had a lot to get done before I left for Italy, and then I was in Italy for almost a week, so I have some catching up to do.

Italy was great! The buildings were beautiful (not even just the "special" buildings), the food was great, and the company was fantastic. Many of my friends and colleagues were at the conference as well, and most of us managed to find rooms at the same hotel, making it easy to go out to dinner and spend time together. The stress I was under to finish up several things before leaving was gone shortly after I left, and I felt so much better after returning.

Sadly, there were no tickets left for the opera at La Scala. It would have been fantastic if we could have gone, especially given the opera they were performing while we were in town:

But we did get to tour the opera house and that was amazing in itself. You could just imagine the women in their opera gowns with their opera glasses, spying on the comings and goings in the boxes across the theater from their own.

By far, the vast majority of my photos feature Il Duomo, the cathedral.



I had just gotten a new pocket-sized camera before leaving, and I'm still amazed at the level of detail it was able to capture:


I can't even imagine how many people it took to carve all that marble...

Other fun shots of Milan include this arch:

And the medieval castle of the ruling family, where Leonardo da Vinci worked for many years:

A statue of the man himself:

The best thing I saw during the entire trip was da Vinci's masterpiece, The Last Supper. I was traveling with two colleagues from my institution, and the three of us took a tour of Milan the afternoon we arrived. The tour was the only way to see the painting since the viewing slots were sold out and the number of people allowed to view the painting each day is strictly limited. The dining room at the monastery where the painting resides is now encased in a humidity-controlled room to slow down its deterioration as much as possible. It was truly amazing, but no pictures are allowed, so I can't share my experience here other than to say it was the highlight of my trip, and if you find yourself planning to go to Milan, make reservations to see the painting as far in advance as you possibly can.

Just to prove that I was behind the camera, here's a shot of me spinning on my heel on the Torino Bull for good luck:


And here's the bull himself, with the mark of many tourists left behind:The particular part of his anatomy that is now worn away through the spinning of countless heels apparently has to do with the original meaning of the spinning, which was to ensure a safe pregnancy. Luckily, since I'm not pregnant and not planning on it any time soon, the meaning has now changed to just generic good luck. :)

That's probably enough photos for now. I have some catching up to do with other posts too, so I should be posting fairly often in the near future.

Tired...

Too tired to think of anything to say, so here's a pretty picture instead. It's 4:17am, with another 2.5 hours to go before sunrise. I've run out of web pages to surf and I've heard the same 10 songs on the radio about 10 times each tonight. They apparently have a very short playlist that they set to loop overnight when all the non-astronomers are sleeping.

Observing

I'm off traveling again. It's 12:40am (2:40am back home) and I'm trying to keep myself awake just a bit longer so that I'll sleep later tomorrow before the first night of observing. So I stood out in the cold and played with our digital SLR camera for a bit. Recognize the star pattern (asterism) above? Hint -- it's upside down.

I'm actually quite impressed with the level of detail captured in this photo (there's a higher resolution version on my Facebook page). The exposure time was only 60s, but you can already see the stars streaking due to the Earth's rotation. And you can pick out the different colors of the stars. I'll try to take some more photos while I'm here where the skies are nice and dark.

Working, working, working

What have I been doing this week? Working. It's one of those times of the year when it seems that there are not enough hours in the day and that I don't have enough brain cells to deal with everything. And it's going to last for another month or so.

Classes were a mess from the snow/ice days at the beginning of the semester and I think we've just now gotten everyone straightened out. Just in time for their first test on Friday!

I'm a co-investigator on a proposal for a NASA Explorer mission with the submission deadline coming up soon. I've been spending lots and lots of time proofreading the proposal and typing out corrections (mostly grammatical and typographical corrections at this point) to send to the principal investigator. Seems a bit amazing to me that I am one of the science experts on this effort... but I guess that's what I actually am, so I shouldn't be so surprised!

The proposal deadline for the next cycle of Hubble Space Telescope observing time is coming up fast (end of February), so I've also been scrambling trying to get some preliminary results together to show in my proposals so that I can justify asking for more observations. "See what neat results we're getting? Give us more observations so we can have more neat results!"

I'm also trying to get some results together to write a Letter to Nature in rebuttal of a recent Letter to Nature that was titled something like "There is no connection between this thing and that thing". My title will be "There is a connection between this thing and that thing" of course with the proof in the text and figures. And with this project, I feel a huge self-imposed deadline to get it together and get it submitted soon while people are still thinking over the first article that started all of this.

I finally sat down for a few minutes and forced myself to write an abstract and complete my registration for a conference in Milan, Italy in April. The abstract wasn't too hard to write, I just really had to force myself to focus on it for half an hour or so, and it was hard to find the focus with all this other stuff going on and pulling me a million directions. The deadline is Monday, so I made myself finish it Friday afternoon before going home for the weekend.

Where does this leave my crafty projects? Exactly where I left them last weekend. :P I'm forcing myself to take some time away from work stuff this weekend so I don't push myself over the edge and end up getting sick (which always happens when I work too hard and get run down). I have some sewing to do on my Pendrell blouse and Crepe dress, and assembly and a collar to knit on my Blackberry cardigan. If I can get my cardigan assembled and get the shawl collar started this weekend, then the rest of the collar knitting is mindless enough that I could work on it in the evenings next week when I come home exhausted and brain dead.

So, yeah, Milan in April. Just need to hold out a few more months...

Big Questions: Science and Religion

Many of the students taking my class are fulfilling a science requirement. That means that it's very likely that my class is the last science class they will ever take in their lives. Their future understanding of science and scientists may be shaped during their 14 weeks with me. Since this is Georgia, it's very likely that the vast majority of my students attend church and will continue to do so throughout their lives.

I make sure that we go over the definition of science and what science can and cannot do. I try to make it clear that science is dynamic, each day brings new questions and new discoveries. I try to point out that I am a scientist, and I am not an old man with crazy hair who spouts incomprehensible equations day and night. I also try to point out instances of historical astronomers who were also religious -- like Georges Lemaitre, the Catholic priest who came up with the idea of the Big Bang (yes, you read that right). As often as religious people and scientists are in conflict with each other, Religion and Science do not conflict because they don't actually overlap. Religion is not testable, and Science can't answer the question "Why?"

I was really happy to see the recent articles on Space.com addressing the issues of Science and Religion: How Astronomy and Religion Intersect Part 1 and Part 2. The Catholic Church has a long and colorful history of scientists within its ranks, as well as other scientists outside its ranks, and it is refreshing to read these two articles that present a balanced view of the history along with documented facts (rather than opinions). Especially as Space.com is dedicated to keeping up with the state-of-the-art in all things space-related.

For those of you who are interested in the Age of the Universe question specifically, I think this brief but very clear Official Statement perfectly sums up my professional opinion on the matter.

Back to Work

We're still thawing out here, but the University re-opened today. Classes won't start until tomorrow, but faculty and staff were asked to report in at 11am this morning. I was in my office until about 5pm tonight, and the sidewalks downtown are just awful. A lot of the side streets all over town are still a mess too. I'm not expecting a huge turn-out tomorrow for our first day of class. And then Monday is a holiday for MLK Jr. Day!

Not much else to report right now. I'm looking forward to a warm, cozy evening at home tonight, but not looking forward to getting out of bed early tomorrow morning. I've gotten spoiled by being able to sleep until I wake up and just keeping the alarm off. :P